1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition Midway Plaisance

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1893 CHICAGO WORLDS COLUMBIAN

EXPOSITION
THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE
The street today is quiet, largely forgotten, dominated by its great grassy median of park land... a
200 yard wide, one mile long lawn, where neighborhood residents walk their dogs and students from the
University of Chicago across the street take a break to relax on fine, sunny days.
Yet for one brief summer in the 1890s, it was the greatest attraction in Chicago-- in all America, in
fact-- more visited and talked about than the world's fair it adjoined. Here, amidst Moslem mosques and
Chinese pagodas, European castles and South Sea island huts, straw-hatted Americans came by the
thousands to see Bedouin warriors, Egyptian belly dancers, lions that rode horseback and roller-skating
bears. Over it all loomed the first giant Ferris wheel, taller than most skyscrapers downtown.
This was where America first "turned out for an unrestrained good time". [1] Here, the Victorian
age of amusements ended and our modern age began. For the next hundred years, Chicago would help
lead this revolution in American popular culture-- the revolution that created the modern amusement park- a revolution that began here, on the Midway Plaisance, that summer of 1893.
HOW THE MIDWAY CAME TO BE

Promoters of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition intended it to be the grandest of all
world's fairs to date. Realizing what an expensive proposition this was, they looked from the start to
concessions to provide much of the funding for the fair.
In this regard, they drew upon the experience of previous world's fairs. The Philadelphia
Centennial Exposition of 1876 had allowed no concessions on the grounds. They popped up anyway, in a
tawdry `Shantytown' outside the grounds, where Fair managers could neither control them nor share in
their profits. By contrast, the Paris Exposition of 1889 included amusement concessions, and some of
these, such as a collection of exotic èthnic villages' from around the world, proved to be the most
lucrative attractions there. [2]
"It was only after Paris had opened its splendid fair that Chicagoans became serious about
hosting" their own. Driven by a desire to rival the Paris fair, Chicago would emulate it in many ways. [3] In
the matter of concessions, the lesson was clear. Chicago would follow the successful Paris model.
Original discussions for the Columbian Exposition site suggested the downtown lakefront where
Grant Park exists today. When this choice proved unsuitable, the fair's promoters called on noted
landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner, Henry S. Codman, to select an alternative

site. The plan of the fair, submitted by Olmsted and Codman along with Chicago architects Daniel
Burnham and John W. Root in November 1890, settled instead on Chicago's South Park System. [4]
This system, planned for the city by Olmsted in 1870, consisted of Washington Park inland and
Jackson Park on the lakeshore connected by a strip of parkway one mile long and 600 feet wide.
Because of its location between the two parks, this strip was named the Midway; Olmsted added the word
`Plaisance', a landscape term from the French for "pleasure ground".
Olmsted's 1870 plan had called for connecting the two parks by water, from an artificial pond or
`mere', in Washington Park to a great lagoon in Jackson Park, by means of a canal and series of basins
down the length of the Midway Plaisance. But in 1871, in the wake of Chicago's Great Fire, all work on
the South Parks was suspended. In the years since, due to limited funds, only Washington Park had
been completed, with much modification of the original design. [5]
Thus, by late 1890, the Plan for the Exposition centered on the largely undeveloped Jackson
Park, with Washington Park and the Midway Plaisance reserved for "other parts" of the fair as needed. [6]
Gradually, the plan was refined. The idea of using Washington Park was abandoned. The
Midway Plaisance, as of February, 1891, was still "largely reserved for the overflow [of exhibits from
Jackson Park] and for military encampments and displays." [7] By March, however, a change was made
which determined the Midway's ultimate use. Now it was to be "devoted to curious exhibits of various
sorts, installed as privileges," as well as the "overflow from states." [8] By the fall of 1891, concessions
granted by the Fair were being segregated on the Midway Plaisance. [9]
As chief architect Daniel Burnham developed a scheme of monumental buildings for Jackson
Park, it became evident that `foreign villages' and commercial concessions would mar the "stateliness" of
what would soon be called "The White City". Again, the 1889 Paris fair provided an example of what to
do; the `villages' and concessions there had been shunted to the far edges of the fair site. In Chicago,
the Midway Plaisance, jutting off at a right angle from the main fairgrounds, became the perfect place to
consign these attractions. [10] "Many applications have been made for locations by private parties,
companies and syndicates," Director General George R. Davis reported to the National Commission on
the fair, in September, 1891. "As a general policy it was deemed wise to place those exhibits showing the
manners and customs of peoples in Midway Plaisance." Davis emphasized themed `villages' of the type
that had been the rage of the previous Paris fair--mentioning a Bazaar of all Nations, a Street in Cairo, an
Indian Village and a Turkish Village as already proposed for Chicago at this time-- but his next sentence
makes it clear that a strict `Street of Nations' was never intended. "There will also be located in Midway
Plaisance panoramas, cycloramas, etc., and a sliding railway..." [11] Concessions of all types were to be
placed on the Midway.
"This narrow strip of land," wrote fair president Harlow N. Higinbotham, "gave an opportunity for
isolating these special features, thus preventing jarring contrasts between the beautiful buildings and
grounds" of Jackson Park "and the amusing, distracting, ludicrous and noisy attractions of the `Midway'."
[12]

Commercial amusements could thus be segregated from the educational and cultural concerns of
the main Exposition. "Ethnic"--i.e., non-European--"villages" like those in Paris, with their "picturesque"
architecture (not to mention inhabitants), could be kept apart from the lofty classicism of the White City.
Yet the Exposition could still cash in on both.
The isolated amusement zone thus created, the first of its kind at any world's fair, gave its name
to the "Midways" of every fair and carnival since, and provided the model for the modern amusement park
to come.
MIDWAY MYTH # 1: THE PROFESSOR AND THE

SHOWMAN
The assignment of the Midway to Department M, the ethnological section of the fair headed by
Professor F. W. Putnam of Harvard, has resulted in much confusion by latter-day historians. Some have
asserted that the Midway was originally intended to be a serious anthropological display of foreign and
primitive cultures under Putnam's guidance. [13]
This has been compounded by the claims of Sol Bloom, manager of the Midway's Algerian
Village who later became a U.S. Congressman. According to Bloom, when the fair's organizers belatedly
decided to make the Midway an amusement zone, they realized that keeping Putnam in charge "was
about as intelligent as it would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and
Barnum & Bailey Circus." And so (Bloom claimed), Chief of Construction Burnham hired the young
showman to really run the Midway, though Putnam kept his nominal title. [14]
The story of the Professor and the Showman makes a nice myth, but that's all it is. President
Higinbotham recorded that the Midway was "abandoned to the Committee on Ways & Means at the
outset and did not occupy very much thought of the Exposition management outside of that committee
until the time...for opening the gates." As scholar Gertrude M. Scott has pointed out, all concessions
were granted by Ways & Means, with which Putnam had no involvement at any time. [15] And, as we
have seen, the Midway was never intended to be solely a street of `foreign villages'.
Actually, the assignment of the Midway to Department M was almost an afterthought; in order to
bring in the various exhibits on the Midway Plaisance, "in April, 1893"--just one month before the Fair was
to open--"a section of Isolated Exhibits was organized by instruction from the Director General (Davis),
with John Bidlake, of North Dakota"--not Putnam nor Bloom--"as superintendent." This section was
"grouped in the Department of Ethnology merely for classification, and had no direct connection with it.
The manifold attractions of the Midway Plaisance...were the work not of this department, but of the
Committee on Ways and Means of the Directory, who planned all arrangements and closed contracts for
these features." [16]

As for Bloom's claims, they were made in his 1948 Autobiography, more than 50 years after the
Fair. Either his memory was faulty, or he was fudging the truth to make his role on the Midway more
important... he was, after all, both a showman and a politician. Whichever the case, contemporary
accounts note Bloom only as manager of the Algerian and Tunisian Village on the Midway, and Secretary
of the Concessionaires' Club. [17]
Rather than ever having any serious educational intent, the Midway was reserved from the outset
for, in Higinbotham's words, the "light entertainment of visitors...for various forms of amusement,
refreshment, comfort and rest..." [18]
MEETING THE NEW NEED FOR AMUSEMENTS

Much as the Exposition itself collected representative samples of the world's arts and industries,
so did the Midway methodically collect the range of amusements available in Chicago and elsewhere in
1893.
The 1890s were the beginning of commercialized popular culture in America--Tin Pan Alley,
vaudeville, etc.--as opposed to the high culture of museums and classical music, and the folk culture of
ethnic groups.
The rise of public amusements was a by-product of the enormous growth of America's urban
population and white- collar work force. Wages and disposable income increased as work hours
declined, but the shortened workday "was increasingly regimented, concentrated, and tedious, creating a
need for recreation." `Going out' had become not a luxury but a necessity in the new urban life. [19]
The new miracle of electricity, powering street lights and mass transit, made going out at night
"not only safer and more exciting but easier and cheaper than ever before." [20] Electricity was the great
marvel of the Columbian Exposition, but it made exciting new entertainments possible in the city outside
the fairgrounds as well.
Chicago, as the nation's fastest growing metropolis, was second only to New York City as an
entertainment center at the time, and the Fair created not only a banner season for Chicago's established
theaters but occasioned the rise of all sorts of amusements outside the Fairgrounds.
Downtown theaters featured special plays and acts brought in for the Fair summer: America, Imre
Kiralfy's patriotic extravaganza, at the Auditorium Theater, the New York Company of David Belasco's
The Girl I Left Behind Me at the Schiller, Lillian Russell in comic operas at the Columbia, etc. [21]
At the Trocadero music hall (Michigan Avenue at Monroe Street), Flo Ziegfeld, Jr. began his show
business career by exhibiting the "strongest man in the world", Eugene Sandow. [22]

A favorite diversion of the time was the panorama. Downtown Chicago boasted three fine
examples of the art: the Battle of Gettysburg Panorama at 401 Wabash, Jerusalem and the Crucifixion
directly across the street, and the Chicago Fire at 130 Michigan. [23]
There were also two `labyrinths' or mirror mazes-- the Mystic Labyrinth on Congress near the
new L line to the Fair, and the Oriental Labyrinth and Panopticon at 292-4 Wabash-- and three dime
museums-- the Clark Street and State Street Dime Museums owned by Kohl and Middleton, and
Epstean's on Randolph Street, owned by the alderman of the 1st Ward. [24]
On Wabash Avenue, just south of downtown (between 14th and 16th), there was a Civil War
museum in the Confederate Libby Prison, which had been moved, brick by brick, from Richmond,
Virginia, in 1889. For the Fair season, it added the "Original Cabin of Uncle Tom", a 16'x18' cypress log
house "from the Legree plantation at Chopin on the Red River in Louisiana". [25]
Just north of Libby Prison (at 1341 Wabash)-- and hoping to rival its popularity-- was "John
Brown's Fort", the engine house from Harper's Ferry, WV, where the raiders of 1859 had been besieged
and captured. Not to be outdone by Libby's "Uncle Tom's Cabin", the Fort presented "Songs and Scenes
from Slavery/ the Only Colored Vocal Spectacular Company before the People of Chicago." [26]
Proposed for the blocks just south of Libby Prison, (between 16th and 18th) was the unique
Hardy Subterranean Theater. Here visitors could travel by elevator to a vaudeville theater in a `stalactite
grotto' supposedly 1200 feet below the earth. At stops along the way, the elevator doors would open to
give passengers glimpses of the underground world. [27]
Hypolite Hardy, a Parisian entrepreneur, had originally applied for four and a half acres on the
lakefront to build this "subterranean exposition" as a concession at the Fair. He proposed to "illustrate,
among other things, the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, the buried cities of Herculaneum, Stabie and
Pompeii, Dante's Inferno, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, etc." These were probably the scenes staged
at the `stops' made by the trick elevator. [28]
Unfortunately, Hardy's attraction never got off the ground-- or into it. "An exchange gravely
announces that work on the Underground Theater in this city has been stopped.... the builders in sinking
the pit for the underground effect struck a quicksand, and it was found impracticable to cope with the
problem this presented. No other suitable site was available." [29]
Finally, a number of amusements sprang up just outside the Fair's own gates. With the exception
of the brand new University of Chicago (then being built just north of the Plaisance), the area around
Jackson Park and the Midway-- like the Fair site itself-- was largely undeveloped before the advent of the
Fair. Once the Fair was announced, vacant lots adjoining the site were quickly leased, and a building
boom began. Hotels, restaurants-- and all manner of amusements-- sought the patronage of Fair visitors.
On Cottage Grove Avenue, at the west end of the Midway, the Garden City Observation Wheel, a
rival to the Ferris wheel, was erected, as was another, smaller wheel (see page 33). Nearby was the
Serpentine and Cavern Railway, a scenic railway ride probably built and operated by L. A. Thompson,
"father of the American roller coaster". Pain's, a firm world-famous for their elaborate fireworks displays,

presented the "Last Days of Pompeii" and the Crimean War battle of Sebastopol on Cottage Grove as
well. [30]
Directly across Stony Island Avenue from the Fair in Jackson Park, Buffalo Bill's Wild West show
settled in to play the Fair season, much as it had in Paris during the Exposition of 1889. Reportedly,
Cody had originally applied for space at the Fair itself, but had been turned down. [31] Along Stony Island
Avenue, between Buffalo Bill's and the Midway, a shanty-town of rough amusements popped up as it had
in Philadelphia in 1876: gypsy fortune tellers, carousels, games of chance, and another much smaller,
much cruder `Ferris' Wheel (see page 43). [32]
Altogether, there were said to be "thirty-two first class theaters and places of amusement in
Chicago"... and a good number of lesser class entertainments besides. [33] These amusements were
not, of course, under the control of the fair's organizers. They would bring no revenue into the fair's
coffers. It was up to the Midway, therefore, to effectively compete with all these outside entertainments if
the fair was to make a profit.
Thousands of applications, for concessions of all sorts, from all around the world, deluged Ways
& Means. The committee actively considered at least 491. Many that were agreed to ultimately never
reached contract or failed to operate, and spaces were still being filled after the Exposition opened. This
state of flux is readily seen by comparing òfficial' maps of the Midway issued and updated throughout the
Fair's run. [38]
The result was an arbitrary mix of "authentic" ethnic villages, commercial versions of the same,
miscellaneous amusements and rides.
THE THEMED VILLAGES

The popularity of the themed "foreign villages" at the Paris Exposition of 1889 ensured a desire
for concessions of this type on the Plaisance.
An early proposal for the Midway was a "Bazaar of All Nations", selling characteristic wares from
around the world. This would have kept the commercial sale of articles separate from exhibits. This idea,
however, was abandoned early on, and individual "village" concessions granted instead. [39] The first
"foreign village" to officially break ground on the Midway--indeed, the first concession of any sort, though
not the earliest to have been granted by the fair--was the Turkish Village. Robert Levy, a concessionaire
from Constantinople, raised the Turkish flag to dedicate the attraction's site September 20, 1891, one day
after his application was approved by the Committee on Ways & Means. [40]
The themed "foreign village", often thought to have been original to this Fair, clearly was not. In
fact, it had been a popular type of amusement in both Europe and America for some twenty years prior to
the Columbian Exposition.

