Recreation Facilities in the Loop (Map)  |
Chicago's leisure pastimes have been a production of several factors. Early Chicago's entertainment reflected its rough-edged frontier graphic symbol, simply, as the village grew into a walking urban center, leisure options reflected its growing urbanity. Afterwards the Fire of 1871, Chicago became an industrialized radial city with a huge, heavily strange-origin population. These factors had a major bear on on working hours, discretionary income, the formation of subcultures differentiated by grade, gender, race, and ethnicity, and changing spatial relationships, all of which helped shape the leisure patterns of metropolitan Chicago.
Leisure in Preindustrial Chicago
View of Sauganash Hotel, c.1830  |
Recreation in preurban Chicago reflected frontier life. The Fort Dearborn community was made upward of soldiers, French Canadians, and Native Americans who enjoyed rural sports, gambling, and drinking. They hunted wolves and wild fowl and honed their skills with marksmanship contests. At the time the town was founded in 1833, denizens sleighed, skated, danced, went to equus caballus races, and attended monthly concerts of pop music. Mark Beaubien's Sauganash Hotel was the nearly of import recreation center in the early 1830s, with dancing, drinking, card playing, roulette, and storytelling.
Chicagoans in the newly established walking city worked 6 days a week, leaving just Dominicus and holidays for residual, most notably New year's day, May Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The city lease empowered the municipality to license, regulate, or prohibit amusement to encourage wholesome recreation, promote prophylactic and morality, and enhance revenue. The government originally banned billiards, shuffleboard, baiting sports, card playing, and prostitution to discourage gambling and restrain the flourishing male person bachelor subculture that frequented saloons, poolrooms, and brothels, although the revised 1851 charter licensed bowling alleys and billiard parlors, while other vile amusements went on illegally. Prostitution flourished. By 1856, 1,000 women worked in 110 brothels. Lotteries were legal, gambling games were commonplace, and betting at the racetracks was popular. A temperance crusade against Irish and German drinkers resulted in stiffer licensing and Sunday closing laws that culminated in the Lager Beer Riot.
Chicago & N Western Ad., 1887  |
American middle-class reformers in the 1840s initiated the rational recreation movement that sought to substitute moral amusements for the evil pleasures of the male available subculture in order to uplift people, reduce offense, and improve public health. In 1858 evangelist Dwight L. Moody gear up upward a YMCA branch in Chicago to develop muscular Christians. New sports were introduced, particularly baseball, a simple team sport that would supposedly build morality, character, and health. One year after the Civil State of war, in that location were 32 teams sponsored past fraternal organizations, occupational groups, the companies, and neighborhood clubs. Businessmen like Marshall Field, who had earlier opposed baseball game as deleterious to hard work, began to see it as a ways to promote teamwork, discipline, sobriety, and self-sacrifice, and sponsored company nines. By 1870 civic boosters raised $15,000 for a professional person baseball team, the White Stockings (Cubs), to enhance the metropolis's image nationally.
McVicker's Theater  |
Touring professional person singers commencement appeared in Chicago in 1839, the Christy Minstrel shows were popular in the mid-1850s, and the first opera flavor occurred in 1853. In 1837, Chicago's start theatrical performances, starring the renowned Joseph Jefferson, were widely opposed as demoralizing and out of fear that the Sauganash Hotel where they were held might fire. A weak economy further discouraged theater troupes. In 1847 the $xi,000 brick Rice Theater was constructed, with patrons segregated by toll and race, but it was surpassed by the $85,000 McVickers (1857) and by Crosby'due south Opera House (1865), with its three,000-seat auditorium; all three were located in the heart of the city. Pop plays included the works of Shakespeare and Richard Sheridan and productions based on local topics and anti-southern themes.
Colonel Woods'due south Museum, 1865  |
Other occasional entertainment was provided past touring monologuists and illusionists, exhibitors of panoramas of events like the burning of Moscow, and circuses like Barnum's "One thousand Colossal Museum and Menagerie," which charged adults thirty cents admission. There were also dime museums, whose exhibitions of freaks, wax reproductions of infamous crimes, and objects of historical marvel were pop with the lower classes.
