Chicago has been an important hub for a wide variety of industries, serving as the center for everything from meat processing and candy to publishing and advertising – even pinball machines. But the city has also been a chief exporter of something else: good, old-fashioned fun.
“Chicago really played a critical role in the development of amusement parks, and it really had a history that does not reflect in a lot of other cities,” Jim Futrell, director and historian for the National Amusement Park Historical Association, told Chicago Stories. The World’s Columbian Exposition set the stage for Chicago to become a key player in amusement parks and innovations in ride technology. Amusement parks, such as Paul Boyton’s Water Chutes, Kiddieland, White City, and Santa’s Village, began to pop up over the decades, giving Chicagoans and their big shoulders a place to recreate.
For decades, the city’s largest – and perhaps the most beloved – amusement park was Riverview Park.
“Riverview was a rite of passage for anybody growing up in Chicago in the twentieth century,” Chicago Tribune reporter Rick Kogan told Chicago Stories. “Riverview was a neighborhood place. It existed right in the middle of this city.”
The Origins of Riverview Park
In the late nineteenth century, a section of land at the intersection of Western and Belmont avenues was home to a private club called Sharpshooters Park, which was located in the middle of a predominantly German neighborhood. Eventually, the skeet-shooting club dissolved, and some of the members purchased the club’s land.
One of those members was a man named William Schmidt. His son, George, who had spent some time in Europe and visited parks such as Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and the Prater in Vienna, encouraged his father to transform the property into an amusement park. In 1904, the Schmidt family renamed the park, calling it Riverview Park, a nod to its proximity to the North Branch of the Chicago River.
“The idea was that there was enough transportation around that you could reach this area. It was isolated enough that you could do your own thing and…make something special,” Tim Samuelson, cultural historian for the City of Chicago, told Chicago Stories. “So [Schmidt] made it into this giant park that had anything you could imagine in terms of your entertainment, in terms of music, spectacle, rides – it was all right there. In some ways, it was like a big carnival.”
In its first 10 years, Riverview expanded to 140 acres and called itself the world’s largest amusement park. Over time, Samuelson said, Riverview Park became more “complex.” Instead of having just one large, signature ride, people had a variety of options. There were multiple roller coasters of various levels of intensity. There were carnival barkers, games, and food kiosks. There were historical pavilions where parkgoers could watch reenactments or plays.
“It was almost like you were being put into this fantasy setting in another world, and you are a participant in it. This was a special thing,” Samuelson said. “This was a place to let go and let loose and have a good time.”
The Rides and Thrills of Riverview Park
Riverview Park was drawing millions of visitors per year. It was the promise of thrills that attracted the crowds, as the park was “heavily investing in these big, spectacular rides from the beginning,” Futrell said.
In its early days, Riverview was home to a Shoot the Chutes ride, as well as a figure-8 roller coaster called The White Flyer. There was also a large carousel with 70 hand-carved horses. (The carousel still operates today at Six Flags Over Georgia and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.)
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, roller coaster technology began to advance, giving parkgoers bigger thrills. A leading coaster engineer named John A. Miller designed several rides for Riverview Park, and his improvements made rides safer.
“He’s the guy that invented the ‘chain dog.’ That’s the anti-rollback device that gives the roller coasters that distinct ‘click-click-click.’ And in 1919, he patented a way to lock the trains to the track,” Futrell said. “So amusement parks then could build a taller roller coaster with steeper drops and higher speeds because they would not have to worry about the train leaping off the track.” This allowed roller coasters to become thrill rides virtually overnight.
Among Miller’s contributions to the rides at Riverview were The Velvet Coaster, The Blue Streak, and The Bobs – a massive wooden coaster that opened in 1924 with a nearly 80-foot drop and speeds that reached 50 mph.
“You had to get a little older in order to be able to have enough guts to go on The Bobs because, man, that thing was just brutal [and] so fast,” Cale Carvell, whose family once co-owned Fun Town amusement park on the South Side, told Chicago Stories. “These are all wooden roller coasters, so there was a lot of jerking around. Now they’re faster and they’re more extreme, but they don’t necessarily seem that way because you’re so locked in and safe. On [wooden coasters], you’re getting smashed back and forth from one side to another. It was just wonderful.”