In the 1870s, the great animal trainer Carl Hagenbeck imported a family of Laplanders to tend
reindeer at his Hamburg, Germany `zoo'. They quickly became an attraction in their own right. By the
1880s, Hagenbeck had added a group of Soudanese along with their domestic and wild animals; and for
the next six years, he toured Europe with "ethnographic exhibitions" of Lapps, Nubians, Eskimos, etc., as
well as a troupe from India including magicians, jugglers, snake charmers and dancing girls. [41]
In 1878, while Hagenbeck was presenting a "Nubian Camp" in London [42], the `foreign village'
became a highlight of that year's Paris Exposition. "Perhaps the most innovative and widely admired
feature of (this) fair was the Street of Nations, planned and executed by Georges Berger, director of
foreign sections. In the central courtyard of the Palace of Industry, each participating nation was invited
to build an entranceway to its exhibits. The result was a splendid row of facades that announced, in
architectural terms, the character and aesthetic values of every nation....The whole ensemble taken
together allowed fairgoers to see, at one glance, the eclectic nature of the world in 1878." [43]
Outside, in the parc du Trocdero, a `Street of Algiers' featured merchants and performers from
that French colony. Nearby were Japanese, Chinese, Persian and Tunisian and Moroccan `villages'. [44]
In 1884, a "Japanese Village" was erected in London; two years later, another was exhibited at
the Columbia Theater in Chicago, and yet a third at Chicago's Cheltenham Beach. In 1885, two East
Indian "Villages" played London. [45]
The most direct influence on the villages of the 1893 Midway were those that appeared at the
1889 Paris Exposition. On the eastern edge of that fair, along the Esplanade des Invalides, the "exotic
cultures" of the French colonial empire were displayed "in an attractive jumble of huts, bazaars, and cafes
attended by thousands of natives plying their crafts." One of these, the Algerian & Tunisian Village, won
a gold medal at the Exposition and captured the imagination of American visitor, young Sol Bloom. [46]
Across the fair site was the "Rue du Caire", a reproduction of a Cairo street "and an attraction
second only to the Eiffel Tower." There, in the Cafe Egyptien, a girl named Aioucha performed the
"seductive danse du ventre (belly dance)" which "became an international sensation..." [47]
Aioucha and the Rue du Caire were not solely responsible for this sensation. There were other
exotic dancers at the Paris Exposition; according to a souvenir history of the fair, it was "impossible" to
avoid the many oriental cafes on the Esplanade des Invalides where "Jewish and Moslem dancing girls"
named "Mouny, Farila, Zaina or Fatima" swayed "their breasts, their abdomens, and their loins." Yet the
Rue du Caire got the major credit for the danse. "It is already famous in Paris, this Street of Cairo..." [48]
Not surprisingly, a version of the "Rue du Caire" was one of the first concessions to apply for and
be granted space on the Midway Plaisance. (Plans for the Columbian Exposition were announced in
1889, so concessionaires at that year's Paris fair knew it was coming.) The Egypt-Chicago Exposition
Company was chartered to bring essentially the same plan as in Paris to the Chicago fair, where it was
called the Street in Cairo. It became the single most popular attraction on the Midway, even more
popular than the Ferris wheel. [49]

The Street contained cafes, a mosque, a replica of the ancient Egyptian `Temple of Luxor'
complete with imitation mummies, a theater, and sixty-two shops. The buildings admirably captured "the
general architectural flavor of Cairo. Its inhabitants were equally as authentic--Egyptian, Nubian, and
Sudanese men, women and children, along with their dogs, donkeys, camels and snakes. These
residents gave frequent impromptu street performances, including fights, sword and candle dances,
weddings and other celebrations. Snake charmers and fortune tellers lined the street." [50] Visitors could,
for a fee, ride the donkeys; riding the camels was even more popular, especially with couples, and even
more so with spectators, "because the lass always repented when it was too late and the altitudinous
camel was rising in sixteen parts." [51] But again, as in Paris, the Street's top attraction was the danse du
ventre... which again, not surprisingly, became the sensation of this fair as well.
Adjacent to the Street in Cairo on the Midway were two other Mid-Eastern "villages". One was
the Algerian and Tunisian Village, again a version of an 1889 attraction, this time the award winning
exhibit seen in Paris by the young Sol Bloom. It consisted of a semicircle of buildings including a covered
bazaar, a cafe and coffee house, and a number of stalls in a decorated "Moorish Arcade". Street
performances included jugglers and snake charmers. At the center was an Algerian Theater, featuring
various performances including a `torture dance', but most notably, of course, the danse du ventre.
Compared to the Street in Cairo, this was a theatrical set designer's version of Algeria and Tunis, its
tightly clustered, brightly colored buildings lacking its neighbor's subtlety and detail. [52]
Even less authentic was the near-by Persian Palace of Eros. A single building whose first floor
was devoted to a bazaar selling jewelry, candy, Persian carpets and curios, its name derived from the
coffee house upstairs, where, again, the danse du ventre was performed. The dancers here, however,
were Parisian, not Persian; French danseuses imported from cabarets of Montmartre like the MoulinRouge where the belly dance lasted long after the 1889 fair. [53]
Elsewhere on the Midway was Robert Levy's Turkish Village, also known as the Street in
Constantinople. Unlike most Midway concessions, it had no enclosing fence and no admission charge,
being less a compound than a collection of shops. Gertrude M. Scott considers this to have been, in
terms of architecture, the "least authentic" of the Mid-Eastern "villages". Instead, its authenticity came
from its 200 to 350 merchants and performers, the largest population of any concession, who roamed the
Midway in red fezzes, never failing to attract crowds of curious fairgoers. The Turkish Village was very
popular and financially successful, and its manager, Constantinople caterer Levy, served as Chairman of
the Concessionaire's Club. [54]
Levy's Turkish Village contained an authentic Moslem mosque, donated by Abdul Hamid, the
Sultan of Turkey. It was open to the public only when it was not being used for religious services by the
villagers. Later in the summer, a "Moorish Mosque of Tangiers" opened separately on the Midway; this
was an exhibit selling photos and curios of Morocco. [55]
The last of the Midway's Mid-Eastern attractions did not arrive on the Plaisance until midsummer, and due to the late date was placed at the west end, farthest from the White City. The Bedouin

Camp or Ottoman Hippodrome was brought to Chicago by promoters who originally booked the ensemble
in the old West Side Baseball Grounds as a non-fair attraction. After a series of calamities, the promoters
left the tribe of Bedouins stranded in Chicago, and the fair found room for them on the Midway. Often
called "the Wild East show", the Bedouin horsemen put on exhibitions of Oriental riding in hopes of
competing with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show just outside the Midway. Due to its late arrival, and its
assignment at the farthest point from the Fair proper, the Bedouin Camp was the least successful of all
the Mid-Eastern "villages". [56]
Instead of villages, merchants from India and Japan erected purely commercial bazaars. A
troupe of "Hindoo Jugglers" performed first in a booth at the Street in Cairo, then moved during the
summer to their own small building next to the Illinois Central Railroad tracks at the east end of the
Midway. [57]
What was often erroneously referred to as "the Chinese Village" was instead a single building
containing a bazaar, a tea house and a replica of a temple or "Joss House". It was generally authentic,
although the `Joss House Cafe' did sell pork & beans, potato salad, ham sandwiches and oatmeal as well
as lichee nuts and oolong tea. [58] Not very popular-- fairgoers reportedly found the Chinese music
cacophonous and their dramas bewildering-- this may reflect the general racial prejudice of 1890s
Americans toward the Chinese. Scott suggests that the exhibit may well have been a front for smuggling
Chinese immigrants into the U.S. despite the Exclusionary Laws of the time. [59]
The Chinese concession was said to have been built by members of the very small Chinese
community in Chicago in 1893. The city's largest and most powerful immigrant groups of the time-- with
much greater political and economic clout than the Chinese-- led to the inclusion-- and much greater
popularity-- of their own European villages on the Midway.
There were not one, but two separate Irish villages on the Plaisance, reflecting the split between
the Protestant Ulster provinces and the Catholic rest of Ireland. Each was erected by a group promoting
cottage industries like lace- making, embroidery and wood carving. The Catholic village, with a
reproduction of Blarney Castle featuring what was said to be an actual fragment of the Blarney Stone (but
rumored to be just a piece of ordinary Chicago street paving brick) was the most popular, overshadowing
the Protestant village with its replica of Donegal Castle. [60]
Large and influential as the Irish population was in Chicago, the Germans were an even stronger
segment of the city. Consequently, the Midway featured a German Village that was among the largest of
all concessions. Part of it was indeed a kind of museum village, with representative houses from
respective provinces of the Fatherland and a reproduced fortress exhibiting medieval armaments. More
popular, however, was the large beer garden that featured performances of two different bands from the
German army, one from the infantry, and one from the cavalry. This concert garden was not that different
from many commercial bier gartens on Chicago's North Side, an area so heavily populated by German
immigrants that it was commonly called the "Nord Seit". [61]
The German Village beer garden gained a reputation for being a boisterous and rowdy spot.
Quite the opposite was the reputation of Old Vienna, a compound reproducing "Der Graben", a Viennese

town square of one hundred and fifty years earlier. There were forty different shops, plus cafes and
taverns, a church and a `City Hall' or Rathhaus. An outdoor restaurant occupied the center of the square,
and it became a fashionable rendezvous point for fairgoers. (Even so, Old Vienna also contained a
tavern staffed by women which gained a more risqu reputation.) [62]
The great popularity of Old Vienna led to a smaller Vienna Cafe concession (not to be confused
with the Vienna Bakery, see below) which hoped to imitate its success. A "German Weinerwurst House"
and a Hungarian Orpheum (or Cafe and Concert Pavilion) also hoped to attract customers from Chicago's
large population of immigrants from Germany and Austria-Hungary. [63]
A Bulgarian Curiosity Shop and a French Cider Press, complete with waitresses in Norman
costumes, were yet other "European"-themed concessions. [64] The only authentic ethnological villages
on the Midway were those from Dutch possessions in the East Indies, the Java Village and the South Sea
Islanders Village and Johore Bungalow. These were run by competing colonial entrepreneurs and were
commonly acclaimed for presenting a "true", educational picture of life in these lands. All other ethnic
concessions on the Midway were, to one degree or the other, commercialized attractions. [65]
Incongruously positioned side by side at the far west end of the Midway, the Dahomey Village
featured tribesmen and Àmazon' women warriors from Africa, while the Lapland Village presented a tribe
of Arctic Scandinavians. The Lapps' leader, the ancient King Bull, said to be 119 years old, had presided
over a similar Lapland Village at the Paris fair of 1889. [66]
The lure of these concessions, like those of Java and the South Sea Islands, was their
supposedly authentic displays of life in these cultures, although both the Dahomey and Lapland Villages
were, to some degree, commercialized. However, the lure of the most popular "villages" on the Midway
rested instead in their entertainment values, whether taking the form of "exotic" performances, or ethnic
nostalgia. In this they followed the pattern set earlier, by Hagenbeck and others, for "foreign villages" as
attractions at circuses and theaters.
By midsummer 1893, "natives" of the Americas were added to the roster of Midway village
performances. In the case of the American Indian Village and the compound known as Sitting Bull's
Cabin, the attempt to compete with the popularity of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, performing just outside the
fairgrounds, is evident. (In fact, Sitting Bull's Cabin had been part of the Camp of All Nations exhibit at
Cody's show before being moved to the Midway.) [67] The concession known as "The Aztecs" (actually,
Indian potters and basket-weavers from Mexico) and the Brazilian Cafe (featuring native Indian folk
performances) were both probably influenced by the Wild West as well. [68]
Lastly, the New England Log Cabin and Restaurant, with its relics of colonial days and waitresses
in òlde tyme' costumes, fits the general pattern of the themed attraction, though this time of U.S. origin.
It seems influenced by a growing nostalgia among Americans for earlier times, seen also in the colonial
English and Spanish architecture of many state buildings in Jackson Park, not to mention Cody's
romanticized ensemble. [69]
10

