Riverview Park Built the Pike Walkway parallel to the Chicago River in 1904.

The Pike Walkway was Riverview's answer to the 1893 World's Fair Midway Plaisance. In 1907, Riverview began constructing the new Marine Causeway, also known as the River Walk, with new attractions.

Today it's the North Branch Riverwalk which is marked in red on the map. 

This postcard shows the early attractions at Riverview Sharpshooter Park (1904-1908) that would be renamed to Riverview Park. In this postcard, you can see the Katzenjammer Castle. Next to that is the Kansas Cyclone Show. Next to that is the Electric Theatre, and next to the Electric Theatre is the Serendipity Jubilee.

The Katzenjammer Castle. The tickets cost 10¢ each. Visitors would ascend via a moving stairway and be conveyed to the upper floor of the building, which was dark and narrow passages, moving, springing and suspended floors, dark rooms with images of goblins, heads of ferocious beasts with lighted eyes, many kinds of weird and fantastic figures, all so arranged in connections with the noises made, as to produce an effect upon the nerves of the visitors. Having passed through this section of the floor they came to the exit, claimed by the plaintiff to be the only exit from this part of the castle. This consisted of a chute or slide. The chute extended from the outside of the upper story of the building to from, eighteen inches to two and one-half feet from the ground, and was at an angle or pitch of thirty-five or forty degrees.

The Kansas Cyclone was located on the Pike walkway. It was built in 1904 and razed in 1907 to make way for new amusement park rides. The Kansas Cyclone gives visitors a very realistic and safe view of the damage done by a sudden tornado or 'twister.' It is a real storm produced by electricity. Heavy rainfall and a thunderstorm proceed with the windstorm.

The Electric Theatre showed moving pictures (silent films), and was the second most popular attraction at Riverview by box-office receipt at $16,000 ($461,000 today) in 1906.

The Serendipity Jubilee, as best as I could deduce, was a dance show.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Real Story Behind the Igorrotes Village at Riverview Park in Chicago, 1906.

---

In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

---

A group of tribespeople danced with jerky movements as a man, barefoot and wearing only a g-string cloth, dragged a dog by a rope. The mutt snapped and snarled. Then with one deft stroke, the man slit the animal’s throat before chopping its lifeless body into pieces and throwing it into a communal pot. This was the Igorrote Village at Coney Island, and in 1905, it was the talk of America.

The Igorrotes on show at Coney Island, New York, in the summer of 1905.

The Igorrotes, or Bontoc Igorrotes to use their full tribal name, were from a remote region in the far north of the Philippines named Bontoc. 

Truman Hunt, an opportunistic former medical doctor turned showman, envisioned transporting 50 Igorrotes to America and putting them on display in a mocked-up tribal village at Coney Island.

In early 1905, Truman Hunt traveled to Bontoc and made the Bontoc Igorrotes an audacious offer. If they agreed to leave their family and friends behind for a year and journey with him to the United States to put on a show of their native customs, he would pay them each $15 a month in wages.

Before long, the Igorrotes had made Hunt a fortune.

But he was spending money as quickly as the Igorrotes earned it. He had no desire to share his lucrative trade with anyone. But, hot on Hunt’s heels, another group of Igorrotes arrived in America. They were traveling with Richard Schneidewind, another Spanish-American war veteran and a former cigar salesman.

The two men could not have been more different. Hunt was a charming risk-taker and regarded the tribespeople as a commodity. Schneidewind, who had been married to a Philippine woman who died giving birth to their first son, treated “his” tribespeople like family. He invited them to his home to meet his son and to eat dinner with them. 

Schneidewind took his Igorrote exhibition group to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, then on to Chutes Park in Los Angeles, where they were a huge hit.

Hunt was furious. He split his tribespeople into several troupes to maximize his profits. Hunt’s groups toured the country, making dozens of stops lasting from a few days to several weeks.

The rivalry between Hunt and Schneidewind was intense. In May of 1906, Hunt and Schneidewind ended up at a competing park, Riverview Park in Chicago. There the two showmen did everything they could to undermine each other’s exhibits.

Hunt rubbished Schneidewind’s reputation with his newspaper friends. Schneidewind and his business partner, Edmund Felder, wrote to the head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, the U.S. government agency located within that War Department charged with administering the nation’s newly acquired territories. Their letter reported that the village Hunt and his associates operated at Sans Souci Park in Chicago was in terrible condition. They wrote that the 18 men and women in Hunt’s group were crammed into three small A-frame tents in a muddy scrap of the land beneath the roller coaster. Though arguably motivated more by business rivalry than concern for their fellow human beings, their description was accurate.

A member of the public -- possibly put up to it by Schneidewind and Felder -- wrote to the Bureau complaining that the Bontoc Igorrotes were living in squalor. There were further rumors that Hunt had stolen the tribe’s wages, that two men in the group had died on the road, and that the showman had failed to bury their bodies.

