Luna Park

Luna Park, St. Kilda, Victoria

While we're on the subject of classic amusement parks, I'd like to bring up one that is very much alive, about 10,000 miles away in Australia.

I had the great privilege of visiting Melbourne a few years back and was struck by the similarities of the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, and my hometown of Chicago. The two are about the same age, Chicago having received its city charter in 1837, and Melbourne in 1847. Both are the traditional second cities of their respective countries, although only Melbourne can still legitimately claim that title. Both Melbourne and Chicago were boom towns in their early days because of their advantageous geographical locations as far as trade and commerce are concerned.

Walter Burley and Marion Mahony
Griffin's
Capitol Theater Building

One big difference between the two is that Chicago became a city sixty years after American independence from Great Britain while Melbourne was founded as an imperial city. Much of its Victorian era architecture reflects that fact. Locals like to joke that the city's main train station, the beloved over-the-top, Flinders Street Station, was designed back at the home office in London, but there was a mix-up and its plans were mistakenly sent to Melbourne instead of Bombay(Mumbai), where the station was intended to be built.

Manchester United Building
sporting a tower that should
look quite familiar to Chicagoans

Despite the large number of British inspired Victorian era buildings, there is a strong architectural bond between Melbourne and Chicago. Walter Burley Griffin who earned his chops in Chicago in the offices of Dwight Perkins and Frank Lloyd Wright, and then on his own with a successful practice, moved to Australia with his professional partner and wife Marion Mahony Griffin when they were commissioned to design the plan for the new Australian capital city of Canberra. The couple established an office in Melbourne as well where they made their presence known with some of that city's' finest buildings including the Capitol Theater pictured on the left, with a facade that would fit quite nicely in Chicago's Loop.

The adjacent building just visible in the left corner of the photograph is the Manchester United Building designed by Melbourne architect Marcus Barlow. That 1932 building is a neo-Gothic skyscraper, a genre which was in vogue in Chicago in the twenties. The tower of the Manchester United Building should look very familiar to anybody who has ever been to the Windy City with its strong resemblance, flying buttresses and all, to Raymond Hood's Tribune Tower.

Melbourne Mish Mosh

These two Chicago inspired skyscrapers reside in Melbourne's Downtown or as they call it, their Central Business District, CBD for short. The CBD like Chicago's Loop is like an architectural workshop displaying a wide range of styles from the aforementioned British Victorian, and Chicago Industrial, to almost every subsequent popular style of the era, neo-Gothic and Classical, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism, Brutalism, Deconstructivism, Post Modernism, virtually every kind of "ism" you can think of except for one. That one would be "contextualism", the idea that new buildings should be designed to fit in with at least the spirit of the extant buildings in the neighborhood. By and large the architectural landscape of Melbourne is far less conservative than Chicago's, and planners and architects of that city have more free reign to experiment with forms, styles and one particular trait, whimsy. All that would be frowned upon here. The result is a hodge-podge, crazy-quilt collection of buildings that don't appear to speak to each other as much as scream at each other.

Let's face it, this sort of thing would never fly in Chicago

The strange thing is that it works. Strolling the streets of the CBD is a journey of discovery; approaching each intersection, you never know what you'll find around the corner. What ties it all together is a system of arcades, elaborate ones from the 19th century, connected by more rough hewn ones from the last two decades, that create a system of walkways, some indoor, some outdoor, that break the monotony of the rigid street grid pattern. In a way this reminded me of the Chicago Loop of my childhood with its many subterranean haunts and multi storied buildings filled with a wide variety of mom and pop shops that invited visitors to explore businesses catering to every possible interest. A victim of its own success, today, Loop property values and rental costs are prohibitive for all but the most lucrative businesses, and what was once a place of endless variety, the Loop is now almost strictly the domain of chain restaurants and retailers, closed door offices, and residential units.

Alas, such is "progress".

Anyway, I experienced a real feeling of deja vu when I took the streetcar (another long vanished part of the Chicago landscape) out to the bordering suburb of St. Kilda, and visited Luna Park. There were many amusement parks all over the world with that name, some of which still exist, including the one at Coney Island. The St. Kilda Luna Park opened in 1912 and has enjoyed nearly continuous operation ever since, save for a period during World War I.

