A picture in the 1907 brochure shows the former Memorial Hall dining room, now Annenberg Hall, with tablecloths, silverware and serving trays between each table.

According to the brochure, members could bring in guests, including "ladies," who were "admitted only to the Southeast Room." Smoking was permitted in the Hall.

In 1893, Robert W. Greenleaf, M.D., of Boston, published The Diet of Harvard Students, a comprehensive review of where and what Harvard students were eating. His poll indicated a variety of places at which University students and affiliates took their meals. Many students ate at Cambridge restaurants or in their places of residence (at the time, many students lived in local boarding houses which were not University-sponsored).

Thus, University dining halls, which served about 1100 students, faced stiff competition in their attempt to attract students, and, in fact, operated "at a heavy loss to the University" in 1909, according to University President A. Lawrence Lowell, class of 1878 in a letter to an HDA director.

Spring of 1924 was HDA's last season running the Harvard dining halls. They reopened in the fall under University management.

According to an article that appeared in The Crimson on Saturday, September 20, 1924, Memorial Hall reopened with "many striking innovations." Along with lower prices, changed seating arrangements and the ability to term-bill meal coupons, "white waitresses replaced negresses."

"The hall has been provided with entirely new service and new equipment which are expected to improve the quality of the dining hall. White waitresses have been substituted for negro waiters, and a complete stock of new tables and easy armchairs has been put in," The Crimson reported. "Not only will the menu be more varied in the future, but white table clothes, out of use for over a dozen years, will be restored."

"And for the first time in its half century of existence, Memorial Hall will extend its privileges to ladies, with escorts," the article said.

Obviously, Memorial Hall has undergone many changes since the '20s. The centralization of Dining Services began under Lowell.

"One of the most valuable things in college life is the close contact among students, with the lasting friendships formed thereby; and this is promoted by nothing so much as dining together," Lowell wrote to the director of HDA in 1909.

Eventually, the University would expand and operate all of Harvard's new dining halls, including the Freshman Union, the houses and the graduate dining halls.

According to Michael P. Berry, former director of Harvard Dining Services (HDS), each hall served the same menu.

"That was the low-point," Berry said. "That was when they tried to sell the same plan to everyone," he said.

In the mid-1960s, however, the graduate schools began to contract separate food services because they felt they were "getting undergraduate food," according to Berry.

Today, all of the University's food services are centralized under HDS. However, there is more variation within each dining hall.