Midway Plaisance

Midway Plaisance

The Midway first came to being during the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as a bit of an accident. The world's fair scheduled for 1892 was pushed towards a higher standard than most others. The successes of the 1876 Philadelphia and 1889 Paris fairs drove the Chicago planners to produce something even greater. As stated by Richard Wilson, the Paris fair especially hit home for the Americans. The sheer magnificence of the buildings and exhibits made the United States look very backward indeed. While France and the rest of the Old World countries held their own with remarkable advances in art, architecture, and science, the U.S. appeared to be falling behind. America's relatively inferior showings didn't help to shake this harsh image. The U.S. was desperate for a new self-image. It needed an opportunity to establish itself as the superpower it felt it deserved to be. The Columbian Exposition gave the U.S. this chance. Fair organizers planned the fair on a grand scale. They gravitated towards a solemn Neo-Classical style, as exemplified in the all-white Court of Honor, a style which represented order, tradition, purity, and grandeur -- all the things that America was trying to display.

However, this new classical character impressed upon the fair's major buildings produced a conflict with a group of people that had already laid claim to the fair: the members of the entertainment industry. Even before the formal announcement of the Fair in 1890, requests for space from all sorts of vendors, musical and circus troupes, and restaurateurs. Amusement vendors had been set up at previous expositions, usually right outside the fairgrounds. There, they not only attracted more fairgoers than the regular exhibits...

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...ighted crowds at Montreal in 1967. This endurance of the idea of the Midway is a testament to its charisma, its power, and the high place amusement holds in the eye of society.

Bibliography

Richard Wilson, "Challenge and Response: Americans and the Architecture of the 1889 Exhibition," in Annette Blaugrund (ed.) Paris 1889. American Artists at the Universal Exposition, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1989, 93-110.

Findling, John E. Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions: 1851-1988. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Meehan, Patrick. "The Big Wheel." Chicago's Great Ferris Wheel of 1893.

Rydell, Robert W. Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

Keefe, John Webster. Libbey Glass: A Tradition of 150 Years: 1918-1968. Toledo, Ohio: Toledo Museum of Art, 1968.