Both Hunt and Schneidewind had brought their Igorrote groups into America with permission from the U.S. government, an entity with a clear incentive to portray the people of the Philippines as primitive. How could such a society govern itself if it was filled with citizens as “backward” as the Igorrotes?  If it was true that Hunt was mistreating the Igorrotes, the government could hardly afford to be engulfed in a major scandal that could turn public opinion even further against a permanent presence in the Philippines.

Alarmed, the chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Clarence Edwards, and his deputy, Frank McIntyre, called in one of their agents, Frederick Barker, and asked him to investigate the claims.

When Hunt received a tip-off that the Bureau was sending a man to examine his Igorrote enterprise, he fled town. He went on the run, taking some of the tribespeople with him.

A manhunt followed as Pinkerton detectives, the government agent, creditors and a woman who accused Hunt of bigamy pursued the showman across America and Canada. Hunt proved himself to be a slippery opponent. Finally, in October 1906, he was arrested on multiple charges of stealing from the Igorrotes and sentenced to 18 months in the state workhouse after a sensational trial in Memphis.

With his rival out of the way, Schneidewind emerged as the leading showman in the Igorrote exhibition trade. In the winter of 1906, Schneidewind returned to the Philippines to collect another Igorrote group and embarked on a second tour of America. A third U.S. tour followed in 1908.

In 1911, despite vociferous opposition from Bontoc tribal elders and officials of nearby towns, Schneidewind was permitted to take a group of 55 Igorrotes to Europe, where they exhibited in France, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

Schneidewind and his associates were unfamiliar with the European entertainment business, and in 1913, after two years on the road, they ran into serious financial difficulties. What happened next was alarmingly reminiscent of Truman Hunt’s tour. According to American newspaper reports, in the winter of 1913, a group of starving Igorrotes was found wandering the streets of Ghent, Belgium. The group’s interpreters, Ellis Tongai and James Amok, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson begging for his assistance. In their letter, they complained that they had not been paid for many months and reported the deaths of nine members of their group, including five children.

Schneidewind told the Igorrotes that if they stayed on and continued working for him until the 1915 San Francisco Exposition, they would earn a handsome wage, allowing them to return home rich. Despite the hardships they had endured, about half of the group wished to stay in Europe, perhaps a sign that Schneidewind’s troubles owed more to incompetence than cruelty or a lack of compassion for the Filipinos.

But, fearing another scandal, the U.S. government was unwilling to give Schneidewind another chance and decided they must intervene. In December 1913, the U.S. consul in Ghent escorted the tribespeople to Marseilles to catch a boat back to Manila.

This disastrous venture did little to help the image of the Igorrote show trade. The Philippine Assembly took action and, in 1914, passed legislation that banned the exhibition of groups of Filipino tribespeople abroad. As a measure of the seriousness with which the Philippine lawmakers regarded the subject, the ban was included as an amendment to a new Anti-Slavery Act.

Schneidewind, like Truman before him, exited the Igorrote show trade. For a full decade, starting in 1905, the Igorrotes had been the greatest show in town, thrilling and scandalizing the American public and filling the nation’s newspapers. But in the intervening period, they disappeared from the public consciousness.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Reasons Why Harwood Heights and Norridge Aren't Part of the City of Chicago.

The Norridge and Harwood Heights villages are surrounded by the City of Chicago, like islands. For at least half a century, the canoe-shaped hole in the city's Northwest Side has been a source of wonder and frustration for anyone who's ever squinted at an old city street map.

But the situation was no accident. The self-sustaining villages of Norridge and Harwood Heights owe their independence to a combination of stubborn farmers, wary city bureaucrats and determined neighbors who wanted their own shot at governing.

The Norridge and Harwood Heights villages are surrounded by the City of Chicago.

Some homeowners had made a fleeting effort in 1928 to get the city to annex the territory, hoping they could access Chicago's water and police protection that their urban counterparts took for granted. However, they ran into resistance from the dominant farming population.

The homesteaders in the area did not need paved streets, sidewalks or street lighting and weren't willing to pay taxes.

Just north of the area, the city's boundaries were creeping out to swallow the industrial and commercial corridors of Milwaukee Avenue and Northwest Highway. And to its south, a community called Dunning was forming around the Cook County Poor House and Insane Asylum.

That left a hole in the city grid with a sparse population and even less infrastructure. In the 1930s, Norridge and Harwood Heights were little more than open prairie, low-lying forest and seasonal swamps, interspersed with some farms and dirt roads.

In 1947, residents near Lawrence and Harlem avenues, led by a Navy veteran named Herbert Huening, made a second, more serious effort to join the city.

At the end of WWII, the residents wanted what citizens of established communities had lighted and paved streets, police and fire protection, an adequate water source and storm sewers.

The City of Chicago believed that the area residents wanted to avoid paying to fix their water system or building their own sewers. Being annexed to Chicago would be a quick fix, and Chicago would pay for all those upgrades.

