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"Yesterday's City: Chicago's Other Coliseum"

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  • independent scholar
Chicago is one of the youngest major cities in the
world, exploding from a population of a mere 150
in 1833, when it incorporated as a town, to
become one of the world’s great cities by the 1890s, when
it reached more than one million inhabitants as a thriving
industrial, commercial, and cultural giant. No other major
city in the world in the nineteenth century grew from
nothing into a great metropolis, which is why historian
Phillip Johnson has rightly called Chicago the “city of the
century.” Chicago signaled to the world its coming of age
by hosting the spectacular World’s Columbian Exposition
of 1893. While Chicago was leading the world in urban
architecture by developing the modern skyscraper, how-
ever, the “White City” recalled the classical design of the
ancients, as the nineteenth century was still under the
thrall of Greece and Rome. Millions flocked to Chicago
during the fair. When it closed, civic leaders decided to
sustain Chicago as an attraction by constructing an
immense indoor arena called the Coliseum, evoking the
great structure of ancient Rome.
The planned structure would host political conven-
tions, entertainments, sporting events, and trade shows,
all on a massive scale befitting the great metropolis.
Hailed as the world’s largest indoor arena, the Coliseum
represented Chicago at full maturity, a flourishing city of
a country rapidly becoming the richest and most pow-
erful on earth. It rose in the South Side community of
Woodlawn, on Sixty-Third Street, between Harper and
Blackstone Streets, a block from the entrance of the
former fairgrounds. The site sat at the terminus of the
Jackson Park elevated line, which three years earlier had
brought tens of thousands of visitors to the fair.
44 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
Chicagos Other Coliseum
ROBERT PRUTER
Top: Wolf’s Point 1833, home to the area’s early settlers, as painted
by Justin Herriott, c. 1902. The city’s growth was explosive; by
1885, it boasted the world’s first skyscraper (right), the Home
Insurance Building, shown here in 1926.
YESTERDAY’S CITYI
Yesterday’s City |45
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition awed visitors from around the world. Above: The construction of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts
Building gave little clue of the splendor that arose. Below: View looking east from the central Court of Honor; photograph by C. D. Arnold.
Chicago has had three Coliseums in its history, all
indoor facilities. The first Coliseum briefly made an
appearance in the late 1860s at State and Washington
Streets in Chicago’s downtown, hosting horse shows,
boxing matches, and circus acts. This arena was a rowdy
place, serving the city’s bachelor subculture. Its history
is nebulous, as we know neither what year it was built
nor when it disappeared from the city’s landscape. The
third Coliseum was built in 1900 and lasted until the
1980s, when it was torn down.
The Woodlawn facility, the second Coliseum, had a
difficult history. A great indoor arena was immediately
planned for construction by the Chicago Exhibition
Company at the close of the world’s fair on the grounds
where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had been held on
Sixty-Third Street. The nationwide recession that had
engulfed the country at the time, however, delayed the
financing and the start of the construction. Work on the
structure finally began in the summer of 1895. The
building, designed in Italianate Renaissance style by the
S. S. Bemen architectural firm, was an immense edifice,
770 feet in length and 300 feet wide, covering nearly five
and a half acres. The structure included a 240-foot-high
tower, plus mezzanine stories and a roof garden. The
central area of the structure was 692 feet long, 225 feet
wide, and 70 feet high, with lower seating boxes and
upper boxes set on a 38-foot-wide gallery rounding the
area. The optimum seating capacity was estimated at
forty thousand.
The Coliseum neared completion on August 25, 1896,
as six hundred workers worked feverishly on finishing
the roof with green lumber so that the venue would be
ready for the grand opening on September 2 with the
Barnum & Bailey Circus. That night, at around 11:30 P.M.,
after the workers had left, the building completely and
mysteriously collapsed in a pile of timber, bricks, and
metal beams. The exact cause of the collapse was never
determined, but strong speculation assumed several fac-
tors, beginning with a pile of lumber weighing close to
46 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
and more spartan, without a tower (planned but never
built), mezzanine stories, and a roof garden. The con-
struction of the 727-by-300-foot building ultimately
entailed the use of 2.5 million pounds of steel, 3.2 mil-
lion feet of lumber, and 3 million bricks and was com-
pleted in late May 1896. The building was impressive for
its day, twice as large as Madison Square Garden; its inte-
rior supported by twelve massive steel trusses, 100 feet
high, with a span of 230 feet. Visitors entered the
Coliseum via one of three vestibules—one on the south
end, facing Sixty-Third Street, 144 feet wide and 50 feet
deep, and on the east side, two smaller ones. The
vestibules led into the grand interior hall, which was 676
feet in length, nearly 200 feet wide, and 100 feet high. It
seventy-five tons concentrated on top of just one of the
fourteen 218-by-60-foot arch trusses. This, plus the lack
of connection of the arches and a flaw in the fastening
of one arches to the foundation likely brought the
building down.
