“Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Progressive Chicago” considers restaurants as contentious spaces where larger debates about gender, class, race and ethnicity, public health, and the role of the state were carried out between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 18th Amendment. Using Chicago as a case study because of its unique position as a laboratory of urban modernity during this period, it considers the city’s restaurants as sites of labor and statebuilding, as well as sites of consumption. Using sources including press coverage, trade publications, novels and memoirs, court cases, and municipal and state records, this dissertation traces the attempts made to sharpen the liminal legal and cultural space that existed between the saloon and the restaurant during the early decades of the twentieth century. Though restaurant dining had become increasingly popular in Chicago, debates continued to rage between lawmakers and citizens alike about what a restaurant was, who could work in these spaces and under what conditions, what their physical environments should look like, and who could patronize them during what times of day. By combining cultural, labor, and policy/legal history, “Open Tables” argues that the restaurant provides insight into the multifaceted efforts made to refashion American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As saloons began to fall into disrepute and dining out became popular among a wider swathe of people, state and municipal officials—alongside extralegal actors working across class, gender, and ethnic and racial lines—created systems and procedures to make restaurants conform to their standards for safety and respectability. Examining these efforts more closely reveals that these systems and procedures rarely worked smoothly, and that it was (and remains) near-impossible to achieve a singular vision of orderliness in Chicago.

Creator

• Toulin, Alana Marie

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tznh-v819

Subject

• History
• American history

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_771086
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15330

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright