Christine Curran | Oregon Places: The Georgian Room at Meier & Frank | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 107.3

OREGON PLACES

The Georgian Room at Meier & Frank

by Christine Curran

THE DOWNTOWN MEIER & FRANK department store is currently undergoing a significant reconfiguration, and the Georgian Room restaurant is empty and shuttered. Unlike the many life-long customers of the tea room, I discovered the place relatively late in life. My mother did not take me to the Georgian Room when I was a child, preferring instead the Chocolate Lounge restaurant on the mezzanine level at Lipman's, next door. I first went to the Georgian Room when I was twenty-three with my friend Nancy, who had been going there with her mother since she was a child. It was glamorous and old-fashioned at the same time and appealed to our sensibilities, both sophisticated and sheltered.

The Georgian Room has seen thousands of customers come and go over its many years; and whether a person has been there three times or three hundred times, he or she probably has a memory of the place: a birthday or anniversary or special outing or event, marking time passed and time shared. The passage of the Georgian Room from place to memory shall be marked for the role that it played in the life of the city and in the lives of the people who loved it.

It is not entirely clear when the Georgian Room came to be. We know there was a restaurant, a soda fountain, and a dairy lunch counter in the downtown Meier & Frank store by 1920, located in the section of the present building that was built in 1915. That section faces Fifth Avenue and covers the east half of the block between Morrison and Alder. It replaced Meier & Frank's first building at the location, which was a five-story structure clad in buff-colored brick with cream terra-cotta trim, built in 1898.

Although we do not know for certain, there may have been a restaurant in the 1898 store, because it was commonplace for department stores to include food service by the turn of the century. The Bon Marche in Paris was the first true department store to do this, including a buffet in its 1869 store that served "wine and syrups." In the United States, John Wanamaker offered the first department store food service in 1877. A year later, Macy's opened its second-floor lunch room, and many others soon followed.¹

The Georgian Room's main dining room, in about 1933

OHS neg., OrHi 76689

If there was a restaurant in the 1898 Meier & Frank store, it could have been a tea room. The first department store restaurants were not known as tea rooms, because the custom of afternoon tea did not become trendy in America until around the turn of the twentieth century. As tea rooms became more popular, department stores, which strived to be on the cutting edge of merchandising, restyled their restaurants to follow the fad. Chicago's Marshall Field and Company was the first department store to do so, recasting its dining room into a tea room in the 1890s.² The first tea rooms served only afternoon tea, but later ones branched out into lunch service, because tea service alone was not very profitable. The tea rooms quickly evolved into small restaurants, which served lunch and sometimes dinner.

Department store restaurants were part of a retailing trend that historian William Leach calls "strategies of enticement," in which department stores provided nonretail services to encourage people to come in, stay, and buy. By the early 1900s, customers expected nonretail services in major urban department stores. Those services often included reading and writing rooms; "silence" rooms, where frazzled shoppers could have a quiet moment; hospitals for both shoppers and employees; art galleries; post offices; pet shops; shoe repair shops; baby sitting services; auditoriums for fashion shows, pageants, and plays; libraries; beauty parlors; and, of course, Santa Claus at Christmastime. Because department stores were among the first commercial institutions to cater primarily to women, most of the events and services they offered, including restaurants, were developed with women's tastes in mind.³

Gathering in the private dining room in the 1940s

Courtesy of the State Historic Preservation Office

With the replacement of its five-story 1898 store with a shimmering white, glazed terra-cotta, thirteen-story building in 1915, Meier & Frank boasted many popular nonretail services, including manicuring parlors; a grocery, bakery, creamery, and delicatessen; a mezzanine gallery and restaurant; and a generous employee facility that included a kitchen, cafeteria, hospital, recreation room, observatory, and girls' silence room.⁴ By the end of the 1920s, Meier & Frank was advertising a ninth-floor "Tea Room."

