City - Chicago, IL - The Midway Plaisance 1893 Tile

Colorized photo from 1893 Original title: Trained animals lined up, with trainers, clowns and others, the Midway Photographer: Frances Benjamin Johnston Location: South Cottage Grove Ave and Midway Plaisance, Chicago, IL This is the grand entrance to the midway in the Chicago's worlds fair, the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Just 20 years after the great fire, the city was nearly rebuilt and they were trying to rebuild their image. They won the right to create a worlds fair in their city. It had over 64,000 exhibits, and was considered "high culture", and "exotic", they wanted to titillate anyone that came. They designed very fancy looking buildings, all painted white, it looked very upper class. So when it came time to put a Midway in, they said, nope, not going to happen, no way, no how. They didn't like the thought of something low-brow to be there. (which by the way was a newly coined phrase borrowed from phrenology, where it stated a racist idea that non-whites were less evolved, or closer to heavy-browed neanderthals). In these days they were only seen as entertainment. However after learning how well the entertainment part did in the 1889 Paris Exposition, they decided that maybe we should have a midway. And so they did. However they said it can't just be a bunch of rides, it had to have educational value of some kind. The midway was a mile long and 600 ft wide. Most shows an exhibits charged an extra fee, just like today. Where as White City (the fair itself), charged an entry fee but everything inside was free. Each exhibit in the midway would charge around 25cents. And as each exhibit was independently owned, they had to share 25% of the profits back to the fair. Thanks to the midway, they made most of their profit here. There was also a balloon ride at a whopping $2.00 a ride ($61 today's money). I couldn't find the price to enter the midway itself, my guess was that it was fairly cheap since you had to pay more inside. The fair had to open months late because the Ferris wheel that was being built took longer than they expected. But once opened the midway became the thing to go to in 1893. The Ferris wheel was built in competition with the Eiffel tower that was created for the Paris exposition. The wheel was huge, and the first of its kind. It stood a towering 264ft tall, which is a 100ft taller than the current one on Navy Pier. It cost 50 cents to ride it, which is $15 in today's money. The fair itself also cost 50 cents. Over 6 million people rode on it, people even got married in it, some on horseback. It was located in the center of the midway, it sat where the ice rink is now. Due to the heavy amount of racism, when they organized the fair , they used the racist theory of Social Darwinism, in order of most evolved to least evolved. In the front they had Japanese, Irish and Germans, in the middle were known as "half-civilized", which were Middle Easterners and Pacific Islanders). And in the very back they considered the "least-civilized", the Dahomeans and the Indigenous Americans. Each area was set up like a small city, it looked almost like a movie set in some areas. It was a bit confusing and chaotic as they would rotate exhibits due to the lack of space. Unfortunately this so called educational aspect of the midway allowed many to belittle people as if they were inferior. The Chicago Tribune reported, "an opportunity was here afforded to the scientific mind to descend the spiral of evolution, tracing humanity in its highest phases down almost to its animalistic origins." The term midway, was coined from this fair, it came from the street it was on. The Midway Plaisance, the street was created in 1850 and was known as a pleasure drive lined with trees. It connects Jackson Park with Washington Park. People just called it the Midway and it stuck.