Those Were the Days

Ah nostalgia. How many of us think back to the good old days of our youth, when life was so much simpler? Yesterday I had the sweet experience of walking with my mother in the neighborhood in which both of us grew up. She and I passed the homes of childhood friends whose names we still could recall. We passed the church where both of us were confirmed and the parish school which both of us attended. That particular walk for me evoked so many memories of my childhood in the sixties, and one song in particular which brings me back every time I hear it to that exact place, Chicago's Palmer Square.

The song for what it's worth, is Get Together as recorded by a band called the Youngbloods. You may know the song from its refrain:

Come on people now, smile on your brother everybody get together, try and love one another right now.

Corny lyrics to be sure when you read them on a computer screen, but if you were around fifty years ago and remember what we were living through at the time, you might get the message it was trying to convey. I came to know the song as it was used in a TV public service announcement put together by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, as a call for brotherhood in a time of war and deep divisions in this nation and around the world. I also vaguely remember, back in the days when the guitar mass was the real thing, that song being sung in the church my mom and I walked past yesterday.

Despite the difficult times that inspired the lyrics of Get Together, the song brings to mind happy times of my life in that neighborhood which we left in the summer of 1968, exactly at the moment of the Democratic National Convention which was taking place only a few miles away. Of all the tumultuous moments of the sixties that I clearly recall, that convention, the anti-war demonstrations that accompanied it, the shameful actions of Mayor Daley on the convention floor, and the riots in part caused by over-zealous police that took place in Grant Park, are a blur to me as we were busy schlepping all our worldly possessions from one part of the city to another as all the mayhem was taking place.

Save for the chance to once again see the people I loved who are now gone, I don't have any particular urge to revisit the sixties. Between the the terrible racial divide, the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the burning cities, including Chicago, the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation, and all the other really bad stuff that was going down, the world really did seem to be spinning out of control, even to someone not even a decade old.

Yet it was the time of my childhood, and triggers such as the song Get Together bring me back to a time and place where I was safe at home with my parents on Humboldt Boulevard where I always felt I belonged, despite all the turbulence that was going on around us.

Such is nostalgia, the longing for a better, happier time, when you were safe and home, even if the reality was quite different.

I think that was the appeal to so many Americans of Donald Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again." It evoked for them a time, somewhere in the distant past, and a place, this country, that was simpler, happier, healthier, and stronger than it is now. The Great America for them was what Humboldt Boulevard and Palmer Square before August of 1968 were for me.

The problem is, those idyllic times and places never really existed, other than in our minds. My mother reminded me yesterday just how bad the neighborhood had become in the late sixties. Despite my parents' urge for unity and brotherhood, a family needs to take care of itself first, when it no longer feels safe in the place it once called home. So we became yet another family who fled the city for the suburbs during that terrible time.

As I mentioned, the sixties was a period that saw tremendous suffering around the world. Things settled down in the seventies to some extent with the end of the Vietnam War and the slow but gradual acceptance, at least in theory, that people of every color deserved their fair share of what this country had to offer. But the seventies also saw economic stagnation due to the energy crisis and other factors. International terrorism was on the upswing.  It was a time of  tremendous cynicism after Watergate and other political scandals. As a result, we didn't seem to believe much in ourselves anymore. The Reagan years of the eighties saw a decline of cynicism and a resurgence of prosperity for some, but the administration's emphasis on big business and its acceptance of making money at whatever cost, jump-started a trend toward the ever growing gap between the haves and the have nots in this country. The nineties saw even more prosperity, if you were in the right line of work. It was a good time to be in the tech industry as computers became an ever increasing part of our lives. The downside is that computers and other technologies did away with countless jobs that disappeared forever. Then came 9-11 and with it, the collapse of the old world order which imperfect as it was, at least enabled us to tell our friends from our enemies. After that came the economic collapse of 2008, from which many of us still have not recovered, despite the slow economic progress of the last eight years.

That in a nutshell is the state of this country during my 58 years on this planet, some good times, some not so good times, and some really shitty times.

Ah but at least we had good jobs, Trump supporters would point out, where you didn't need a college degree in order to raise a family while still maintaining a decent standard of living. That may be true, but if  my condensed Readers Digest view of the history of America since 1960 is any indication, you'll realize that the handwriting had been on the wall for a very long time. The country and the world have been changing at a lightning rate during my lifetime, (I've been around for a long time), and if you're not willing to change with it, you're stuck holding the bag. In fact the country has been changing rapidly ever since it was founded. Good, well paying jobs such as telegraph operator, blacksmith, mule skinner, log driver and lamp lighter were lost to new technology in the early twentieth century just as so many jobs were replaced by newer technology in the late twentieth century. In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Still, millions of Americans bought into Trump's promise of bringing jobs and greatness back America. Who in their right mind could be against that?

