I lived in Forest Park, IL from around 1984 until 2007... from the age of about 5 until the age of 31. In that stretch there were a couple of years here and there where I lived in Berwyn and Riverside, but even in those years my work, as well as my tiny circle of friends, were both still rooted in Forest Park. It was the center of my world for more than half my life, to the point where I'm now writing about it from freaking Delaware.
So I find I'm a little embarrassed, and retroactively disappointed, to admit that it was only in the final year or two of my time in Forest Park that I learned about the large and extremely popular amusement park that once existed where the blue line CTA terminal on DesPlaines Ave is today.
Looking at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine captures of Wikipedia, information about the Forest Park Amusement Park wasn't added until some time between March and July of 2006, shortly before I moved away. However I still didn't learn about it from Wikipedia, I actually learned about it from a book called THE CHICAGO "L" by Greg Borzo, which is a fascinating pictorial history that I can recommend to anyone. Infuriatingly, I cannot find my copy of that book right now, but I can remember a single muddy picture that I could not make heads or tails of, and a caption describing it as the train stop for the former amusement park. At which point, I'm sure, I dropped the book to my lap and blurted, "The f***ing what?".
Since then, a wealth of information has become easily available to anyone to stumble across by doing the most casual web search for "Forest Park, IL". But I wish I could go back in time to when I was growing up there and find out how many of the people around me knew about the existence of the park. My mother and I moved to Forest Park when I was 5 from Florida, so the entire village didn't exist for me until then. But it could very well be that half the kids in my elementary school classes knew something about an old amusement park that used to exist, having heard stories about it from their grandparents, and the subject just... never came up.
So I don't imagine many people living in Forest Park today are going to find out about the Forest Park Amusement Park from this blog, but I'll try to add a little value by sharing a fun little aha! moment I had while looking at a postcard featuring a view of the park from the top of one of its signature attractions called Shoot the Chutes.
From there you can see part of the Giant Safety Coaster, the Steeple Chase ride, and the carousel. And of course the twin towers flanking the park entrance.
This view is looking north-east, towards the 600 block of Ferdinand where I lived for several years when I attended Garfield Elementary, and onward towards the 500 block of Hannah where I lived for several years with my future wife in the early 2000s. None of that can be discerned in this picture of course, if those blocks even existed at the time. What caught my eye and interest though is the large brown building on the horizon, just to the right of the park entrance towers.
Zoom, enhance...
Oh, it's RUSH Oak Park Hospital. Well obviously that can't be it, it's much too modern, relatively speaking. But wait, what's that behind...
Oh well there it is. The original hospital building, which is really just the central part under the hipped roof, and which opened in 1907. Right on time to photobomb my postcard!
And hence, the title of this entry. A picture taken a century ago of a place I've known all my life, but utterly unfamiliar, until I realized what that building was. Because I've been in there. That part of the hospital includes the ER, where I went when an unruly boarder at the animal hospital I worked at ripped my hand open (The hand survives, it famously went on to write roughly half this blog post). And just like that, the Forest Park Amusement Park became a tiny bit more real to me.
I won't pretend like I'm the first person to figure that out, but I very much enjoyed the journey. I hope you did too.
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