Vintage Chicago Tribune: 6 activities people used to do in the city during the summer

Chicago Tribune

17-07-2025

There are activities we can't wait to experience here each summer — catching a concert in a park; watching Buckingham Fountain's majestic water display explode 150 feet into the air; taking a dip to cool off in Lake Michigan; swaying with thousands of others to the sounds of the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field; or just playing tourist in our hometown.
Yet Chicagoans of another era had their own ways of celebrating warm weather that we just don't do today. Here's a look back at six of them.
The first match in the sport of kings took place in Chicago, according to the U.S. Polo Association, at Lincoln Park in October 1879.
'For the benefit of the ignorant, polo may be described as shinney (pick-up game of hockey) on horseback, or, rather, ponyback,' the Tribune reported at the time.
Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest, which fielded its first polo team in 1896, hosted an epic championship series that pitted the best players in the United States — one team from the East Coast and the other from the West — against each other in August 1933. The best-of-three tourney with spectator seating for 20,000 people was the brainchild of Chicago Blackhawks team founder and U.S. Polo Association executive committee member Maj. Frederic McLaughlin. West won the national championship 12-6.
A smaller, faster form of the game called arena polo was played indoors for years at the Chicago Avenue Armory.
Oak Brook Polo Club, which was founded by Paul Butler in 1922, and closed earlier this year, is considered one of the oldest of its kind in the U.S. It hosted the U.S. Open Polo Championship for 24 seasons. Prince (now King) Charles was part of a memorable match there on Sept. 5, 1986, when he and England's star player Andrew Seavill were both laid out on the ground after a collision. After a five-minute pause, both the player and the prince appeared to be OK.
'I liked the part when he fell, the best,' said Chicago-based political satirist Aaron Freeman. 'It's not often you see people who won the genetic lottery embarrassing themselves in public.'
Before highways were plentiful and car ownership was common, Chicagoans headed to the city's docks to board steamships destined for Milwaukee; Mackinac Island, Michigan; or a variety of other lakeside communities.
One such ship was the SS Eastland, which was chartered by Western Electric Co. on July 24, 1915, to transport about 2,500 employees and their families across Lake Michigan to a company picnic at 'the Coney Island of the Midwest' Michigan City, Indiana.
Rare Eastland disaster photos discovered in Tribune basementAs people boarded the ship that morning at the Chicago River between LaSalle Drive and Clark Street, however, the Eastland began to list to its side. The ship overturned and within minutes 844 people — including 22 entire families and four members of the Eastland's crew — were dead. Chicago Bears owner George Halas was supposed to be aboard the ship. It was the deadliest day ever in Chicago and the greatest peacetime inland waterways disaster in American history.
Several hundred performers — including Goliath the sea elephant — arrived in August 1931, to perform as part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which became a fixture of summer in Soldier Field's parking lot for decades.
Successive open-air 'floating hospitals' in Lincoln Park were built between the 1870s and the 1900s and offered excursions from the piers on Lake Michigan.
In 1914, the Chicago Daily News offered to fund a more permanent sanitarium building. Opened in 1921, the impressive Prairie-style structure was one of several Lincoln Park buildings designed by Dwight H. Perkins of the firm Perkins, Fellows, and Hamilton. Perkins, an important Chicago social reformer and Prairie School architect, designed buildings including Café Brauer, the Lion House in the Lincoln Park Zoo and the North Pond Cafe.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: Unexpected finds in Chicago parksThe impressive Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Sanitarium building was constructed in brick with a steel arched pavilion with 250 basket baby cribs, nurseries and rooms for older children. The breezes through the shelter were believed to cure babies suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. Free health services, milk and lunches were provided to more than 30,000 children each summer until 1939, when the sanitarium closed. Major reconstruction of Lake Shore Drive led to the demolition of the building's front entrance. During World War II, the structure became an official recreation center for the United Service Organization. The Chicago Park District converted the building to Theatre on the Lake in the early 1950s. Today it's a lakefront restaurant and venue that hosts concerts and theater events.
The rodeo originated in the Southwest as a way for ranchers to celebrate the annual cattle roundup. Promoters brought it to Chicago and other northern cites to capitalize on Americans' nostalgic fascination with the Wild West.
From 1925 to 1929, Tex Austin presented rodeos first at Soldier Field and then indoors at Chicago Stadium — though rodeo competitions didn't end in Chicago after Austin's contest packed up and left for good.
In 1927, Soldier Field hosted World Championship Rodeo.
The sights and thrills of Austin's rodeos had a wide appeal. Women were half of the 35,000 spectators in Soldier Field on the opening day of the 1925 rodeo, the Tribune's society columnist reported. 'The shouts of approval that hit against the sides of the Field Museum and bounced back again were just as soprano as they were deep bass.'
Rodeo competition also was open to women as well as Black people and Native Americans, when other professional sports were segregated or off-limits to them.
Austin carried the rodeo far afield. He mounted shows in Madison Square Garden, Hollywood and London. His promotions went belly up in the Great Depression, and he opened a restaurant in Santa Fe. But going blind in 1938, he committed suicide.
He left a note asking his wife's forgiveness and, on their coach, a stack of photographs of his rodeo days, a time when 'he appeared every inch at home.'
Starting 75 years before Lollapalooza took up residence in Grant Park, the Chicagoland Music Festival claimed gaudy attendance numbers at the annual Soldier Field events, figures no longer possible in the renovated stadium.
Like the College All-Star Game, Golden Gloves boxing, the Silver Skates Derby and numerous other events, including airplane and horse races, fashion and kite-flying shows, bowling tournaments and wrestling matches, the music festival was organized and sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper wasn't shy about promoting its own events in its news pages — especially once longtime publisher Col. Robert McCormick took a liking to it. It's hard to say how much the Tribune's glowing coverage helped the festival thrive, but even accounting for some exaggeration and boosterism, and assuming the reporter was ordered to don his rose-colored glasses, that first Chicagoland Music Festival was a spectacle.
Unlike most events, the Chicagoland Music Festival didn't start small and grow. It started big and became huge. About 150,000 — with thousands more unable to get in the stadium — watched the inaugural show Aug. 23, 1930. There were so many people, in fact, that spectators sitting on the sidelines impeded the drum corps' movements.
The thrill — and the showmanship — started with the public address announcement: 'You are sitting now in the glow of 392,000 watts of light, and in order that you may have a standard of comparison, I will add that that is three times as large a volume of light as at any baseball game that ever was played at night. Friends, it is the greatest artificial illumination of a single arena in the world's history.'
To which the Tribune reported: 'The people rapturously applaud these words. They are rising to the fact that they have come to a big show.'
Before that first night was out, the crowd saw 21 marching bands and 16 drum corps, which entered the arena in one bombastic burst. They heard the festival band play the John Philip Sousa marches 'The Washington Post,' 'Stars and Stripes Forever' and 'U.S. Field Artillery.' Another highlight of the night was a 1,000-member African American choir singing the spiritual 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.' The climax of that first evening was the 'Hallelujah' chorus from Handel's 'Messiah,' performed by a combined 3,000-voice choir.
While numerous famous singers and musicians played at the festival over the decades, including Louis Armstrong, Frankie Avalon and Mahalia Jackson, for many Chicagoans and their beaming parents, the highlight of the show was no doubt their own children.
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