Philadelphia 1876

'Coney Island is curiously like the Centennial; that is the only description that does it justice. It is a Centennial of pleasure, pure and simple, without any tiresome ulterior commercial purposes, held amid refreshing breezes, by the sea. There is the same gay architecture, the same waving flags, the same delightful distracting whirl, the same enormous masses of staring, good-natured, perpetually marching and counter marching human beings. Its essential character is bound up with the crowd, and so are its faults.'*1

Recovering from the devastating Civil War, the population of a young country was moving away from a farming majority through the years of the industrial revolution and toward the age of electricity and the internal combustion engine. This was a year of steam, machine power and the railways. The USA was very soon to become the world's foremost industrial power.

On the 10th May 1876 America honoured the US Centennial in the opening of its first major World's Fair, the Philadelphia Exposition. "The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine". In planning over the previous ten years by the Centennial Commission, the huge site occupied 285 acres of Fairmount Park in the City of Brotherly Love. President US Grant launched this seven month birthday party on May 10th in Philadelphia.

Interconnections for transport of all kinds, both for the new streets in and around the site and for the main lines, were well planned. There was even plank walk from the Schuylkill River to the entrance, where, for ten cents, or fifteen cents for the round journey, people could alight from a pleasant steamboat trip from old Fairmount.

In a hot summer, the Centennial Exhibition proved to be the most successful ever, the best attended since London 1851, drawing in almost nine million visitors. It was well planned and designed to accommodate the huge crowds safely and comfortably.

Claiming the largest building and tallest tower in the world, turnstiles were used at the entrances and security for 'season ticket' holders was provided with a photograph of the holder on the pass. Innovative public facilities were incorporated. The machinery hall, for example contained huge blowers that could cool the customers. The exhibition included the world's first monorail.

Popular exhibits included the first typewriter and a section of the galvanized cable that was to be used for the Brooklyn Bridge. A good modern water closet could be seen on display. Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his newly patented telephone. All exhibitors were awarded bronze medals.

Exotic displays and buildings included a Tunisian Restaurant and Moorish Villa. Foreign cultural artifacts and indeed, foreign natives themselves were part of the exhibits and were, no doubt looked upon as curiosities by most visitors to the Exhibition. Anything approaching true emancipation was a very long time away.

In 1876 the world, and indeed, America, was a much bigger place. It was in August of the year in that the Battle of Little Bighorn took place. The prevalent main and benevolent themes of the Exhibition were technological and cultural progress. A negative side of society at the time was a mid nineteenth century philosophy of American imperialism seen as a providential mission on a national basis; a theme that was seen as inevitable.*4

Victorian social reform movements were underway including the National Woman Suffrage Association which cited the country's progress with the success of the Exhibition in their protest leaflet of July the 4th.

'All through our Civil War the slaves on the Southern plantations had an abiding faith that the terrible conflict would result in freedom for their race. Just so through all the busy preparations of the Centennial, the women of the nation felt sure that the great national celebration could not pass without the concession of some new liberties to them. Hence they pressed their claims at every point, at the Fourth of July celebration in the exposition buildings, and in the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions; hoping to get a plank in the platforms of both the great political parties.'*2

The Temperance movement was active too, and had an ornate drinking fountain outside the US Government Building. Alcohol was strictly banned inside the exposition grounds and the new 'soda fountains' dispensed carbonated drinks.

Reform was certainly needed in local government because, since the end of the civil war, weakened city authorities had enabled plenty of opportunity for outrageous graft and corruption. In the east, Tammany Hall was the New York headquarters of a kind of political club used by its crooked members as a conduit to swindle millions out of the city coffers. William Tweed was its leader who had escaped from prison in the December of 1875. Helped by a cohort, Mike Norton, he made a dramatic escape abroad via Coney Island but he was finally brought to justice and extradited from Spain in November 1876. Coney Island had it's own version in the John Y McKane Association who's "Boss" finally went to Sing-Sing in 1894.

There were "concessions" for sales of beer in the streets adjoining the Exhibition. Some of the more unsavoury areas around the exhibition had, no doubt, a deserved reputation for vulgarity and vice.

This note from an Italian restaurant entrance sign (Operti's Tropical Garden ) gives a good idea of how Victorian ideals of propriety were adhered to. The owner attempts to attract what was decided to be a better class of customer:

'The admission fee is half a dollar; and in order to prevent the intrusion of improper characters the management announce that they will deny admission to ladies unaccompanied by gentlemen.'

Although there was no designated 'midway de plaisance'*3 at the fair, it can be seen from the following scrapbook illustration, that both inside and outside of the grounds, a village of lively sideshows, restaurants and beer gardens made profit from the huge crowds that increased as the year went by.

*1 From: Atlantic Monthly

*2 From: Eighty Years And More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 (1898) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Chapter XIX. The Spirit of '76.

*3 Midway or Midway de Plaisance is a phrase first coined at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and used ever since in the United States to denote the funfair area of a park or show.

*4 American Imperialism - The Theory of Manifest Destiny - a recipe for genocide! "...wherever they go, this inferior native population, as a result of amalgamation, and that great law of contact between a higher and a lower race, by which the latter gives way to the former, must be gradually supplanted, and its place occupied by this highest of races....[The United States] will occupy the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfillment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millenial day."