Echoes of the White City Postscript: “One of the Funniest and Best Things of the Kind”

[Part 1 of this series (“Chicago Society’s 1894 Charity Bazaar”) describes the organization of a novel society fundraiser called “Echoes of the White City” in Chicago during the fall of 1894, and Part 2 (“A Midway in Miniature”) and Part 3 (“Fourteen Villages and a Jail”) described the attractions and events of the Midway bazaar. Part 4 (“Heard No More”) details the special days of the bazaar and its closure.]

“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”

—Victor Hugo

On the final night of “Echoes of the White City—The Midway” in Chicago, the organizers of the bazaar held a banquet in Old Vienna to consider a second Midway benefit show. Reflecting on the great success of their affair, the women began plans to establish an annual benefit show for Chicago society, keeping the spirit of the 1893 World’s Fair alive while raising money for charitable causes.

Half a dozen other cities in Illinois also developed the idea of erecting miniature Midways, and delegates actively pursued Mrs. Pond-Pope for advice on repeating her success in their towns. Meanwhile, Chicago society toasted Matilda B. Carse for her creative and successful fund-raiser and nostalgic celebration of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The idea for reviving the Midway Plaisance, however, had not originated with her.

In fact, Midway-themed charity bazaars and fairs were a trend sweeping across America throughout 1894 and beyond. Echoes of the White City could be heard from coast to coast.

Echoes of the White City heard across America

As early as January of 1894, the Cincinnati Cavalry Club had sponsored a Midway show in their city. A forty-foot-wide miniature Midway ran the length of Music Hall, with booths for a German Village, Old Vienna, Japanese Village, Indian Village, Irish Village, Congress of Beauty, Turkish and Chinese theaters, Dahomey Village, Moorish Palace, and a Street in Cairo exhibit. As in Chicago, local society folk and performers played the roles for the various international villagers.

A traveling miniature Midway, launched by the Detroit Light Infantry and managed by Mr. Herbert C. Cly, toured many cities in the east. The show included a Street in Cairo, Irish Village (with Blarney Stone), Congress of Beauty, Java Village, Turkish Theater, Dahomey Village, Japanese Bazaar, Old Vienna, German Village, Moorish Palace, Indian Village, Chinese Bazaar, Hagenbeck’s Circus, and Ferris Wheel among its attractions. Some of the performers reportedly came from the original Chicago Midway, though in other cases local socialites may have been performing caricatures of people from other cultures, as evidenced from racist descriptions in news reports.

The traveling Midway visited Cleveland in January before moving to the 74^th Regiment Armory in Buffalo for a run from February 7-18, 1894. The show opened on February 19 in Philadelphia, with both the mayor and governor attending. The Midway arrived at the South Armory in Boston for a two-week run commencing March 26; a group of people indigenous to northern Alaska (described as “Eskimo”) not from the World’s Fair in Chicago joined the show. The show moved to New Haven, Connecticut, for a run in late March, and the Governor’s Foot Guard of Hartford, Connecticut hosted it from April 9-14. By the end of April, the show had arrived in Elmira, New York, where 2000 visitors packed into Stancliff Hall and raised $700 to benefit the Y.M.C.A.

Geometrical gyrations and the bold, bad barkers

Smaller Midway bazaars were mounted in Detroit at the Holy Trinity Church in early February, and at the Our Lady of Help parish school a month later. Greenfield, Indiana, erected one in March. In May, one year after the Columbian Exposition had opened in Chicago, the Washington Artillery Hall in New Orleans held a grand Midway Plaisance.

The State Naval Reserve hosted a Midway fair in Old City Hall in Pittsburgh starting on May 1. (The touring Midway from Detroit was in Elmira, New York, at this time, so the Pittsburgh show appears to be an independent venture.) The Pittsburgh Press reported that the “geometrical gyrations and the bold, bad barkers” made this fair “one of the funniest and best things of the kind that the city ever had within its limits.”

Even Chicagoland had seen the Midway resurrected months before “Echoes of the White City” had opened downtown. Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Riverside, Illinois, held a benefit called “Recollections of the Midway” on June 15, 1894. William A. Havemeyer’s lawn, adorned with hundreds of Japanese lanterns glowing among the tree branches, recalled the Wooded Island of the 1893 World’s Fair. In his yard were miniature versions of Old Vienna, the Street in Cairo (with a stubborn donkey), South Sea Islanders, Dahomey Village, Chinese Theater, East India Jugglers, along with a Turkish coffee house, a Japanese tea house, an Irish cottage. The “fair creatures” featured in the International Congress of Beauty, were men dressed in women’s clothing. A Columbian Guard arrested people minding their own business and locked them in a guardhouse until they paid their fine to raise funds for a new rectory.

Midway bazaars were launched in Rockford, Quincy, Springfield and Joliet, Illinois in the fall of 1894. For five nights in early December, the Midway Plaisance was revived at the New Tabernacle in Decatur, Illinois. Eleven scenes from the original Midway, “correct reproductions in miniature,” were constructed and managed by J. Allen Whyte of Chicago. Whyte and W. C. Coup ran a Midway Plaisance reproduction as a travelling show for charitable benefits.

Freak, fairies, foreigners and other features

A Midway that sprang to life during the summer at Black Hawk’s Watch Tower in Davenport, Iowa, drew 8,000 people in one day. A Midway Plaisance was constructed in June in Connersville, Indiana; in August at the Tri-State Fairgrounds Toledo, Ohio; in October at a YMCA in Pottsville, Pennsylvania; and in December in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Logansport, Indiana, also held their Midway in December, while the one in Lexington, Kentucky, popped up in January of 1895.

“Freak, fairies, foreigners and other features” of the Midway, including a impersonator of Bertha Palmer, were on display for two nights in Albuquerque, New Mexico in May of 1895, and five hundred society people of Minneapolis, Minnesota, organized their own charity show to benefit the Asbury Hospital in June of 1895. Other cities continued to hear echoes of the White City by staging their own Midway fairs for months or years to come.

Legacy of the Midway

Even though the name originated with a six-hundred-foot wide by one-mile-long strip of land connecting two Chicago parks, “The “Midway” is forever remembered as an event. Following the Columbian Exposition, many of the attractions moved intact to the 1894 “Midwinter Fair” in San Francisco before becoming a standard presence at World’s Fairs for years to come.

The Midway—in name and concept—also was absorbed into traveling circus shows and countless amusement parks. A lasting echo of Chicago’s Midway can be heard today in the international village design of Disney’s EPCOT, which some scholars describe as having a direct lineage to the World’s Fairs of the late eighteenth century. [Comstock-Skipp; Gilfoyle; Nelson]

In the months after the close of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the structures of the White City succumbed to dismantling and destruction. Midway fairs that popped up around the country offered thousands of Americans who were not able to make the trip to Chicago in 1893 a taste of the Midway Plaisance—or at least imitations and offshoots of its international villages and attractions. Others who attended these bazaars could relive their time exploring the polyglot settlements on the Plaisance in Chicago one more time.

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SOURCES

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