The "village" attractions of the Midway, with their ethnic, exotic and nostalgic themes, were clearly
the prototype for early 20th century amusement park settings as well as the theme parks to come.
THE RIDES
Contrary to our modern concept of a `Midway', the original of 1893 had very few mechanical
amusement rides. And, strictly speaking, three of the four attractions visitors could ride on the Plaisance
were not originally intended to be `rides' as we think of them today--i.e., for the purpose of amusement.
The reason was simple: the merry- go-round and the mild `scenic railway' type of roller coaster were
virtually the only amusement rides existing in 1893 -- and most likely, neither were considered
spectacular enough to merit a spot on the Midway. Yet the physical dominance--and tremendous
popularity--of one single Midway attraction in 1893, the Ferris wheel, paved the way for a boom in
mechanical rides, ensuring their place as the dominant amusement feature of midways to come.
Despite the common belief that the Plaisance was intended from the beginning for "foreign
villages", the very first concession assigned space on the Midway was a ride. The Barre Sliding Railway
was not intended, however, to be an amusement. Instead, it was meant as an example of the
`transportation of tomorrow', much like the monorails at later world's fairs. Concession Agreement # 1 was
granted, August 26, 1891, to the Barre Sliding Railway Co. to build a "Hydraulic Sliding Railway" one mile
long, or the length of the Midway Plaisance. A train without wheels that hydroplaned over a track covered
by a thin sheet of water, it was the invention of a Frenchman, Charles A. Barre. Previously demonstrated
at the 1889 Paris Exposition and an 1890 exposition in Edinburgh, Scotland, it was built as an elevated
railway down the southern edge of the Midway, and was originally intended as a means of rapid transit
between Washington and Jackson Parks. [70]
Unfortunately, two separate sets of promoters failed to ever get the Barre Railway successfully
running on the Midway. Fairgoers seeking the future of urban mass transit were better off taking the city's
first L line, just opened from downtown to the fair. [71]
More successful, while using a similar principle to the Barre, was the Ice Railway. Instead of
wheels, the Ice Railway's cars had sleigh runners; and instead of tracks, the coaster's course was iced-even in the heat of a Chicago summer--by pipes containing freezing ammonia gas. [72]
Built by the De la Vergne Refrigeration Company of New York, the railway was invented by
Thomas L. Rankin, "an àll around' refrigerater" (sic) who pioneered cooling systems for ice houses,
railroad freight cars and the manufacture of ice skating rinks. Like the Barre, the Ice Railway was first
intended "as a means of transportation" for fairgoers; the original application was made to build it in
Jackson Park, from the Horticultural building to the Liberal Arts building, passing over the Wooded Island
and the East Lagoon. [73] When Ways & Means consigned the railway to the Midway, a decision was
made to construct it as, essentially, a roller coaster. And so, to build the Ice Railway, the De la Vergne
Company hired as contractor the man who knew more about such things than anyone else in 1893-- the
"father of the American roller coaster", L. A. Thompson. [74]
11

Born March 8, 1848 in Jersey, Licking County, Ohio, La Marcus Adna Thompson was a man of
his times, a mechanical genius of the great 19th Century industrial boom. In 1875, he invented a new
kind of seamless hosiery and traveled to Chicago to interest merchants in it. Convincing Field, Leiter and
Company (later Marshall Field and Company) to place a $10,000 order, Thompson founded the Eagle
Knitting Company in Elkhart, Indiana in 1877. "By 1882, the company had built and owned a complete
mill, employed over 300, and annually netted over $250,000 in various grades of hosiery, leggings,
scarfs, and mittens distributed over the United States." But business success took its toll on Thompson.
Near a nervous breakdown, he sold his interest in the mill and went to Arizona to recuperate. Upon
returning to Elkhart, he devoted his energies toward developing an amusement device for adults as well
as children. In 1884, he built his invention at Brooklyn's Coney Island, then still just a seaside resort.
Called the Switchback Railway, it was America's first roller coaster.
"From 1884 to 1887, Thompson was granted thirty patents, all leading to the improvement of the
gravity ride." In partnership with James A. Griffiths of Atlantic City, he added tunnels with elaborate
artificial scenery to the ride, and called this improved version a Scenic Railway. It "quickly became the
most popular and famous amusement device in the world", and L. A. Thompson Scenic Railways were
built throughout America and overseas. From 1889 to 1893, he and Griffiths built a version called a
"Serpentine Railway". The Serpentine and Cavern Railway operating on Cottage Grove Avenue just
south of the Midway was probably one of these. [75]
Despite a fatal accident on its test run-- a coupling bolt broke and a car slid off the track, killing
one passenger and injuring five others-- the Ice Railway operated successfully during the fair. The cars
ran to the jingle of sleigh bells and patrons were given a souvenir snowball made by the same
refrigeration process, all in the middle of summer. [76]
At the far west end of the Midway was a Captive Balloon, the only Plaisance attraction intended
as an amusement ride. In honor of Christopher Columbus, the Chicago rose 1493 feet in the air to give 15
to 20 passengers a panoramic view of the Exposition and the surrounding city, all the while securely
tethered to the ground by cables. Hydrogen-filled balloons like this one had been standard features at the
Paris Expositions and American circuses for some time. [77] During a freak windstorm on the Midway, the
Chicago was damaged beyond repair, and for the rest of the fair season, its grounds featured a Mexican
orchestra, a vaudeville revue, a "large orchestreon" (sic), and a trapeze act. [78]
Far more successful as both a ride and an observation device- indeed, the major sensation of
the fair--was the great Wheel built by George Ferris, Jr. Yet, like the Barre and Ice Railways, the Ferris
wheel was not originally intended to be anything as mundane as an amusement ride. Instead, it was to be
Chicago's answer to the great monument of the Paris Exposition, the Eiffel Tower.
It was thought that the Chicago fair had to have a tower to rival Eiffel's and many schemes for
one were proposed, including a Circular Railway Tower which would have featured roller coaster-like
trains spiraling up and down its height. All these plans came to naught but inspired Ferris to conceive his
giant Wheel. [79]
12

"Towers of various kinds have been proposed but towers are not original," Director of Works
Daniel H. Burnham told a meeting of architects and designers early in 1892. "Mere bigness is not what is
wanted--something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers
are to retain their prestige and standing." [80]
Among Burnham's listeners was 33 year old engineer George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. Born
February 14, 1859 in Galesburg, Illinois-- a town founded by his family-- Ferris, like L.A. Thompson, was a
child of America's industrial boom. An 1881 graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy,
New York, Ferris had spent the ten years since building railroads, tunnels, trestles and bridges. By age
26, he was a recognized expert in the use of structural steel and established his own engineering firm in
Pittsburgh, PA. Four years later he formed Ferris, Kaufman and Company, to construct bridges over the
Ohio River at Wheeling, WV and Cincinnati, OH. [81]
Now he took up Burnham's challenge. According to a legend that Ferris himself helped promote,
the idea came to him at a "chop house dinner", and he sketched out the complete Wheel on scrap paper
at the restaurant table. Actually the process was far more involved. There had been other proposals for a
giant wheel, and much of the specifications that made Ferris' idea workable were calculated by one W.F.
Gronau, an engineer employed in Ferris' firm. But the dinner table story made a good story for the
press....and, in many ways, it was good publicity that made the great Wheel go round. [82]
Ferris' original application for a concession at the Fair was granted, then revoked the following
day in June 1892. His plan for the Wheel was so audacious that many thought it impossible to build, or
that people would be afraid to ride it. While critics scoffed that he had "wheels in his head", Ferris turned
to a group of railroad men familiar with his bridge building. They agreed to finance the Wheel, and with
their backing secured, a concession was finally granted by the Fair in late November, 1892. [83]
The agreement gave Ferris five months to build his Wheel. It wound up taking eight months, but
even that is remarkable considering the staggering feat of construction involved. [84]
Two steel towers, each 140 feet tall, had to be built and anchored to massive foundations sunk 35
feet deep in the ground. This required excavation through 20 feet of water and quicksand in brutal winter
weather. With the mercury hitting 10 degrees below zero, the concrete for the foundations had to be
continuously steam heated to keep it from freezing before it was poured. [84b]
To the top of these towers, fourteen stories high, a great axle, 45 feet long and nearly 3 feet in
diameter-- the largest single piece of steel ever forged to that date-- had to be hoisted into place. On this
axle, not one, but two steel wheels, spoked like bicycle wheels, would rotate. Each wheel was 250 feet in
diameter.
Between the two wheels, 36 enclosed passenger cars were hung. The size of streetcars-- 27'
long, 13' wide and 9' high-- with large observation windows barred by iron safety gratings, each car was
fitted with 40 swivel chairs and had room for twenty more standing passengers. Each car weighed 13
13

tons. Stepped platforms at the base of the Wheel enabled six cars to be loaded and unloaded at a time.
Fully loaded, the Wheel's maximum capacity was an astounding 2160 passengers. [85]
It was instantly hailed as the "eighth wonder of the world". With skyscrapers in their infancy, the
264'-tall Ferris wheel stood just a bit shorter than the tallest building in North America at that time,
downtown Chicago's Masonic Temple! Outlined at night by 1400 light bulbs, the Wheel reportedly could
be seen from fifty miles away. [86]
Rising from the very center of the Midway Plaisance, the Ferris wheel was a major reason the
amusement zone became more popular with visitors than the Fair proper. Nearly a million and a half
people paid fifty cents each--as much as it cost for admission to the Fair itself--to ride the Wheel between
its opening June 1 and the Fair's closing November 1. [87]
It was sketched, photographed and written about for hundreds of newspaper and magazine
articles. Nine different songs were composed in its honor. Booklets, framed pictures, paper weights,
medals, spoons, and dozens of other items sold as official souvenirs of the Wheel were eagerly snapped
up by the public. Like the Eiffel Tower at the previous Paris fair, the Ferris wheel became the very symbol
of the World's Columbian Exposition... as such, it also symbolizes the triumph of the Midway over the
White City in public popularity. [88]
Contrary to our modern concept of a `Midway', the 1893 original had only these few rides. Yet
the sensation caused by the Ferris Wheel--and its sheer physical dominance at the center of the entire
Plaisance, looming like Leviathan over every other concession--set the pattern for mechanical thrill rides
to dominate the Midways and amusement parks that followed.
OTHER WHEELS
Following the spectacular success of the great Wheel on the Midway in 1893, all such devices
have been called `Ferris wheels'. Yet the concept was an ancient one, and even in America before and
during the Columbian Exposition, there were other wheels than Ferris'.
According to Dr. Norman D. Anderson's definitive Ferris wheels: An Illustrated History, primitive
pleasure wheels existed in Europe, Russia and Asia as far back as the 1600s. In America, the earliest
known pleasure wheels operated at the New York State Fair in 1849 and Atlanta, Georgia in the early
1850s.
Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut, and Rocky Point, Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, two
early American resorts that later became full-fledged amusement parks, reportedly had wheel-type rides
in 1854 and 1858 respectively. (In 1892, carousel maker Charles I.D. Looff built a wheel approximately
60' high at Rocky Point.) In the 1870s, C.W.F. Dare, general manager of the New York Carousal
Manufacturing Company in Brooklyn, advertised two sizes of wheels-- 20' and 30' in diameter--calling
them Revolving or Aerial Swings.
14

The seaside resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey, was home to a number of pre-Ferris wheels. I.N.
Forrester of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the first person to get a U.S. patent for this type of amusement ride,
built perhaps two different pleasure wheels near Atlantic City's first resort hotel, the Sea View Excursion
House, in the early 1870s. His second, improved model, the "Epicycloidal Diversion", consisted of four
wheels holding eight cars each on a revolving platform, giving passengers "a double ride-- up, over and
down as in the case of the usual pleasure wheel and also around and around a center pole, as in the
case of a carousel."
William Somers, from a family long connected with Atlantic City history, invented and erected an
"Observation Roundabout" on the Boardwalk in 1891. When Somers' first wheel burned on June 22,
1892, he speedily replaced it with two side by side wheels by July 4 of that year.
After his initial success at Atlantic City, Somers built wheels at Coney Island and Asbury Park,
New Jersey in 1892, and Rockaway Beach, Long Island and South Beach, Staten Island in 1893. He
also granted a group of promoters permission to build a wheel based on his patent at the Chicago world's
fair.
In June, 1892 the Garden City Observation Wheel Company applied for a concession to build a
Somers wheel on the Exposition grounds--at just about the same time George Ferris made his
application. Actually, neither was the first, nor the last, proposal the Ways & Means Committee received
for a wheel at the Fair. A year earlier, September 1, 1891, a Chicago industrialist, H.W. Fowler,
proposed a wheel 250' high, supported by a tower in the shape of a Dutch windmill. Just after the Ferris
and Garden City proposals, W.H. Wachter of Brinkley, Arkansas, applied to build a wheel 220' high,
carrying 224 passengers in 28 "upholstered baskets".
Ways & Means was exceedingly wary about all of these schemes. Telling Fowler in 1891 that
"nothing of the kind" would be permitted at the Fair, the Committee seems to have changed their minds
by 1892. They granted Ferris' application over Garden City and Wachter, perhaps because Ferris had
applied first. By the very next day, however, they changed their minds again, rejecting Ferris as well. (It
was not until late November, 1892, that Ferris' application was finally approved.)
Fowler and Wachter abandoned their schemes, but Garden City did not. Their application
rejected, the company decided to build their wheel outside the fair, at the southwest corner of Cottage
Grove Avenue and 60th Street. Work began in November, 1892 and was completed about April 1st,
1893. It was immediately placed in operation to capture the business of the crowds coming to preview
the fair site. "The wheel was 60' in diameter with 18 carriages, each designed to hold 4 people.
Compared to 50 cents charged by the Ferris wheel when it opened in June, a ride on the Garden City
wheel was a bargain at 10 cents."
Another smaller wheel was put up in June 1893 on the east side of Cottage Grove near the
Garden City wheel, and yet another very primitive wheel evidently operated in the strip of crude
15

amusements on Stony Island Avenue just outside the fair. The names of these rides' promoters are
unknown today.
Although the Somers Company built the Garden City Observation Wheel, William Somers had no
business interest in it except for the royalties he received on the use of his patent. In July, 1893, the
Garden City Company brought suit against the Ferris wheel for infringement on Somers' patent, but the
court eventually decided in favor of Ferris.
History did the same. The impact on the nation's consciousness of Ferris' great engineering feat
inevitably led to calling all wheel rides `Ferris wheels', regardless of their size or who built them. [89]
MISCELLANEOUS AMUSEMENTS
The rest of the Midway Plaisance was a potpourri of the amusements of the time.
From the zoo world came Hagenbeck's Animal Arena. Carl Hagenbeck not only started the
exhibition of `foreign villages', but "revolutionized the presentation of wild animals in circuses by inventing
new and humane methods of training and sustaining wild animals in captivity." [90]
Born in 1848, the son of a Hamburg, Germany fishmonger, Hagenbeck was only 4 years old
when his father obtained six seals some fishermen had caught in their nets. The boy exhibited the seals
in wooden tubs for a penny admission. At age 21, he embarked on a career exhibiting wild animals of all
kinds, running a menagerie, and sending out ethnographic exhibits. He developed the method of training
animals through praise and rewards, the modern open-air zoo, and the exhibition of animals in the highcage arenas used by circuses today. By 1888, Hagenbeck was exhibiting tigers, bears and cheetahs at
London's Crystal Palace and sending groups of trained animals all over the world. [91]
On the Midway, in Hagenbeck's first U.S. engagement, the world-renowned trainer astonished
audiences with lions that rode horse's backs, polar bears climbing ladders and jaguars that played with
lapdogs. [92]
Another menagerie-type concession, the California Ostrich Farm, featured twenty-eight African
ostriches with names like Grover Cleveland, James G. Blaine, Susan B. Anthony, and General Grant. A
display showed how the exotic birds were hatched by incubators on a ranch in Fall Brook, CA. [93]
According to Sol Bloom's Autobiography, this concession had a "restaurant where the specialite
de la maison was ostrich-egg omelet. This delicacy consisted of the finest chicken eggs, and everybody
sent postcards home to Kansas or Iowa or South Carolina describing its subtle flavor.... A minor strike
interfered with egg deliveries... [and the Ostrich Farm's manager had to] canvass the grocers and
restaurants of the South Side and buy everything with a shell around it.... for a few days the ostrich-egg
omelets were more subtly flavored than usual: in addition to hen's eggs, they contained duck, goose and
turkey eggs. For all I know, they might have had a few ostrich eggs in them." [94]
16