The owners and architect Bemen immediately began
work creating a new building, somewhat reduced in
length but wider and taller than its ill-fated predecessor
Yesterday’s City |47
In the summer of 1895, the Chicago Exhibition Company began
constructing the city’s second Coliseum. Materials from the fol-
lowing summer’s National Democratic Convention depict the struc-
ture in two different ways, probably as it originally appeared (left)
and as it was rebuilt after its collapse (below).
48 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World made its mark in Chicago outside the grounds of the 1893 world’s fair.
Cody brought the show to the Coliseum in 1896 and 1897.
experienced an exciting show as the various horse units
did wild racing down the six hundred–foot arena; the
Cossacks charging down upon the audience with drawn
swords must have set the blood rushing. Indians on
horses attacked the racing Deadwood Stagecoach, but
the audience did not get the Battle of Little Big Horn.
The somewhat jaded Chicago Tribune reporter was full of
wry comments, writing, “Five buffalo allowed themselves
to be hunted around the ring without any fatalities,” and
remarking that when Buffalo Bill came riding to the
rescue of some settlers, the Indians “seemed struck by
the fear that he was going to reduce their salaries, and
they immediately retired.”
Spectators of such shows in 1896, unlike the audience
of today, had not been exposed to western images on
television, nor to photographs in newspapers of the day
(crude ink drawings were the rule). Only a rare book or
magazine featured a photo. So to merely gaze on living
breathing Indians, cowboys, and buffalo—as well as
exotic Cossacks and Arab horsemen—was in itself a
thrill, let alone the reenactments and the riding, roping,
and shooting.
The Buffalo Bill Wild West Show returned to the
Coliseum a second time in September 1897 for a two-week
stay. The show was modified from the previous year’s visit,
becoming “more American,” in the words of Buffalo Bill,
perhaps reflecting a growing nationalism of America in the
Gilded Age. A larger percentage of the show was given over
to United States cavalry units. Newspapers were taken with
featured two elevated seating areas—a balcony 25 feet
above the floor and 40 feet wide, fully encircling the
arena, and a gallery 40 feet above the floor and 12 feet
wide. Together the interior and vestibules provided seven
acres of interior floor space. One hundred arc lights illu-
minated the interior, each of which were “reinforced by a
powerful reflector,” which a reporter described as the
“most brilliant illumination” ever found in any building
interior. Chicago was now ready to host one of the
biggest and splashiest entertainment shows of the nine-
teenth century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders
of the World opened the Coliseum on June 1, 1896. The
show, first established in 1883, was at the height of its
popularity at this time. William F. Cody, through his rep-
utation as a scout, guide, and buffalo hunter, built his
celebrity via dime novels as a Western hero, beginning
with Ned Budline’s Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men in
1869. In 1872, he began performing on Eastern stages as
himself in melodramatic Western-themed plays, alter-
nating theater with his work in the West. In 1883, Cody
presented his first Wild West Show in Omaha, Nebraska,
and the following year added one of his most popular
acts, Annie Oakley, who soon became the most famous
female sharpshooter of all time. Using genuine cowboys
and Indians, the show presented several reenactments of
the storied Wild West, such as an Indian attack on the
Deadwood Stage, plus demonstrations of riding, roping,
and buffalo hunting. In 1887, Cody became an interna-
tional celebrity when his Wild West Show was presented
as part of the American exhibition at Queen Victoria’s
Golden Jubilee in London.
In 1893, the Wild West Show had a long run in
Chicago outside the grounds of the World’s Columbian
Exposition (it was not an official part of the fair, but
attracted thousands of visitors nonetheless). The show
was greatly expanded with a large variety of horse units
from around the world, called the “Congress of Rough
Riders of the World.” These acts included military units
from Germany, England, and France, who did fancy
drilling, plus a variety of more exotic units that included
Mexican vaqueros, Syrian and Arabian horsemen,
Russian Cossacks, and Argentine gauchos, who did fancy
and trick riding. Buffalo Bill also introduced his most
famous western reenactment, “The Battle of Little Big
Horn,” in which real Indians recreated the massacre of
General George Custer and his troops, some of whom
were played by real soldiers.