As soon as I stepped through the mouth of Mr. Moon and into the amusement park, I was transported back nearly fifty years to my childhood days at Riverview. I couldn't help be struck by Mr. Moon's resemblance to the face of Aladdin in front of his castle, the fun house of my old stomping grounds. Just like Aladdin's Castle, the first thing you encounter at Luna Park is this:

The roller coaster pictured below, called the "Scenic Railway" which completely encircles Luna Park, dates from the very beginning of the park and is the oldest continuously operating roller coaster in the world:

Like Riverview of old, admission is free so you can walk around Luna Park to your heart's content. The rides of course are not free. From what I can tell, even taking inflation and exchange rates into account, ticket prices are exponentially higher than Riverview's, but probably not out of line with comparable amusement parks these days. Case in point, a one minute and half ride on Coney Island's famous Cyclone roller coaster will set you back nine bucks.

Here are pictures of a few of the rides in St. Kilda:

Pharaoh's Curse

The Coney Drop, a replica of a ride at Luna Park's namesake amusement park in Coney Island

The Twin Dragon

The Scenic Railway

In case you're an old time Chicagoan jonesing for a Riverview fix, before you pack your bags and fly halfway around the world, let me just say you could probably take the entire Luna Park and place it inside the area once occupied by Riverview's Shoot the Chutes, and still have space for the Wild Mouse ride.

What's more, in these sensitive times, there are no collapsing stairways, dunk tanks, or guys who control air grates in the floor, opening them when unsuspecting ladies in skirts walk above. And for the life of me I couldn't find a freak show to save my life.

No, it's all good, clean, PC fun, even the roller coaster as you can see is so tame, park employees ride it standing up. In reality, given its size and the intensity of its rides, Luna Park, Melbourne could probably be better compared to another defunct Chicagoland amusement park, Kiddleland, which entertained families in west suburban Melrose Park for sixty years from 1950 until 2010.

This isn't meant to dis Luna Park in any way, it is a wonderful place that holds countless memories I would imagine for every Melburnian since 1912. Just like other amusement parks, it's had its ups and downs with sporadic threats over the years to close it down. But times change and what to one generation is tired and old, to another is warm and charming. Luna Park exists today because it survived through the bad times long enough to be cool again.

In light of that, it's tempting to wring our hands here in Chicago and wonder if only the owners of Riverview had not been so eager to sell back in the sixties, and instead had the foresight to carry on, maybe, just maybe, we'd now have a tremendous vintage amusement park that would be the pride of the Midwest as well as a huge money maker.

That's a nice fantasy but quite honestly I can't imagine a scenario where Riverview could have possibly survived to this day. First of all, in 1968, the year following Riverview's closing, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and much of Chicago burned. What followed was a mass exodus of people (who could afford it), from the city to the suburbs. Riverview already had a reputation, whether deserved or not, for being dangerous, and that reputation most certainly would have increased in the late sixties/early seventies, as the words "inner city" became synonymous in the minds of many, with crime and danger. The motivation to sell would have only increased in the ten years after Riverview closed.

Then in 1976, what almost certainly would have been the death knell for Riverview, had it not already been dead, was the opening of Great America Park in Gurnee, Illinois. The big attraction to Riverview was always its size (it was billed as the largest amusement park in the world), and the scariness of its rides. Great America was much bigger and its rides were scarier. On top of that, Great America was located way out in the distant suburbs, you neded a car to get there. Once there you needed a significant chunk of change just to get into the place, a trip there would cost a family of four well into the hundreds of dollars. You might think this would be a deterrent, which it certainly was for people without the time and the money to make the trip. That was exactly the point. For those who had the money, it was well spent as it kept out the riffraff, (i.e.: people like me, who never set foot in the joint), insuring a pleasurable and above all safe family outing, at least in the minds of its visitors.

Had Riverview survived into the mid-seventies, it would have been seen as the poor man's Great America, which certainly would have degraded it's by then, damaged reputation.