The list of rides – and the memories people created on them – could fill a book. There was The Flying Turns, a bobsled-like, trackless ride that shot riders through twists and turns. There was also a ride called Pair-O-Chutes, a free-falling parachute ride that dropped two people at a time.
“It ended with a jolt at the bottom that [felt] like your spine was just going to go right through you,” Samuelson joked.
Riverview Park Through the Years
At Riverview Park, visitors could also experience another kind of thrill: young love. “Probably millions of first kisses happened at Riverview,” Futrell said. Rides such as the Thousand Islands (later renamed Mill on the Floss, and then renamed again as the Tunnel of Love) were an ideal date spot for teenagers, who could roam free up and down the park’s midway.
“There was not a lot of adult supervision. It was a kids’ playground and kids will, given the chance, get up to mischief,” Kogan said. “The first time I ever smelled the very distinctive odor of marijuana was at Riverview in the mid-’60s.”
A fun house called Aladdin’s Castle contained a tunnel with a rotating barrel that inevitably knocked giggling teens to their feet. Inside the fun house, “There was someone holding the button that had an air hose, and when he saw a pretty woman walk by with a dress on, he would press the button, the air hose would shoot, and it would look like the Marilyn Monroe picture with the skirt going up. All the men would be standing out in front at the fence watching,” historian Cheryl Brown told Chicago Stories.
The air hose was not the only thing that would make modern parkgoers cringe. An attraction called the Palace of Wonders and later, far less delicately, the “Freak Show,” exploited people with disabilities or other physical differences. Some of the rides and attractions contained racist imagery or were downright racist themselves. A water-dunking game was known by several offensive nicknames over the years, including “The African Dip” and others that included slurs. It was later renamed “The Dip.” The game involved throwing a baseball at a target, and if the patron struck the target, a Black man sitting above the tank would fall into the water. By the 1950s, many parkgoers decried the attraction as overtly racist. Riverview closed The Dip in 1964.
The Surprise Closure of Riverview Park
As the park entered the 1960s, the perception of Riverview began to shift. It developed a reputation for being a “seedy” place where some unsupervised teenagers would congregate and get into trouble. Some of the rides and attractions began to show their age. Although, said Kogan, “It was never as dangerous as people made it out to be.”
Chicago had changed in the more than half a century that Riverview operated, too. When the park first opened, the neighborhood was considered far-flung from the city center. But as Chicago expanded, the land that Riverview occupied was considered part of the city. The Schmidt family, who still owned the park, found themselves with a large piece of land worth a lot more money. Park shareholders began looking for a new buyer in the mid-1960s.
“This went on for a couple of years before they actually sold the park, but they kept it quiet. Nobody knew about it. The employees didn’t know about it. The patrons didn’t know about it. This was all kind of behind the scenes,” said Riverview historian Norm Cherry.
When the news came in 1967 that a real estate investor had purchased Riverview Park and that the park would close permanently, it hit hard.
“It was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. We had home delivery, so I just opened up the newspaper, and I was totally shocked, taken aback. Riverview closes, and there was no grace period. There was no period of mourning. There was no, ‘Go take a final ride on The Bobs,’” Cherry said. “It’s like somebody took a light switch and just turned it off, and that was the end.”
In its 64 years, some 200 million people visited Riverview Park. Today, the land is home to Catholic high school DePaul College Prep, a shopping center, and a police station. The Bobs, the Pair-O-Chutes, and the Tunnel of Love are long gone, but the memories remain.
“Riverview was a place where you had lots of nice memories of friends, dates, good times, complete liberation from any kind of cares or restraints,” Samuelson said. “It had a little bit of a nice, shopworn, comfortable feeling, like a nice comfortable pair of shoes.”
“Any of us who ever went to Riverview are getting older,” Kogan said. “There is an innocence tied to Riverview because most of us now who can remember it were relatively young and innocent when we went there. So it holds a very special place in hearts and minds…perhaps your first kiss, perhaps the first time you were scared, perhaps the first time you were allowed to go somewhere on your own with friends and not your parents. I think, in a sense, it is a touchstone of freedom.”
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