Ethnic groups had a meaning impact on amusement. High german, Irish gaelic, and Scandinavian immigrants brought their own amusements, which promoted a sense of peoplehood, particularly in terms of linguistic communication and culture. Germans brought to America an intense dearest of classical music. In 1850, Julius Dyhrenfurth conducted Chicago'due south first symphonic concert, and in 1852 the Männergesangverein, the city'due south first male chorus, was founded. An of import German theater was established at midcentury that staged German classics that reminded audiences of the Old Earth. New plays were written that taught how to cope with the New Earth. The Svea Society (1857) sponsored a Scandinavian theater where performances were often followed by dances. Tickets price fifty cents.
Beck's American Band, Englewood  |
The Germans and the Irish brought able-bodied traditions. The Irish emphasized boxing, which was office of their ain male bachelor subculture and enabled them to fit in with the prevailing bachelor subculture. However, the Germans fabricated a more distinctive contribution with the mainly working-form turnverein, which emphasized calisthenics and gymnastics and supported workingmen's interests.
Turnhalles were community centers, ofttimes the largest building in the neighborhood, with a large gym and auditorium. By the 1890s in that location were v,000 turners in 34 units, the most of whatsoever American city. They provided a model for the establishment of similar organizations by Bohemians, Poles, and Ukrainians.
Leisure in the Industrial Radial City, 1870–1920
Chicago's leisure patterns in the industrial radial era were influenced by industrial commercialism and its social structure, a heterogeneous population divided into ethnic communities, gender, irresolute spatial relationships, and a liberal enforcement of Dominicus blue laws. The upper class had the greatest wealth and control of time. They used leisure activities for fun and social prestige past participating in and financing expensive high-status pastimes. Parties, clubs, and sports dominated their social calendar. Clemency balls introduced debutantes and honored individuals. Parties were ostentatious multicourse meals at elegant hotels or luxurious mansions. Institutions of high civilisation similar the Art Institute, founded in 1879, were established to promote civilization, boost Chicago's reputation, and raise personal recognition.
Washington Park Race Track, 1903  |
Chicago's elites gathered in the Chicago Gild (1869), where men socialized and did business, and the Fortnightly (1873), where women considered social issues and pursued educational topics. Sports clubs, similar the Chicago Yacht Guild, the Chicago Athletic Club, and the Chicago Women'due south Athletic Club were less prestigious just enabled its new rich members to proceeds condition and participate in expensive sports. Fascination with English country life and the new sport of golf, which was enormously pop in Chicago, resulted in the establishment of suburban country clubs, showtime with the Chicago Golf Club (1893). These organizations were particularly attractive to elite women who enjoyed golf, tennis, and parties at the clubs. The elite was very involved in equestrian sports, and a few endemic thoroughbreds and belonged to the prestigious jockey club that operated the elegant Washington Park Race Track, founded in 1884.
Lake View Cycling Club, 1890s  |
The center class, which made up 31 percent of the workforce in 1900, mostly believed in difficult work, domesticity, sobriety, and piety, and wanted to employ complimentary time for self-improvement and self-renewal. Center-grade men worked a 5-and-a-half-day week and had sufficient income to pursue leisure activities. The new eye course of professionals and bureaucrats turned to their pastimes to demonstrate their creativity, self-worth, and manliness at a time when WASP birthrates were declining and culture seemed to exist feminized by influential mothers and schoolteachers. Men formed organizations that sponsored hobbies like the Chicago Philatelic Society (1886), the Chicago Camera Order (1904), and the Chicago Coin Club (1905). They became active sportsmen, joining groups like the Chicago Bicycle Club (1879), and became ardent ball fans. They had the time and coin to attend White Stocking games played in midafternoon. The squad did non have Sunday games until 1893, originally considering of league rules and then because owner Albert Thousand. Spalding incorrectly assumed that center-course fans opposed public amusements on the Sabbath.