Now imagine it had stubbornly survived all that, and lasted into the era of the revival of the big American city in the eighties and nineties. Had that been the case, the property value, not for the development of industry as was the trend in the sixties, but for the development of mid to upper income housing, would have made the value of the land underneath Riverview skyrocket. Had the owners sat upon their property say twenty or thirty more years, the value would have increased perhaps tenfold, that after inflation is figured in. Looking back, it's kind of funny to think the Schmidt family sold the land under their amusement park, thus insuring its doom, for a mere six million dollars.

Could a dilapidated 1990s Riverview have survived the temptation for its owners to sell the land for perhaps several hundred million dollars? Most likely not.

You may be asking, given their similar circumstances, if the Luna Parks in Coney Island and Melbourne survived why couldn't Riverview? I would answer with two simple reasons, location and size. Those two parks were built in the middle of historic resort areas fronted by beaches. Their neighborhoods had amenities that catered to the beachcombers and other visitors, and the amusement parks served as merely one of many attractions. Think of Coney Island and you think of the Boardwalk, Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs and of course, the beach, along with the Wonderwheel and the Cyclone. While the neighborhood went to pot in the sixties and seventies, people still went to the beach. In a city where everybody rides the subway, at least half the New York City subway lines go to Coney Island. Likewise, St. Kilda is at the end of a tram line that runs through the heart of the CBD, making it easily accessible to visitors such as myself.

By contrast, Riverview was built in the middle of a residential and industrial neighborhood. Had it been located on the shores of Lake Michigan, it may have been a different story. Riverview's neighborhood never went through a drastic transformation as the neighborhood of Coney Island, but aside from the concentration of antique shops on Belmont Avenue, by itself there's not a whole lot there to attract visitors.

It's not particularly difficult to get to Riverview on public transportation, but it's not on an "L" line, you have to transfer to a bus. Unlike Great America, it's not right off the highway either, you have to navigate city streets. Riverview by itself was the destination of its neighborhood, and when it was the only game in town, it was well worth the effort to get there. If it had become no longer the only game in town, not so much.

Then there was its size. Riverview took up 47 acres of land. Compare that to just over three acres at the current Luna Park in Coney Island and about the same for St. Kilda. Back in the days when land and labor were cheap, it wasn't much of an expense to keep a big park going. Things change. Combine that with the cost of keeping order in the increasingly disorderly Riverview and it's not too hard to understand why the owners wanted to get while the getting was good.

Hard for me to say it but maybe it's a good thing that Riverview closed when it did. More than likely, it would have gone into a downhill trajectory for at least twenty years had it remained open. By the time things got better for the city, it might have been beyond repair. Had that been the case, our memories of it would be much less sweet. As it is, like the careers of the Beatles and Peyton Manning, despite showing its age, Riverview's days ended while it was still on top.

Perhaps there's something to be said for that.

The Last Ride at Riverview

Inspired by the impending demolition of the 54 year old Western Avenue Overpass which began this week, I took the kids for one last ride up the old roadway for a final chance at a view of the city that will be gone forever. If you recall from two posts ago, that roadway's purpose if you don't know its history, may seem perplexing. It was built to bypass the tremendously popular Chicago icon, Riverview Amusement Park. Perhaps when the overpass was built in 1961, Riverview and its million and a half yearly visitors seemed like a fixture that would be around forever. Alas, six years later after the 1967 season, Riverview closed for good. Long after the Shoot-the-Chutes, the Bobs, the Parachute ride and Aladdin's Castle were turned to scrap and dust, the roadway remained until nature ran its course, and a few years ago a decision had to be made, either rebuild the dilapidated, out-of-date structure, or simply remove and replace it with a conventional roadway. 

Many motorists no doubt would have preferred the former solution but such is life. Sorry to say it, but as of March 1, 2016, the last ride of Riverview is no more.

The Western Avenue overpass as it looked during its last weekend of operation.
Here you see local traffic on the right, while on the left,
some of the final motorists to ever use it "fly" over Belmont Avenue.

After Riverview closed, from a practical standpoint, for drivers on Western the overpass was a nice, but relatively insignificant bonus as it enabled them to avoid only one stoplight. From the street level as you can see, the overpass is something of an eyesore, and as far as I can tell, there was little opposition to its demolition.

