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For much of the twentieth century, Riverview Park on Chicago's
northwest side was one of the city's most popular amusement destinations.
Spread across more than 140 acres of land bounded by Belmont Avenue
on the south, Western Avenue on the east, and the north branch of
the Chicago River on the west, the park offered inexpensive amusements
to work-weary Chicagoans. Every summer, thousands flocked to the park
to enjoy its combination of thrilling rides, fascinating exhibits,
cheap eats, interesting people, and cool evening air.
Riverview was the creation
of William and George Schmidt, whose successful dealings in the city's
booming real estate trade provided them with the necessary capital
to enter the amusement business. In 1900, they purchased what was
then known as Sharpshooter's Park at Belmont and Western Avenues.
The park was the home of German gun club that shot at targets set
up on an island in the middle of the river and hunted for game in
the woods nearby. But the Schmidts often received complaints from
the gunmen's wives that the park offered women and children little
in the way of entertainment while their husbands were busy shooting.
Partly in response to such requests, the Schmidts looked for ways
to expand their park's variety of amusements and thus increase its
appeal for entire families. In 1903, George Schmidt visited Copenhagen's
famous Tivoli Gardens while on a tour of Europe. Apparently inspired
by the park's beauty and variety of amusements, Schmidt returned to
Chicago determined to turn Sharpshooter's Park into a similar pleasure
spot.
Riverview's first season of operation
as an amusement park was the summer of 1904. Although attendance during
its first season suffered some from inadequate transportation services
to and from the park, successive seasons drew ever larger crowds.
The leading attractions during the park's early years included a toboggan
slide, a giant swing, the Old Mill tunnel-of-love ride, the water
chutes, a carousel, a miniature railway, and a traditional midway
featuring a variety of shows, games, and eateries. Daily performances
by German bands were very popular as well, especially among thenorthwest
side's sizable German-American population.
As the park matured and
the public's tastes in amusement shifted, Riverview's owners constantly
updated and improved the park's attractions in order to lure patrons
back year after year. This was especially true with the park's most
popular rides, its roller coasters. The park's first coaster was the
Scenic Railway, built in 1907. Though tame by comparison to later
coasters, the Scenic Railway nonetheless thrilled riders with its
gentle inclines and refreshing breeze. During the 1920s, as Chicagoans
sought out ever more exciting physical sensations, the public demand
for roller coaster rides increased and with it the number of coasters
at Riverview. Among the new coasters constructed by park management
during the decade was the famous Bobs. Built in 1926 at a cost of
$80,000, the carefully designed coaster joustled its riders from beginning
to end. Excessively sharp curves, shortened dips, low-riding cars,
and clanking gears not only rattled riders' bones, but intensified
the illusion of the ride's mechanical dangers and its seemingly life-threatening
speeds. Other Riverview coasters included the Comet, the Blue Streak,
the Pippen, the Jack Rabbit, and the Flying Turns, which was moved
to Riverview in 1935 after Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition,
its former home, came to an end.
Riverview's patrons visited the park for many different
reasons. Many Chicagoans made their first visit to the park as children,
either on a family outing or as part of a school or church group.
As they aged, teen-agers and young adults continued to patronize the
park, in part because its low prices made for an inexpensive date
and because many of its rides afforded young couples the opportunity
to hold one another tight or even steal a surreptitious kiss. Many
of the park's attractions were especially well-suited to the interests
and desires of young men and women, including the jazzy Riverview
Ballroom and the Riverview Roller Rink, where youthful roller-skating
enthusiasts and members of the Riverview Roller Skating Club gathered
to compete for prizes and make new friends
Adults, to be sure, also enjoyed Riverview. Many
who had first visited the park as a child returned with their own
children, drawing pleasure from seeing the reactions of their own
sons and daughters to the rides they had themselves so much enjoyed
as chidren. Significant numbers of adults also came to Riverview as
part of lodge or labor union outings, while on weekend leave from
Chicago-area military duty, or with business associates in town for
a convention or seminar. Even for older adults, Riverview, with its
colorful midways, picnic groves, lively music, and passing crowds
was an entertaining sight to behold and a leisurely way to pass a
summer afternoon.