Hockey and Skating, 1903  |
Center-class women besides had substantial leisure time, as they seldom worked outside the dwelling and many had servants to perform household chores. They read fiction, belonged to clubs, and shopped in downtown stores. Specialty shops and department stores like Marshall Field'due south made shopping an enjoyable feel with tearooms, fine restaurants, and gratuitous delivery. Increasingly, younger women also participated in sports, encouraged by physicians and female person physical educators who recommended exercise to improve health and dazzler. Such "feminine" sports as golf game, tennis, horseback riding, cycling, and ice skating proliferated. Even certain active sports similar basketball game became women'south sports, modified by special rules designed to conform to current notions of women'due south physical abilities.
Arcades on South State, c.1912  |
Low wages and long working hours limited turn-of-the-century working-class leisure opportunities. Less-skilled workers regularly worked sixty hours per week, while more than-skilled workers typically worked 54 hours. Yet the limited remaining free fourth dimension was of import, providing opportunities for self-expression, status, and even politics, with the Eight-Hour Day Movement.
Reflecting the immigrant character of Chicago (fourscore percent of Chicago's population in 1890 was of foreign origin), blue-neckband recreation was indigenous, neighborhood, and family-based and tied to religious customs. Roman Cosmic immigrants observed a Continental Sun Sabbath, with afternoons free for moderate pleasures that contested local blue laws, while Jews observed the Sabbath on Saturdays and considered Sunday a working day. Traditional holidays were still observed, like the Italian festivals that honored patron saints in a carnivalesque atmosphere, providing continuity with the Onetime World. Houses of worship also provided infinite for weddings, sports, and clubs, most notably the Catholic Youth System, founded in 1930.
Wading in Union Park lake, 1912  |
Gender was important in socializing and family unit gatherings that focused on the dinner table. Women prepared traditional foods, and subsequently men and women socialized separately. The primary daily entertainment for working-class women was visiting with friends and neighbors at home, on the stoop, or in the street. Second-generation daughters were very closely supervised, at least until they were full-time wage earners, when they gained a lilliputian more freedom. Their brothers, by comparison, had far more liberty to hang out in the street or participate in neighborhood recreation. They played sports at indigenous social and athletic clubs, pool halls, bowling alleys, battle gymnasiums, or settlement houses, where reformers sought to use athletics to socialize inner-city youth into the values of the host social club.
Steinmetz Saloon, 1898  |
Developed men socialized away from crowded homes at fraternal clubs or saloons, often the only recreation site in their neighborhoods. By 1915 there was one saloon for every 335 residents in Chicago. German taverns were family institutions, well-lit beer gardens that provided wholesome amusement. Most others, however, were "poor man'south clubs," highly particularistic institutions where men drank, ate gratuitous lunches, played games, and gambled. Irish saloons, for instance, were small-scale, dimly lit "stand-up" taverns whose customers were encouraged to beverage excessively.
Gambling and prostitution were rampant in Chicago. Illegal betting occurred at neighborhood saloons, resorts in the South Side vice district, and downtown gambling halls and poolrooms that served as off-rail betting parlors. Men of all classes visited houses of prostitution, the most famous of which was the Everleigh House, where an evening could cost $50. The Vice Commission identified 5,000 prostitutes working in 1,020 resorts in 1910. When Mayor Carter Harrison II closed the vice district presently thereafter, prostitution moved into residential neighborhoods.
In the 1870s historic traveling companies boasting stars like Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Lily Langtry, and Sarah Bernhardt played the McVicker'south, the University of Music, and the Grand Opera House, where Chicagoans paid twenty-v to fifty cents to see them. Vaudeville made its first Chicago appearance in the 1880s. Immigrants, who often brought with them a theatrical tradition, supported indigenous theaters in spite of weak scripts, inexperienced actors, and a express audition base. The theater promoted their civilization and ethnic pride, gained them respect from the host society, and helped newcomers go acclimatized to America. German theater dominated with volkstheaters and classical scripts. The English press reviewed an 1889 performance of Schiller glowingly, and a 1903 performance of Goethe's Faust drew 3,600 spectators to the Auditorium Theater.
