I’m starting a project. As I research my monthly article for the Hyde Park Herald, I come across a lot of fun images scattered across the various archives–with more being digitized seemingly every day. If you want to follow along, I’m posting them on Instagram (hydeparktrish) and Twitter (@HydeParkTrish).
Photos of course are informative. Old ones in particular aren’t yet manipulated, so I have a lot of trust in them–though not always the captions. The postcards are fun and quite often close reproductions of a photo I’ve also found. However, sometimes they are embellished–or edited, particularly the advertising ones. Here, a fun detail to track down is that there seem to be attendants in all-white uniforms in the boathouse.
I’m also not sure that the tower of the White City Amusement Park would have been visible to the southeast of the Washington Park boathouse. The White City was a great tourist destination in 1918 so it might have been stuck into the image to sell the postcard and memories of fun in Chicago. The address of the White City was 63rd and King Drive. Did it stretch east/west along 63rd? Maybe. I’ll have to figure that out.
What the postcard made me realize is that the southern horizon of Washington Park would have been a bright white glow at night (see photo below). When I imagine the scene–or maybe write a novel–that’s a detail that would be fun to have.
Patricia L. Morse 