A Booklet of Photos from the World's Columbian Expo's Midway Plaisance

This a small ribbon bound horizontal format booklet featuring photos of various attractions on the Midway. The photos are better in the printed product than my photos of them. There were, as you know, dozens of publications like this that overlapped the contents of one another. This is in quite decent condition as you can on the cover.

The second photo shows you the format as well as the contents of the pages, and the next three photos are examples of images of other attractions.

The Midway was a mile long and 600 feet wide, as it remains today. But today it is a Chicago park surrounded by roads and highways and a short walk from the University of Chicago. When you look at photos such as these you can appreciate how vast everything at the fair was.

But you'd also swear that the Midway was much, much larger than a mile x 600 feet.
In 2017 when my book about the Midway was published by the University of Illinois Press, I signed books at several events and gave talks on different aspects of the Midway. One such session at a bookstore just across the street from the Midway ended with me leading a two-hour walking tour of the Plaisance. I had spent years writing about and studying the fair, but it was no easy task to envision the attractions as we walked along the green belt.

Perhaps the greatest seeming contradiction was how a huge German or Austrian Village fit within the confines of the 600-foot width of the site. But it didn't just have to fit into 600 feet: It had to fit in half of the width, minus the large street/walkway down the center where it was fronted by the attractions on both sides. And there was also a service road that sliced away another 10-15 feet from the back of the village sites. This meant that the maximum depth for any site/concession at about 280 feet by whatever the frontage length.

Assuming visitors entered at the Midway entrance to the fair, it wasn't too practical to do that up-and-back routine, at least not immediately after one another. No one would want to walk a mile in one direction, turn around an walk another and then need to walk a third mile just to get back to the main fair grounds.

If you don't have a book with a comprehensive group of photos from the Midway, this would be good place to begin. But there are many larger books with much more about the Midway. And, heck, you could also purchase an entire modern book about only the Midway....written not coincidentally by me. If you would like a reduced price new copy, just let me know. I also sell the Midway history with its 100 or so photos and other of my books on ebay or here and always at substantial discounts over the retail prices.