The intersection of Belmont, Western and Clybourn.

Of course nothing is ever perfect, and the demise of the overpass will no doubt result in more backups at the five way intersection of Belmont, Western and Clybourn Avenues. That's not counting the horrific congestion its demolition and reconfiguration will cause. The whole project is not scheduled to be completed until September, 2017.

A symbol of the pre-eminence of the automobile in the early sixties, the overpass like the expressways of this city, was built without any consideration of its surroundings. It obscured the main entrance to Riverview on Western Avenue, visually cutting it off from the other side of the street. Visitors arriving on foot from the east had to walk under the overpass whose diminishing ceiling under the north ramp had to have been a nuisance, especially for tall people:

The main entrance to Riverview on Western Avenue before the overpass was built.
The presence of the "Green Hornet" streetcar dates this historic photo (photographer unknown)
 to sometime before 1958.
The structure of the Silver Flash roller coaster is in the background.

This was shot from roughly the same spot as the photograph above,
showing how the overpass would have obscured the view of the entrance from the street.

For an eight year old like me however, walking under the overpass was a prelude to the fun house with its rooms of distorted proportions. But for grownups on foot, the cramped, unwelcoming, somewhat threatening confines of the space underneath the overpass certainly had to diminish the experience of entering the park:

My daughter demonstrating the experience I had at her age while under the overpass, feeling very tall.

I also wanted to show my kids the site of one of the happiest places of my childhood. Unless you have a thing for irony, you'd be hard pressed to apply Riverview's old slogan. "Laugh your troubles away" to the site today. The closest thing that resembles lost Riverview is the huge police radio tower that was built on almost the exact site of the Pair-O-Chutes ride. With a bit of squinting and a whole lot of imagination, you can almost see the old contraption that thrilled and terrified Riverview patrons at the same time:

A rendering of the Pair-O-Chutes at night (artist unknown)
If you use your imagination and squint really hard,
you may be able to conjure up this; but open them...

...and this is what you see, the police tower which sits upon the site of Riverview's Parachute ride.

Of course the functions of the two structures couldn't be more different, and opening your eyes to the reality of the place is like waking from a fantastic dream and finding yourself back within the confines of your old, bleak, hum drum world. If you recall the story of my mother's two delinquent classmates who ditched class one day only to find themselves stuck on top of the parachute ride back in the forties, how appropriate, or ironic it should be that the ride would be replaced by the ultimate symbol of authority. Perhaps that tower should be named for the two boys. Perhaps it already is.

It only gets stranger. As if it were a twisted joke, the police headquarters/courthouse proper sits upon the site of Aladdin's Castle, Riverview's fun house. Your sense of fun would really be tested here, especially if you found yourself checked in as a guest of the police station's iron hotel.

I'm only speculating but I suppose that given Riverview's dubious reputation in its later years for being crime ridden, a lot of folks applauded the fact that the first thing to be built on the old site would be a police headquarters. It was the late sixties after all, a time when the tension between those who loved authority and the police, and those that hated them was even stronger than it is today. That a facility representing the state's authority would be built upon a site that once represented joy, freedom,  and a little bit of controlled mayhem, is very powerful symbol indeed.

As a token effort to pay lip service the old amusement park as well as add a touch of color and levity to an otherwise dour environment, artist Jerry Peart was commissioned in 1980 to create a sculpture, titled, appropriately enough, "Riverview", intended to evoke the feeling of the long lost park. Did he succeed? Well, you be the judge...

Before (photographer unknown)

After

It may be a pleasant work of art of sorts, but there's no question where I'd rather hang out.

For many years, the vast majority of the old site of Riverview was taken up by acre upon acre of concrete, which served as parking spaces for the staff and students of DeVry University. Most of the time the parking spots were empty, making the area great for student drivers, skateboarders and roller bladers but not much else. Recently a few other schools replaced much of the concrete and now there is a little campus of schools that is an improvement:

A new campus has brought some more life to the site.

