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The street today is quiet, largely forgotten, dominated by its great grassy median of park land, 200 yards wide, one mile long, where neighborhood residents walk their dogs and students from the University of Chicago across the street take a break to relax or eat lunch 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 Muslim 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 observation "Ferris" wheel, taller than all but one downtown Chicago skyscraper, but only by a few feet. This was where Americans first "turned out for an unrestrained good time." 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. |
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