Entrance to Ravinia, 1931  |
Musical entertainment flourished between 1871 and 1920. Theodore Thomas outset brought his chamber music orchestra to Chicago in 1869 and established the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891. Sure dates were prepare aside for workingmen's concerts with reduced admissions. Popular vocal music emphasized low-cal opera, and group singing was common at parties. There was growing involvement in opera, and in 1885 over 100,000 enthusiasts attended the Chicago Opera Festival. The iv,300-seat Auditorium Theater, completed past 1890, had its first opera flavor in 1891 and continued to have opera every yr through 1932, when the Civic Opera Company went out of business concern. Choral music was very pop with ethnic groups, especially Germans, Scandinavians, and Poles. The three major German singing societies in 1900 consisted of over 200 singing clubs, but interest sharply fell off during World State of war I, when Chicagoans identified German culture as unpatriotic.
Dancing boomed in the early 1900s amid all social and ethnic groups. In 1911, an average of 86,000 people nightly attended 1 of the 275 trip the light fantastic halls in Chicago, more than than went to whatsoever other recreation. Especially popular with the most stylish middle-class couples were cabarets, a type of nightclub influenced past the onetime beer gardens, public trip the light fantastic toe halls, and revues. Cabarets combined hot music, new dances, risqué shows, drinking, and smoking.
Freiberg's Trip the light fantastic toe Hall, 1911  |
Ethnic leaders worried the second-generation would get debauched or meet the incorrect people at public dances, so they organized dances at indigenous clubs and neighborhood halls. Their young men and women preferred modern commercial ballrooms with big bands but maintained a sense of ethnicity. They preferred attainable halls where their group dominated or controlled part of the flooring. Rather than bringing formal dates, dancers often came in groups or met at the trip the light fantastic. The girls usually danced with neighborhood boys or other fellows from the same ethnic grouping. Many unmarried immigrant men frequented taxi dance halls where they paid x cents per tune to dance with women employed by the possessor. By the late 1920s, Chicago had 36 taxi dance halls, which, along with cabarets, were often accused of demoralizing young people.
Silent movies were a hugely pop entertainment based on a new technology. Chicago's kickoff theaters in the early 1900s were five-cent nickelodeons, simple storefronts in working-class neighborhoods. By 1908 in that location were more than 340 in the city, and admission had reached 10 cents. Moralists' concerns about conduct in the dark theaters and about discipline matter resulted in the establishment of a moving picture censorship code by 1909. The movie theater boomed in the mid-1910s with the popularity of feature-length movies exhibited in elegant downtown and suburban theaters and accompanied past stage shows and large orchestras.
Plantation Café  |
African American newcomers welcomed the leisure options available in Chicago which they in turn shaped in of import means. However, African Americans encountered prejudice at theaters, dance halls, YMCAs, public parks, beaches, and other entertainment venues. They had to rely heavily on their own institutions in the Black Belt to sponsor recreations and on entrepreneurs who established theaters, nightclubs, and baseball teams. The first notable African American nightspot was the 900-seat Pekin Theater at 2700 South State Street, established by policy kingpin Robert T. Motts to diversify his operations. It became a showcase for black musical talent. A stock company was established to perform dramatics, operettas, and comic operas. Admission was fifteen or xx-five cents. The leading nightspots in the early on 1910s were located on "the Stroll, " State Street from 26th to 39th Streets. By 1920 every bit many as a thousand couples went to the Purple Gardens Café (459 East 31st Street) every Fri to dine, dance, and heed to jazz and dejection music.
