Midway Gardens restaurant, Chicago, United States of America, opened in 1914, demolished in 1929

Abstract

Located in the suburban neighbourhood of Woodlawn on Chicago’s South Side, Midway Gardens combined — as one excited Chicago newspaper claimed at the time — a ‘German Volksgarten, the ambitious Baireuth and the distinctly American park’. When Edward Weller Jr. and Oscar Friedman signed the lease for a large plot on the southwest side of the corner of Cottage Grove Avenue and East 60th Street in 1913, the idea was to build an upmarket amusement park or a typical Chicago beer garden. Edward Weller and his associates at the Midway Gardens Company swiftly resolved to put their new enterprise on the architectural, culinary and cultural map. They handed the architectural commission for the venue to Frank Lloyd Wright. Nevertheless, Midway Gardens never became a commercially viable undertaking. It was taken over by the Edelweiss Brewery in late 1915, under whose stewardship it enjoyed four successful seasons.