Skeptics pointed out that you can't stop progress and turn back the hands of time.

So how's he done so far? Well he's proved the skeptics wrong. Donald Trump has indeed succeeded in turning the clock back, taking us back to yesteryear and bringing back things we never thought we'd see again:

• Despite all we learned from Watergate, I haven't seen so much outright distrust of a president since Richard Nixon, and quite honestly, the potential trouble Trump has gotten himself into, makes Nixon's indiscretions look pale by comparison. 
• Just over a week ago we were talking about the real possibility of using nuclear weapons on another country and that country using them on us. I haven't heard that kind of talk since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 
• Last week, Nazis and Klansmen openly marched and chanted slogans of hatred right in the heart of Thomas Jefferson country. I remember when Nazis wanted to march in the largely Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois in the seventies, but back then they were only a small fringe group who were the objects of scorn and ridicule by virtually everyone. Once they won their legal battle to march, they chose not to, out of fear of the consequences. To find a time when there was so little resistance to this kind of people, going all the way up to the President of the United States, you have to go back to the 1920s. 
• Trump has tried to implement immigration bans that also harken back to the twenties, and through his rhetoric, has inspired fear and hatred of foreigners the likes of which we haven't seen since the Know Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

To be fair, job numbers and the stock market are up since Trump became president, and naturally he is taking all the credit, despite the fact that those numbers have been steadily increasing for the last several years under the previous administration. As we all know, what goes up must come down, and with his focus on de-regulating business and the markets, the chances of a catastrophic collapse harking back to 1929 may very well be looming in our future.

The good news is that maybe we won't have to worry about that because we'll be engaged in a nuclear war and we'll have bigger problems.

I'm not so big on nostalgia but I kind of miss the time, say about a year ago, when we didn't have to worry about this shit.

Man, those were the days.

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.

Back then...

I was in Prague for the first time in early 1993, barely three years after the end of Soviet hegemony in the country at the time known as Czechoslovakia. The city was filled with life and as such, packed with tourists. Since I never experienced Prague before the Velvet Revolution, I had nothing to compare it to. Suffice it to say, when I returned home there were many people who told me how visiting the city was much better back in Communist times: fewer tourists and tourist traps, more locals and businesses catering to them meant that back then the place had more charm and was "more honest and real." Of course those folks didn't have to live in a country in the grips of a totalitarian regime; the locals I spoke to didn't exactly share the sentiment that things were better in Prague in the good ol' days.

Likewise I've never been to Havana, but people suggest I go there before it is "ruined", presumably by the imminent but as yet  unfulfilled fall of Communism in Cuba, accompanied by the relaxing of tensions between the island nation and the United States, and the inevitable crush of tourism that would bring.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that tourists are attracted to interesting, readily accessible places. It's also clear that being a boon to the local coffers, local governments do whatever they can to encourage tourism. There is a tipping point however once a place becomes saturated with tourists. Often times, so much energy is devoted toward catering to tourists at the expense of the local population, that a place loses its soul. There's even a word for this phenomenon: Disneyfication. The word, obviously derived from the highly successful theme parks owned and operated by the Disney Corporation, is defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary as follows:

the transformation (as of something real or unsettling) into carefully controlled and safe entertainment or an environment with similar qualities.

The comments section at the bottom of this piece reflects the public's ambivalence about the transformation of the mother of all Disneyfication projects, which transformed the familiar New York City landmark, Times Square. Here's another piece on new Times Square. Historically the center of the city's entertainment district, the "Great White Way" began its steady decline after the Depression as gambling, prostitution and other nefarious activities gained a strong foothold in the neighborhood. Reaching its nadir in the 1970s and early 80s, Times Square became well known for its low life, as strip joints and sex shops sat cheek by jowl alongside the area's iconic theaters and restaurants. Because of its high profile as a tourist destination, the seediness of Times Square galvanized the general public's perception of the overall decline of New York City.  

