Mary E. J. Colter in St. Louis
Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) is best known for her work designing, decorating, and renovating buildings for the Fred Harvey company. But before she started her career with the hospitality company, she was as an artist and teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota. It is in her capacity of art teacher that Colter’s first connection with St. Louis was documented.
Colter taught freehand drawing and literature at St. Paul’s Mechanic Arts High School from 1892 to 1907. The work of Colter’s pupils was honored at several world’s fairs, including St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904.
When the students’ gold-medal winning work returned from St. Louis to St. Paul, the school held an exhibition for the public to view it. A St. Paul newspaper reported, “The thousand or more visitors that crowded the rather small room of the free hand drawing department quickly understood why the manifold fruits of practical, yet scientific, skill acquired at the Mechanic Arts school and easily eclipsed at the world's fair the work of every other similar institution.”
An earlier report about the Minnesota building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition read in part, “The exquisite furniture for the north parlor was designed by Miss May Coulter [sic] and executed by students of the St. Paul Mechanic Arts high school.” Not everyone viewed Colter’s furniture designs so favorably; another article reported, “The furniture on display lacked only the presence of rubicund friars to convince the onlooker that these ponderous chairs and tables, these rugged, leather-cushioned settles, were appurtenances of a sixteenth century monastery in a glowing California valley. Yet the several sturdy constructions were described as being in ‘modified’ Mission style.”
Colter left teaching and in 1910 became a full-time employee of the Fred Harvey hospitality company, where her decades of work included designing and selecting furniture. By 1938, Colter had returned to St. Louis, this time to design a new cocktail lounge in the city’s Union Station. George Roche, manager of the Fred Harvey restaurants there, described Colter’s design of the lounge as “unique” owing to her departure from the “Spanish or Indian motifs” that she often referenced in other work for Fred Harvey.
Cocktail lounge, Union Station, St. Louis, 1946. (Sievers Studio, Missouri Historical Society)
The St. Louis cocktail lounge was known as the “Transportation Lounge,” Roche said, and was designed to reference the steam boats that had once navigated the Mississippi River. Colter also decorated the walls of the lounge with prints by Currier and Ives and others that evoked the city’s early transportation history including steam boats, trains, and the Pony Express.
The Transportation Lounge was the third but not the last cocktail lounge Colter designed for Fred Harvey. Others include one in Los Angeles’s Union Station and in one in Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel.
Sources:
“Minnesota has a Home at the Fair,” The St. Paul Globe, June 8, 1904, 1.
“School Art Exhibit Draws Large Crowd,” The St. Paul Globe, January 19, 1905: 2.
“Union Station has Cocktail Lounge,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 22, 1938: 22.
“New Harvey Manager,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 17, 1939: 11.
George J. Roche, letter to Virginia Grattan, January 2, 1978. Virginia Grattan Collection, 3546633 MS656 Box F2, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson.