It's Not Over Until We Say It's Over

It sounds like a Monty Python skit, but the ad at left advertises just one of the great acts - "Big Fat Girls Hoop Skirt and Crinoline Laughing Show" - that Chicagoans could catch at the Clark Street Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum in 1893. Heck, I'd have gone just because of the act's name!

C.E. Kohl and George Middleton were very successful in Chicago. Harry Houdini appeared on one of their stages as did Calamity Jane. But it was the "freaks" and the dime admission price that kept the crowds coming.

"In coming down from the northwest C. E. Kohl and I decided there was an opening in Chicago for a dime museum, so we formed a co-partnership and I went on to Chicago to look up a location, which I found at 150 West Madison Street, just east of Halstead. [This was 1882] It was an instantaneous success, and we kept in operation a great many years.

"The next year we opened one at 150 Clark Street, which was also very successful.

"During the World's Fair we opened another one at 300 State Street, which was also a success. We also established them in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. All except Cleveland paid handsomely, which was our only failure in the dime museum business.

"It was a strange business, and for a few years the dime was something new for the price of admission to a place of amusement. Thousands and thousands of people would pass along and say, "Oh, let's go in for fun;" but as years went by those same people became critics and would not spend their dime nor their time unless the show was considered worth it.

"The dime museum business, with its curiosities, its stage performance and its music, led to the continuous vaudeville of the theatres; then came the ten, twenty and thirty cent performance, the people all the time demanding better shows, for which they were willing to pay, until finally it has reached the high class vaudeville of today, in which higher salaries are paid than in any other class of amusement, excepting grand opera."

So what does this enterprising duo have to do with the Columbian Exposition? The Fair and the popular Midway closed at the end of October. But, the men just didn't want to see it end! So, by November 12th they had put together a gigantic show reproducing the "Old Midway," just in case there was anyone left in Chicago who had not visited the original. Rrrrrright here on our stage! The Columbian Exposition! (Click on the ads for a better view)

Recommended reading:
Circus Memoirs: Reminiscences of George Middleton as told to and Written by his Wife By George Middleton
Vaudeville (Encyclopedia of Chicago)
Midway Plaisance Walking Tour
THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE (Map)
Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance, 1893 (Encyclopedia of Chicago)