Theme Restaurants & the Orientalist Fantasies of Henry Erkins
Murray's Roman Gardens
By chance, in a 1910 copy of Vogue, I came across a photo of the Café de l'Opera, the most stylish new restaurant of the moment. Described as having taken "the Eastern note for its decorative scheme," the restaurant ("not a place for imbibing liquid concoctions") looked to be an Orientalist fantasia: "The Court of One Hundred Columns of Alexander, with black marble pillars and orange hangings, is one of its great attractions, and the balcony, of Japanese design, contains many quaint carvings taken from an old temple at Nippur." Captivated, I fell into an ever-increasingly deep rabbit hole of the work of Henry Erkins, who designed Café de l'Opera along with several other "exotic" lobster palaces. Today I will focus on another of Erkins' creations, while on Friday I will expound on Café de l'Opera's interiors and scandals.
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century elite New Yorkers did all of their entertaining at home, but with the opening of restaurants (like Delmonico's in 1831) and hotels (like the Waldorf Astoria in 1893) they began to shift some of their socializing to these quasi-public, yet still elitist, places. The food historian Cindy Lobel posited that restaurants "provided a staging ground for social interactions and stratification, for gender mores and conventions, and for the working out of social relationships and public behavior in the increasingly complicated metropolis." With the Belle Époque being a period of intense wealth creation, the opportunity to display one's riches—whether that of old money or as a new tycoon—became an incredibly important part of staking one's place in a high society that was beginning to shift away from the ruling "Four Hundred." At the turn of the century, the refined hotels and restaurants of Fifth Avenue were that battleground; but the younger generation chafed against the strict societal norms of their elders and wanted something faster—something more morally and socially permissive. Starting in 1899, a series of ostentatious restaurants opened on Broadway to appeal to these younger elites. Called "lobster palaces" due to their lavish late-night menus of lobsters and champagne, they were immersive, multimedia dining experiences for the after-theater crowd. The first such lobster palace was Shanley's, opened on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd in 1896, which included a "Roman Court" themed banquet room on the third floor—similar in style to the fashionable Pompeian suite at the Waldorf Astoria.
Over the next few years, more lobster palaces began opening in the area around Longacre Square (renamed to Times Square in 1904), increasing in size and grandeur as restaurateurs competed for the fashionable market. The Irish-American restaurateur John L. Murray developed the idea for a completely themed lobster palace—in the words of historian and archaeologist Elizabeth Macauley-Lewis, "a three-story, all-enveloping dining extravaganza that promised to transport diners back to the luxury of antiquity." To complete this vision he sought out Henry Erkins, an architect who had traveled around China, Japan, India, and Europe. Once back in New York, Erkins established a business manufacturing interior and garden fixtures—in particular, cast concrete and plaster neo-antique garden furnishings. As an interior decorator for upscale homes, he brought together all of the influences from his travels into sumptuous spaces—which translated well for the stage-set wonderland he created at Murray's Roman Gardens.
Opened in 1908 on West 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth, Murray's Roman Gardens was a fanciful recreation of Rome and Pompeii at their most excessive. Erkins looked to the Rome of Caesar and Nero; in the words of historian Margaret Malamud, " When America became a wealthy industrial nation and an imperial power a new twist was given to the usual negative references to imperial Rome: favorable images of empire now began to be produced, especially in the built environment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperial rather than republican Rome seemed the appropriate positive model to invoke in the analogies drawn between Roman and American civilizations." Originally constructed in 1872 as a Roman Catholic school, 230 West 42nd was completely rebuilt in 1882 by the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White into a bachelor apartment house. Erkins covered the facade in concrete in a French Renaissance style, festooning it with vines; the front doors opening into a black, gold, and polychrome mosaic foyer with a grand staircase rising to the multi-floor interior court dining room. Macauley-Lewis provides in her book Antiquity in Gotham a room-by-room analysis of Murray's, which she describes as "not, strictly speaking, simply a Roman or Pompeian room. It was a fanciful hybrid merging indoors and out and drawing decorative inspiration from famous ancient Mediterranean civilizations across a range of centuries." The Indoor Court was, according to Erkins, meant to "reproduce the garden of a villa at Pompeii, the Newport of Rome, bedecked with sculpture, statuary and various trophies of victories"—no Roman garden had been systematically excavated by 1908, allowing Erkins the opportunity to indulge in total fantasy. The illusion of being outside was capped off through a deep blue ceiling embedded with twinkling electric light stars. At the center of the room was a large fountain in the shape of a Roman barge, carrying a small temple—supposedly designed by Stanford White for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Twenty-four private dining rooms and bachelor apartments rounded off the lobster palace; the largest of which was an Egyptian-style Peacock Room, while others supposedly took Gothic and Chinese themes. Most of these private rooms were located on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors—the McKim, Mead & White rooms left mostly alone except for ornate moldings and bas reliefs. Across all of these spaces were murals and sculptures that alluded to a highly sensuous, licentious antiquity—that of Nero or Anthony and Cleopatra—providing the quasi-public and private rooms with a sense of exotic debauchery that paralleled the lives of the diners (mainly wealthy men and their mistresses).
