park White City

15 fields changed

Name

White City

Status

Demolished

Closing

No

Timezone

America/Chicago

Park type

Amusement Park

Park types

Amusement Park

Size acres

14

Description

White City was one of the grandest and most influential of America's early amusement parks, opened in 1905 on a former cornfield at 63rd Street and South Parkway on Chicago's South Side. Named for the gleaming Beaux-Arts 'White City' of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and financed by Sherman House hotelier Joseph Beifeld, it was ringed with staff-white plaster buildings and lit by tens of thousands of incandescent bulbs beneath a 300-foot Electric Tower said to be visible for fifteen miles. Admission was a deliberate ten cents so working Chicagoans could afford it. Its midway packed coasters, a shoot-the-chutes, funhouses, dance halls, a casino, a roller rink and freak and fire-show spectacles into fourteen acres, and it billed itself as the largest amusement park of its kind in the country. Fires in 1925 and 1927 - the latter destroying the ballroom and the Electric Tower - together with the Depression drove attendance down, and the operating company slid into receivership in 1933. The grounds were condemned in 1939, the surviving structures auctioned in 1946, and the site was cleared for the Parkway Gardens housing development; the roller rink outlived the rest into the late 1940s.

Operator

White City Amusement and Construction Company

Closing date

1933-01-01

Opening date

1905-05-26

Opening year

1905

Property owner

White City Amusement and Construction Company

Closing date precision

Year Only

Opening date precision

Exact Date