The set up for the Buffalo Bill show in the Coliseum
provided for an arena 600 feet long and 160 feet wide.
On one end of the hall was draped a huge panoramic
backdrop, 100 feet high and 200 feet long, showing a
western scene with mountains in the background to
better illustrate the reenactments. The audience surely
Yesterday’s City |49
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody pictured on August 23,
1916, at the old Cubs Park. His showmanship made him an
international celebrity. Among his achievements: introducing
sharpshooter Annie Oakley to the world.
The Coliseum accommodated 906 delegates, who
were organized in a 125-by-80-foot area before a center
stage, and a multitude of nondelegate attendees, who
numbered on some days up to 25,000. These included,
according to historians R. Craig Sautter and Edward W.
Burke, “spectators, political operatives, dignitaries from
the city, party officials, and all those diverse interests
looking to gain political power or spoils” spread out over
hundreds of yards of floor seating, plus hundreds of
reporters located at tables below the rostrum.
To late nineteenth-century attendees who were unac-
customed to viewing huge crowds inside such large
arenas, one reporter explained:
The one feature of the hall which impressed upon
every spectator was its immensity. . . . To a person in
the center of the hall the scene looked like nothing
so much as it did like a big war panorama. The
people in the gallery were so far away they seemed
painted against the canvas or bunting at their backs,
and the peculiar light from overhead and the iron
girders rising at the sides all carried out the impres-
sion of being in the center of a panorama.
For political excitement, the attendees had to wait until
the third day of the convention, July 9, which featured
how large the show was, noting the fourteen acres of tents
in the vacant lots surrounding the Coliseum housing the
show, and the forty-three sixty-foot box cars used to bring
the show to Chicago.
The Coliseum next hosted what had been anticipated
the previous year when the building was being erected,
the 1896 Democratic Convention, held July 7 through
11. This hugely contentious convention was bitterly
divided between the largely eastern industrial elite, who
wanted to maintain what they called a “sound” money
policy with the gold standard, and the agricultural forces
in the South and West, who wanted a bimetallic money
standard of silver and gold (expressed as “Free Silver
Coinage” at a 16 to 1—silver to gold valuation). The
arrivals for the convention were no doubt in awe of the
immense indoor structure. A book published later in the
year on the convention said of the Coliseum:
There had lately been erected in Chicago a vast struc-
ture known as the Coliseum, intended for the
accommodation of such great gatherings as this, and
the incoming multitude of delegates and alternates
found the most complete arrangements for the recep-
tion and for holding a convention on a grand scale
ever known in the political history of the country.
50 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
The Coliseum’s promoters envisioned the site as a host for political conventions. The National Democratic Convention of 1896 was among
the most contentious. It included William Jennings Bryan’s legendary “Cross of Gold” speech and, ultimately, his nomination for president.
Yesterday’s City |51
Top: This diagram of the interior of the Coliseum describes it as the largest permanent convention hall in the world and illustrates the setup
for the 1896 National Democratic Convention. Above: The seating arrangement for delegates.
52 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth played for two glorious weeks at the Coliseum in 1896. Above: Inside the 1881 program, Bar num
boasted that his circus gave “the public an opportunity to see such an entertainment as they have never seen before.”
hall for the menagerie and the Oriental India sideshow. A
hanging bandstand midway between the southern and
northern ends was constructed for an orchestra.
