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Reading Room · Carnival, Fair & Amusement Park History · Carnival and midway history · History

Why is the carnival strip called a midway?

The name comes from the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long parkway linking Chicago's Jackson Park and Washington Park. During the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition it held the fair's paid amusements, foreign villages and the first Ferris wheel. Afterward, dictionaries record "midway" becoming the everyday word for a fair's rides-and-games area.

Facts checked on against 10 sources, 5 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.

Quick timeline

Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.

1870Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux design the Midway Plaisance as part of Chicago's South Park System, with a canal and pleasure drive that were never built.1
1889Paris holds an exposition whose village exhibits later served as the model for the Algerian, Tunisian and Cairo displays on Chicago's Midway.2
1 May 1893The World's Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago; its official directory gives the run as May 1 to October 30, 1893.3
1893The Midway Plaisance serves as the fair's amusement section, with restaurants, foreign villages, ethnological exhibits and the first Ferris wheel.41
1893 onward"Midway" passes from the name of this Chicago strip into general use for the amusement area of a fair or carnival.56
1922Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time is installed at the western end of the Midway.1
1934The Midway Plaisance becomes part of the Chicago Park District.4

A park before it was a fair

The Midway Plaisance is a strip of parkway, about a mile long, joining Jackson Park and Washington Park on Chicago's South Side.16

Olmsted and Vaux gave the centre strip its name; the Park District notes that the French word plaisance is linked by some dictionaries to an old spelling of "pleasance," a secluded garden.4

Their plan called for a canal joining the lagoons of the two parks, but financial troubles after Chicago's Great Fire of 1871 delayed it, and it was never built.41

The 1893 Midway: the fair's pay-as-you-go strip

While the main exhibition halls stood in Jackson Park, the Midway held the fair's amusements, restaurants and foreign villages; these could charge extra admission and helped make the fair profitable.42

The Midway's star attraction was George Ferris's wheel, about 264 feet tall with 36 cars, costing 50 cents a ride; it opened some six weeks after the fair began.24

Frederic Ward Putnam, head of the fair's ethnology department, was put in charge of the Midway to give it educational value, and he and his associates brought in the impresario Sol Bloom to plan its exhibits.6

Bloom, then a 23-year-old music entrepreneur, is credited with shaping the Midway's attractions, including the Algerian dancers and the tune known as "The Streets of Cairo."7

How one street's name became a common word

Dictionary.com defines a midway as the area of a fair or carnival where sideshows and similar amusements sit, and traces that sense to the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago exposition.5

The American Heritage Dictionary gives the same general sense: the part of a fair, carnival, circus or exposition set aside for sideshows and amusements.8

The older word "midway," meaning halfway, goes back to Old English; only the fairground sense is tied to Chicago.5

The villages, seen honestly

Villages such as the Moorish Palace, the Javanese Village and an Inuit ("Esquimaux") village recruited performers from around the world and presented them for paying visitors.92

Smarthistory describes the Midway as arranged along a ranking of peoples rooted in Social Darwinism, with groups labelled least "evolved" placed farthest from the main fairgrounds.6

Harvard's Peabody Museum has re-examined a book of 80 Midway portraits, noting the subjects' exploitation and racist treatment, and has paired the images with student-researched biographies of the performers.9

Then and now

Then

In 1893 the Midway Plaisance was the fair's separately ticketed entertainment strip, with foreign villages, concessions and the first Ferris wheel.42

It was promoted as educational under Putnam's ethnology department, yet its human displays reinforced stereotypes.69

Now

"Midway" is now the ordinary word for the rides, games and sideshow area of a fair or carnival.58

The Midway Plaisance is a Chicago Park District park with an ice rink on the site of the original Ferris wheel, winter gardens and playing fields.4

It runs through the University of Chicago campus, where the 2013 Midway Crossings light bridges link the north and south sides.10

What we worked out

Not stated outright by any one source. This is our own arithmetic or reading of the sources cited.

  • Because "midway" already meant halfway, the name of a park strip lying between two larger parks was easy to borrow for the central avenue of any fairground.51
  • The fair ran about six months (May 1 to October 30), yet the word it left behind has lasted well over a century.35

What we couldn't confirm

  • The year of Olmsted and Vaux's original plan: TCLF (tclf.org), a US nonprofit for historic designed parks, gives 1870, while 1871 is also commonly cited; we could not confirm 1871 from a fetched source.
  • Exactly how much authority Sol Bloom held over the Midway versus Frederic Putnam differs between accounts, and the Encyclopedia of Chicago and Britannica pages could not be retrieved to check.
  • We found no fetched source tying the word "midway" specifically to fortune-telling machines.
  • The first dated use of the fairground sense of "midway" (commonly given as 1893) could not be confirmed from a dictionary page we were able to load.

Spotted something wrong? The corrections page says how we fix it.

Sources

Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. We paraphrase; nothing is copied. We never cite Wikipedia.

  1. TCLF (tclf.org): Midway Plaisance, Chicago, IL. Read on · Reference
  2. Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, University of Illinois Library: The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893: The White City, Midway Plaisance, and Ferris' Wheel. Read on · Library
  3. Internet Archive (Library of Congress copy): The official directory of the World's Columbian exposition, May 1st to October 30th, 1893. Read on · Archive
  4. Chicago Park District: Midway Plaisance Park. Read on · Government
  5. Dictionary.com: midway. Read on · Reference
  6. Smarthistory via LibreTexts (Dr. Kimberly Kutz Elliott): The Midway. Read on · Reference
  7. Jewish Currents: February 24: Sol Bloom and the Chicago World's Fair. Read on · News
  8. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: midway. Read on · Reference
  9. Harvard Gazette, Harvard University: Putting a new face, and new faces, on the 1893 World's Fair. Read on · University
  10. University of Chicago (125th anniversary site): Then and Now: Midway Plaisance. Read on · University
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