Marine Dining Room, Edgewater Beach Chicago 1949
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These graceful mermaids propelling themselves through water using fluid, wave-like motions and body rolls were on the cover of a 1949 menu for the Marine Dining Room at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel and Resort.
The first building in the Edgewater Beach complex was built on Lake Michigan in the northern community of Edgewater in 1916 and offered rooms for 400 guests. The hotel had a 1,200-foot private beach and offered a seaplane service to downtown Chicago. An adjacent south tower building was added in 1944.
The hotel hosted many famous guests including Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Dwight D Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin and Nat King Cole.
Elegantly dressed guests spent spring and summer evenings here in the open air, or overlooking the resort’s bandshell, drinking gin rickeys or bourbon highballs and dancing to the music of famous band leaders such as Xavier Cugat, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.
In the winter months, when Chicago fully lived up to its Windy City reputation and temperatures plunged, entertainment was provided indoors in venues like the Marine Dining Room.
As you can see from the interior menu, a table d’hote dinner and a la carte selections were on offer for dinners and double stinger cocktails and whiskey sours were available for the grand price of $1.
Access to the hotel’s private beach on the lake was cut off in the 1950s and, as Edgewater faced competition from other hotels, it lost its allure and went bankrupt. It closed in 1967. The hotel and resort were demolished in 1970.
The Edgewater Beach Co-op Apartments, built in 1928 at the north end of the property, are the only remaining vestiges of this once-elegant Chicago resort.
Each order includes a print of the interior menu.
All printed in USA.
