Whisked away by White City
Chicago’s first amusement park mixed family-friendly joys, sensationalism
Aaron Jones looked at a Chicago cornfield and envisioned customers riding a roller coaster, gawking at thinly garbed showgirls and gasping at daily reenactments of the Great Chicago Fire. The site was remote but accessible by public transportation. The northern border of the farmland was 63rd Street, where the “L” had been built to transport visitors from downtown Chicago to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The fair had offered exhibits of artistic and scientific progress, as well as a carnival of fun and games. In accord with a showman’s philosophy, Jones adopted the latter to create White City, Chicago’s first amusement park.
“You can talk all you want to about the people’s taste becoming elevated and theorize as much as you will, but to attract the crowd give me a good, old fashioned melodrama, with all the thrills and hairbreadth escapes you can manufacture,” Jones told the Tribune, three years after White City’s opening in late May 1905.
Jones had built a series of nickelodeons, or silent movie theaters, and penny arcades. One was in a building owned by Joseph Byfield, proprietor of the Sherman House Hotel, who provided the financial know-how for Jones’ amusement park.
A sign was posted on the 13-acre site, announcing: WHITE CITY $1,000,000 AMUSEMENT PARK
TO BE ERECTED HERE. The South Side park was bounded by 63rd and 66th streets, Calumet Avenue and what is now Martin Luther King Drive.
Its centerpiece 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.
The 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.
“You just walk around and look over a railing at imitation rocks and water and boats and things. In a little imitation valley is an imitation house and in front of the house are a bronze family with not many clothes on, looking, I should judge, toward the sunset.”
A landmark on the South Side, White City hosted a rainbow of ethnic gatherings. Ten thousand Slovaks gathered there for a program to pledge their loyalty to America during World War I, when their homeland was part of Austria-Hungary, an enemy of the U.S. Two thousand Hungarians launched a campaign for their homeland’s independence, and the Irish held a Celtic Ball on St. Patrick’s Day.
On less happy occasions, White City was taken to court. The Sherman House’s former manager claimed it was a money-laundering scheme: He alleged that Byfield, as president of both, was transferring the hotel’s profits to the park’s ledgers. That denied the manager the percentage of profits specified in his contract.
When Ald. Bernard Snow was called before a graft-investigating committee, he admitted getting19 questionable zoning variations for White City. He acknowledged having a financial interest in two park concessions, but denied any wrongdoing.
“Ald. Snow told frankly enough about his connection with the White City, but he perspired freely under many leading questions,” a Tribune reporter observed.
In 1909, spectators crowded a courtroom for the trial of Bertha Faulk. Nicknamed the “bare bronze beauty,” she was arrested at White City by a member of the police censorship squad who admonished the girlie show’s barker: “You will have to cut out that talk about bodies painted in golden paint.”
Both sides agreed that was pretty much Faulk’s act: She walked across the stage wearing two girdles and bronze paint. The prosecution said that violated the obscenity law. The defense countered that the cops allowed famed dancer Isadora Duncan to appear at Orchestra Hall “with no more dress than a handkerchief.”
“It is hard to get a jury of men to convict a pretty woman,” the acting chief of police said after Faulk was acquitted.
South Side ministers triggered the scrutiny of police with a letter threatening White City’s management with legal action: “The admission of children of tender age, the suggestive and indecent talk of the barkers is a disgrace, and the performance itself is vile, vulgar, and vicious.”
In fact, the park’s entertainment venues hosted two shows at the same time: one on stage, the other performed by a barker outside. Some in the barker profession “could wring dimes out of a crowd’s pocket with nothing but an empty tent behind them,” a guest writer wrote in the Tribune. He noted one barker’s lament:
“When it ain’t right, shoot high, shoot low, go up amongst the clouds, or fish for minnows on the platform, and hand ‘em the bunk that makes the tear water come, or give ‘em something that will make ‘em ‘tee hee,’ you can’t take down a handful.”
The spiels of barkers hyping their show’s virtues and badmouthing others echoed throughout White City. Barkers delighted in spoiling each other’s ballyhoo, as a Tribune reporter witnessed in 1906.
At a generic “real fire show,” a rival of the Chicago Fire reenactment, its barker brought out a few performers to whet appetites. But among them was a papier-mâché Mrs. O’Leary, carrying a sign bearing “Chicago Fire,” which was surreptitiously slipped in as a plug for the competition.
One attraction had no counterpart. Dr. Martin Couney’s infant incubators pavilion allowed visitors to see the “glass ovens” that were used to keep premature babies alive.
Though Couney had studied medicine, he lacked the degree his title implied. So he created a roadshow practice, but bristled at being considered a mere showman.
“All my life I have been making propaganda for the proper care of preemies, who in other times were allowed to die,” he told a magazine in 1939 when he’d been appearing at fairs for 43 years.
That same year, wrecking crews knocked down most of White City after the city condemned it.
“This grand old park holds many happy memories for all of us,” Ald. John Healy said before the start of demolition.
The Great Depression had hit White City’s customers hard, causing revenues to tank. The park could no longer mount the elaborate spectacles that were its signature.
Buffalo Bill’s famed cowboy show was a major attraction at White City in 1915. Whereas in 1931, the major event was a marathon dance contest at the park’s hall that eight years later would escape the bulldozers.
Also surviving the city’s razing were a bowling alley, a boxing arena and a roller skating rink. The rink perpetuated the segregation of White City; even as its neighborhood became a Black community, the park was off-limits to African Americans. In 1942, Jimmie Lunceford and his jazz band were the first Black musicians booked at the park’s ballroom.
The roller rink resisted protests, lawsuits and boycotts. The owner dropped his Jim Crow policy only in 1946. After a 1959 fire destroyed the 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.”