Why is the carnival strip called a midway?

A park before it was a fair

The Midway Plaisance is a strip of parkway, about a mile long, joining Jackson Park and Washington Park on Chicago's South Side.¹⁶

Olmsted and Vaux gave the centre strip its name; the Park District notes that the French word plaisance is linked by some dictionaries to an old spelling of "pleasance," a secluded garden.⁴

Their plan called for a canal joining the lagoons of the two parks, but financial troubles after Chicago's Great Fire of 1871 delayed it, and it was never built.⁴¹

The 1893 Midway: the fair's pay-as-you-go strip

While the main exhibition halls stood in Jackson Park, the Midway held the fair's amusements, restaurants and foreign villages; these could charge extra admission and helped make the fair profitable.⁴²

The Midway's star attraction was George Ferris's wheel, about 264 feet tall with 36 cars, costing 50 cents a ride; it opened some six weeks after the fair began.²⁴

Frederic Ward Putnam, head of the fair's ethnology department, was put in charge of the Midway to give it educational value, and he and his associates brought in the impresario Sol Bloom to plan its exhibits.⁶

Bloom, then a 23-year-old music entrepreneur, is credited with shaping the Midway's attractions, including the Algerian dancers and the tune known as "The Streets of Cairo."¹⁰

More than 27 million visits were made to the fair over its six months; the Chicago Public Library’s ephemera from it include an advertisement for the Midway’s Esquimau Village and sheet music for a musical trip through the Midway Plaisance.¹¹

From one fair to the travelling carnival

The travelling carnival as Americans came to know it took shape in the 1890s. Otto Schmidt, a showman at the 1893 fair, formed a Chicago Midway amusement company afterwards and toured with 13 acts, some of them straight from the fair.⁸

Frank C. Bostock, born in Darlington, England, in 1866, came to the United States in 1893 with a small animal show in Brooklyn; his partnership with the Ferari brothers became a gathering point for the early street-fair showmen, and the National Fairground Archive credits them with starting America’s touring carnival tradition.¹²

By 1901 the trade paper The Billboard was printing weekly news of street fairs and carnival companies, many booked by local Elks lodges, from Winona, Minnesota and Lafayette, Indiana to Tuscaloosa, Richmond and Salt Lake City.⁷

A 1902 Billboard advertisement for the Gaskill-Mundy Carnival Company, managed by Frank W. Gaskill, listed Elks lodges in Nashville, Louisville, Dayton and Detroit as past clients and promised clean, moral amusements, a sign of how hard early carnivals worked to win over towns.¹³

Fairs kept the word. The 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo had its own Midway at the northwest end of the grounds, with over 300 vendors and a Venice in America ride whose 25 electric gondolas charged 50 cents.¹⁴

How one street's name became a common word

Dictionary.com defines a midway as the area of a fair or carnival where sideshows and similar amusements sit, and traces that sense to the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago exposition.⁵

The American Heritage Dictionary gives the same general sense: the part of a fair, carnival, circus or exposition set aside for sideshows and amusements.¹⁵

The older word "midway," meaning halfway, goes back to Old English; only the fairground sense is tied to Chicago.⁵

The villages, seen honestly

Villages such as the Moorish Palace, the Javanese Village and an Inuit ("Esquimaux") village recruited performers from around the world and presented them for paying visitors.¹⁶²

Smarthistory describes the Midway as arranged along a ranking of peoples rooted in Social Darwinism, with groups labelled least "evolved" placed farthest from the main fairgrounds.⁶

Harvard's Peabody Museum has re-examined a book of 80 Midway portraits, noting the subjects' exploitation and racist treatment, and has paired the images with student-researched biographies of the performers.¹⁶

The wheel’s later life, and midways in Canada

In 1895 George Ferris and the streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes rebuilt the wheel in a beer garden on North Clark Street near Lincoln Park. Neighbours objected, and in 1896 the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the refusal of its liquor licence.⁹

Ferris himself died of typhoid fever on 22 November 1896, aged 37. A scrap dealer bought the wheel after its Chicago run ended in 1903, and at St. Louis in 1904 it made a profit of about 200,000 dollars before its demolition in 1906.¹⁷⁹

Canada’s big exhibitions grew up alongside the American carnival: Toronto’s Industrial Exhibition first opened in 1879 and was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition in 1912.¹⁸

Vancouver’s exhibition association formed in 1907, and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier opened its first fair on 16 August 1910 before 68,000 people; its amusement area was named Happy Land in 1926 and became Playland when it moved in 1958.¹⁹

In the 1930s the train-borne Royal American Shows, billed as the world’s largest midway, played Brandon’s Provincial Exhibition in Manitoba; Conklin Shows took over that fair and the western circuit in 1940, when wartime travel rules bit.²⁰