While Riverview's management promoted the park as a family-oriented
amusement center, there were those who wondered about its potentially
demoralizing effects, particularly upon the hundreds of teen-agers
and young adults who filled the park each night. Social reformers,
as part of their efforts to clean up commercial amusements across
the city, made frequent "inspections" of the park to assess how closely
park management monitored the behaviors of their customers. Of particular
concern to advocates of child welfare was Riverview's ballroom, feared
by some as a place where unchaperoned girls, if left to their own
judgement, might be lured into a life of prostitution. Others pointed
to occasional accidents on the park's rides (see table below) as evidence
that Riverview was not as safe as its owners and their publicists
claimed. And during the early years of Prohibition, federal agents
regularly raided the park and its picnic grove in search home-brewed
beer. Park-goers, however, grew accustomed to the raids, sacrificing
a token keg or two to the agents and then sounding an "all clear"
for local residents and bootleggers to deliver the rest of the day's
illicit beer supply
Part
of Riverview's success in attracting large crowds was due to its easy
accessibility to public transportation. The front gate of the park
was located within easy walking distance of five streetcar lines,
including the lengthy Western Avenue line, which ran nearly twenty
miles, making connections to thirty-five other lines along the way.
In addition to the regular service, special "Riverview Park" streetcars
provided rides to patrons coming from the Loop. While most park-goers
journeyed to and from Riverview on streetcar, increasing numbers,
especially by the 1930s, came by automobile. Confronted by a growing
demand for parking facilities and fearful of losing customers unable
to find a place to park their cars, Riverview management laid out
a series of parking lots around the periphery of the park. Additional
parking was provided by several privately owned parking lots located
nearby.
An often unacknowledged
factor in Riverview's popularity during much of its history was the
informal exclusion of African-Americans from the park. Although there
existed no official policy against the admission of blacks to the
park, all Chicagoans, white and black, recognized that Riverview,
like many other public amusement sites, lay on the white side of the
invisible racial boundaries that divided the city. Few blacks risked
crossing such boundaries. Those who did put themselves in danger and
were often viciously attacked by white thugs for their refusal to
submit to white authority. Rather than accomodate African-Americans,
Riverview's owners and patrons found it more useful to make blacks
the subject of white amusement at the park. For many years, the African
Dip was a well-known midway attraction, particulary among young white
males eager to demonstrate their racial solidarity with other whites.
Players of the game paid for the chance to dunk an "African" in a
pool of water. Those who were hired to play the role of the "African"
were encouraged to be as verbally abusive as possible in order to
incite the racial animosities of white patrons and thus drum up additional
business for the game. White Chicagoans responded positively to the
informal exclusion of African-Americans from the park and race-themed
games like the Dip because of their own ethnic diversity. By defining
themselves as "white," ethnically diverse Chicagoans developed a sense
of racial solidarity that obscured the particulars of their own ethnic
backgrounds. The Dip remained in operation until the late 1950s, when
the NAACP pressured the park's owners to remove the odious game.
Riverview continued to attract
large crowds during the 1950s and 1960s. Chicagoans, as they had for
most of the century, continued to enjoy the park's exciting combination
of wild rides, upbeat music, lively crowds, tasty eats, and cool evening
air. Several factors, however, helped bring about the park's closure
following the 1967 season. The immediate causes were financial. Riverview's
operating costs, pushed upward by rising property taxes and increased
maintenance costs on the park's aging infrastructure, rose throughout
the 1960s. When a developer offered to purchase the property from
the Schmidt family, the deal was too enticing to pass up, particularly
in light of what at the time appeared to be the growing unpleasantness
of urban life in general. To have continued to have operated the park
would have required the Schmidt family or some other group of operators
to confront (and adjust to) the growing reluctance of white, middle-class
families to live in the city and partake in its long-standing popular
amusements. Not eager to share public spaces such as Riverview with
African-Americans no longer willing to accept de facto segregation,
the majority of white Chicagoans opted to abandon their familiar neighborhoods
and entertainment centers and rebuild in the suburbs. Following the
amusement park's demolition, the site was redeveloped with a combination
of light industry and various retail stores.
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