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Vintage Chicago Tribune: For your amusement — pleasure parks of bygone summers
As summer days get shorter and school supplies are added to the shopping list, we know Chicago prepares to enter a new season — fall.
But before these hot, humid days are gone for good, let's step back and think about how previous generations spent their leisurely days or nights with friends or family. For many, it was a good excuse to get to an amusement park.
Here's a look back at some of the parks, rides and attractions that brought visitors to the ticket stands.
Remembering the Chicago amusement parks that filled summertime with thrills and spills and waterBoyton (whose last name is sometimes spelled as Boynton) was a strong swimmer who traveled the world performing feats of endurance and also organized in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a monumental lifesaving service — of which he served as captain — according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. The imaginative Pennsylvania native also publicized the use of a rubber suit that kept him dry while he swam the English Channel in 1875, and floated down the Mississippi River in 1879.
The showman's biggest contribution to pop culture, however, may be his 'shoot the chutes' ride. Originally produced for a London show, the concept was simple. With the purchase of a ticket, riders climbed aboard a flat-bottomed boat that was transported on a track to the top of a 60-foot ramp. The boat then descended down a 300-foot chute, which was essentially a water slide, before it splashed down into an artificial lake.
An eight-person boat took on riders for the first time on July 3, 1894. Admission was 25 cents. Just a few years later — relocated to the West Side — about 20,000 people visited Boyton's chutes in one day to partake in or watch the slide ride.
The park lost its lease in 1907, and everything within it was sold at auction. By then, competing Chicago amusement parks had their own versions of the ride.
Billings Hospital opened on the park's original site in Boyton's chutes ended, Forest Park began. Operators of the new amusement park — claiming to be the biggest and brightest in the area — purchased the 'Chutes' ride at auction.
Yet not everyone was happy about the park's placement next to cemeteries. Several Lutheran congregations opposed it with one local pastor calling it 'a sacrilege that such a thing should be attempted within the hearing of those mourning their dead,' the Tribune reported.
Issues mounted before the park opened its doors to the public. A violent storm destroyed a chunk of the park in late May 1908. Temporary electrical lines that illuminated the park were mysteriously cut the night of its formal opening, leading then-president of the Chicago Sanitary District and future Tribune editor/publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick to offer a reward for information leading to the suspects.
Just weeks later, visitors packed Forest Park to catch a ride on its pneumatic tube that supposedly 'shot (passengers) through a tunnel three-quarters of a mile long at the rate of a thousand miles or more a minute,' the Tribune reported. The Giant Safety Coaster and Grand Canyon rides followed, according to the Historical Society of Forest Park.
The park closed in 1922, and many of its fixtures were sold off in 1929, Arthur Fritz lost his contracting business to the Depression. Putting together whatever money he could, he and his wife, Ann, bought six ponies for children to ride. Within two years they were able to open the County Fair Pony Track. Later they added some little cars, a merry-go-round, and a Ferris wheel, and Kiddieland was born.
By the 1960s and 1970s, according to the village of Melrose Park, the ponies were gone and the park had added a Tilt-A-Whirl, The Whip, German carousel, log flume ride and swinging pirate ship.
As many as 600,000 people visited Kiddieland by 2008.
A dispute among descendants of the 17-acre park's founder, however, forced Kiddieland to close in September 2009.
Four rides went to Santa's Village Amusement & Water Park in East Dundee while Great America in Gurnee got the Little Dipper, Kiddieland's old roller coaster.
The old miniature steam engine train that would pull passengers around the park has found new life as well, at the Hesston Steam Museum in LaPorte, Indiana.
Kiddieland rides: Where are they now?The longtime amusement park was demolished and replaced by a Costco, but its memorable sign is still displayed outside the Melrose Park Public Library, 801 N. Broadway Thompson used his experience managing exhibits at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to build Luna Park with business partner Elmer 'Skip' Dundy at Coney Island in New York in 1903. He opened a park with the same name here in 1907.
'Nearly 800 willow shade trees will make Luna cool on hot midsummer days, while at night myriads of vari-colored electric lights will festoon and entwine the boughs,' the Tribune wrote in its roundup of 'summer gardens.'
Among its attractions for the 10-cent cost of admission were 'a roller skating rink, an auto-ride coaster, the 'rube fire show,' the Razzle-Dazzle, the electric theater,' the Tribune reported just before the park's May 11, 1907, grand opening.
Just one month later, Thompson brought his successful production of 'Brewster's Millions' — the story eventually became the 1985 film starring Richard Pryor and John Candy — to Chicago's Colonial Theatre. The Tribune loved its 'masterly stagecraft' and and called its 'dramatic flare' — 'light and frivolous and accordingly admirably suited to the requirements of the summer season.'