For the two-week engagement, the circus shows were
held twice a day, at 2:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M. The circus
began with a grand parade that snaked its way around
Chicago’s South Side avenues and boulevards for twenty-
two miles before reaching the Coliseum. A Chicago Tribune
reporter contrasted the opening of the circus with the
well-known politicians that appeared in the Coliseum
three months earlier: “The great arches of the Coliseum,
which once echoed the eloquence of Chauncey Depew,
the magnetic tones of Bourke Cockran, and the words of
William Jennings Bryan, resounded last night with the
whoops of Hindee [sic] fakirs, the mellow trumpeting of
trick elephants, and the jabbering of monkeys. The
reporter also gave a full account of the three-ring acts,
opening with: “the three rings, the platforms, and the air
above became filled with sliding, jumping, turning,
twisting, running, riding men and women, horses, ele-
phants, and pigs.The paper reported that the circus
brought four hundred horses. Some were used for a
the fight over the platform between the gold-standard
advocates and the silver advocates, and a former two-time
Congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan,
made one of the most famous and rousing orations in
American history with his “Cross of Gold” speech. With
impassioned orator y in a clear sonorous voice that res-
onated across the huge chamber, Br yan inspired and
moved the crowd with his moral fervor. He closed with
these immortal words: “We shall answer their demands
for a gold standard by saying to them, You shall not press
down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.’” He
then touched his temples, extended his arms Christlike,
and roared, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross
of gold.” According to Sautter and Burke, the crowd was
“electrified . . . first into stunned silence and then into an
ecstatic rapture that was deafening and chilling . . .
The floor broke into pandemonium as bands played, del-
egates marched, men cried, and foot stomping spread like
an earthquake through the immense hall.” The speech
propelled Bryan into winning the Democratic Party nom-
ination two days later.
After the convention, the Coliseum continued to serve
as a venue for political rallies. In October 1896, Republican
vice presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt came to
the Coliseum to deliver a campaign address to the
Republican College League and attracted 13,000; and on
Election Day, November 4, the Chicago Tribune hosted a
rally for “largely a McKinley crowd” to get reports of elec-
tions results for some 25,000 attendees. As the election
bulletins came in, they were projected on a huge screen
at the end of the hall.
In October 1896, the Coliseum hosted the biggest and
most spectacular three-ring circus of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Barnum & Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show
on Earth” as it proudly billed itself well before its merger
with the Ringling Brothers Circus. P. T. Barnum founded
his circus in 1871, started promoting his show as the
greatest on earth in 1877, and merged with the Cooper
and Bailey Circus to form the Barnum & Bailey Circus in
1881. With the merger, Barnum & Bailey introduced the
first three-ring show, establishing itself as the preeminent
circus in North America during the 1880s and 1890s. It
drew customers with such legendary acts as Tom Thumb
(a midget who had joined Barnum in 1842) and Jumbo
(advertised as the world’s largest elephant).
The circus had been scheduled to open in the earlier
incarnation of the Coliseum in September 1895 before it
came crashing down only weeks before completion. A
year later, Barnum & Bailey was back. In the northern
part of the Coliseum’s great hall, a hippodrome track was
constructed, within which three circus rings and an ele-
vated platform were erected. The seats that encircled the
track were designed to hold twenty thousand viewers.
Seating was also arranged around the southern end of the
Yesterday’s City |53
In 1882, the circus trumpeted its newest celebrity, Jumbo, “the
largest elephant that ever lived,” recently acquired from the London
Zoo. Sadly, circus-goers to the second Coliseum missed seeing the
pachyderm marvel, as he died only a few years after his arrival in
North America.
parade of faux monarchs, such as Queen Victoria and the
Emperor of Germany, surrounded by cavalry detachments,
and fifty were used in a horse show.
The Coliseum operated in the midst of a great bicycle
craze. Millions of Americans took to the roads to tour
and travel while whistling the Tin Pan Alley tune, “Daisy
Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).” Bicycle racing became a
spectator sport, and bicycle manufacturing and mar-
keting became a major industry. In mid- July 1896, the
Chicago Cycling Club announced that it would conduct
races in the Coliseum on ten dates in October and eight
in November. Later in the month, the National Cycle
Exhibition Company announced a full schedule of races
for the remainder of the year at the Coliseum. Each
month, a meet lasting from two to six days would be
held in the arena. The company promised all kinds of
races—short and long distance, twenty-four-hour races,
six-day races, and more—and said that it had secured
the Coliseum for a “number of years.”
The first races were held on August 7 and 8, 1896,
when 5,000 spectators flocked to the Coliseum the first
day to see an all-day schedule of quarter-mile to mile
races from novices to top professionals from around the
world. The races were held on the longest indoor track in
the world, a quarter-mile plank surface so smooth that
several world records were broken. Soon the track built a
reputation of being the fastest indoor track in the
world.” A reporter commented, “The spectators who sat
in the great building howled themselves hoarse at the
finishes and applauded to the echo when the globe trot-
ters [foreign racers] appeared.”
54 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
The Coliseum’s lifespan coincided with America’s bicycling craze.