I shot the photograph above while standing near the site of the famous Bobs roller coaster which would have been to my left, just out of the picture frame. Here you're looking north, in the direction of the Shoot-the-Chutes and the Tunnel of Love, a ride I didn't get the point of until about eight years after Riverview closed. By the time I understood, it was too late...

Riverview Tunnel of Love, 1943 (photographer unknown)

Fortunately there is a small section of the Riverview site that retains some of the atmosphere of the old park. It fronts the river and could legitimately be called Riverview Park, even though that's not really its name. It's called Richard Clark Park and comprises a sliver of the west end of the old Riverview site. Now that the overpass is no more, Clark Park contains the only relics from Riverview that you will find on the site. For starters, I'm told there are cottonwood trees that were around at the time of the amusement park. I spent a good time photographing them about fifteen years ago while working on a photographic project documenting the Chicago River. If you look hard enough, you'll also find some remnants such as footings from the old Shoot-the-Chutes ride:

The Shoot-the-Chutes, the first ride ever built at Riverview,
and the cable railway called the Sky-Ride, the last, (photographer unknown)

My son standing upon what remains of the Shoot-the-Chutes.

Clark Park has a lovely river walk that is perfect for a stroll day or night. Even better, some of the devil-may-care spirit has returned to Riverview in the form of a bike dirt jump and pump track. Without any bikes, my kids still had a blast running up and down this crude but effective obstacle course that takes advantage of some of the remnants and topography of the old picnic grounds that surrounded the Shoot-the-Chutes:

A little bit of the spirit of Riverview lives on...

This looks like fun. If I were about ten years younger I'd try it out myself.

The bike course pictured above, maintained by an independent group, Chicago Area Mountain Bikers, has brought back a little of the fun and mayhem to the north side of Chicago, something it sorely needs.

Last Saturday we went for a final ride on the Western Avenue Overpass, the last ride at Riverview. I asked my children, one on the passenger side, the other on the driver side, to document the ride. Strap yourself in folks for a hair-raising, spine tingling, ride. Hold on for dear life...

Photographs by Rose and Theo Iska

Ok so maybe it wasn't  the Silver Flash, the Comet the Jetstream, the Flying Cars, Hades, the Rotor, the Chute-the-Chutes or even the Wild Mouse. It certainly didn't have the cache of the Bobs, or the Pair-O-Chutes. More than likely, most of the people who used the overpass everyday didn't think much about or even notice it, or the great views of Chicago it provided.

Like the old amusement park it was built around, it had its dark side to go along with the thrills (yes I mean thrills). Eventually the realities of economics, safety and practicality deemed it had to go. So be it. We've been through this before and will again and again. The city, ever growing, ever changing, stops for nothing, least of all memories of a long gone, but very sweet past.

The overpass on its last day of service, February 29,2016.

Goodbye old friend.

The Last Trace

The only thing I remember from an urban studies class I took in college nearly forty years ago was a discussion that dealt with urban archeology. The professor brought up the topic of incongruous features in the urban landscape which are perfectly logical, only if you know the history of the neighborhood. He was from Detroit and used the example of an expressway that inexplicably veered off course by several feet. Anyone coming across this odd feature of the road that had been otherwise straight for miles would have been perplexed. Long time residents of the neighborhood of course remembered the old brewery that stood in the path of the new superhighway which was built to skirt around the long gone building.

There is a similar incongruous road feature on the north side of Chicago, an overpass on Western Avenue that takes the street over Belmont Avenue. The overpass is convenient for drivers along Western as it enables them to bypass one of the hundreds of stoplights on the longest street in Chicago. Its elevation also provides motorists with a nice relief from the otherwise pool table flat topography of Chicago, as well as a terrific view of the surrounding neighborhood and the Loop, about six miles away. But why is the overpass here and not say a few blocks farther south over the much busier six-way intersection at Elston and Diversey, or perhaps a dozen of other seemingly more logical places?

Unless you're old enough to remember as I am, or at least know a little about the history of that particular patch of land at the northwest corner of Belmont and Western, you're likely to be stymied by the seemingly arbitrary bit of roadway that sadly is about to disappear forever.

