All the news that's fit to print

All the news that's fit to print "Minneapolis is a bad restaurant city."

That was the opinion of the New York Times when the City of Lakes last played host to the Republican National Convention. In 1892.

A month before the big event (which was held at the Industrial Exposition Building, across the Mississippi River from downtown Minneapolis and now the site of condominiums), the newspaper sent a reporter to assess the city's ability to feed the convention's attendees, which were conservatively estimated at 50,000 visitors.

After invoking the wince-inducing "bad" word, the un-bylined dispatch, published May 6, 1892, went on to describe an alarming lack of dining establishments, seemingly the result of residents' preference for enjoying three squares a day at home. (The city's population at the time was roughly 165,000.)

The article did manage to eke out some praise for the West Hotel (razed in 1940 and replaced by a parking lot) and its sumptuous dining rooms. It also singled out the city's best restaurant as being located "on the top floor of a twelve-story office building," without naming either the restaurant or the building, although it's presumably the open-air rooftop pavilion (perhaps the Seven Sky Bar of its time?) of then brand-new Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building, later known as the Metropolitan Building, which was demolished in 1961.

The lion's share of the story is devoted to describing the planning committee's most ill-conceived dining idea -- unlimited pork and beans for everyone -- served at a re-created lumberman's camp just outside the exhibition hall. The Times sniffed at the idea, calling it a "bean carnival."

A month later, with the convention in full swing, the news from the Times was not exactly what city fathers were going to later quote in a travel brochure.

"The willingness to bear with discomforts is really one of the distinguishing features of this convention," intoned the newspaper on June 10, 1892. "Today the capacity of the lumber camp near the Exhibition Building, where pork and beans are cooked in true Northwestern lumberman's style, has been severely tested. ... Hundreds of people who paid to enter the camp today, and then paid for dishes of pork and beans, came to the conclusion that worse food was easier to get than this. ... Minneapolis people think that they have kept their pledges to the National Committee if the thousands now here are not obligated to go hungry. They did not contract to feed everybody in Fifth Avenue Hotel style."

(Thanks to staff librarian Roberta Hovde for discovering this article.)

RICK NELSON