Antique 1920s Elkay Mayonnaise Salad Dressing Label 🫙 L. Klein Chicago Black Gold Collectible

What Does Elkay Stand For? 🫙 Elkay Mayonnaise Salad Dressing Label, "The Mark of High Quality" - L. Klein, Halsted, 14th & Liberty, Chicago

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2"

Gold script "Elkay" pressed into a deep black ground, THE MARK OF HIGH QUALITY on a ribbon, MAYONNAISE SALAD DRESSING in raised gilt capitals and a little plate of stuffed tomato slices tucked in the corner - for a one-quart jar, "Packed for L. Klein, Halsted, 14th & Liberty." Never used, embossed so deep you can read it from the back. Yours will look just like this one.

🔤 Elkay = L. K.

Say it out loud: El-Kay. It's L. Klein's own initials turned into a brand name, the kind of trick a big-city department store used so its house brand read like something national on the shelf. And L. Klein put Elkay on just about everything - sandwich spread, catsup, dill and sweet pickles, mince meat, evaporated milk, malt extract, sweet apple cider, Little Kernel corn, tomatoes, plums, Royal Anne cherries, grape jelly - with a second house brand, Fern Park, on tomatoes, pork and beans and hominy. "Packed for" means a packer made the mayonnaise and Klein's name went on the jar. (Malt extract, by the way, was every Prohibition home brewer's best friend - for "baking," of course.)

🏙️ Halsted and 14th

That address sits on Chicago's Near West Side, a block south of Maxwell Street, where Halsted crosses at 1330 South. The city officially recognized the Maxwell Street Market in 1912, and for generations it was the gateway neighborhood - Irish, Greek, Bohemian, Russian, German, Italian, Polish and African American families, with Eastern European Jews the biggest group from the 1880s on. It's been called the Ellis Island of the Midwest. It gave the world the Maxwell Street Polish, and its street musicians plugged in their amplifiers so they could be heard over the crowd and helped invent electric Chicago blues. The old market ran until 1994, when the University of Illinois at Chicago expanded into it. A few blocks up Halsted stood Hull-House, the settlement house Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened in 1889 for the same neighborhood.

🏬 L. Klein's on Halsted

L. Klein wasn't a corner grocer - it was one of the big department stores of Chicago's West Side. Klein got his start in a one-story frame store with 25 feet of frontage, in the middle of the block on South Halsted between 13th and 14th. By 1887 the business was "L. Klein, Wholesale and Retail Dry Goods and Carpets," on the corner of Halsted and 14th, and by 1896 a trade paper was calling it "L. Klein's big department store" at Halsted, Liberty and 14th streets. Liberty was a short street running east from Halsted over to Canal - that's the "Liberty" on this label. The four-story store filled almost half a block at 14th Street, and it was there before the Maxwell Street Market was. A 1901 trade journal called it one of the most popular department stores in Chicago, with groceries and a café "the most convenient of any in the large stores."

The store pulled its weight on the street, too. When Halsted's businessmen pushed in 1905 and 1906 to widen it into a 100-foot highway "from river to river," the Chicago Tribune named L. Klein among the men active in it, and in 1909 Klein's led the drive to close the West Side department stores on Sundays, and at 5:30 three nights a week in July and August. It had its own optical department, it was rebuilt after a fire in 1918, and by 1928 Irving N. Klein was president of L. Klein, Inc. A toy-trade journal noted in 1930 that a good part of Klein's business came from the outlying parts of Chicago - it wasn't just a neighborhood store. And in Carolyn Eastwood's Near West Side Stories, one of the neighborhood's own remembers L. Klein's and the 12th Street Store as the big department stores of growing up, with a doctor's office, a haberdasher and a theater across Halsted from Klein's. The store was sold in November 1947 for $627,500.

🥫 Elkay at the Provision Counter

Groceries were a big part of Klein's. In 1927 Printers' Ink, the advertising trade weekly, reported that the L. Klein Department Store had "the largest and most complete provision store outside of the loop," one of the largest in Chicago, featuring "Elkay" products extensively - "a high quality grocery brand." That's the counter a jar with this label was packed for. L. Klein, Inc. filed for the Elkay trademark on January 8, 1923, with coffee and wheat flour among the foods it covered, and a later filing for Elkay sweet apple cider put the name's first use at November 1, 1922.

🥄 Mayonnaise or Salad Dressing?

Nowadays those are two different things by law, but there was no federal definition of either one when this label was printed. The government's first standards for mayonnaise, French dressing and "salad dressing" came in 1950, and "salad dressing" turned out to mean the cooked, boiled-dressing kind. Under today's rules mayonnaise has to be at least 65 percent vegetable oil, while salad dressing can get by on 30 percent plus a starchy paste. Klein's jar just called itself both.

Darling framed small in a kitchen.