WAS THAT EARLIER TEA ROOM the Georgian Room that so many people knew and loved? It was more like a precursor to the Georgian Room. According to Gerry Frank, a member of the Meier & Frank family, the "Georgian Room" was a later moniker given to the locally famous restaurant, known to everyone simply as the "Meier & Frank Tea Room." With 1932 addition — the southwest corner of the current building — the tea room moved to the tenth floor, expanding to include a men's dining area and a private dining room. According to the construction drawings, the new men's dining area was called the Pine Room and the new private dining room was named the Georgian Room. Gerry Frank remembers the Pine Room, which was commonly known as the Men's Grill, as a popular place for Portland businessmen to meet and the Tea Room for its delicious food, prepared under the watchful eyes of his grandmother by a chef who had been there for forty years. It was probably during the 1932 storewide remodel that the main tea room and the adjacent private dining room took on the appearance of a nineteenth-century, Georgian-style interior. At some later point in the restaurant's history, the dining rooms became known collectively as the Georgian Room.⁵

Department store tea rooms enjoyed a long run of popularity in the United States. From the early 1900s through the 1950s, they were often known to be among the best eating establishments in a city. In Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, Jan Whitaker mentions the Meier & Frank Tea Room specifically, noting that it "was said to be one of the top dining spots in that city, if not the entire Pacific Coast." Tacoma's Rhodes Brother's tea room was known in that city as one of its best restaurants. In Chicago, Marshall Field had the Walnut Room; Minneapolis boasted Dayton's Tiffin Room and the Young Quinlan Tea Room; in Philadelphia, Wanamaker's operated the famous Grand Crystal Tea Room; and Neiman Marcus in Dallas ran the Penthouse Tea Room.⁶ The Meier & Frank Tea Room was not the only tea room in Portland. Both the Lipman Wolfe and the Olds, Wortman & King department stores had tea rooms. Lipman's, next door to Meier & Frank, had a tea room on the ninth floor and the Chocolate Lounge lunch restaurant on the mezzanine level. Olds, Wortman & King, up the street at Tenth and Morrison, had a tea room and auditorium on the fourth floor and a soda fountain in the basement. Its tea room, decorated with tapestry, mirrors, and latticework, opened in 1910 and reportedly could accommodate two hundred people.⁷

The names of tea rooms usually suggested the decorative theme found inside them. By 1915, many upscale department store tea rooms had themed interiors, reflecting a popular marketing trend of the time in which displays, backdrops, and scenery were developed around a single theme or color scheme. Theater owners, restaurateurs, and retailers created French salons, pirate dens, Egyptian temples, Japanese gardens, pastoral grottos, and colonial kitchens to entice shoppers.⁸ The rise in popularity of Colonial Revival architecture in the 1920s and 1930s was primarily responsible for the common use of Early American decoration in department store tea rooms. Marshall Field's had a Colonial Tearoom by 1914, along with four others that had different themes: the Walnut Room, the English Room, the Narcissus Fountain Room, and the Crystal Tearoom. Wanamaker's first Crystal Tea Room was modeled after the Georgian-style house of Robert Morris, a Philadelphia merchant and major financier of the American Revolution. Philadelphia's Strawbridge Clothier had a dining room called the Georgian Room after about 1929.⁹

Georgian decoration recalls the dominant style used in the English colonies from 1700 to about 1780. Georgian-style interiors typically featured full-height, vertical wall paneling; fluted pilasters, posts, and columns; paneled ceiling beams; arched openings; and doorways and windows enriched with moldings and pediments. Walls were painted in rich blues, greens, or reds or covered with scenic wallpapers. The Meier & Frank Georgian Room fully embraced that cultured style, beckoning customers through an arched opening to a formal foyer with velvet ropes. To the left was the private dining room, where the themed interior remained essentially unchanged for seventy-four years. Early photographs of the main dining room show pictorial wallpaper, beamed ceilings, and fluted square columns. With the exception of the wallpaper, which was eventually lost, the room retained most of its original Georgian-style character to the end. Paneled wainscot traveled the room, interrupted by floor-to-ceiling arched windows with dramatic projecting frames topped with oversized keystones. The multi-paned windows and their sweeping Georgian-style draperies were over-scaled, conveying the feeling of a drawing room of a formal estate. Cornice moldings, boxed ceiling beams, and square fluted columns gave structure to the large, open room, where all woodwork was painted "Williamsburg Green," contrasting brightly against white walls and a dark wood floor. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. Tucked between the main and private dining rooms was the Men's Grill, decorated in complimentary Early American style, with floor-to-ceiling knotty-pine paneling and wide plank floors. Windows were plain and deeply set, with simple moldings — a cozy, intimate space evocative of a colonial pub.