After such exotic animal exhibitions, it is with much chagrin that one finds, in the latter days of the
fair, a "Dog Show" assigned space on the Midway, between the Ostrich Farm and Sitting Bull's Cabin.
[95]
The panorama, a type of entertainment widely popular in Chicago and elsewhere in 1893, was
represented on the Midway by two elaborate examples. The Panorama of the Volcano Kilauea simulated
the largest active volcano in the Western Hemisphere, located in the Hawaiian Islands. As part of the
attraction, a kahuna or Hawaiian priest chanted to Pele, the goddess of fire, and a native octet sang
kanaka melodies. Ironically, this concessions owner was Loren A. Thurston, leader of the American and
European sugar planters who had overthrown Hawaiis native government just that January of 1893.
Thurstons low opinion of Hawaiian native culture did not, evidently, stand in the way of his exploiting it for
profit on the Midway. [96]
The Panorama of the Bernese Alps was the work of Swiss artists, simulating a breathtaking view
of their native terrain. [97]
An improvement on the latter panorama was the Midway's Electric Scenic Theater. Combining
the tricks of the panorama with effects from 250 incandescent lights, it simulated "A Day in the Alps" from
sunrise to twilight. "The show opened at dawn with light just beginning to play on a painted scene of the
Alps and Mt. Blanc, moved through the atmospheric changes of the day from morning mists to a
thunderous lightning storm, and ended with a re-creation of evening, with moonlight and stars. The visual
drama produced by the theatre's electric lighting was enhanced by the music of Tyrolean singers and
musicians." [98] This type of display, presented for the first time on the Midway, would go on to be a
popular, widely presented amusement of the next two decades. [99]
It has often been written that Thomas Edison's kinetoscope, showing the first motion pictures,
was part of the inventor's display in the Electrical Building in Jackson Park. In fact, Edison did not have
the kinetoscope ready in time for his exhibit. [100] However, an early version of the motion picture was
presented on the Midway by Eadweard Muybridge in his Zoopraxographical Hall.
In the 1870s, Leland Stanford of California employed photographer Muybridge to settle a wager:
whether a racehorse had all four of its legs off the ground at any point during a run. Muybridge placed "a
row of cameras along a track and set them off in rapid succession as the animal went by", making a
series of still photos like the frames of a movie-- and proving that the horse did, indeed, have all legs off
the ground at one point. He continued his work at the University of Pennsylvania, taking some 30,000
photographs of lions, kangaroos, athletes and nude men and women in motion. [101]
On the Midway, Muybridge presented these photos (though probably not the nudes) in his
Zoopraxiscope (Greek for life action view), a machine he devised from a `magic lantern' and a rotating
slotted disk. Each sequence of photos was transferred to a circular glass disk for use in the projector. A
descriptive book and a portfolio of fifty zoopraxographic disks were available for purchase at the hall.
[102]
17

Today, we recognize the historic significance of Muybridge's concession. In 1893, ironically, it

was a flop, and his exhibit was replaced during the course of the summer by a concession offering
"Stereopticon Views of Pompeii". Actually a painted panorama of the ancient Roman city, with a second
view of the site as it was in the 1890s, "it proved a great success, producing $19,505 in gross earnings
compared to the meager" $320 Muybridge grossed. [103]
Later in summer, the Electro-Tachyscopes (electric rapid views) of Ottmar Anschutz, an imitator
of Muybridge, were presented on the Midway. Under the patronage of the German army and Ministry of
Education, Anschutz-- like Muybridge-- used a series of cameras to record motion (military drills, troop
maneuvers, cavalry charges, as well as gymnasts) and then transferred the photos to a revolving disk.
Unlike Muybridge, Anschutz' device used a flashing electric light to show his pictures without projection
(somewhat like Edison's kinetoscope, a peep-show device presenting a crude, early form of movies).
Anschutz' machines were displayed both as part of Germany's exhibit in the fair's Electricity building, and
separately on the Plaisance, where Arthur Schwartz, concessionaire of the Electric Scenic Theater,
secured the right to install them under the viaducts where Stony Island, Woodlawn, and Madison
Avenues crossed the Midway. [104]
Another optical device added to the Midway later in the season was a Camera Obscura, offering
views of the fairgrounds, and of "The Big Tree" or "Tree of Wonders". [105]
A number of Midway attractions presented acts or displays one could easily have found in the
dime museums of the day.
The United States Submarine Diving Company featured deep sea divers in a tank of water, in the
bulky diving suits and helmets of the time. [106]
The International Dress and Costume Company's Congress of Beauty presented "40 Ladies from
40 Nations". Though this sounds like a burlesque show, the object was to present the native costumes of
these women. Despite the show's claims, some commentators of the time claimed all the girls came from
New York's Tenderloin district. [107]
The Vienna Bakery and Natatorium was perhaps the oddest concession on the Midway. It
combined versions of two popular Chicago enterprises. The bakery was based on the Vienna Model
Bakery at 36 Washington Street downtown, the Natatorium (or indoor swimming pool) on the popular
Chicago Natatorium run by L.J. Kadish at 888 Milwaukee Avenue. [108]
When the Natatorium part proved to be a failure on the Midway, it was converted to a vaudeville
theater. The first revue presented featured then-heavyweight champion of the world "Gentleman Jim"
Corbett, along with knife-throwers, bell-ringers, a boxing kangaroo sparring partner and some racy French
`split dancers'. Unfortunately, Corbett's act had already bombed at the Haymarket Theater downtown,
and did no better on the Midway. After two weeks, Fair authorities decided the show was of questionable
character even for the Midway and ordered it shut down. [109]
18

Scale models of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome (and other European churches) and the Eiffel
Tower in Paris were presented on the Midway; such models were commonplace in dime museums. A
mock-up of a Colorado gold mine straddled the line between these dime museum type attractions and the
industrial ones we will look at in a moment. [110]
The Moorish Palace, while seeming to be a Mid-Eastern concession in name and in architecture,
was actually a combination of a wax museum featuring distinctly non-Mid- Eastern subjects and what in
later years would be called a funhouse. Wax museums, called at the time "Eden Musses", were as
popular and prevalent as panoramas and dime museums.
Upon entering, visitors found themselves in a `Palm Garden' filled "with a number of palm trees
with mirrors set between, so that impressions are multiplied by the thousand. A number of Arabs in armor
and other figures in wax heighten the effect; also a fathomless well (the illusion being produced by
mirrors)." [111]
Visitors made their way through the Palm Garden to the Moorish Palace itself, a "labyrinth"
representing the exterior of Spain's Alhambra, with endless colonnades and scenes of the coast of
Tangiers; in one part there was a Harem scene, complete with wax Sultan, dancing girl and eunuch.
Back into the labyrinth, one had to "ask the attendant for escape". [112]
Next one entered the Cave, a grotto with stalactites, more wax tableaux (this time, of Hell) and
the "Monster Kaleidoscope", a Hall of Mirrors. In a routine still followed in today's "haunted houses", a
costumed employee--in this case dressed as the devil-- would jump out to scare patrons; when this
happened to one of the American Indians from the Midway, he beat the devil with his cane and broke
$200 worth of glass. [113]
Originally, there was to be a Chamber of Horrors, but this was replaced by a potpourri of wax
figures, from Lincoln, Christ, and Martin Luther to Little Red Riding Hood, a "Dying Zouave", and a
tableau titled "You Can't Make Me White, Honey" (a white child being bathed by a black nurse tries to
sponge the color from the "mammy's" face). The Chamber of Horrors motif was retained only in "The
Execution of Marie Antoinette" with what was touted as the original guillotine. [114]
In another room, two illusion acts with names drawn from classical mythology were performed.
"Magneta" featured a woman on a rising globe; as the globe descended, the woman remained in mid-air.
In "Galatea", a marble statue transformed into a living girl right before patrons' eyes. Good illusions never
die; versions of both acts would pop up in Chicago amusement parks for decades to come. Indeed, a
form of the "Galatea" illusion can still be seen at carnivals today as the "Girl into a Gorilla" act. [115]
In yet other rooms, visitors encountered a circus clown named Sparrow, exotic dancers and the
musicians and singers of the "Royal Roumanian Quartette". [116]
The final concessions on the Midway were commercial/industrial in nature, and could easily have
been placed in the White City in Jackson Park. Perhaps the reason for placing the exhibits of the Libbey
19

Glass Company, the Venice-Murano Glass Company and the Parisian Art Glass Company on the Midway
is that the wares produced by their glass blowing artisans were for sale to the public. (Products exhibited
in the Fair proper were not supposed to be for sale.) The same rationale may be why the Diamond Match
Company and Adams Express Company exhibits were placed on the Midway. [117]
Seemingly, no such explanation fits the model Workingman's Home presented by the
Philadelphia branch of the fair's Women's Auxiliary. (A similar model home was part of the New York
state exhibit in Jackson Park.) Perhaps all these industrial exhibits wound up on the Midway because,
ultimately, no space was available for them in Jackson Park. [118]
Plantings of trees, actually nursery exhibits of the fair's Horticulture department, added a bit of
park-like nature to the Midway, though the landscaping was nowhere near that of Jackson Park. [119]
Scattered among the major Midway concessions were smaller booths selling refreshment drinks,
cigars, and official photographs. [120]
After noting what was on the Midway, it should also be noted what was not. Unlike our modern
idea of a Midway, nowhere on the Plaisance were there any `carnival' games. Games of chance and
gambling were strictly forbidden by the Fair's directors. Nor were there any `freak' shows of the type then
common in both circuses and dime museums. [121] Both, however, could be found in force among the
more tawdry amusements lining Stony Island Avenue between the Midway and Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
OUTSIDE THE GATES

The Fair's managers had hoped, by including concessions and amusements in the Fair itself, to
avoid the kind of `shantytown' of crude amusements that had popped up outside the Philadelphia fair of
1876. That strategy did not work.
"For a mile along the west side of Stony Island Avenue, from Fifty-Sixth Street to Sixty-fourth,"
reported the Inter-Ocean, "sideshows and other alleged attractions" sprang up on the empty lots across
from the Fair, north and south of the Midway.
In quickly slapped-up shanties, rented for $2 to $5 a day, "theaters" presented low vaudeville and
the inevitable Uncle Tom's Cabin, not to mention "the iron-skulled man" who pounded his head with a
rock. "Oriental museums, museums of anatomy... and collections of human curiosities galore" offered fat
ladies and living skeletons, òssified' (or petrified) men and women, a "human spider", a three-headed
woman, and a man who rode a bicycle standing on his nose. Sidewalk stands sold sweet cider, lemonade
and sandwiches, peanuts and popcorn balls, trinkets and tintype photographs and cheap souvenirs,
amidst the clamor of "mournful barrel organs...agonizing horns and shouting shrieking fakirs." [122]
For five cents, one could hang from a strap on wheels and speed down a wire across a vacant
lot, "flying through the air as if shot out of a catapult." Nearby was an "alleged Ferris wheel", crude and
small, with a "wheezy boiler and rickety engine". There were also at least two merry-go-rounds, one of
20

them a "Palace Carousel" from Germantown, PA, featuring horses, chariots, camels, giraffes, goats and
reindeer. [123]
Though the Chicago Herald compared the scene to "Podunkville when the circus comes to town",
some Fair and Midway people played both sides of Stony Island Avenue. After suing their concessionaire
over conditions, a group of the Eskimos originally exhibited in Jackson Park set up their own show
outside the grounds. Milhim Ouardy, a Syrian swordsman at the Moorish Palace, ran an "Oriental
bazaar" on 55th St. [124] And, though Stony Island was the most publicized `shantytown', a similar strip
of cheap saloons, dance halls, shooting galleries, and games of chance sprang up in shacks and tents on
Cottage Grove Avenue, between the Midway and 63rd St. [125]
Stony Island, too, had games of chance a plenty: gypsy tents, striking machines, shooting
galleries, and wheels of fortune. It also had an "African Dodger", perhaps the most racist and inhumane
àmusement' ever devised. A black man was hired to put his head through a hole in a canvas backdrop;
patrons (generally white) paid to throw baseballs with the object of hitting this target. The "African's"
ability to "dodge" the ball was limited to ducking his head from side to side. Eventually, "Dodgers" wore
wooden skullcaps covered with fake `kinky' hair for protection.
An incident at the Dodger on Stony Island Avenue shows just how cruel this sickening `game'
could be. One day, "a quiet young man" put down a nickel for three balls. His first throw "went through
the air like a rocket, brushing the right ear of the human target, who hadn't seen it coming. The young
man twisted his fingers around the second ball and sent it whizzing on a wide out curve. The colored
man didn't know which way to dodge. He ducked and the ball struck the top of his head with a sound like
hitting a muffled drum. Before he could recover, the third projectile came along, grazing his scalp.
"`Give me six more,' said the quiet young man. Ì'd rather throw than take the cigars (that were
the prize).'" The "quiet young man" was Bill Hutchison-- professional pitcher for Cap Anson's Chicago
Colts, forerunner of the Cubs. In 1892, the year before he stepped up to the Stony Island Dodger,
Hutchison led the National League in strikeouts; his specialty was the fastball. [126]
The Dodger, along with many of the freak and `girly' shows, illustrates just how low the
`pleasures' of the Stony Island strip could be. Yet the cheap entertainments drew scores of working-class
patrons who could not afford the more expensive Fair and Midway, as well as `swells' like Hutchison who
had a taste for `slumming'; early in the season, when the Fair and Midway were closed on Sundays,
"thousands" attended these lesser attractions. [127]
In general, however, these sideshows were vastly overshadowed by the Midway. It's ironic,
therefore, that they would give many Americans their first taste of the Midway concept. At Fair's end,
some Chicago entrepreneurs got the idea to put together a `traveling Midway', to play the nation's state
and county fair circuits. As most attractions from the real Midway were not available, it was from these
cheap entertainments outside the Fair's gates that America's first traveling carnival was assembled. (see
page 80).
21