Above: Mae Sawyer Stibgen (right) and a friend ride with the
Lincoln Cycling Camera Club in Half Day, Illinois, in September
1896. Right: A bicycle parade on South Michigan Avenue (looking
north) in May 1897.
Yesterday’s City |55
56 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
The Associated Cycling Clubs of Chicago sponsored road races for several years.
their games to big crowds. Especially popular were
Thanksgiving Day games. Venues were college stadiums
in metropolitan areas and major league baseball parks,
notably the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Chicago pro-
duced the most exciting experiment for its Thanksgiving
Day games with its indoor college games at the Coliseum.
The Coliseum owners had alerted college football
teams to the feasibility of playing indoor games in their
building, and in early July, talks had already begun
regarding a Thanksgiving game between the University of
Michigan and University of Chicago, a contest fought for
“supremacy in the West.” As in New York, where
Thanksgiving games were society events, expectations
were that all the social bigwigs would appear and that a
huge crowd would attend. To refit the stadium for foot-
ball, the bicycle track was disassembled and stowed
away, and the floor removed. This left a playing surface
of natural clay, which was sprinkled with water and
packed down by a steamroller. Stands were erected on
the sides and both ends of the field; with the balcony
and gallery, the total seating capacity was 14,000.
The records continued apace in September, when a
Chicago racer, C. W. Miller, set an American record for
100 miles, before an audience described by the Tribune
as “one of the largest crowds which have yet attended
the races.” The reporter provided no exact numbers, but
one suspects a bit of exaggeration; because several days
later, the National Cycle Exhibition Company announced
that it had lost money on the racing dates and aban-
doned the season. The now world-famous track was
taken up in sections and put into storage.
After the failure of the late fall season, bicycle racing
moved to Tattersall’s on Sixteenth Street for much of
1897. Bicycle racing briefly returned to the Coliseum for
two days in 1897, November 12 and 13, for two big
match races involving three racing stars of the day, aug-
mented each night by a full program of racing, which
attracted what the Chicago Tribune described an enor-
mous crowd of more than 10,000 people each night.
In the 1890s, the major collegiate football powers were
building their programs into commercial enterprises,
bringing their contests into major urban centers to sell
Yesterday’s City |57
Cyclists J. A. Spenks (from left), C. G. Starsch, Dick Strutz, and an unidentified rider position their bicycles in front of the Water Tower on
North Michigan Avenue for the start of a race in 1901.
58 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team on October 14, 1899. The team played against the University of Wisconsin at the
Coliseum in December 1896. Before the game, some newspapers crudely referred to the Indian players as “savages” and suggested that they
would “scalp” their opponents, but the team simply played well and won.
Yesterday’s City |59
The Chicago Tribune predicted a “Shakespearean
drama” with the yelling from the stands “roaring down
to the gridiron beneath” and the seats so near to the
game as though they were “nearest the stage in a the-
ater.” The newspaper predicted that “the place will rever-
berate with the assembled thousands until it will be
impossible to think, much less talk . . . since all the avail-
able supply of tin horns and other means of producing
noise are being secured in advance.”
The Michigan–Chicago game pitted two different styles
of play. Michigan players relied on offense and worked to
advance the ball with a hard running game that plowed
through the line, while the Chicago players relied on
defense, using their great kicker Clarence Herschberger to
advance the ball down the field with long punts. Game
day, November 27, at 1:42 P.M., saw the Chicago style pre-
vail in upsetting Michigan, 7–6, behind the long punts of
Herschberger that kept Michigan deep in their own terri-
tory. His drop-kick goal from forty yards scored five
points, and a safety got the clinching score. The Chicago
Tribune reported that the game attracted 8,000 fans of col-
lege football and “society people of the type who came to
be seen.” This turnout was a disappointment, as local
papers had predicted a sellout, if the Tribune report is
accurate. Two rival papers, the Chicago Times-Herald and
Inter Ocean, claimed that 15,000 fans or more came to
see the game.
When the game was planned, organizers had expected
that the bad elements would be snow and frigid cold.
Instead, the weather outside brought a continuous
downpour, and the Chicago Tribune commented, “the
comfort of the audience . . . was certainly greater than if
they had sat the game through outside in a drizzling, dri-
ving rain.” The Coliseum featured plenty of natural
lighting, but the windows were made opaque to keep out
heat and blinding sunlight, so when the rain was at its
heaviest at 3:00 P.M., it was so dark that the interior arc
electric lights were turned on, which illuminated a
scene at once brilliant and unique,” a dubious assertion
as it turned out.
