December 2019 – Page 2 – Chicago and Cook County Cemeteries

From Venice to Mount Carmel Cemetery

Come with me on a late night automobile ride north from downtown Chicago, 21 miles to the quiet suburb of Wheeling. Let’s choose 1924 for our trip, in a spiffy Studebaker touring car. As we drive north on Milwaukee Avenue we bypass a corridor of roadhouses, taverns, mob hangouts, hotels, arriving at 2855 Milwaukee Avenue.

We drive through a main gate and enter an extravagant resort called Villa Venice where we will have a seven course dinner, drink adult beverages, watch a Las Vegas style revue, dance until dawn, gamble and ride in authentic Italian gondolas.

But behind all the glitter and glitz is a dark side, that later in this story will end us at the beautiful Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Hillside.

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THE WHEEL AND A CEMETERY NEARBY

It is well known that George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., 1859-1896 a structural and civil engineer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, built the colossal Chicago Wheel for Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. What is not as well known is where the huge wheel reappeared after the fair had ended.

The fair wanted a landmark, something daring, and unique. They wanted something that would surpass the Eiffel tower which was built in 1889. Ferris’s enormous vertical structure served their purpose, which rotated around a massive center axle weighing 71 tons, and featured 36 gondolas capable of holding up to 60 people each—for a total capacity of 2,160 people. It carried some 38,000 people daily who each paid 50-cents for a 20-minute ride. Some 2.5 million people rode the wheel before it moved to a quiet northside Chicago neighborhood.

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THE END OF THE LINE (no pun intended)

Cemeteries and Amusement parks share a common geographic trait, that both were on the “end of the line” of street cars, “L” lines or interurbans. The owners of transportation companies realized that amusement parks could be a boon to weekend revenues.

Cemeteries on the other hand, often were at the end of the line, because as early as 1865, Chicago banned burials within the city limits, banishing cemeteries well out of the then city. Before motorized hearses, funerals to these outlying cemeteries depended on funeral trains and street cars for transportation. Hearses pulled by horses did not fare well on long trips and muddy rutted roads.

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61 years ago -December 1, 1958

There are no words to describe the horror of the Chicago’s worst school fire. We should never forget the 92 children and 3 nuns who perished in this awful disaster. So with all due respect to their memory, I offer a link to my post a year ago.

https://chicagoandcookcountycemeteries.com/2018/11/30/never-witnessed-a-sight-so-terrible/