SATISFYING P0PULAR TASTES

More people visited the Midway than rival Chicago amusements. This was what the Fair's
planners had hoped for, and done their best to ensure. The Midway, after all, was part of the Fair; the 50
cents admission to the Fair admitted one to the Midway as well (though, of course, most individual
attractions charged additional entrance fees). As part of the Fair, the Midway had crucial advantages
over its rivals: it had "official" status and was much better publicized, it had unique attractions/attractions
of better quality, and it was safer than the city's other amusement zones. Most importantly, the variety of
amusements scattered throughout the city were available on the Midway in one single place.
However, the Fair's planners probably did not foresee that the Midway would draw more visitors
than the White City itself. On April 10, 1893--about 3 weeks before opening--the Chicago Daily InterOcean noted: "With one exception, yesterday was the greatest Sunday the World's Fair proper has
seen. The turnstiles show that 11,907 spectators passed into the grounds. But far more popular than its
great white neighbor, Midway Plaisance...was the great attraction ....Men who were on the ground all day
estimated the crowd at 20,000." [128]
This continued to be the case during the Fair as well. "Soon after the Exposition opened new
booths and entrances were established on 59th and 60th Streets, where the tracks of the Illinois Central
Railroad cross the Midway Plaisance...This was necessitated by the popularity of the Midway Plaisance,
which was greater than had been expected." [129]
"Admissions to the Exposition through the western entrance to the Midway Plaisance exceed
those of any other avenue to the Fair." [130] Those visitors then had to travel the whole one mile length of
the Midway before they reached the Fair itself. Who can say for certain if they ever even made it to
Jackson Park?
Thus, the popularity of the Midway was not only "greater than expected", the Midway in fact
proved to be more popular with visitors than the White City itself. The Fair's planners may not have
anticipated this, but it's easy to see why it happened. [131]
By segregating amusements onto the Midway, the Exposition created a dichotomy that could not
be ignored. The Fair proper--the White City in Jackson Park--was grandiose, awe-inspiring, packed with
education and high culture. It was also an unrelenting mass of exhibits. So many, that even attempting
to see everything in a given building was a tiring proposition. The same had been true of the Paris
Exposition, with the same result: a tremendous fatigue factor. [132]
Most Fairgoers, therefore, took in only those exhibits of personal interest to them - farmers looked
at agriculture, etc. - then looked for something with general appeal. What had the most general appeal
was the Midway Plaisance; and as journalist Theresa Dean wrote, sooner or later, everybody went there.
[133]
22

The Midway, with its emphasis on commercial entertainment, stood in such marked contrast to
the Fair proper that some commentators dubbed it the "Fair improper". The term was meant to be
disparaging, but it proved to be seductive. To most people, it seems, the ìmpropriety' of the Plaisance
meant fun-- a much-needed respite from the White City's decorum, dignity, and social restraints.
The Midway signaled this intention to the public in a variety of ways. Even before the Fair
opened, the Inter-Ocean story of April 10 singled out the following elements to explain why the Midway
was drawing more visitors than the White City: "its cosmopolitan character of architecture, the beauty of
its disorder and lack of general design, the lively variation in color, and the motley exhibition of darkskinned Orientals..." These, said the paper, were the factors that made the Midway-- and not the White
City-- "the great attraction." [134]
ARCHITECTURE AND COLOR

Volumes have been written on the majestic architecture of the Fair proper, the White City. The
architecture of the Midway, on the other hand, has been largely ignored, except to point out its lack of
aesthetic merit. Yet, as the Inter-Ocean pointed out, the Midway's architecture was one of the features
that beckoned most strongly to visitors.
The Fair proper-- the White City-- was vast and staggering, its buildings monumental and
imperious. The Midway, by contrast, was an eclectic hodgepodge of styles, designed on a pedestrian
scale, full of picturesque, inviting alleyways and quarters. Its form perfectly expressed its function as a
place of entertainment and amusement.
The authentic-seeming architecture of the foreign villages appealed to many fairgoers as a
substitute for world travel. Though the days of the Grand Tour of Europe had arrived, only the wealthiest
Americans could afford such a trip. Fewer still were the Americans in 1893 who could trek to Africa and
the Orient. If "seeing the world" was an implicit promise of a world's fair, it was only on the Midway that
one could actually feel like a globe-trotter.
While the Street in Cairo or the Java Village-- even, for that matter, Sitting Bull's Cabin - appealed
to those who fantasized about adventures in far-off places, the European concessions further appealed to
nostalgia for the "homeland" among large numbers of Chicagoans (and other Fairgoers) who had
emigrated from Germany, Ireland, and the Slavic lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, of
course, these are the same lures--adventure, fantasy, nostalgia-- that attract Americans to the modern
theme park.
The Midway's architecture also appealed in its use of color. The great buildings of the Fair proper
were, of course, all white-- stately and unified, yet ultimately as much impassive as impressive... cold and
emotionally distant in their absence of color. The Midway, on the other hand, was a riot of bright, even
gaudy hues... the blue pagoda towers of the Chinese Temple with their red and yellow trim, the green and
red cars of the great Ferris wheel, the minarets of Cairo trimmed in scarlet and gold, the huge blue dome
of the Moorish Palace.
23

ACTION AND INTERACTION

Architecture and color set the stage for the third component-- Life, or action. With all the street
life of an actual street, the Midway bustled with activity--people, animals, etc. Its often tight quarters
accentuated this. The White City, even when thronged with visitors, seemed emptier because of its vast
scale. Ironically, even the official photographs put out by the Fair revealed this contrast, and so "gave the
impression, if nothing else, that the Midway was far more popular." [135]
Being outside was, in itself, becoming a popular trend in 1890s America. Urban congestion and
pollution had robbed city flat-dwellers of the òutdoors' that earlier, rural Americans had enjoyed. The
loss of shade trees and open spaces where breezes could blow, coupled with the stench and smoke of
industry, magnified summer heat.
The indoor recreations of the city (theaters, museums, etc.) offered little respite in these days
before electric fans, let alone air conditioning. Outside, public park space in Chicago was limited to a few
`grand' parks like Lincoln and Washington Parks; smaller, neighborhood parks were unheard of as yet.
To beat the heat, city dwellers went on picnics in cemeteries and in commercially owned groves scattered
around Chicago. Bicycling and baseball were becoming major urban pastimes. [136]
The Midway fit
this trend perfectly. Most of the time spent in the Fair proper was spent passively, inside buildings,
looking at endless rows of displays. By contrast, the Midway visit took place for the most part outdoors-even when technically inside a `village' compound like Old Vienna or the Street in Cairo, one was outside,
on the `village' streets or in open-air cafes and beer gardens a good part of the time--and was active,
indeed participatory: not just seeing and hearing, but riding a camel, haggling with merchants, eating
strange foods, etc.
Rather than just watching machines, the Ferris wheel or Ice Railway allowed Midway visitors to
ride them. Where the White City presented the industrial age as means of work, the Midway used the
same as a means of pleasure.
In this jumble of strange architecture, people and activities, there was a marked element of
Chaos. Where the White City was all dignity and decorum, the Midway was loose and boisterous. "Babel
without a tower," one writer described it, hearing the shouts of vendors and barkers, and the strange
music from strange instruments that sounded up and down the street. [137] As in all great human
festivals, from carnival in Rio to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the chaos of the Midway was a major part of
its appeal.
Obviously, this chaos was carefully controlled, compared to that of the city at large. It was
thought that fair visitors would expect a wide-open city, and Mayor Carter Harrison had been elected
largely on his promise to give them just that. In actuality, prostitution, gambling and drug use were to be
confined in a special, set-aside "vice district".
24

Still, Chicago's downtown, where most theaters were located, abutted this district; and so,
amusements were in close proximity to brothels, con games, and clip joint saloons, like the Lone Star,
whose notorious barkeeper Mickey Finn doctored drinks with knock-out drops in order to rob passed-out
patrons. In dark streets and alleys, muggers waited for unwary tourists. On the Midway, there was none
of the real danger found in the "Black City" beyond the fairgrounds.
Still, chaos--in the sense of a hodgepodge of elements --was the main characteristic of the
Plaisance. Unlike Burnham's highly organized White City, the Midway was primarily a haphazard
sequence of attractions.
The separate admission fees required at almost every attraction reinforced the essentially
random nature of the Midway. To attend all of the attractions would have cost each Midway visitor some
$13.00-- an enormous sum considering admission to all the rest of the fair was a mere 50 cents. As a
result, the Midway experience was exceedingly "un-programmed"; each visitor selected their own
experience of the Midway by choosing which attractions to visit.
Ultimately, the Midway itself, with its color and activity, was the biggest attraction of all. Simply by
strolling the Plaisance, you could feel you were having an adventure. Within the bounds of comfort and
safety, there was a sense of unpredictability, a sense that, on the Midway, anything - at any time - could
happen.
The lack of organization that was the Midway's fundamental characteristic was also its greatest
drawing card. The odd juxtaposition of attractions, combined with the fact that village inhabitants were
not confined to their villages, but roamed the street at will, gave the Midway the liveliness, color and
unpredictability that the austere, regimented White City sorely lacked.
The interactive nature of the street itself made a stroll there more popular than strolling in the
White City. Dozens of photos and paintings of the Midway show turbaned and fezzed exotics
intermingling with straw-hatted Americans. Reporter Marian Shaw's account of the Midway stroll sounded
the typical note: "Walking down the cosmopolitan avenue, jostled by men of every race, color and creed,
with quaint faces and quainter costumes [138] multitudes may be easily gathered to look on something
which is alive, especially a man or woman; but a paradise of domes and sculpture, waves and waters,
vistas and perfumes-- this entertainment, if it lack some speck of humanity...must languish.... This love
for live people has made Midway Plaisance a magnificent festival; has drawn the life-blood away from the
Universal Exhibition of the Works of Man [the Fair proper]." [139]
Even Frederick Law Olmsted saw the contrast between the lively Midway and the cold, austere
White City. As he toured the Fair proper, he made an "unsettling discovery: the crowds of visitors about
him wore a tired, dutiful, `melancholy' air..." He wrote Daniel Burnham to urge that "More incidents of
vital, human gaiety" be included in the White City. Expression of the crowd too business like, common,
dull, anxious and care-worn.' Olmsted suggested introducing unexpected festive elements:
masqueraders, singing children, musicians, colorful peddlers-- anything to enliven the scene. Why not,
he continued, hire exotic figures in native costume- -`varieties of "heathen" ', Olmsted put it-- from the
25

Midway?" [140] In fact, as the summer progressed, parades of Midway inhabitants and sporting events
featuring them were introduced into the White City.
THE FAIR IMPROPER

Another major draw of the Midway which cannot be overlooked was its erotic appeal to both men
and women. The term "Fair improper" carried the promise of 'forbidden pleasures', and this particular
kind of interaction had much to do with the Midway's popularity. (This trait would carry over to the
amusement parks and carnivals which followed.)
This was obviously the great appeal of the danse du ventre. By August 1893, local Chicago
clergy, the fair's Board of Lady Managers, even the National Association of Dancing Masters of America,
had condemned the `wicked' danse, particularly the `French' versions performed at the Persian Palace.
Under pressure from these groups, the Palace was ordered closed, then permitted to reopen - twice.
The second time it reopened, it was, supposedly, with all "objectionable features removed". But
Midway visitors never would have guessed that from the spielers outside, who now cried, "Come right in.
This is the theater that was closed because the girls were all arrested. This is the Palace Theater where
the dancing was stopped."
Ultimately, the only effect of the danse du ventre controversy was to increase Midway business,
especially at the Persian Palace. Seeing that, the Moorish Palace, Hungarian Orpheum, International
Costume show, Stereopticon Views of Pompeii-- even the Model of the Eiffel Tower-- promptly added
dancers to their concessions. [141]
Yet foreign women were far from the only sex objects on the Midway. "Handsome men,
regardless of color, were always objects of admiration at the Fair," reported the view book Midway
Types. Racism seems not to have been a factor here, as the caption in question continues: "These two
[men]... were very black men..." [142]
Despite the word "handsome", the admiration alluded to here could have been the philosophical
kind that Western artist and journalist Frederick Remington felt for the "savages" of the Plaisance.
Covering the Exposition for Harper's Weekly, "he turned away from the modernity symbolized by the
White City to walk the Midway..." There, he found the value of "that part of the world which does not wear
Derby hats and spend its life in a top-and-bottom tussle with a mortgage bearing eight per cent." Despite
his contempt for non-Whites, Remington found the sight of an armed Turk awakened "the sense of
admiration... that if you were not an American you would be a savage of that type." [143]
Indeed, to many female visitors, the men of the Midway exuded definite sex appeal. Miss Jennie
Hammond, visiting the Fair from Bellaire, Ohio, met, fell in love with, and announced she would wed
Abdul Lateef of the Turkish Village in Moslem rites. Chicago schoolgirl Alice Ranney, captivated when a
Bedouin, Nojep Farnesse, threw his silken scarf about her during a performance at the Ottoman
26