Before the police station, the campus of trade colleges, and the non-descript strip mall that currently occupy the area, from 1904 until 1967 that 74 acre site bounded by Western, Belmont, the Chicago River and Roscoe street was the happiest place in Chicago, and perhaps the entire Midwest, Riverview Amusement Park. So popular was Riverview that the overpass was built in 1961 for the benefit of the few drivers along Western Avenue who were not headed there. That roadway is one of the last remaining traces of the park.

Riverview holds a special place in the hearts of anyone my age or older who grew up in Chicago and could count on spending at the very least, a few summer days and/or evenings at the park. Folks from the south and west sides made the trek either by car or bus, usually two or three of them. It was within walking distance for many north siders, in fact that's what lots of kids did on their way home after they spent all their bus money inside the park. As I was only eight during its final summer. I never experienced Riverview without an adult chaperone, still I have nothing but sweet, happy memories of the place. Because of my age, (well I like to think that anyway), I never rode the most famous and terrifying rides in the park, the roller coaster with its advertised 85 foot 90mph drop known as the Bobs, and the heart stopping Pair-O-Chutes; more on them later. I did ride the tamer Jetstream roller coaster which still was a little out of my league. More my speed was the fun house known as Aladdin's Castle, pictured on the right, the arcade, and the Shoot-The-Chutes, where a gondola would take you and perhaps eight other riders to the top of a tower, then be released down an enormous water slide into a pond below.

As wonderful as the park was during the day, it was spectacular at night. With everything lit up, it was a dreamland, a place far removed from the serious everyday business of school, work, or anything else the city had to offer. To get a feeling of what Riverview de nuit was like, check out the carnival scene from Alfred Hitchcock's great 1951 film Strangers on a Train. That scene doesn't end well for poor Miriam, the estranged wife of the protagonist. But with the lights of the carnival reflected in the broken lenses of her glasses, Miriam's death at the hands of the sociopath Bruno Antony played brilliantly by Robert Walker, is probably the most beautiful murder scene ever captured on film.

I bring that up not because murder was a regular occurrence there, but because like all carnivals, circuses and amusement parks of the time before our safety conscious, uber-hygenic, politically correct, self-absorbed, litigious era, there was indeed a darker side to Riverview.

Take the freak show. No self-respecting carnival or amusement park back in the day would have done without one of these, and Riverview's was right there on the midway, smack dab in the middle of the park across from the entrance to the miniature train ride. You simply couldn't avoid it. The best part of the freak show, sorry folks, that's what it was called, was its presentation on the outside. There you'd have the classic barker, whose job it was to entice passersby to spend their hard earned money to come inside and witness some of the strangest, most bizarre and unbelievable sights known to man, or something of that nature. Giant hand-painted banners, which today command top dollar, would advertise the amazing sights inside. Usually as a tease, one of the performers would come out and give a little presentation of his or her talent. There might be a contortionist, a sword swallower, a tattooed lady, a fire eater, or the human blockhead, a guy who would pound nails into his nose. I specifically remember a fellow called "the two-faced man" who was portrayed on his banner as a man who had two separate, distinct faces. The real two-faced man had in fact only one face, one side of it was what most people would consider "normal" while the other side was greatly deformed.

Once the suckers, I mean patrons, paid their money to get inside, they'd get a little routine from the performers, usually giving their life story then explaining their condition, if their talent was something unusual about their body, or a little demonstration of something they could do that was unusual. David Letterman used to call acts like these, "stupid human tricks." They weren't done sucking your money after you got inside the sideshow, there was always another opportunity to tease you with something even more unbelievable, beyond another door or obstacle. Here's a link to a page, on a site devoted to sideshows, featuring one of the Riverview performers, Sylvia, the Girl with the Elephant Feet.