James 'Big Jim' O'Leary — son of Catherine O'Leary of the Great Chicago Fire fame and owner of a gambling establishment near the Union Stockyards — bought Luna Park in 1908, and immediately slashed admission to five cents.
'I'm going to make it into a high-class amusement resort,' O'Leary said. 'Nothing disorderly will be permitted.'
O'Leary shut the park down after the 1912 season with plans to transform the site into a marketplace for meat, vegetables and themed Old Chicago amusement park/shopping center — the first enclosed one in the United States — opened in Bolingbrook. It went bankrupt and closed in March 1980.
Amazon purchased the site in early 2020, for $50 was something special. Tribune columnist Rick Kogan summed it up best in 2017:
A great deal of life is about loss, of people and things. Most landmarks of our youth have vanished. So much of the city and the suburbs have been razed, paved over, obliterated.
Still, some gone things remain so memorable that they stay with us, as if snuggled up with our DNA. Riverview is such a place, and I think the reason is that it disappeared without warning. After its 1967 summer season, it was bought by an investment firm and promptly demolished: a death without wake or funeral or proper goodbye.
But, oh Riverview — a place like something from a colorful dream.
It was a melding of heaven and hell, seedy and serene, glitzy and garish. But for all its blemishes and, indeed, because of many of them, it maintains a special place in the minds of Chicagoans.
It always opened on the second Friday in May and so there you would be rushing through its tall gates and into the tasty terror of the Bobs, that massive wooden roller coaster, and the Pair-O-Chutes, that free-fall simulation on rickety seats; the wildly ornate, 70-horse carousel; the Tilt-a-Whirl; the Flying Turns; Aladdin's Castle, that walk-through fun house, and on and on and on.
This crafty concoction was on the banks of the north branch of the Chicago River near the corner of Belmont and Western avenues. Its roots went back to a private skeet shooting club run by the William Schmidt family in the 1880s. Later, some swings and rides and a merry-go-round were added to entertain the wives and children of the shooters. Eventually, on July 2, 1904, it formally opened to the public, 76 acres along with Schmidt's promise of 'an avalanche of novelties, a whirlwind of surprises.'
He came through and Riverview eventually could claim the title of the 'world's largest amusement park,' its area and number of rides far outnumbering those at the more famous and sprawling four-park setup at Coney Island, N.Y., and of such rival local playgrounds as White City or Joyland on the South Side.
Its slogan was simple — 'Laugh Your Troubles Away' — and through world wars and a Great Depression, through divorces and deaths that's what people 'without worry' in French, Sans Souci Park was opened by operator W.H. Carter on May 27, 1899. Vaudeville entertainers appeared in the afternoons and evenings. The grounds included an electric fountain, Japanese tea garden, an illuminated arcade and drinks served inside the park's seven buildings. A large roller skating rink and beer garden were other features.
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned in 1914 — the same year Sans Souci closed — to construct a half-million-dollar 'winter garden' on the site. Midway Gardens, as it became known, included a ballroom, restaurant and outdoor theater. But the fancy venue was never a financial success. It changed ownership several times before shutting down completely. The building — which was practically one giant block of concrete — was a beast to deconstruct when it was demolished in centerpiece of White City was a 300-foot tower, dubbed 'babylonic' by the Tribune. Lined with 20,000 light bulbs that gave the park its name, the tower could be seen from a distance of 15 miles. A ballroom accommodated 1,000 dancers, and the College Inn, a German restaurant, seated 2,500 diners.
Dramatization of the Chicago Fire was staged by 2,000 performers. Real horse-drawn fire engines extinguished blazes set in model buildings.
Flashback: White City, Chicago's first amusement park, mixed family-friendly joys with sensationalismThe Tribune's movie reviewer, writing under the pen name Mae Tinee, described White City's offerings on a summer evening in 1913.
'For a purely nominal price you may be whisked through the clouds; scooted down the chutes; tumbled through a woozy maelstrom; or skillfully 'canoed' amongst the Thousand Islands,' she wrote. 'There are constant lures to things which tip and things which go sideways and all around.'
The critic didn't know what to make of the park's most widely advertised exhibit, a working model of the Panama Canal.
The Great Depression hit White City's customers hard, causing revenues to tank. The park could no longer mount the elaborate spectacles that were its signature. Bankruptcy was declared in 1933, and the park was put up for sale.
After a 1959 fire destroyed the roller skating rink and other remnants, the White City site became home to a Black residential development.
A Tribune reporter offered a final tribute following its blazing end:
'White City in its heyday was like an unruly, impulsive movie queen who was often in trouble,' Jean Bond wrote. 'No one objected to her flings because, most of all, she was never dull.'
Thanks for reading!
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