In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been presenting these Fred Harvey menus in alphabetical order of the restaurant names, not in the order in which the facilities opened or how far they were from the Santa Fe Railway. With this menu we return to Fred Harvey’s roots of a station restaurant.
Click image to download a 546-KB PDF of this menu.
Kansas City Union Station opened in 1914 and, since Santa Fe was one of its major tenants, Fred Harvey naturally had a restaurant there. In 1936, the restaurant was remodeled into the Westport Room (named after Westport Landing, the starting point for westbound travelers from Kansas City before the coming of the railroad).
Click image for a larger view of this mural depicting “outfitting at Westport Landing.”
The Westport Room was so far above a simple station restaurant that it became one of the finest and most popular restaurants in the region. It was “the most talked about restaurant in Kansas City,” remembers a local food critic many years after it closed in 1968. Oft mentioned is a signature dish, Chicken Maciel, named after the restaurant’s popular Maître D’.
Click image for a larger view of this mural depicting “arrival at Westport Landing.”
To decorate the restaurant, Byron Harvey — Fred Harvey’s son — personally hired a friend of his, Hildreth Meière, to paint three historic murals. Details of the menus were also used on the restaurant menus.
Click image for a larger view of this mural depicting “commerce of the prairies.”
The photo on the cover of this menu shows one of the murals, which were relocated to the Union Station Post Office after the restaurant closed. The cover photo is credited to Tyner and Murphy, which was a well-known Kansas City photo studio for several decades.
Mary Colter has been credited with the restaurant’s redesign, but in fact it was done by Fred Harvey’s in-house architect, Robert Raney. Colter’s contribution, according to Meière, was limited to suggesting that the tables be positioned four inches away from the walls so they wouldn’t damage the murals. I apologize for harping on Colter, who was a wonderful interior designer, but I get angry every time I read a web site, or history book that credits work to her that was done by a real architect. For the full story, see Fred Shaw’s book, False Architect.