Hippodrome, made similar plans. Printing reports of other Midway romances, the Chicago Daily News
decried the outbreak among white American women of "A FAD FOR COLORED MEN". [144]
But eroticism seems to have outweighed racism for both sexes on the Plaisance. Consider the
Dahomeyans, routinely ridiculed in the (White) media of the day... and yet, the Dahomey Village topped
the Persian Palace (with its popular French belly dancers) on the list of highest grossing Midway
attractions (see page 76). The custom of the Dahomey women Àmazons' to go about bare-breasted
may well have been why. [145]
Obviously, the issue of Midway eroticism is far more complex than most accounts have indicated.
At the very least, it was a sign of the loosening of Victorian restraints taking place in many ways during
the 1890s, which helped make the coming amusement parks possible.
MIDWAY MYTH #2: LITTLE EGYPT

The legend persists to this day: The sensation of the Midway in 1893 was the exotic dancer Little
Egypt, who introduced the "Hootchy-Kootchy" to America.
Unfortunately, the legend is wrong-- on three counts:
1. No one on the Midway ever called it the "Hootchy-Kootchy";
2. It was first performed in the U.S. long before 1893
3. There was no `Little Egypt' on the Midway.
The term "Hootchy-Kootchy" evidently derives from the Arabic kouta kouta or houta kouta. A
song copyrighted 1893 uses the latter term in its lyrics; otherwise, all published accounts refer to the
dance as either the danse du ventre, the `muscle dance', or the `nautch dance' (from the Hindi nach,
meaning dance). As for the term "Hootchy-Kootchy", historian Gertrude Scott could find no usage before
the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895; even then, the dance was billed as the "coochee coochee".
Apparently, the dance was first performed in the U.S. in 1876, outside the grounds of the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, in a Shantytown variety hall that, ironically, had once been the site of
a church. Strangely enough, no one paid much attention to it at that time. It seems to have taken the
impact of the dance at the 1889 Paris fair to pave the way for the furor over it on the 1893 Midway.
As Gertrude Scott points out, the name Little Egypt was never applied to any dancer during the
term of the 1893 fair. Newspaper accounts mention dancers by first names, usually various Fatmas,
Fatimas, and Farida/Pharidas. Carnival historian Joseph McKennon thought `Little Egypt' may have
appeared in one of the "men only" cafes outside the fairgrounds. However, there were many articles
written about this area in 1893, and, again, none make mention of her. Similarly, after the fair, in
performances in New York and elsewhere, reference is made to `Midway dancers' like those in Chicago,
but no Little Egypt, whether individually or generically.
27

The name did not become famous until December 1896, when Herbert Barnum Seeley, a
grandson of P.T. Barnum's, held a stag dinner at Sherry's restaurant in New York. The evening's
entertainment was a young woman who did the dance, nearly nude, atop the banquet table. The New
York tabloids made much of the affair, and of the dancer, who identified herself as "Little Egypt". This
was the first recorded use of the name.
According to amusement historian Edo McCullough, a "Little Egypt" appeared with a `Streets of
Cairo' concession at Coney Island, in 1895; if true, this may be the same dancer that performed at the
Seeley dinner.
The first recorded Chicago performance of a "Little Egypt" was not until June, 1897, at the Clark
Street Dime Museum. One would expect ads for her appearance to make some mention of the 1893
Midway if this was, in fact, her return to Chicago. (Indeed, the very same bill advertised a "Rosa, Turkish
Star, and her Midway Dancers".) Instead, "Little Egypt" is billed only as "New York's Sensational AfterDinner Dancer"... reference to the Seeley affair, but not one word about the Midway; strong proof there
was no Little Egypt in Chicago in 1893.
How then did Little Egypt come to be identified with the 1893 Midway? Probably because she
was considered a `Midway' dancer, and that was confused with actually being on the Midway. Also, the
term "Little", identifying an area (i.e., Little Italy in Chicago or New York) was sometimes erroneously used
in reference to Midway concessions. Old Vienna, for instance, is referred to in one account as "Little
Vienna". Just as the concession actually named "A Street in Cairo" was, in later years, referred to as
"The Streets of Cairo", so perhaps, someone referred to or remembered it as "Little Egypt". Thus, "the
dancers in `Little Egypt'" may have become, in time, "the dancer, `Little Egypt'".
When, in 1936, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made the movie The Great Ziegfeld, showing a fictitious
Midway romance between "Little Egypt" and Ziegfeld's strongman, Eugene Sandow (not only was there
no Little Egypt on the Midway, but the real Sandow wasn't there, either; he performed downtown at
Ziegfeld's Trocadero), a Chicago woman, Fahreda Mahzar Spyropoulos, sued the studio for libel, claiming
to be the original `Little Egypt'. She died of a heart attack, April 5, 1937, before her suit came to trial, so
the veracity of her claim was never proven. However, although there was a `Farida' or `Pharida' at the
Street in Cairo-- and this may or may not have been Mrs. Spyropoulos-- there was never any reference
to this dancer during the fair as `Little Egypt'. [146]
REALITY AND FANTASY

No one had ever seen anything like the Midway before. Its immense popularity-- despite its
ìmproprieties', despite the marked contrast between it and the `proper' White City-- confused the cultural
establishment. Official guidebooks to the Fair either ignored it, or maintained the fiction that it was
primarily an ethnological display. [147] Critics labeled it vulgar and charged that it was all "sham".
28

The Inter-Ocean wrote of "the beauty of [the Midway's] disorder and lack of general design," but
other writers of the time, seeing beauty only in the White City, tried to impose an artificial order on the
Plaisance hodgepodge. The Midway, they decided, was a "sliding scale of humanity", which ran from the
lowest peoples to the highest... from the savages (American Indian, African) at the Western end farthest
from the Fair, up through the Oriental (Chinese) and Semitic races (Arabs), and non-English Europeans
(German and Irish Villages) to the Anglo-dominated White City of the Fair proper. [148]
As modern scholar Robert Muccigrosso has pointed out, "a glance at any guide map to the fair
fails to confirm this argument." [149] The Old Vienna of the Strausses stood next to darkest Dahomey,
the South Sea natives were closer to the Fair than the Germans and Ulster Irish, indeed, the Mexican
Indians were closer to the Fairgrounds than any 'village` other than Blarney Castle!
To be sure, America was far more openly racist in 1893, and there were surely many Americans
who believed this `sliding scale' interpretation of the Midway. Yet not only was it wrong, it missed the
point completely.
Far from being an organized attempt to present any certain world view, we have seen that the
Midway's lack of organization was its fundamental characteristic.
The odd juxtapositions this created-- reindeer across the street from ostriches, an African village
next door to the town square of Old Vienna-- combined with other elements of ùnreality'. The villages,
for all their seeming authenticity, were romanticized, idyllic; as one commentator noted, the Irish villages
conspicuously lacked both the dirt and the pigs so prevalent in the real Ireland of the time. At many
concessions, supposed `typical natives' were often professional performers from the lands in question,
playing the èxotics' American visitors expected to find. [150]
In short, the Midway was very much a fantasy, never intended to be `real'. As reporter Marian
Shaw told her readers: "Much has been said and written of the Midway Plaisance as affording a grand
opportunity for ethnological study, and as being an equivalent of foreign travel... On the other hand,
much has been said of the immoralities and vulgarities of this unique pleasure-ground. One should not
make the mistake of adopting either extreme of opinion. The people of the Midway are typical only to a
certain extent. They represent some phases of foreign life, but it is life in its most whimsical aspect, and it
would be as unfair to take them as representatives of their respective nations as to take Buffalo Bill's
"Wild West" show as typical of American life." [151]
Shaw was right--the Midway was not a substitute for foreign travel, nor solely a 'Street of
Nations`, no matter how much that may have contributed to its appeal: in combination with the nonforeign attractions (the Ferris Wheel, Ice Railway, etc.) it was "unique"--a place unlike any other... as
much a `Dream City' as the Fair proper across Stony Island Avenue...or the "Wild West" a few blocks
south on that street.
29

MYTHIC SPACES
Buffalo Bill's Wild West, with its Congress of Rough Riders of the World, was the third most
popular attraction in Chicago that summer of 1893, after the World's Columbian Exposition and the
Midway Plaisance. It is striking, therefore, that the Wild West had in common with the Fairs proper and
improper, this same sense of dream world or illusory "place". As scholar Richard Slotkin has pointed out,
Cody never called his enterprise a `show': "From its inception in 1882 it was called `The Wild West' (or
`Buffalo Bill's Wild West'), a name that identified it as a `place' rather than a mere display or
entertainment." But while supposedly re-enacting the history of America's westward expansion, it actually
reduced complex events into `typical scenes' based on formulas borrowed from popular literature: the
`Forest primeval' scene presented colonial history in James Fennimore Cooper's terms, the Plains
episodes in terms drawn from a dime novel. "If the Wild West was a `place' rather than a `show', then its
landscape was a mythic space in which past and present, fiction and reality, could co-exist..." [152]
The Midway, too, was that sort of "mythic space": the past of Ancient Egypt and Old Vienna coexisted with the technological present of the Ferris wheel and Muybridge's motion pictures; the reality of
the Java Village and even the Street in Cairo blurred with the fictions of the Persian Palace's French
dancers `playing' Arabs, and the Moorish Palace funhouse.
The White City of the Fair proper was this sort of mythic space as well, combining the past of
Columbus with the present of American industrial might; the reality of electric lighting, modern sewage
disposal and steel-trussed buildings with the fiction of imperial Greco-Roman facades made of lath and
plaster.
In the end, of course, "mythic space" is just another way of saying "sham". The Midway, the
White City, Buffalo Bill's Wild West-- all of the three top attractions in Chicago in 1893 were shams. The
urban public, with its growing need for recreation, also had a need for such shams-- mythic spaces-dream worlds-- where they could lose their everyday cares by stepping out of the troubled present into a
romanticized past or an idyllic future.
A NEW DEMOCRATIC FORM

The dream world of the Midway proved stronger than Buffalo Bill's or even the White City's for all
the factors already mentioned-- colorful, eclectic architecture; human interaction at times erotic or
ìmproper'; the use of industrial machines for pleasure, not work; the relaxation of everyday restraints in a
dream space where fantasy and reality blurred-- but mainly for these three reasons:
Because it brought all the main types of available amusements together in one safe outdoor
space, offering something for everyone at a time when `going out' for leisure purposes-- and relief
from indoor heat in summer-- had become an urban need;
30

Because these collected amusements were eclectic and unorganized, thus un-programmed-capable of being all times, all places, all people at once, while still allowing visitors to select their
own èxperience' (Ride a camel? Or ride the Ferris wheel? See a show? Or just watch the
random activity on the street?);
And, most importantly, because it was interactive-- whether one was riding the Ferris wheel or
rubbing shoulders with exotic strangers. In the mythic spaces of the Wild West and the White
City, one could only be an observer. In the dream world of the Midway, visitors were participants.
There was a rising tide of populism in America in the 1890s. Americans-- especially the
increasing majority that lived in the cities-- were demanding a greater voice and a greater choice in social
and political affairs. The Midway established a new and essentially more democratic form of
entertainment well suited to the times, and in so doing, set the form for the modern amusement parks
which would follow. [153]
MOST AND LEAST POPULAR MIDWAY ATTRACTIONS

What were the most popular attractions on the Midway? What were least popular? In the
absence of attendance figures for each concession, the following list-- determined by the amounts they
grossed-- gives us some idea:
1) Street in Cairo.......................................$787,826.95
2) Ferris Wheel...........................................733,086.60
3) German Village.......................................622,500.30
4) Hagenbeck's...........................................526,708.65
5) Libbey Glass..........................................490,321.65
6) Old Vienna.............................................485,702.35
7) Turkish Village.......................................474,601.64
8) Moorish Palace......................................449,048.00
9) Vienna Bakery & Natatorium.................283,775.50
10) Algerian & Tunisian Village..................257,660.24
11) Japanese Bazaar.................................206,283.63
12) Congress of Beauty.............................166,020.56
31

13) Java Village.........................................154,895.00

14) Blarney Castle.....................................138,869.25
15) Dahomey Village.................................113,152.50
16) Persian Palace....................................103,308.72
17) South Sea Islanders............................93,224.35
18) Vienna Cafe........................................88,473.15
19) Ice Railway..........................................67,319.05
20) Donegal Castle....................................65,180.96
21) Bernese Alps Panorama.....................64,232.70
22) Chinese Building.................................64,207.22
23) Lapland Village....................................63,716.45
24) Kilauea Panorama...............................61,560.70
25) New England Log Cabin.....................51,552.60
26) Bedouin Camp....................................47,217.50
27) Ostrich Farm.......................................44,825.85
28) Captive Balloon..................................31,612.55
29) American Indian Village......................24,207.80
30) Electric Scenic Theater......................22,897.50
31) Views of Pompeii...............................19,505.75
32) Colorado Gold Mine...........................18,716.50
33) U.S. Submarine Diving......................18,029.70
34) Sitting Bull's Cabin.............................10,564.20
35) Aztecs................................................10,233.45
36) French Cider Press............................9,001.10
32

