Fred Harvey had restaurants in Chicago’s Dearborn Station (which served Santa Fe, Wabash, and several other railroads), Union Station (which served Burlington, Milwaukee Road, Pennsylvania, and several other railroads), and the Bowl & Bottle Restaurant on the top floor of the 31-story Straus Building. But for its Chicago entry into this menu series, it chose the Harlequin Room in the Palmolive building, a 1929 skyscraper that housed offices for the Colgate-Palmolive Company (which had merged in 1928).
Click image to download a 628-KB PDF of this menu.
Fred Harvey had taken over food services in the Palmolive Building in 1951, including a cafe and cafeteria for building employees. The company’s first-class restaurant was known as the Harlequin Room and Harvey House Grill, with the adjacent Columbine Lounge. While this menu is a cover only, images of the food side of a 1957 menu used at Harvey’s Union Station restaurant are here and here and a menu from the Harlequin Room itself is here.
For the restaurant, Fred Harvey commissioned a huge mural, shown in the cover photo, by Karin van Leyden (1906-1977). Born Elisabeth Kluth in Germany, she studied art in Cologne and in 1932 married a Dutch painter, Ernst Leyden. I don’t know when or why she changed her name to Karin, but they added the “van” when they emigrated to the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II. Soon after, they were rubbing shoulders with and often painting portraits of such famous artists as Aldous Huxley, Artur Rubenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Salvador Dali.
As near as I can tell, the Harlequin mural no longer exists, but this is what it looked like based on the menu cover above.
Before returning to Europe in 1957, Karin did murals for hotels and restaurants from New York to Los Angeles. While they worked together on many of their paintings, Karin was particularly known for such murals, so while this menu credits the Harlequin mural to both Ernst and Karin, it is likely that she did most of the work. A biography of Karin (in German) was published in 2009 and a documentary movie was made about the van Leydens in 2016.