Rube Foster, 1909  |
Black ballplayers were barred from playing in organized baseball game. While African Americans did attend games played by the Cubs and White Sox, most attended Sunday games played past local black semiprofessional teams similar the Leland Giants, who were a source of community pride. In 1911 that gild was supplanted by Rube Foster'due south American Giants, which became a charter member of the Negro National League in 1920. The team played at Schorling Park (39th and Wentworth), adjacent to the ghetto, where adult tickets toll xx-v cents.
Other popular commercial entertainments of the fourth dimension included museums, circuses, county fairs, and entertainment parks. Fairs often publicized agronomical and scientific achievements, most notably the Interstate Industrial Exposition, held downtown from 1873 until 1892. The World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 attracted an estimated paid omnipresence of 21.5 million, who preferred the Midway'southward attractions to displays of technology or fine art. Buffalo Bill Cody'south Wild Due west Bear witness that summer played earlier six million spectators on a 14-acre site just across from the main archway to the fair.
Sans Souci Entertainment Park, 1908  |
Major amusement parks included White Urban center, established in 1905 at 63rd and South Park Fashion and emphasizing depression-class pleasures similar carnivals, bowling alleys, and a roller rink and roller coaster. Past 1914 it provided year-round entertainment including two dance floors that accommodated five 1000 people. It was partially destroyed by a fire in 1927 and went into receivership six years later. Riverview (1904–1967) was the North Side equivalent, with thrill rides, freak shows, dance halls, and a beer garden.
A much-needed park system was funded by the legislature in 1869. The new big parks were Jackson and Washington, south of the urban center; Douglas, Central ( Garfield ), and Humboldt on the Westward Side; and Lincoln Park, the largest, at the city's northern edge. These suburban parks, at beginning attainable only to center-class residents of nearby communities and train riders, originally emphasized receptive recreation. But park goers wanted agile recreation, and in the 1880s baseball diamonds and tennis courts were constructed. Lakefront beaches were opened for public utilise afterwards 1895. Park space was also set aside for the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Camping in Wood Preserve, 1922  |
Unfortunately, the organisation lagged behind population growth. In 1899 one-tertiary of the population lived more than a mile from any park. The suburban parks in the 1890s had become more than attainable to meliorate-paid workers in one case carfare on the expanding streetcar organisation dropped from fifteen to five cents, yet this was still as well expensive for the poor. Reformers organized a modest-park movement in the 1890s to alleviate the inner-city'due south need for play and breathing spaces, leading to the municipality funding neighborhood parks in 1904. The
Programme of Chicago of 1909 stimulated time to come recreation past recommending the extension of Grant Park and the building of beaches, Municipal (Navy) Pier (1914), forest preserves (1914), and lakefront museums.
Leisure in the Interwar Era, 1920–1945
In the 1920s the average Chicagoan enjoyed a higher standard of living than ever before. Past 1920 the blueish-collar workweek had shortened by about 10 hours compared to 1914, plus wages had appreciated significantly, averaging about $1,000 a yr for unskilled workers and $2,000 for skilled. During the Great Depression incomes plummeted, and workers enjoyed a lot of unwanted free time. The national standard of a 40-hr workweek was established in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In the 1920s leisure was heavily influenced by the greater freedom of young women who smoked, drank liquor, wore short dresses, danced the Charleston, and dated men with automobiles that provided privacy for dating couples as well as greater admission to suburban recreational opportunities. During this decade ethnic peer groups mediated mass culture through sponsored dances, clubs, and sports. Simply past the 1930s white industrial workers were generally Americanized, and the indigenous factor was less prominent, although clubs, parades, and holidays were (and remain) pregnant.