37) St. Peter's Model................................5,958.00

38) Anschutz Tachyscopes......................4,552.99
39) Bulgarian Curiosities..........................4,374.65
40) Mosque of Tangiers...........................1,618.10
41) Zoopraxographical Hall......................320.05
(No figures were given for Brazilian Concert Hall, Camera Obscura, Dog Show, Eiffel Tower
Model, German Weinerwurst House, Hindu Jugglers, Home Restaurant, Hungarian Orpheum, and the
Venice-Murano Glass Company. No admission fees were charged by the Adams Express Co., Diamond
Match Co., East Indian Bazaar, Parisian Art Glass Co., or the Workingman's Home.)
If the Midway set the form for the amusement parks to come, the top twenty Midway attractions
further refined what would be in these parks. Òriental' villages and `hootchy- kootchy' shows (#s 1, 7, 10
& 16), novel mechanical rides (#s 2 & 19), beer gardens (#s 3 & 6), trained animal acts (#4), funhouses
(#8) and `native' villages (#s 13, 15 & 17) would all become standard amusement park attractions.
Other attractions would be adopted and adapted by the parks despite poorer showings on the
Midway. Electro- mechanical panoramas (#s 21, 24, 30 & 31) and Wild West shows (#s 29 & 34) would
become mainstays of the future parks. So would motion pictures-- despite the dismal showings of
Anschutz's Tachyscopes (#38) and Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope (dead last, #41) in 1893.
Of course, the amusement zones of later fairs would innovate many park attractions as well. Still,
the Midway of 1893 set the pattern for amusement parks well into the 20th Century. [154]
THE AFTERMATH
At Fair's end, there were calls to keep the Midway going as a permanent amusement center.
This could not be realistically done-- concession contracts were up, many were disbanding, their
concessionaires and employees returning to their foreign homelands, and the Plaisance itself, like the
Jackson Park land the Fair had been built on, was to revert back to Chicago's public park system. Still,
the potential of the concept had been recognized. The Fair and Midway made America amusement
conscious. If it could not be kept going, the next best thing was to try and recreate it.
Michael H. DeYoung, an Exposition commissioner from California (and a former employer of Sol
Bloom's), saw the potential for the California Mid-Winter Fair he was helping organize for January 1894 in
San Francisco. Realizing that the Midway was the Chicago fair's most popular draw, he quickly
assembled a number of its attractions for San Francisco, and as a result, the fair there "resembled the
Midway Plaisance more than the White City." [155]
33

Otto Schmidt, a scenery painter at Chicago's People's Theatre, got a brainstorm: Why not take
Plaisance-style amusements on the state fair circuit, bringing the famous Midway to the far reaches of the
union? In actuality, Schmidt's attractions came from the tent shows on Stony Island Avenue and
elsewhere outside the Fair, but he billed them as the "Chicago Midway Plaisance Amusement Company".
America's first traveling carnival was born. [156]
There was even a how-to book published as a guide to setting up local `Midways' anywhere in
the country. The Midway: A Burlesque Entertainment advised including a Street in Cairo, a Congress of
Beauty, a Japanese Bazaar, and a Blarney Castle. [157]
Indeed, every World's Fair since the Columbian Exposition has had a "Midway"-- as have most
state, county and civic fairs. The word itself has passed into the lexicon as a synonym for amusement
zone.
But these attempts to recreate the Midway were by nature transient, temporary attractions. Even
when Buffalo Bill's partner, Nate Salsbury, assembled his own group of Midway entertainments, hoping to
take them to Coney Island, it was to exhibit them as independent, self-contained attractions... much like
other amusements already scattered along the seashore there. [158]
The idea of putting the Midway concept-- a wide variety of amusements, all in one enclosure, to
which admission was charged-- on a permanent basis... the idea which would turn `midway' into
amusement park... was still ripe for the picking.
The man who would seize this idea was a Chicagoan, Captain Paul Boyton. Boyton was in
England the summer of 1893, and so he missed the Columbian Exposition.
He did not, however, miss the significance of the Midway Plaisance.
Special Thanks to Stan Barker for research.
34

REFERRENCES & NOTES

1) Quoted in R. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979), 109.
2) Badger, 20 & 80.
3) Wim de Wit, "Building An Illusion: The Design of the World's Columbian Exposition", in Grand Illusions:
Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 (Chi: Chicago Historical Society, 1993), 46-47.
4) Rossiter Johnson, ed. A History of the World's Columbian Exposition, 4 vols. (New York: D. Appleton &
Co., 1897), 33-43. This work, authorized by the Fair's Board of Directors, is a major reference on the
WCE.
5) [FLO 1870 plan to 1890]
6) [Plan of 1890]
7) World's Columbian Exposition Illustrated, v.1 n.1, Feb. 1891, p.15. A plot at the west end of the
Plaisance was set aside for encampments of visiting military organizations; it was frequently used by
National Guard units, on one occasion by the cadets of the Michigan Military Academy, etc. The same
plot was also used as a track for special events such as camel and donkey races. [Daniel H. Burnham,
The Final Official Report of the Director of Works of the World's Columbian Exposition (NY & London:
Garland Publishing, 1989) v.III, p. 17 and v. VIII, Midway map.]
8) WCE Ill., v1, n2, March, 1891, p.7. The term "privileges" was probably used incorrectly here.
According to Johnson, the Fair defined `privileges' as the sale of articles on the grounds to exemplify or
illustrate an exhibit, for example, goods produced by a special machine on display. A `concession' was
any business conducted on the grounds for direct gain--"whether the object of such business was the
comfort of the public or its amusement and entertainment." By this definition, exhibits on the Midway were
concessions, not privileges. (Johnson, 71)
9) Concession Agreements (CHS library)
10) Johnson, 75 & 339.
11) WCE Ill., V1, N8, September 1891, "Extracts from the Report of Director General Davis, submitted to
the National Commission Sept. 2, 1891" p.17.
12) Harlow N. Higinbotham, Report of the President to the Board of Directors of the World's Columbian
Exposition. (Chi: Rand, McNally, 1893), 85.
35

13) This confusion may stem, in part, from an early report that Putnam planned to exhibit `streets' of
London, Damascus, Jerusalem and Pompeii, along with the Pyramid of Cheops, the homes of
Shakespeare and Burns, and George Washington's Mt. Vernon. These, however, were to be scale
models, displayed inside an Ethnology building. The Midway played no part in this plan. (WCE Ill., v1 n1,
Feb. 1891, p. 18.)
14) Sol Bloom, the Autobiography of (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1948), 119-120.
15) Gertrude M. Scott, "Village Performance: Villages of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of
1893," Ph.D. diss. (New York University, 1990), 53.
16) Johnson, 316 & 333-334. Although a section of Dept. M was set aside for Ìsolated & Collective
Exhibits' as early as February 1891 (WCE Ill., v1, n1, p.16), no mention was made of the Midway in
connection with it at this time. A summary of plans for Putnam's department published in June
("Ethnology and Archaeology at the Exposition/ Professor Putnam's Wonderful Exhibit", WCE Ill., v1 n5,
June 1891) made no mention of the Midway as any part of Dept. M. In November (?) 1892 it was
announced that "The plan of Dept. M, of the Ethnology Exhibit, is fully settled. ...Under the group,
Ìsolated & Collective Exhibits', the department will include numismatic, zoological, geological and natural
history collections in general. But only specimens having a high scientific and educational value will be
accepted by the department." (WCE Ill., v2, n?, November?) 1892, 262-263) Again, no mention of the
Midway, nor does this description of the Ìsolated' group even sound like it.
17) The Concessionaire's Club was formed among the Midway exhibitors to deal, in concert, with Fair
authorities about shared grievances (for instance, faulty electric service on the Plaisance) and to organize
special events among the various concessions. As Secretary, Bloom kept the Club's òffice' at the back
of the Algerian Village, at times acted as spokesman for the entire Midway, and, in organizing special
events, could perhaps be considered a kind of ad hoc `manager'. However, similar duties were also
performed by the Club's Chairman, Robert Levy of the Turkish Village, as well as its president, a Mr.
Prussing. At any rate, this is a far cry from Bloom's claim to have been put "in complete charge"-- by
Daniel Burnham, no less-- of securing Midway attractions, supervising their construction, etc.!
Although most modern fair scholars have accepted Bloom's claims at face value, Scott, for one, is
wary of them. James Gilbert, in Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893 (Chi: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), similarly warns that Bloom's Autobiography "should be read with some caution. Bloom
promoted himself as skillfully as he promoted his acts." (245)
18) Higinbotham, 85.
19) David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New
York: Basic Books, 1993), 1-5.
20) Nasaw, 6-9.
21) Some theater productions directly reflected popular elements of the Midway: Dancing Nautch Girls"
were advertised as part of Rider Haggard's She at the Empire Theater; "8 French Dancers direct from the
Follies Bergere" appeared at the Windsor. "The Midway Plaisance" was a song featured in the
extravaganza Ali Baba at the Chicago Opera House.
36

22) [Ziegfeld]
23) A Week at the Fair (Chi: Rand, McNally & Co., 1893), 24.
24) Ibid, 24; Chicago Amusement News, 4/30/1893. "The (Oriental) Labyrinth is an importation and exact
reproduction of the famous labyrinth in Stockholm, Sweeden (sic). The statues in the Panopticon are
modeled from famous paintings and opera scenes, as `Bien Klosterbier', `Parole d'Amour', `The French
Masque Ball', `Faust' etc. Admission, 25 cents." (Chicago Inter-Ocean, 6/4/1893.)
25) Advertisement, Trocadero Music Hall program, 7/7/1893 (CHS library)
26) Inter-Ocean, 7/11/1893.
27) Advertisement, A Week at the Fair, 255. The illusions here sound like a prototype for the special
effects portion of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at today's Disney-MGM Studios, only with the elevator
moving `down' instead of up.
"Though the elevator car (a miniature theatrical hall in itself, accommodating comfortably one
hundred people) only moves up and down in a shaft about fifteen to twenty feet deep, the illusion is made
perfect by a combination of mechanical devices, and the effect produced is a real descent about 1,000 to
1,200 feet under the surface of the earth.
"The elevator car moves into the center of a circular platform, carrying different stages arranged
with appropriate scenery and living actors. The platform turns on rails, and is made to revolve and bring
successively each scene in sight of the elevator car at the different stops made by the car in its descent.
"Entrance to the subterranean scenery is obtained through a hall, decorated to resemble a
chamber of stalactites, having a stage at one end, where variety performances are given every afternoon
and evening. Admission to the Hardy Theater, 50 cents."
28) WCE Ill., v1 n2, March 1891, p. 23.
29) "Theatrical Gossip", Inter-Ocean, 8/6/1893.
30) A Week at Fair, 246.
31) Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century
France (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985), 75; Nellie Snyder Yost, Buffalo Bill: His
Family, Friends, Fame, Failures and Fortunes (Chi: Sage Books, The Swallow Press Inc.,(?), 236. The
reason the fair denied Cody a concession may simply have been lack of space; his Wild West show
required 14 or 15 acres to set up.
37

32) "Outside the Gates", Inter-Ocean, 5/8/1893, 1.

33) Handy Guide to Chicago (Chi: Rand, McNally & Co., 1893), 57.
34) WCE Ill., v1 n1, Feb. 1891, p.18.
35) "House of Ancient Rome", WCE Ill., v1 n1, p.16.
36) WCE Ill., v1 n, Mar. 1891, p. 10.
37) WCE Ill., v1 n5, June 1891, p.3.
38) Johnson, 81 & 75. For example, various towers and a Roman House appear on early maps of the
Midway, but none of these attractions were ever built.
39) Ibid, 75;
40) "At Turkey's Site To-Day", Inter-Ocean, 9/20/1891.
41) Scott, 29-30.
42) Ibid.
43) Historic Dictionary of World's Fairs, 78.
44) Les Merveilles De L'Exposition (1878), 49, 63-71.
45) Scott, 33.
46) Historic Dictionary of World's Fairs, 113; Scott, 176; Bloom, 107.
47) Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs, 114; Les Merveilles De L'Exposition (1889), 515.
48) Les Merveilles De L'Exposition (1889), 514-518.
49) Concession Agreements; Johnson, 75-76
50) Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: The World's Columbian
Exposition (Washington, D.C.: The Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1992),
135 & 139.
51) (Pix)
52) Scott, 176.
38

Sol Bloom, in his Autobiography, says that he bought a "two-year exclusive right to negotiate a
contract to exhibit the Algerian Village in North and South America", at the close of the 1889 Paris
Exposition, from "Monsieur Guinon", manager of the Village there; that he subsequently secured the
contract and became the "concessionaire" of the Village on the Chicago Midway; that the Algerian troupe
sailed to New York in April, 1892, where Bloom met them and immediately brought them on to Chicago;
that he put them to work here building the Village, and that "By midsummer (1892) part of the Algerian
Village had been built and we were able to give regular performances..." (pp. 107-108, 121-123)
As with his `managing the Midway' story, the facts seem rather different: To begin with, the
Concession Agreement for the Algerian and Tunisian Village lists "Ela Ganon and A. Siflico" as the
concessionaires; "Solomon Bloom" is listed only as manager. (Concession Agreements) Countless
articles written in 1893 refer to "Papa" Ganon as proprietor of the Village (for instance, "The Story of the
Midway Plaisance", Inter-Ocean, 11/1/1893, which calls him "one of the celebrities of the Midway").
Bloom's statement that the Village was partly built and regular performances were being given in
midsummer 1892 is at odds with Inter-Ocean reports of July 31, 1892, that the Village's concession had
only "recently been secured by A. Siflico, Jr."; and May 1, 1893-- nine months later-- that "the theater in
which (the Algerians) are to perform" is first being finished and "It will be several days before... the initial
performance." ("Chatter of Teeth", 5/1/1893)
At any rate, the supposed building of the Village from midsummer 1892 on couldn't have been
done by the Algerian performers, for-- although Bloom makes a point of saying they set sail, by mistake, a
year early and he had to go to New York to get them in April, 1892-- the Inter-Ocean records that they
arrived in Chicago on April 25, 1893, having come "directly from Algiers, only stopping for one day in New
York." They were conducted from New York by Siflico, and, upon arrival in Chicago, "were met at the
station by Solomon Bloom, and Mssrs. Shakti and Karmona of the Algerian concession." Proceeding to
the Midway, they were greeted by "E. Gannon, who is the chief proprietor of the village." ("Algerians Take
Possession", 4/26/1893). Again, as Scott and Gilbert say, Bloom's claims must be regarded with caution.
53) Scott, 190; Rearick, 139.
54) Scott, 214.
55) Official Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance [5 cent edition] (Chi: W.B. Conkey Co., 1893),
36.
56) (Bed. Camp: Scott)
57) Scott, p. 100-101, 128.
58) Midway Plaisance newspaper (CHS library)
59) Scott, 121(?)-124
39

60) Scott, 76-95.

