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By Susan Frost, Class of 2015

Here is the postcard that launched 500 words. My sister sent me this postcard, labelled “Chicago World’s Fair Giant Slide” by the seller. There is no notation on the card itself. I had never heard about a giant slide on the Midway, and this picture didn’t look quite right. So, on a rainy afternoon, I did some digging.

The people who lived in the late 1800s were into some really oddball entertainment: six-day, no-sleep marathon bike races around an indoor track, or horses diving into pools of water 60 feet deep. It was an era that spawned the showman: not only PT Barnum and Buffalo Bill, but also the “Fearless Frogman”, Paul Boyton.

Boyton was born in Ireland in 1848. He was a mercenary, a diamond miner, and worked for a time as a part of the life saving operations at the Jersey shore. He helped to popularize long-distance open-water swimming. But he became famous by donning a waterproof rubber suit with fillable air pockets that turned his body into an inflatable kayak. He paddled himself across the English Channel, through Venice and the straits of Gibraltar, and down most major rivers including the Danube and the Mississippi, floating on his back, looking at the sky, and occasionally hoisting a tea towel sized sail attached to a pole that inserted into a socket by his foot. He towed a boatful of provisions and invited journalists to accompany him to record his exploits. His longest trip was over 3,500 miles, from Montana to St. Louis, in 1881.

In 1893 he visited the Columbian Exposition, and like a lot of other people, was enchanted by the Midway. It gave him ideas about aquatic entertainment on a larger scale. In 1894 he opened “Paul Boyton’s Water Chutes Park” at 63^rd and Cottage Grove, considered by many to be the first modern amusement park. The Chutes featured boats that could carry 8 people, and they slid down a 300 ft incline at 40 miles per hour and landed in a 300 ft. artificial lake. The park was a hit, even with the competition it received from Ferris Wheel Park that opened in 1895, and Riverview, that opened in 1904.

Boyton went on to open Sea Lion Park, Coney Island’s first large scale attraction, in 1895, that also featured chutes – in fact, it seems as if every one of the new amusement parks that burst onto the landscape after 1893 wanted customers to “shoot the chutes”. Boyton’s Chicago park closed when the consolidation of the street car lines eliminated service to the park in 1907. In that same year, the White City amusement park opened nearby, including, of course, a chute, and I believe this postcard to be a rendition of that park, based on photographs.

Sea Lion park became Luna Park, and you can see people enjoying the chutes there in 1903 via this link. It’s likely that many Chicagoans were doing the same, on the same day, at Boyton’s Water Chutes Park, just outside the old fairgrounds of the Columbian Exposition of 1893.