It seems that no discussion about Riverview today would be complete without at least a mention of the dunk tank. You still see these at carnivals, somebody, usually a guy sitting on a plank suspended above a tank of water, hurling insults at passersby, encouraging them, for a fee of course, to toss a ball at a target. If the tosser if successful in hitting the target, the plank collapses, sending the guy into the drink. At the Riverview drunk tank, all the performers sitting on the planks, inside of cages no less, were African American men. The attraction was called "The African Dip." Unsubstantiated rumor has it that once upon a time it was called something else, much worse. In 1963, Mike Royko the great Chicago columnist, wrote an article stating the attraction "was disgraceful and racist... provided whites with malicious joy, while demeaning Negroes, stripping them of dignity" and "had no place in the 1960's the era of the civil rights movement." There was a public outcry (although none of the organized boycotts you may have read about) after the story came out and in a short time, the attraction was closed. Years later, Royko while still rightfully proud of the article, noted that after the amusement closed, well I'll just let him describe it:

The only problem was that about six black men showed up at my office, stood in front of my desk and demanded to know why the hell I had caused them to lose their well-paying jobs. 

As one of them said: ``I was making good money for shoutin` insults at a bunch of honkies and gettin` a little wet, and most of them couldn`t throw good enough to put me in the water one out of every 25 throws.` I explained that there were greater moral and social issues involved. 

And he said something like: ``Yeah? Well, what about the moral issue of you getting me fired? What kind of job are you going to get me now?``

Today, outside of the syrupy nostalgia pieces, you cannot read anything about Riverview that does not comment about rampant racism in the place, and about how uncomfortable black visitors were made to feel there. This includes a nice little piece that the local public radio station WBEZ did a few years ago. It's interesting to note however that of all the black people they interviewed for the piece and the several more who made comments on the accompanying web site, to a person they said how much fun they had at Riverview and how they kept coming back. They may have been taunted on the way to and from the park as at the time it was in an all white, working class neighborhood, but at least the folks in the piece insisted they felt safe inside the park.

As many of the people said in the radio piece, that was simply the way it was at the time. The black kids at the park in the fifties and sixties may have felt uncomfortable with the dunk tank, but it apparently didn't prevent many of them from participating in the amusement by taking turns at attempting to dunk their well-paid taunters. Not to excuse any of it, it was a horrible and disgusting attraction. We can blast Riverview all we want from the safe distance of fifty or sixty years, but the truth is, the amusement park was a microcosm of society and frankly it's a little silly to single it out for being a product of its time.

Riverview's time ended on October 3rd, 1967 when its owners, the grandchildren of its founder Wilhelm Schmidt sold the land under it for six and one half million dollars to a local investment group . It was announced to the public the following day that the doors to Riverview that closed for the season one month earlier, would never open again. It was the first time anyone without direct involvement in the sale had heard about it. Despite showing its age, throughout the sixties the owners of the park continued to invest in infrastructure and new rides. In the summer of '67, its final year, Riverview had 1.7 million visitors, more people than attended Cubs and White Sox home games that year combined. The news of its demise took everyone by surprise. I cried when I heard the news, it was my first experience of the loss of a part of the city that I truly loved.

The reasons given for the closing were the ever increasing cost of upkeep and the escalating problem of violence inside the park.

What made Riverview different from other amusement parks was there was no admission charge to get in, you'd only pay for the rides or other attractions. This may have led in part to its decline as shall we say, a certain undesirable element, what today we'd call gang-bangers, entered the park freely reeking their own brand of havoc (albeit tame havoc by today's standards), causing a certain amount of uneasiness among its patrons. As a kid, I was blissfully unaware of that, and doing some reading on the subject recently, have come to the conclusion that much of the violence reported was overstated. Had the owners sincerely wanted to keep the park open, much of the crime problem could have been addressed, simply by charging admission at the gate. a move the Museum of Science and Industry successfully instituted in the nineties.

It's more likely the owners, perhaps tired of the amusement park business, preferred the quick payout, about 47 million in today's dollars.

On October 4th, 1967, the day of the public announcement of the closing of Riverview, Mike Royko published his tribute to the park in his daily column in the long defunct Chicago Daily News. The column was titled: Riverview Park: A Coward's Tale. You can find an excerpt of the piece here. The column describes Royko's profound fear of the Parachute ride mentioned above. Here's how it starts:

It was the red badge of courage, the moment of truth. It was put up or shut up.

There could be no conscientious objection - no draft card burning - when you faced the Parachute in Riverview Park.

This was it. You had what it took or you didn't.