While the popularity of tea rooms in general began to fade with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s, department store tea rooms remained successful into the 1940s and 1950s. If they were large enough, and most were, they served multiple functions, such as hosting fashion shows, special holiday events, card games, and dancing. Following this trend, the Meier & Frank Tea Room — and, later, the Georgian Room — was for years the place to go in Portland for fashion shows, bridal shows, club gatherings, and holiday events.

Eventually, as retail trends and customer needs changed, the size of department store tea rooms began to diminish. As more women entered the workforce, they no longer had time to linger over a leisurely lunch or afternoon tea. Like other department stores, Meier & Frank added additional restaurant facilities to its flagship downtown store. In addition to the tea room, there was a dairy lunch counter, or cafeteria, in the subbasement, where shoppers could sit down for lunch or a "Summer Girl" soda. Customers on the run could grab an ice cream cone or coffee on the first floor. On the tenth floor, lunch was served at the coffee shop, which had a low counter in a nifty zigzag configuration. Lunch-hour shoppers took advantage of the store's quick counter lunch or fast-food restaurants located downtown.

The main block of the Meier & Frank store was built in 1915. The 1932 addition replaced the four-story building to the west.

OHS neg., OrHi 17526

Increasingly, the luxury of afternoon tea service shifted to fancy downtown hotels. Both men and women continued to visit the Men's Grill and the Georgian Room for workday lunches well past the 1970s, but the era of the department store tea room had definitively passed by that time. All over the country, suburbanization, changing retail trends, and the passing of family-owned stores into national chain ownership took their toll on the popularity of downtown department stores and, subsequently, on the tea rooms inside.¹⁰

As we watch the demise of the last department store tea room in Portland, perhaps "see you later" is a better choice of words than "goodbye." Trends are constantly changing, and we are already witnessing a well-documented surge of residential movement from the suburbs back to the downtown core. Those of us who are aggravated by gentrification find some comfort in wondering not if but when the old-fashioned department store tea room will find favor with a new generation. In the meantime, farewell Georgian Room. Nobody will ever make a Cobb salad like you did.

Notes

The reconfiguration of the downtown Portland Meier & Frank store includes plans for a Macy's department store on floor one through five, and a boutique hotel on floors six and above. Meier & Frank's tenth-floor Georgian Room restaurant will be documented and dismantled. It is anticipated that architectural elements from the Georgian Room will be reassembled inside a large meeting room off the lobby of the proposed hotel.

^1.�Polk's Portland City Directory (Portland, Ore.: R.L. Polk, 1920); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 186; Jan Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), 164.

^2.� Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants! (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1952), 213; William R. Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 137; Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, 164. Whitaker gives a compact history of the evolution of Marshall Field's famous tea rooms, pp. 172–3. See also Joan Greene, with the Chicago Cultural Center Foundation, A Chicago Tradition: Marshall Field Food and Fashion (Petaluma, Calif.: Pomegranate Communications, 2005).

^3.� Leach, Land of Desire, 9, 137; idem., "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925," Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 333.

^4.�Polk's Portland City Directory (Portland: R.L. Polk, 1920); George A. McMath, "Meier & Frank Building," National Register of Historic Places nomination form, 1981, 7: 2–3.

^5.� McMath, "Meier & Frank Building," 7:4; Gerry Frank, interview with the author, April 27, 2006.

^6.� Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, 167–9.

^7.� John M. Tess, "Lipman-Wolfe and Company Building, " National Register of Historic Places nomination form, 1988, 7:5; Judith Fitch Curran, interview with the author, April 25, 2006; John M. Tess and Richard E. Ritz, "Olds, Wortman and King Department Store," National Register of Historic Places nomination form, 1990, 8:7.

^8.� Leach, "Transformations," 322; Leach, Land of Desire, 82–83.

^9.� Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, 12–13; Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 46; Leach, Land of Desire, 137.

^10.� Judith Fitch Curran interview; Whitaker, Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, 182.

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