Topsy Turvy Times Display, 1926  |
At that place was a growing reliance on commercial entertainment by the 1920s. Blueish-collar workers spent on average $22.56 a yr on movies, more the center course and more than than one-half of their amusement budget. Neighborhood theaters competed with downtown picture show palaces with cheaper admission, films that reflected community tastes, and larger playhouses primed for a middle-class audience. In 1921 the metropolis's largest cinema was the 3,000-seat Tivoli Theater (Cottage Grove and 63rd), which had a marble antechamber and charged $1 access. Sound was introduced in 1927, within three years all the big theaters had sound. Sound altered the ambience at neighborhood theaters, where audiences that in the silent era had been pretty loud quieted down to hear the actors. There was a movie seat for every nine Chicagoans during the Depression, when movies took in nigh one-3rd of all entertainment expenditures. Neighborhood prices for adults ranged from fifteen to 20-five cents, half the cost of downtown theaters. Audio films hurt the once-flourishing legitimate stage, which barely survived the early Depression, mainly with Broadway shows.
Radio became ubiquitous during the 1920s. Eighty percent of programming presented musical shows and comedy sketches. Nonprofit ethnic, religious, and labor stations supplemented commercial stations. The Radio Act of 1927 promoted station consolidation merely did not impale indigenous programming, which in the mid-1930s accounted for 5 per centum of local broadcasts. Families bought Victrolas, oft on credit, then they could play their favorite music at dwelling house. Sales of indigenous music swelled equally Italians bought records of Caruso singing operas, Mexicans purchased recordings of Mexican music, and African Americans bought "race" records made by jazz and blues artists.
Regal Theater and Savoy Ballroom, 1941  |
Nightlife flourished in the 1920s despite Prohibition and the demise of the workingmen's saloon. Illegal drinking became an heady centre-class pastime at speakeasies. When Mayor William Dever closed many clubs in the mid-1920s, roadhouses in Cicero, Stickney, and Burnham that offered liquor, sex, and gambling replaced them. Exotic "blackness and tan" nightclubs in the Due south Side ghetto, like the "Plantation Cafe," offered integrated audiences excellent music and the thrills of being naughty and unsafe by drinking illegal liquor, dancing to hot jazz, and rubbing shoulders with celebrities or gangsters. The center of the ghetto's nightlife shifted from the Stroll to 47th Street, where the get-go large commercial dance hall for African Americans, the Savoy, was opened in 1927, followed two years later by the 3,500-seat Majestic Theater. These were a part of the "chitlin' excursion" of blackness theaters in the United States. Forty-seventh Street was home to the big bands in the 1930s and 1940s and rhythm and blues music in the mid-1950s.
Northerly Island and Lagoon, 1933  |
Chicagoans relied heavily on public resources for entertainment, especially sites envisioned by the 1909
Programme of Chicago. The Field Museum moved in 1921 to Grant Park, and side by side door the $six.five meg Soldier Field was opened in 1924 and completed five years after along with the John G. Shedd Aquarium and, a year after that, the Adler Planetarium. Soldier Field was the site of the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney rematch, seen by 104,000, and the 1937 Austin-Leo high-school football game title, attended by over 110,000. In 1933 the Museum of Science and Industry opened with popular presentations of scientific and industrial subjects. Museum omnipresence dropped off sharply during the Low. Field Museum crowds dropped by one-third between 1933 and 1936, with xc percent coming on free days. An exception was the Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933 and 1934, which drew 40 million people. In 1934, Brookfield Zoo opened, and 22 different park districts were merged into the five,416-acre Chicago Park District comprising 84 parks and 78 fieldhouses, along with golf courses and pond pools.
South Side bowling alley, 1941  |
The sports blast of the 1920s fell off during the Depression. The Cubs were a popular attraction, winning four pennants from 1927 to 1938; the Bears began playing at Wrigley Field in 1921; and the Blackhawks began playing in 1926 at the Coliseum, moving to the Stadium iii years later. Boxing and horse racing were legalized in 1926, and several tracks soon opened, including Arlington Park in 1927. Participatory sport besides expanded. There were 55 metropolitan golf courses, including aristocracy clubs whose initiation fees price from $iii,000 to $5,000. Bowling alleys and billiards halls boomed amongst the working form until the Low, when one-third of the former and one-half of the latter closed.
