A new food hall in the Chicago Loop features the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in both name and interior design. Hayden Hall (333 S. Wabash Street) touts itself as “a food lover’s haven featuring over a dozen iconic food and beverage experiences, each celebrating Chicago’s rich culinary history.” Ten quick-service casual restaurants plus two full-service dining experiences fill DMK Restaurants’ latest venue.
The entrance to Hayden Hall in Chicago, named after 1893 World’s Fair architect Sophia Hayden.
The dining space, filling the entire second floor of the iconic “Big Red” tower, is named after Sophia Hayden, the remarkable twenty-one-year-old designer of the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Fair. The full-service Sophia Wine Bar in Hayden Hall also honors the architect.
The Columbian Exposition decor elements begin on the stairway leading up to the food hall, which features a full-wall mural depicting a silhouette of World’s Fair images and names. The designs are playful representations of several structures from the Exposition, including the Peristyle arch, Ferris wheel, Statue of the Republic, Agricultural Building (sans Diana), Administration Building, Palace of Fine Arts, Machinery Hall, Horticultural Building, a tower that may represent the one proposed (but never built) for the Venetian Village, and–of course–the Woman’s Building. A selection of names accompanies these architectural shapes: Columbian Exposition, Horticulture Building, Wooded Island, Daniel Burnham, Sophia Hayden, Field Columbian Museum, Auxiliary Building, and also (inexplicably) Grant Park, which was named almost a decade after the Fair closed. We do wish the misspelled “Women’s Building” had been caught before installation.
A Columbian Exposition mural greets visitors to Hayden Hall.
An iconic Columbian Exposition lamp post and the Statue of the Republic can be spotted in the Hayden Hall mural.
A silhouette of Richard Morris Hunt’s Administration Building and George Ferris’ Great Wheel are among the more recognizable elements of the mural.
Sophia Hayden’s Woman’s Building design is incorporated into the bottom left of the giant mural greeting visitors to Hayden Hall.
Along the food service hallway, lovely murals by Laura Catherwood depict playful animal sculptures. One panel showing a trio of white rabbits likely references the group of women sculptors known by that moniker who created statues for the 1893 Woman’s Building. Other murals along the wall appear to reference the Palace of Fine Arts lions and caryatids.
Laura Catherwood’s “white rabbits” mural honors the women sculptors of the 1893 World’s Fair.
One mural suggest the caryatids from the Palace of Fine Arts.
The iconic Art Palace lions sport drama masks.
The iconic trio of aches forming the entrance to Hayden’s Woman’s Building also shows up as a design element over the bar and elsewhere inside the food hall. The color theme of the large food hall even matches that chosen as Chicago’s “Official Color” for the Columbian Exposition.
The bar inside Hayden Hall sports an inverted trio of arches reminiscent of the entrance to the Woman’s Building of the 1893 World’s Fair.
Hayden Hall opened on February 3, 2020, which happens to be the sixty-seventh anniversary of the death of Sophia Hayden Bennett in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
Sophia Hayden is the namesake of Hayden Hall in Chicago. [Image from Johnson, Rossiter A History of the World’s Columbian Exposition Volume 1 – Narrative. D. Appleton and Co., 1897.]