We’ve seen this cover photo before in a 1951 edition. The menu side of this one was issued February, 1957, with a reference to “CMStP&P,” suggesting that the meals were provided by the Milwaukee Road commissary. Many of the items are the same but the print and prices are different from yesterday’s dinner menu.
Click image to download a 0.8-MB PDF of this menu.
The table d’hôte dinners include salmon ($3.35 vs. $2.50 in yesterday’s menu); lamb chops ($3.80 vs. $3.25); duckling ($3.50, not on yesterday’s menu); and the sirloin steak ($4.50 on both). On the a la carte side, instead of a club steak for $2.75 there’s a sirloin steak for $3.50 (multiply by seven to convert to today’s dollars). Prices on many of the other a la carte items that are on both menus have also gone up by 15 percent or more. Those are some big changes for menus issued a month apart, and may reflect the differences between the railroads more than inflation.
Another very old photo. All the vehicles look prewar again. If you look closely, you’ll see at least two freight cars standing in the middle of the street. It almost looks as if there was an attempt to airbrush them out. These were the tracks of SF State Belt Railway. Leaving standing cars on the tracks was stopped shortly after WWII. Both the freighter and the tug are prewar and wouldn’t have survived the scraper much after the end of the war. Beautiful picture of when SF actually worked for a living though.
Jim