Leisure in Metropolitan Chicago since 1945
St. Joseph's Embankment, c. 1940s  |
The leisure activities of postwar Chicago were influenced past the aforementioned variables every bit in earlier periods, particularly a rise standard of living, along with technological innovations, fashions and fads, age, race, gender, and homesite. Two-solar day weekends were the norm forth with increased vacation fourth dimension. By the 1980s, Chicagoans were spending about 6 per centum of their income on leisure, double the 1901 proportion. Class became less important, although differences in taste remained significant. The upper middle classes who lived in stylish neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Hyde Park and the wealthier suburbs were the main clients at theaters, concerts, golf courses, and college football games. Lower-grade Chicagoans devoted relatively more attention to such sports as baseball, boxing, and equus caballus racing, and to Goggle box, whose rise hurt movies, radio, and reading. Race played a large factor, with differences in musical tastes and nightlife. Racial discrimination hindered opportunities, reflected by uneven park development in different neighborhoods. The feminist movement that emerged in the 1960s encouraged women to piece of work, secure college-paying jobs, become sexually liberated, and participate in sports, a sphere from which they had been largely absent since the early 1900s.
Blue Note Jazz Club, c.1950s  |
Chicago enjoyed a rich nightlife, which flourished in the 1950s on Rush Street at nightclubs like Mister Kelly's and at Due south Side dejection halls which declined with the coming of rock'n' roll. In the 1970s most of the remaining old clubs died in the wake of disco, urban decay, and the expense of booking name entertainers. Blues revived in the 1990s with new clubs on the African American South Side and specially with trendy North Side locales similar blues and Kingston Mines. Jazz had a large following with places like the Green Manufacturing plant in Uptown and the London House (360 North Michigan Avenue), a showcase for Ramsey Lewis, Oscar Peterson, and Stan Getz. Chicagoans had a choice of many comedy clubs, well-nigh notably the 2nd City. Eating out became an of import recreation in the 1960s, with indigenous restaurants for the budget witting equally well equally fine dining. Since 1980, Chicagoans have combined their dear of music and cuisine in the annual Taste of Chicago lakefront festival.
High civilization prospered in this era. In 1953 the Lyric Opera was organized, restoring a tradition of outstanding opera and, with the Chicago Symphony, making the city an internationally renowned center of classical music. Dance companies and specially theater proliferated. By 1998 Chicago was habitation to well-nigh 50 theater companies, from community and experimental theaters and suburban dinner playhouses to Loop theaters that charged Broadway prices for Broadway-manner productions.
Oak Street Beach, 1960  |
Interest in participatory and spectator sport has grown essentially. Peculiarly since the 1970s, Chicagoans accept taken advantage of public beaches, wheel paths, volleyball courts, and soccer fields to better fettle and to socialize. In the decades from the 1950s through the 1970s, the Blackhawks regularly sold out the Chicago Stadium, and attendance at racetracks, Bears games, and major league baseball rose, the latter abetted by extensive TV coverage and the ambience of Wrigley Field. Involvement in basketball was mainly at the collegiate level until the Bulls became pop in the 1970s and achieved fanatic back up once they became title contenders in the late 1980s. The cost of attending sport events, notwithstanding, rose dramatically in the 1990s, making them unaffordable for many Chicagoans.
Conclusion
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, 1994  |
Chicago's leisure patterns have been historically influenced by the metropolis'southward growth and maturation. Leisure opportunities were a product of economic development, which shaped the social structure, income levels, and available gratis time and surplus income, on the ane hand, and, on the other, of urbanization, which reshaped urban infinite and was accompanied by a booming population. Leisure patterns were further affected by entrepreneurs who commercialized recreation, by politicians who promoted public parks and festivals, and past immigrants and southern African Americans who brought with them their ain cultural traditions and values.
Bibliography
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Bargain: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. 1990.
Gems, Gerald R. The Windy City Wars: Labor, Leisure, and Sport in the Making of Chicago. 1997.
Riess, Steven A. City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports. 1989.
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