From Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance; published in 1894 by N. D. Thompson, St. Louis. This book collected portraits of personalities at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For the Exposition, the mile-long Midway Plaisance was turned over to the theatrical entrepreneur Sol Bloom, a protégé of Chicago mayor Carter Harrison. It became a grand mix of fakes, hokum, and the genuinely educational and introduced the “hootchy-cootchy” version of the belly dance in the “Street in Cairo” amusement; it was the most popular, with 2.25 million admissions. |