As the city's boom of the mid-eighties took shape, the reformation of Times Square found itself high in the sights of local government and by the nineties, much of the area was gutted. The sex industry was banished as were residents deemed less than desirable. Old, private businesses were taken over by national chains, and the State of New York took possession of several of the venerable theaters, either demolishing them, or renovating them beyond recognition.  To preserve the frenetic atmosphere of the area, zoning laws were put in place requiring a minimum amount of density of illuminated signs. Other "improvements" to Times Square included the elimination of vehicular traffic on the once busy thoroughfares that define the area, and perhaps the ultimate symbol of a PC, born-again Times Square, a recent law making the neighborhood officially smoke free.

Today Times Square is so squeaky clean you could practically eat off the streets.

Yes you can now even bring your kids to the new Times Square, although it wouldn't rate very high in my book of Big Apple attractions I'd like to show my own children. To me without any edge whatsoever, it's more like a Las Vegas re-creation than the place I first visited with my mother back in the mid-sixties that captivated me with its no-holds-barred vitality, highlighted for me by the half block long billboard of a bottle of Gordon's Gin pouring its contents into into a glass. Today like the ban on smoking, signs such as these advertising anything that could be perceived bad for you would be strictly forbidden.

The old Times Square was incomparable.

If I had to rate new Times Square with similar entertainment districts around the world that I've visited, I'd rank it just slightly above Hamburg's Reeperbahn, which underwent its own Disneyfication several years ago, but light years behind London's West End, which did not. Even Time Square's bombastic light show pales in comparison to the jaw dropping experience of Tokyo's Ginza District.

Back home although not quite so dramatic, Chicago underwent its own Disneyfication process over the last four decades or so. When I was a child I owned a copy of a USA picture book intended primarily for European tourists. I distinctly remember fifteen to twenty pages of the book were dedicated to New York City, containing images of the usual suspects such as St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Statue of  Liberty, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, Central Park, and of course old Times Square. There were several photographs of Washington DC and San Francisco, of the National Parks and other famous tourist destinations in this country. And there were exactly three photographs of Chicago, the obligatory shot of the Grant Park skyline, a passenger train arriving presumably at Union Station, and one picture of the Stockyards. The lack of attention to the Windy City shouldn't come as much surprise considering that with the exception of conventioneers, Chicago wasn't much of a tourist destination back in the day.

Between that time and now, much has changed as the old reliable industries once the backbone of this city's economy pulled up stakes and moved away one by one. Tourism in recent years has become an important cog in Chicago's economy and the city has been transformed by it, for better or worse. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a thread on a Facebook page I belong to devoted to Chicago's past. The gentleman (I'd guess in his mid-sixties) who began the thread, wrote about how he enjoyed fishing off the docks at old Navy Pier back in the day when it was all but deserted. Today Navy Pier is Chicago's number one tourist destination and this particular individual won't set foot in the joint. He also lamented the Disneyfied nature of Millennium Park and other popular sites about town. This set off a maelstrom of rants that were divided between folks who see new Navy Pier as a vast improvement, and folks who tenaciously cling to the past. One woman used the opportunity to voice her opinion about the bygone, distinctive upscale shopping on the Gold Coast (presumably Michigan Avenue) which has now become in her words, a "tourist trap."

Even I got into the act. Here verbatim is my somewhat officious comment:

I sympathize with the good ol' days argument up to a point. Yes in many ways I too liked this city a lot more forty years ago. The problem is that once upon a time, rail was king and we were the crossroads of the nation. We were the hog butcher of the world, we made cars, steel and all kinds of other stuff that are now made someplace else. Unglamorous as those things were, the lifestyles of most of the folks shopping in those unique "upscale" Gold Coast shops were in one way or other made possible by those industries. We may not like all the Disneyesque tourist attractions that seem to be everywhere these days but the bottom line is that tourism today is one of the engines of our economy and as bad as things may be, trust me, without the tourists and the money they bring into this city, things would be much worse.

Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it. As longtime readers of this blog have come to expect form me, I'm not going to put myself on the line by saying the "Disneyfication" of our cities is a good or a bad thing. Let the truth be known, I'm just as ambivalent as the mix of folks who commented on the Times Square post.

You see, despite the fact that I consider old Times Square, (including its sleaziness), old North Michigan Avenue (including its snootiness), and old Navy Pier (including its emptiness), all to be infinitely more interesting places than their contemporary counterparts, the fact remains that all three are insanely successful as far as attracting people and money back into their respective cities.

There is an old adage that suggests you can't argue with success. That's not at all true, you can argue with success.

Winning the argument on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.