All parties concerned expressed some dissatisfaction
with the indoor experience. The stadium was indeed
noisy as predicted, and many fans did not like it. They
unhappily found that their cheering “echoed about [so]
that the noise united into one continuous roar without
rhyme or reason.” On the field, players complained
about the packed clay surface, which turned slippery,
much to the disgust of the Michigan side, which relied
on their running game to advance the ball. Plus, the illu-
mination was deemed poor and the air heavy. Both
teams considered the $1,000 rental price “extortionate.”
The next indoor game arranged for the Coliseum fea-
tured a contest between the Carlisle Indians and the
University of Wisconsin, for a night game on December 19.
of Trade put on a good face concerning the financial
aspects of the show, but the Chicago Tribune reported
that overall attendance had been disappointing.
During the 1890s, indoor track contests, usually spon-
sored by a U.S. Army National Guard regiment in one of
the Chicago’s several armories, became a popular winter
sporting event. In 1897, the indoor season included the
largest indoor track meet ever seen, the Military and
Athletic Carnival, and planners decided the Coliseum
was the most appropriate venue. Originally planned to
be a militar y carnival only, sponsored by the Regular
Army and National Guard units, according to the
Chicago Tribune, the size of the Coliseum made it pos-
sible to include a large track and field meet that would
also welcome high schools, colleges, and amateur organi-
zations. The military part of the show would include
drills, maneuvers, broadsword fighting, escalade (a
scaling contest), tugs-of-war, and something called “mili-
tary evolutions.” In addition, the Coliseum was large
The lighting was upgraded from the Michigan–Chicago
game, and the Inter Ocean reported, “No discomforts are
promised with the novelty of a game under electric
lights.” The Tribune mistakenly reported that this would
be the first football game ever played under lights.
Already forgotten were five games played at night under
lights at the Stock Pavilion in 1893 at the world’s fair.
The Carlisle Indians had become a sensation in the
East with their spectacular play against the most pow-
erful college teams, losing two close games to Harvard
and Yale. The Chicago Press Club made the Carlisle
Indians a nice financial offer that lured the team west.
The team was essentially impoverished and found the
money a godsend for much-needed uniforms and equip-
ment. Their record coming into the game was 4–5.
Carlisle would be making its first trip west, and Chicago
fans clamored to see them. The consensus opinion
deemed Wisconsin the strongest team in the West.
The write up by the Chicago Tribune of the game, won
by Carlisle, 18–8, was typical of the era in its crude
stereotyping: “Scions of the aborigines, representing eight
tribes of North American Indians, left the Coliseum last
night, after one of the most hotly contested games of foot-
ball ever witnessed.” The Inter Ocean reported in a similar
vein, “Many [fans] had evidently come to the game
expecting to see Indians wearing war paint and eagle
feathers in their head guards. They did not. . . . They
played football and they played it well.” The game was
hard fought, and early in the second half Wisconsin had
an 8–6 lead. The Wisconsin players began to tire, how-
ever, and the Carlisle team asserted itself driving for two
touchdowns that sealed the deal. The Tribune reported
that more than 8,000 people watched the game, while
the Inter Ocean reported an astonishing figure of 16,000.
After football, bicycles returned to the Coliseum. In
January 1897, the National Cycle Board of Trade spon-
sored an immense seven-day trade show of bicycle man-
ufactures. Once again, newspaper reporters engaged in
superlatives: “It will be a great show—the greatest
Chicago has ever seen, and will eclipse anything of its
kind which has ever been attempted. The exhibitors do
not hesitate to say the building is the best that could be
selected for such an affair and say the New York show
cannot compare with it. . . . when the lights are turned
on tonight the effect from a spectacular point of view
will be magnificent.”
Visitors not only got to look at the latest bicycles but
also enjoyed a variety of entertainments, including
musical concerts, from classical standards, operatic arias,
and Irish airs to the latest Tin Pan Alley tunes. Each
night was designated for one or more of Chicago’s cycle
clubs. On the evening of January 26, for example, the
Lake Cycling Club, the Englewood Wheelmen, and the
Thistle Cycling Club attended. The National Cycle Board
60 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
In addition to bicycle races, the Coliseum hosted trade shows in
which manufacturers of bicycles and related materials displayed
their wares. In this 1897 advertisement, the Thistle Company pro-
moted the “lightest, fastest, strongest” wheel.