Actually, the Villages fragment of the Blarney Stone may have been on loan from Captain Paul
Boyton. According to materials in the Boyton Archives at St. Francis University, Boyton was given a piece
of the Stone by John Boyle OReilly, Irish nationalist and editor of the Boston Pilot. This fragment was
said to have been displayed at the Columbian Exposition. Boyton, a devout Catholic, and a Chicagoan in
1893, may well have loaned it to the Midways Catholic Irish village. It was subsequently said to have
been displayed at Coney Island, 1899 (presumably at Boytons Chutes); the St. Louis Worlds Fair, 1904
(Boyton had the Chutes concession on the Pike midway}; and at the New York Worlds Fair of 1939.
Boyton Archives, Pasquerilla Library, St. Francis University, Loretto, PA.
61) (GV: Scott; N Side beer gartens, guides)
62) (Old V: Scott); Teresa Dean, "White City Chips", Inter-Ocean, 8/1/1893.
63) Official Catalogue, 28, 33, 35; Midway Plaisance ad, Inter-Ocean, 8/20/1893.
64) Official Catalogue, 28 & 34.
65) (Java & S Seas: Scott, 240?-280?)
66) Scott, 283-?; The Dahomey Village was also reported to have been at Paris in 1889 ("Story of the
Midway Plaisance", Inter-Ocean, 11/1/93, 25.
67) Dean, "White City Chips", Inter-Ocean, 10/6/1893.
The American Indian Village had two `lecturers', "Diamond Dick" (Dr. George B. McClelland) and
"Buckskin Joe" Pette. They hated each other. When Buckskin Joe got better press, Diamond Dick forced
him out. Crowed the one, "I am Diamond Dick, author of the famous dime novels, Indian scout, crack rifle
shot and best-known man of the kind next to Buffalo Bill." Cracked the other, "The difference between me
and Dick is this: My experience has been with Indians; his has been with dime novels." ("Buckskin Joe
Leaves Midway", Inter-Ocean, 9/3/1893, 6.)
Joe's departure did not end Dick's troubles. At the Hungarian Orpheum one night, the great scout
grew belligerent after having too much to drink. The next day's Inter-Ocean read: "POUNDED DIAMOND
DICK. Hungarian Waiters Nearly Kill the Medicine Man with Chairs." (Inter-Ocean, 9/24/1893.)
68) (Aztecs: Scott (?); Official Catalogue, 33.
69) Gilbert, 105-106, 117-118; Robert Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World: Chicago's Columbian
Exposition of 1893 (Chi: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 62-63, 187-188.
70) Concession Agreements; Burnham, v.III, 36. The sliding railway was actually invented by a French
engineer named Girard who was killed in the Franco-Prussian War. Barre, his assistant, later revived and
improved the idea...and put his own name on it. ("Run By Water Power", New York Times, 8/1/1889; "An
Hydraulic Railway", Chamber's Journal (Edinburgh), v.VII n.360, 11/2/1890, 751-752.)
40

71) Burnham, v.I, 68; v.III, 36.

72) Official Catalogue, 27.
73) WCE Ill., (post-fair, late 1893 issue), 284.
74) "Accident at the Fair", Inter-Ocean, 6/15/1893; "One Life Dashed Out", Chicago Herald, 6/15/1893, 1.
75) Robert Cartmell, The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster (Bowling Green,
OH: Amusement Park Books, Inc. & Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), 42-49.
Cartmell reprints a letter from James A. Griffiths to John Miller, listing early Thompson/Griffiths
coasters. Included are "Serpentine Railways-- Patented by L.A. Thompson (firm name-- Griffiths &
Thompson) built 1889 to 1893"; second to last on the list is "Chicago, Ill." Because of the similarity of
name (plus Thompson's presence at the Ice Railway), I feel the Serpentine and Cavern Railway on
Cottage Grove Avenue may have been this coaster. (Cartmell, 53.)
76) "Accident at the Fair"; "One Life Dashed Out".
Killed was W.D. Richmond, a farmer from
Dunlap, IL. The injured were Carl Frick, a member of the German Village's Cavalry Band; Harry Jacobs
and John Jacobs of the Algerian Village; D.F. (or D.S.) Slater, night watchman of the Ferris wheel; and
Miss May Ayers, of 1095 W. Taylor Street, Chicago. (The Herald alone also listed as injured Harry H.
McLeroth of the suburb of Austin.)
"Coroner McHale yesterday conducted an inquest over the remains of Farmer Richmond, who
was killed Wednesday. L.A. Thompson testified that at about 5 o'clock Wednesday afternoon he started
the cable which runs the sleds in order to make an inspection of the machinery previous to admitting
passengers. A large crowd collected and after the car had made three or four trips around the chute
without any passengers several of the employees were allowed to enter the sleds for a trial trip. The
crowd became unmanageable and rushed for seats in the sleds. Before Mr. Thompson could signal Mr.
Freedman, the engineer, to stop, the automatic cable clutched the car and it started on its journey at the
rate of twenty-five miles an hour, and owing to rough places in the unfinished chute, the king bolt which
coupled the two cars together bounded from its socket and the car going at such a rapid rate of speed,
the force of the rear car pushed the other over the side of the tramway. "A.A. Welch, the superintendent
of the concern, testified that no one but employees of the road were supposed to ride, as it was the first
day in operation and only test rides were being made. He also stated that the gates in the entrance were
closed, but the crowd in its eagerness to ride, climbed the footboard fence which surrounds the
enclosure. The jury gave a verdict of accidental death."
In a second, freak accident, the day after the first, an employee, John Smith of Springfield, OH,
fell under the flange of a piston-rod while oiling the vertical engine, and was decapitated. ("His Head Is
Cut Off", Herald, 6/16/1893, 2. (Snowballs: Midway ad)
41


The Chicago was said to be a copy of the balloon used at the 1889 Paris Exposition. That
balloon was made by a Frenchman named G. Yon, who seems to have had no connection with the
balloon on the Midway. However, Monsieur Yon does have a Chicago connection. He evidently came to
Chicago after the Paris fair, for the Gabriel Yon Company ran a Captive Balloon Park in the city, at ___
and ___, in 1890. This could be considered a forerunner to the future amusement parks. (Paris Universal
Exhibition Album [1889]; Gabriel Yon Co. ad, [paper], 1890.)
78) "Collapse of the Balloon", Inter-Ocean, 7/10/1893, 2; Johnson, 444; (pix)
79) Johnson, 76-77; de Wit, in Grand Illusions, 46-49; ad, Inter-Ocean, 12/4/1892, 14.
80) (Ferris: Burnham quote) Chicago History, ?
81) Norman Anderson, Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State
University Popular Press, 1992), 46-50. The definitive account.
82) Ibid, 43-5, 64.
83) Ibid, 55.
84) Ibid, 55-62.
84b) Ibid, 55-62. When the Plaisance was dug up in 1999(?) for a new ice skating facility, long-buried
remnants of the Wheels foundations were unearthed. (News story)
85) Anderson, 55-62.
86) (Masonic Temple; light bulbs)
87) Anderson, 380.
88) Ibid, 68-71.
89) Ibid, Chapters 1-3.
90) John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1990), 290.
91) Marian Murphy, Circus! From Rome to Ringling (NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1956), 192-193.
93) (CA Ost Farm, pix)
42

94) Bloom, 137. A tale too good to leave out; as always, though, with Bloom, take these omelets with a
generous amount of salt.
95) Burnham, v.VIII, Midway map.
96) "The Story of the Midway Plaisance", Inter-Ocean 11/1/1893, 25. At the time of the Fair, Thurston was
the Minister to the U.S. for the illegal Provisional Government of Hawaii.
97) A Week at the Fair, 239
98) Julie K. Brown, Contrasting Images: Photography and the World's Columbian Exposition (Tucson &
London: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 103.
99) (El. Sc. The: Billboard)
100) "Edison on the Fair", Inter-Ocean, 8/21/93, 1.
101) Kenneth MacGowan, Behind the Screen (NY: Delacorte Press, 1965), 47 & 51.
102) Brown, 104.
103) Ibid, 104; Higinbotham (list)
104) MacGowan, 70; Official Catalogue, 10.
106) Ibid, 34.
107) (Int. Cost., tenderloin)
108) Concession Agreements
109) Inter-Ocean , 7/15 and 7/20/1893; but see also "He Is Given A Week", Inter-Ocean, 7/23/1893.
110) Official Catalogue, 25, 27, 34.
111) Ibid, (17).
112) The Moorish Palace and its startling wonders (Chi: [Metcalf Stationery Co.], n.d.), ? (CHS library)
113) Ibid, ?; "He Beat the Devil", Inter-Ocean, 9/2/1893, 1 & 2.
114) Concession Agreements
115) The Moorish Palace, ?; (Billboard)
43

116) Pictorial Album and History: World's Fair and Midway (Chi: Harry T. Smith & Co., n.d.), (?)
117) Official Catalogue, 7, 11, 13, 25.
118) Ibid, 8. As it was sponsored by a women's auxiliary, the Workingman's Home may have been sited
to be near the Woman's Building at the east end of the Midway.
119) (MW horticulture)
120) There were also two restaurants serving standard American fare, the Home Restaurant and a
pavilion run by the Wellington Catering Company. Police, fire and comfort stations were also located
along the Midway.
121) Johnson, 74. Unfortunately, many Midway visitors looked upon the Dahomeyans, Chinese,
American Indians, etc., as "freaks".
122) "Outside the Gates", Inter-Ocean, 5/8/1893, 1; "Outside the Grounds", Chicago Herald, 6/4/1893;
Inter-Ocean, 6/12/1893, 1.
123) "Outside the Gates"; "Outside the Grounds".
The "Palace Carousel" was probably made by Gustav Dentzel, the only carousel builder in
Germantown, PA, at the time; letter to author from Fred Dahlinger, Jr., 5/28/1994.
124) "Outside the Grounds"; "The Eskimos are Out", The Bee, 4/9/1893; Oriental and Occidental
Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: N.D. Thompson Publishing
Co., 1894) (?)
125) Inter-Ocean 9/25/1893.
126) Chicago Record, 9/5/1893.
127) "Outside the Gates"
128) Inter-Ocean, 4/10/1893, 1.
129) Higinbotham, 358.
130) Portfolio of Photos of the World's Fair (Chi: The Werner Co., 1893), ?
131) John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million (NY: Hill & Wang, 1978), 23.
132) Rearick, 134-135.
133) Gilbert, 77, 122; Teresa Dean, White City Chips (Chi: Warren Publishing Co., 1895), 15.
44

134) Inter-Ocean, 4/10/1893, 1.

135) Gilbert, 122.
136) Nasaw, 62, 80; Muccigrosso, 158-159.
137) (Midway Types)
138) Marian Shaw, World's Fair Notes (St. Paul, MN: Pogo Press, Inc., 1992), 57. This collects 20
articles Shaw wrote describing her visit to the Fair for the Fargo, North Dakota Argus in 1893.
139) John Mc Govern, (Halligan's) Illustrated World's Fair, 08/1893, 596.
140) As quoted in Kasson, 22-23.
141) Scott, 195-200.
142) (Midway Types)
143) As quoted in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (NY: Atheneum, 1992), 66.
144) "With Moslem Rites", Inter-Ocean, 9/7/1893, 1; (Alice Ranney); "A Fad For Colored Men", Chicago
Daily News, 10/6/1893. Scott sees the Midway as a starting point for a romanticism of the Arab in
American pop culture that continued through the `Sheik' films of Rudolph Valentino in the 1920s (p. 237).
145) Denton J. Snider, World's Fair Studies (Chi. & St. Louis: Sigma Publishing Co., 1895), 331; S. Culin,
Journal of American Folk-Lore 7 (24), 56.
146) Scott, 200-212; Muccigrosso, 166-167. For Seeley dinner, Lucius Beebe, The Big Spenders, 110114; A.H. Saxon, P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (NY: Columbia University Press, 1989), 315316. For Little Egypt at Clark Street Dime Museum ad, see Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1897. Even Sol
Bloom stated there was no Little Egypt on the Midway; though characteristically, he claimed to have
written the classic "Hootchy-Kootchy" melody, aka "Oh, the Dance They Do!" (Bloom, pp. 135-136)
147) Gilbert, 119.
148) Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions,
1876-1916 (Chi: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64-68.
149) Muccigrosso, 164.
150) For example, Hadji Abeet, a Syrian native who played a Greek brigand in the Turkish Theater. "This
young Moslem came to Chicago not as a representative of a particular people, but as an actor pure and
simple and ready, no doubt, to play any role which his genius and ability fitted him for." (Oriental and
Occidental Types (?) For the comment on the Irish Villages see Holley, 588 (quoted in Scott).
45

151) Shaw, 56.

152) Slotkin, 67 & 69.
153) Kasson, 8 & 26.
154) Higinbotham, (list)
As this is a list of Midway grosses, one should bear in mind that a ride in the Captive Balloon cost
$2, the highest fee on the Midway; if the price had been in line with most other Midway fees (10, 25 or 50
cents), the Captive Balloon's ranking would have been far lower.
155) Scott, 376.
156) Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival (Sarasota, FL: Carnival Publishers of
Sarasota, 1972), v.I and II, 42-47.
157) Annie Myers Sergal, The Midway: A Burlesque Entertainment Based on the Famous Midway
Plaisance of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chi: The Dramatic Publishing Co., 1894).
158) (Salsbury to CI)
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The Living History of Illinois and Chicago Community

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1893 CHICAGO WORLDS COLUMBIAN

HOW THE MIDWAY CAME TO BE

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MIDWAY MYTH # 1: THE PROFESSOR AND THE

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MEETING THE NEW NEED FOR AMUSEMENTS

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THE THEMED VILLAGES

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Today, we recognize the historic significance of Muybridge's concession. In 1893, ironically, it

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OUTSIDE THE GATES

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SATISFYING P0PULAR TASTES

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ARCHITECTURE AND COLOR

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ACTION AND INTERACTION

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THE FAIR IMPROPER

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MIDWAY MYTH #2: LITTLE EGYPT

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REALITY AND FANTASY

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A NEW DEMOCRATIC FORM

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MOST AND LEAST POPULAR MIDWAY ATTRACTIONS

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13) Java Village.........................................154,895.00

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37) St. Peter's Model................................5,958.00

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Special Thanks to Stan Barker for research.

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REFERRENCES & NOTES

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32) "Outside the Gates", Inter-Ocean, 5/8/1893, 1.

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60) Scott, 76-95.

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