The Boulevard Room

My random pick from The Ford Treasury of Favorite Recipes from Famous Eating Places (1950/1955) this week took me to St. Louis and the former Boulevard Room at the Hotel Jefferson, downtown—a place currently in transition. I eschewed the Golden Glow cocktail. What if this nonsense actually led me to moving somewhere, someday? Stranger things have happened. In the meantime, here’s some imaginary traveling. To get this kind of comforting, entertaining, and inexpensive fun emailed to your inbox once a week, please subscribe to my Substack newsletter, Love Me Avenue.

Odd name for a restaurant—I suppose because of its French origins, it seemed like a fancy-pants name for street—so it does have a nice ring to it. The funny thing about that word, depending on how deeply you look, it merely refers to wide road, maybe with trees along it. But growing up, my parents called the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street “the boulevard.” (It was always unclear to me if this was our property or the city’s—and if we were required to mow it or not—of course we did. It was also where you could have cars park if you had a party and your driveway was full.) I assumed this was another of my parents’ odd, made-up words, unique only to them (which turned out, in every case, to have some antecedent, somewhere). And it turns out, when you look more deeply, it sometimes does refer to the grassy area in the middle of some streets—and, also, the strip between the sidewalk and the street. So, where’d my parents get that? I suppose from their parents, or teachers, or maybe TV, or books.

It’s a word that still amuses me. It occurs to me that it would be a good word to include in the title of something… but what? My new (this year) novel already has a name (still a secret). My band, of course, is Love Me Avenue (incidentally the same name as what you’re reading now). Maybe I should start out with the name, and then figure out that story later. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Sunset Boulevard, Heartbreak Boulevard, Boulevard of Death… all taken. How about…The Boulevard Room? It could take place in its original location, Hotel Jefferson, in St. Louis. It’s seen better days, live music, jazz, in the ballroom and The Boulevard Room. I found a 1960s cocktail menu, online, that’s interesting. I noticed, there, the “Golden Glow” cocktail, which I don’t believe I’d ever heard of. The 1955 Ford Treasury book (the source of my random pick) shows an elegant dining room where Chef Mauclair serves Indian inspired cuisine. The recipe is for “Rice Mangalais with Curry Sauce.”

The funny thing is, one of my job notifications this week was at an office in St. Louis, and then I find myself looking up this place—it’s right downtown—the old (originally built in 1904 for the World’s Fair) Hotel Jefferson is still standing, but has been closed and neglected for a couple of decades. But apparently it is just recently undergoing renovations—by the time I get this job, it might be the place to move to! Oddly, there are not a lot of paranormal stories that I could find—but a place that old, it’s got to be haunted, to some degree. Maybe the ghosts are just waiting for the new generation of residents. I can only hope they don’t do a bullshit job, renovating, like seemingly every other old place that gets an overhaul for… well, don’t get me started. St. Louis is probably way too hot, for me, in the summer, and doesn’t get enough snow in the winter. Nowhere does, anymore.

—Randy Russell 1.26.25