Yesterday’s City |61
Purdue University jumper Raymond Ewry (shown center at the
1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis) broke a record at the 1897
Military and Athletic Carnival.
62 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
The Coliseum proved to be a popular addition to the
city landscape, providing a forum that enhanced
Chicago’s status as a world center of culture, commerce,
and manufacturing. Trade shows significantly helped sus-
tain the Coliseum in its second year, and the greatest was
the Manufacturers’ Carnival and Winter Trade Fair,
which opened on December 18 and was scheduled to
continue through May 15, 1898. The Coliseum owners
were directly involved in the show. Instead of taking rent,
they took 35 percent of the share while the Western
Attraction Company, which was conducting the fair, held
the remaining 65 percent. The “trade fair” portion of the
show featured long arrays of booths where some two
hundred manufacturers and other vendors displayed
their wares. The carnival portion provided an immense
roller-skating rink in the center of the hall, plus merr y-
go-rounds and gravity roads “in every spare corner of the
building, band concerts, and, on the galleries,
sideshow- and Midway-style shows.
But all this would soon end. Around 6:00 P.M. on
December 24, 1897, as many visitors left the exhibit for
supper, a fire broke out from faulty electrical wiring and
swept through the building. Hundreds of people occu-
pied the building at the time, but they all fortuitously
escaped, racing out the exits as the fire rapidly grew and
turned the interior into a raging inferno. In a short twenty
minutes, the fire completely consumed the building. It
came crashing to earth, when one of the twelve arches
supporting the roof fell over, bringing down all the other
arches like a row of dominoes. One fireman died in the
blaze. Although the building was advertised as fireproof
because of its iron and steel frame and brick walls, it was
not, resulting in a terrible conflagration. The massive
Coliseum, the greatest indoor facility in nineteenth-cen-
tury America, survived only nineteen months.
The Inter Ocean ruefully commented: “The Coliseum
from its very inception seems to have been pursued by an
evil destiny. Its promoters, when they first attempted to
give realization to the project of giving Chicago a mam-
moth forum and meeting place, found their efforts
retarded by the effects of the financial panic of a few years
ago. At last . . . they got the big building underway, but to
only see it tumble to the ground again. And now when
the great hall might be said to have taken its place among
the institutions of the city it . . . goes up in flames.”
The Chicago Exhibition Company chose not to rebuild
a third time on the Sixty-Third Street site, instead joining
in the dialogue about constructing an “exposition
building” on the lakefront near the city’s downtown.
While discussion centered on the construction of such a
building as being imminent, a lakefront exposition hall
would not come to reality until decades later, in 1960,
when the first McCormick Place rose under the adminis-
tration of Mayor Richard J. Daley.
enough to include the discus throw in the track and field
portion of the show, an event not normally feasible for
indoor meets.
The Central Division of the Amateur Athletic Union
(AAU) sponsored the track part of the meet. It was open
to all competitors and included contestants from military
units, amateur clubs, colleges, and high schools. The
high schools participated in their own competitions, pro-
viding one of the meet’s largest programs. The Chicago
Athletic Association sent the largest local contingent,
while New York’s Knickerbocker Club boasted the largest
out-of-town team. Although invited, no colleges and uni-
versities sent full teams, but instead sent individuals and
relay teams.
The Militar y and Athletic Carnival, scheduled for six
days, opened on May 10 with a parade, before a crowd
estimated at three to five thousand. The first day featured
military drills and local high-school track contests. The
third day featured most of the important open track and
field contests, in which three world records were broken,
one of them by Purdue University jumper Ray Ewry. The
last day featured largely military track events, but the
AAU national indoor title was determined when the
Chicago Athletic Association bested the Knickerbocker
Club in the last event, a relay race. The turnout disap-
pointed the organizers of the meet, however, and they
never attempted another one. The meet was too big, too
unwieldy, a case of too many athletes chasing after too
few paying customers.
In Chicago, the Gilded Age version of the twenty-first
century auto show at McCormick Place was the horse
show, and in 1897 the great Chicago Horse Show began
a week’s run on October 31. The Coliseum hosted a
show competition (like dog show competitions) and
trade show. Newspapers promised Chicago’s “first great
horse show.” Competitions were provided in a variety of
classes (“more numerous than in any other American
show”)—harness, single, tandem, four in hand, run-
about, single brougham, and high cart. Manufacturers
had booths for their wares and extensive stables and
exercising rings that allowed the public to view all vari-
eties of the best horse stock.
