The Midway Plaisance: Where the First Ferris Wheel Turned

The Midway Plaisance in Hyde Park is now a quiet green strip used for sledding in winter and picnics in summer. In 1893, it was the most crowded entertainment boulevard on Earth. The World's Columbian Exposition used the Midway as its amusement zone, and it was here that engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. erected his revolutionary invention: a 264-foot rotating wheel carrying 2,160 passengers at a time in 36 cars. Ferris had proposed the wheel to the fair's organizers specifically to rival the Eiffel Tower, which had debuted at the 1889 Paris Exposition. The wheel's axle alone — a single piece of forged steel — was the largest hollow forging in the world at the time. Riders paid 50 cents for two rotations, a significant sum in 1893. The wheel was later dismantled and re-erected in Chicago's Lincoln Park in 1895, then moved to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and finally dynamited for scrap in 1906. The word "midway" — now used for carnival areas everywhere in the English language — comes directly from this strip. The original wheel stood on the Midway between 59th and 60th Streets, near Woodlawn and Ellis Avenues.