Rejected by city leaders, Huening convinced his neighbors that they could run the show themselves. They drew up articles of incorporation for the village of Harwood Heights, which had a population of 400 people.

Months later, another contingent of residents just south of Montrose Avenue prepared their own push to join the city. Calling themselves the "Annexation Improvement Club," the group scored audiences with 48 of the city's 50 aldermen to make their pitch. They even got tentative approval from the City Council, officially joining the city briefly.

But after just 30 days, the Annexation Improvement Club member Joseph Sieb suggested they secede and plant their own flag, just like Harwood Heights had done. Borrowing their name from Norwood Park and Park Ridge, the village of Norridge was incorporated on December 4, 1948.

sidebar

When Chicago began annexing land parcels between it and the airport, Norridge and Harwood Heights stood directly in this northwest route. So the city had to annex all the land around them to ensure that the airport would be in the city`s domain.

Ascending to Village Board President in 1951, Sieb rallied the new government to pave the roads and dig the sewer lines the area had long begged for. They founded a police department, created a park district and wooed developers with cheaper land and looser building restrictions than could be found in the city.

Norridge shared some public services with Harwood Heights, merging their school district and fire departments. The massive Eisenhower Library was built in 1973 and is accessible to residents of both villages today.

The "island" might have been too isolated to attract much fanfare in the early 20th century, but it proved a ripe target for the car-centric building boom of the 1950s. Vast tracts of fresh-built bungalows promised transplanted city residents "room to breathe."

Family entertainment businesses began popping up, fueling the building boom even more. 

The Harlem Outdoor Theater opened in 1946 at the intersection of Harlem Avenue and Irving Park Road, with a capacity for 1,030 cars. It was the second drive-in theater to open in Chicagoland.

The Hub Roller Rink opened on Harlem Avenue in October of 1950. Kiddie Park opened in the summer of 1938 at the north end of the future Harlem-Irving Plaza. KiddyTown Amusement Park opened in 1953 at the same spot.

Suddenly, people realized they didn't need to move to Arlington Heights for a 20-foot driveway and a two-car garage. And the best part was that you never had to worry about city bureaucracy — you could just walk to the Village Hall and sort your problem out.

In 1955, Sieb convened business leaders and encouraged them to build a shopping center at Harlem Avenue and Irving Park Road on a former livestock farm site. If open spaces didn't attract outsiders to Norridge, the Harlem-Irving Plaza (the HIP) opened in 1956 certainly would, with original anchor stores; Kroger, Walgreens, Wieboldt's, W.T. Grant, Woolworth, and Fannie May Candies.

By the early 1960s, the tables had turned on the city leaders who had spurned the neighbors' pleas for annexation. Instead of sinking their tax dollars into expressways and Downtown high-rises in Chicago, citizens of Norridge and Harwood Heights got to carve out a retail empire exclusively for their own benefit.

sidebar

Chicago Tribune, Sunday, January 3, 1971

ARTICLE: "Police Supt. Conlisk is Chicago Resident in Suburb Peninsula."

Rumor had it that Sieb — who served as mayor until his death in 1998, making him the longest-serving municipal leader in state history — often boasted of calls he got from Mayor Daley, asking, "Are you ready to join the city yet?" As the story goes, Sieb just hung up the phone.

It was a formula that village leaders drew up by necessity.

Today, thanks in part to the sales tax raked in through Harlem-Irving Plaza, a megamall now anchored by a Target and packed with ritzy department stores and quality restaurants, the village hardly needs to collect any property taxes to keep public services running.

sidebar

Chicago Townships: Hyde Park, Jefferson, Lake, Lakeview, North Chicago, Rogers Park, South Chicago, and West Chicago. 

Norwood Park Township is one of 29 townships in Cook County, Illinois which consists of Norridge, Harwood Heights, Park Ridge and an unincorporated area.

Approximately 4.5%, of the 26,385 residents live in an unincorporated residential area within Norwood Park Township. Norwood Park Township is not a contiguous Township. It is essentially divided into three sections as a result of previous annexations by the City of Chicago. There is only one unincorporated residential neighborhood in Norwood Park Township with approximately 330 single-family homes and is wholly surrounded by the City of Chicago, but within the boundaries of Norwood Park Township. 

The housing in the unincorporated residential area is a mixture of old and new frame and brick single-family homes and is similar in age and architectural style of the housing in the neighboring municipalities of Chicago and Norridge. The Village of Norridge provides water to some of the unincorporated residents at the same rate as for residents. The unincorporated residential neighborhood does not have a uniform network of sidewalks or streetlights. The area has a substandard curb and gutter system to manage stormwater, when compared to the neighboring municipalities. Fire protection services are provided to the unincorporated residents through the Norwood Park Fire Protection District, which is funded through a general property tax on property owners within the District. The unincorporated residents of Norwood Park are not part of a public library district or park district.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.