Erkins' work—so heavily reliant on an exotic theme and sense of fantasy—brings together the glamour of high fashion with the magic of Las Vegas. When we think of "theme restaurants" we rarely consider them within the domain of high society dining, yet Erkins' work sat at that intersection. In the book Theme Restaurants (1997), the restaurant designer David Rockwell (the eye behind Planet Hollywood and Nobu, among hundreds of others) explains the appeal of such places: "Restaurants are about having entertaining experiences. Theming is just another word for evocative design that is narrative and transports you to another time and place… When you have a limited amount of time and only so much disposable income, you want to go places that are meaningful, places that touch a nerve and create an emotional response." This stands as much today as it did in the 1990s and the 1910s. Rockwell likened theme restaurants to the theatre, versus amusement parks: "They're immersive, they're involving, they're active instead of passive." For Rockwell, the minimalism of Nobu is as much of a theme as the comic-book garishness of Planet Hollywood—they simply operate within different aesthetics and for different clientele. Similarly, Erkins and Murray's customers sought spaces that publicly showed them as educated and cultured while also providing an "aura of licentious decadence and forbidden pleasures."
It's not possible to look at interiors like these and not think about colonialism and cultural appropriation. As much as there is a colonial urge to these interiors—pillaging the best of other places and restaging together in a stew of cultural appropriation—these restaurants also operated as windows onto other worlds. With the mass of people never traveling overseas and without the technology that today allows us close understandings of the rest of the globe (television, social media, virtual reality), visiting restaurants like these provided diners with trips to far-off places. Just like the World's Fair or Epcot, the idea of travel and the exploration of other cultures was brought to people without them having to leave their city or country—in much the same way that VR proponents push these capabilities with the Oculus. In an elaborate brochure for Murray's, New York Plaisance: An Illustrated Series of New York Places of Amusement, Charles Bevington asserted that the restaurant was a "realistic reproduction, largely from the originals in the form of direct copies, casts, etc."; thereby allowing customers to learn about the past through direct interaction: "…it is also possible, within the limits of this youngest of the world's metropoli, to become familiar with the beauties of ancient art in their original form."
For the most part, Erkins’ interiors were reimagining of ancient spaces—not recreations of ruins, but a very early twentieth-century idea of what those ancient Roman and Egyptian palaces or temples would have looked like in their heyday. It's the ancient world through the overwrought baroque prism of Victorian interiors—revival styles gone brash. There is none of the subdued elegance of the neoclassical; this is exuberant and fun—ideal spaces for a dinner of lobsters and champagne. As dancing became more popular, in 1912 they added a cabaret with a small dance floor, a 12-piece orchestra, and a nightly show. In 1915 Erkins installed a thirty-foot revolving dance floor; completing one rotation an hour, the movement was meant to be imperceptible to the dancers and few diners upon it. As with any fad, even changes like these could not help the lobster palaces from falling out of fashion—a trend whose death was exacerbated by prohibition ending their great profits and devastating the New York entertainment industry as a whole. Murray’s Roman Gardens attempted to find other ways to tempt in diners (their former clientele now drinking illegally at home or in speakeasies)—bringing in dancing girl revues and the like, but in May 1923 Murray’s was forced to close. Once a centerpiece of wealth and extravagance, the building was taken over by Hubert’s Museum; complete with flea circus, penny arcade, and freak show. After the flea circus closed in 1965, the lower floors became a peep show with a brothel of young men operating in the still-intact private rooms of Murray’s.
All of that history—much of it preserved for over eighty years—was demolished in 1996. The area around Times Square was so low rent by the 1980s and 1990s that New York State's 42nd Street Development Project did not even bother to determine the designer or date of 59 of the 78 buildings investigated in a 1981 report on the area; no further research was taken, and according to a 1996 New York Times article, no one on the project took the time to look at the interiors of the building above the third floor, which was accessible only by ladder. According to the journalist, “It appears that all of Murray's decoration on the top three floors, including a room in the Gothic style, survive intact, although they are cluttered with defunct arcade games of the 1950's, like ‘Pin-Up Movies,’ ‘Dive Bomber’ and ‘Voice-O-Graph,’ a telephone booth-sized recording studio complete with Art Moderne cabinet.” Unfortunately, none of the surviving elements of Erkins’ designs were saved; after demolition Madame Tussauds was built on that site. In a full circle moment, Times Square had returned to being a center of theme restaurants and immersive experiences—one less celebratory of history and debauchery, but still wholly concerned with multi-sensory, thematic amusement.
Further reading:
Cindy R. Lobel, Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Elizabeth Macauley-Lewis, Antiquity in Gotham: The Ancient Architecture of New York City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).
Margaret Malamud, “The Imperial Metropolis: Ancient Rome in Turn-of-the-Century New York,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter, 2000), 64-108.
Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York: The Landmark History of Eating, Drinking, and Entertainments from the American Revolution to the Food Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Michael Kaplan, Theme Restaurants (Glen Cove, NY: PBC International, 1997).