Right after the horse show, the Coliseum temporarily
installed a track for bicycle racing and then removed it
and all flooring for the return of football. Football
returned to the Coliseum with two contests, a Carlisle
Indians–University of Illinois game on November 20 and
a return Michigan–Chicago matchup on November 27.
Yesterday’s City |63
In 1897, the Coliseum hosted what was promised to be the city’s
“first great horse show.” Opposite: A decorative program from a
later horse show, held at Chicago’s third and best-known Coliseum
building after the second Coliseum was destroyed in a fire.
1899, but in August of that year, the new imposing struc-
ture came crashing down, delaying completion for a year.
As with its predecessor, a great variety of events were
held in this building—political conventions, circuses,
trade shows, and sporting events. The new Coliseum
closed in 1971 for fire violations and, after continued
deterioration, was demolished in 1982.
Robert Pruter is a librarian at Lewis University in Illinois.
The Coliseum, rather than taking place among the
great structures of Chicago, has been largely forgotten.
Instead, three years after the Woodlawn Coliseum went
up in flames, in lieu of a lakefront exposition hall,
another Coliseum rose on the near South Side, and it is
this facility that is the often-remembered arena. This
structure, at Fifteenth and Wabash, was built on the
ruins of Libby Prison, a Confederate prison brought
brick by brick to Chicago and rebuilt as a Civil War
museum in 1889. When this museum failed in 1898,
planners decided to build a new Coliseum within its
walls. This structure was completed in August 1900, but
not without the usual difficulties. Construction began in
64 |Chicago History |Spring 2012
Many Chicagoans are familiar with the Coliseum at 1513 South Wabash Avenue, shown here in an undated photograph. It was built around
the remains of the Confederate Libby Prison.
For more on Chicago’s dramatic growth from the 1830s to 1900,
see Donald L. Miller’s compelling City of the Century: The Epic of
Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Shuster,
1996). Joy S. Kasson’s richly illustrated Buffalo Bill’s Wild West:
Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang,
2000) traces William F. Cody’s rise from a scout to an interna-
tional celebrity. In The Real Americans: The Team that Changed a
Game, a People, a Nation (New York: Doubleday, 2007), Sally
Jenkins brings to life the Carlisle Indians, an unlikely football
powerhouse. R. Craig Sautter and Edward M. Burke’s Inside the
Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860–1996 (Chicago:
Wild Onion Books, 1996) is a timely history of national conven-
tions held in Chicago since the Civil War era.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago
History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 44, top: i05946,
bottom: i37731; 45, top: i25072, bottom: i02526; 46–7, top
left: i65578, center: i65572; 48, i65550; 49, DN-0066930; 50,
i65576; 51, top: i65577, bottom: i65573; 52, i65580; 53,
i65579; 54–5, top left: detail, i20570, center: i65581; 56,
i65574; 57, SDN-000522; 58–9, courtesy of the Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-125089; 60, i65575; 61, detail, SDN-
002631B; 62, i65551; 64, i20784; 65, i61870.
F O R F UR T HE R RE AD IN G | Past issues of the Chicago
Tribune contain a wealth of material on events held at the city’s
second Coliseum; see particularly July 1896 to December 1897.
Yesterday’s City |65
Like its predecessor, the Wabash Street Coliseum (shown here in 1902) hosted political conventions, circuses, trade shows, and sporting
events. The city eventually closed it for various building and fire code violations, and it was finally demolished in 1982.
Reproducedwithpermissionofthecopyrightowner.Furtherreproductionprohibitedwithoutpermission.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Joy S. Kasson's richly illustrated Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
For more on Chicago's dramatic growth from the 1830s to 1900, see Donald L. Miller's compelling City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996). Joy S. Kasson's richly illustrated Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) traces William F. Cody's rise from a scout to an international celebrity. In The Real Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (New York: Doubleday, 2007), Sally Jenkins brings to life the Carlisle Indians, an unlikely football powerhouse. R. Craig Sautter and Edward M. Burke's Inside the Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860-1996 (Chicago: Wild Onion Books, 1996) is a timely history of national conventions held in Chicago since the Civil War era.