And for those who didn't, the chance is gone forever. They will have to live with the knowledge that they couldn't do it.

Oh you can say: "But I rode the Bobs, and the Bobs was really something."
I once rode the Bobs eight times without getting off.
Sure it was rough, that first dip, and it took extraordinary courage.

But it wasn't the Parachute. You couldn't see it miles away. It didn't rise into the sky, warning you that soon you must look deep into your soul to see what, if anything was there.

The parachute tower stood about 200 feet in the air, about the equivalent of a 20 story building. The riders, two to a chute, strapped to wooden benches were slowly hoisted to the top of the tower, whereupon the operator would throw a switch sending them into a free fall for about twenty feet before the parachute would open up for a gradual decent to terra firma. My mother who was an avid rider of the Bobs, rode the Parachute ride once, that was enough for her. As mentioned above, I never rode it and neither did Mike Royko.

My mother loves to tell the story of something that happened one day when she was in eighth grade. It was late in the school year, close to graduation and the kids were antsy to get out of school. A couple of boys who were known for their antics, didn't return to class after lunch. Now her school was located about one and a half miles from Riverview and the Parachute tower, at least the top of it, was visible from her classroom. In the afternoon, a kid in my mom's class noticed that one of the parachutes was stuck at the top of the tower. Minutes passed, then hours. When the kids left school that day, that parachute and its human cargo were still stuck nearly 200 feet in the air.

On the way home from school, my mom picked up a copy of the late edition of the Daily News to see if it had anything about the malfunctioning ride. Sure enough it did. Turned out it took over three hours to release the chute with its passengers. Those two passengers were, you guessed it, her classmates who had ditched class that afternoon.

Riverview's motto for many years was "laugh your troubles away." My mother said those two boys got a good laugh out of all the attention they got. That is until they came back to school. It turned out the nuns saw their picture in the paper too.

"Laugh your troubles away" was coined by the Rivrview PR Department (if there ever was such a thing) during the Great Depression. There's a certain poignancy when you think about people on the brink still having the outlet of Riverview to let loose, if just for a few hours, escaping the dreadful realities of life at the time. It was then that William Schmidt, son of the founder, invented the foot long hot dog, a novelty that was successful because in Schmidt's words, "it was cheap and filling." In our health conscious time many of us might cringe at the idea of eating unidentified animal products stuffed into a twelve inch casing made of beef intestines, but to the many visitors of Riverview in the thirties it was the one extravagance they could still afford.

Until its sudden demise, Riverview with its free admission, was a place teenagers could go and hang out without getting into too much trouble. If there were normal teenage anxieties, frustrations, or any other pent up feelings that needed releasing (if you catch my drift), it was nothing that a few rides on the Bobs couldn't fix. Here's Royko again:

Much later, I discovered the secret of riding the Parachute. Go there with a girl.

A boy has to suggest the Parachute to prove he is a dashing fellow. A girl has to say yes to prove she is a good sport. I'm told they still have this arrangement, except now it is sex instead of the Parachute.

I suppose one could say that Chicago or any other big city is by necessity, a victim of its own success. The ever increasing demand for land translates to ever increasing property values which means that trivial venues such as amusement parks, miniature golf courses, drive in theaters or just about anything that is a remotely interesting place to just hang out and have a good time without spending half a paycheck, is doomed. Perhaps society pays a price when the only place teenagers can go on their own is the shopping mall.

Despite the dark side that we like to dwell upon these days, I don't know a soul who spent any time there who has anything but fond memories of the place. Googling "Riverview" the other day, I came across this video produced by WGN TV which is a tribute to the long lost park. It closes with a shot of Bozo the Clown, as portrayed by Bob Bell (the inspiration for the Simpsons' Crusty the Clown), walking into the sunset along Riverview's midway. I'm sure to anyone who didn't grow up in Chicago in the sixties, that shot has to be unbearably creepy and corny.

But to those of us who did, that one shot sums up our collective childhood.

You just had to be there.


CODA:

Here is a fascinating account of the Riverview Parachute ride, written by a man who helped run it.

Here's my subsequent post on my family's visit to the site of Riverview and our last ride on the Western Avenue Overpass.