A round bald man spent the morning in a crouch, repeatedly inflating a bicycle tire that kept going flat before its rider could pedal 50 feet. The man was from the Schwinn History Center, the bicycle from 1894; both were part of a Chicago Historical Society effort to reinvent the past.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The first part of the new exhibit offers six slices of Chicago life. Visitors enter by way of a mock railroad car and promptly sit down in front of a TV set. On the tube they see a contemporary scene taking place in front of the Hotel Florence. Two refrigerator deliverymen are arguing about who is doing the most work. When the fellow named McBride boasts of being “fourth generation refrigeration,” the scene shifts: suddenly that big red-brick Victorian hotel fades to black-and-white and we’re in 1890s Chicago, where great-grandfather McBride, a gabby iceman who feels secure knowing “people are always going to need ice,” introduces us to six characters who historians say typified life here a century ago: a German wood-carver, an Irish servant girl, a Polish meat trimmer, a black day laborer, an Italian newsboy-bootblack, and WASP industrialist George Pullman. On the way out of the railroad car, visitors pick up a card filled with fun facts about one of the six. Then they walk through a series of exhibits displaying, among other things, the work spaces of the six characters. After another encounter with the video image of Mr. McBride, it’s on to the Art Institute, the Columbian Exposition, and other “Visions of a Better Chicago.”
This McBride character was dreamed up by an ad agency and a video producer who figured an iceman would be a suitable guide because he might have come in contact with all strata of society. Historical researchers determined that icemen actually worked specific neighborhoods and were thus unlikely to encounter Italians, Poles, blacks, and George Pullman all in a day’s work, but the video producers reasoned that McBride could have known all these characters from having worked different routes in the past.
Just before the cameras began rolling, executive producer John Davies (now an independent, he created Wild Chicago while at WTTW) looked over the set at a dozen people and two horses that would burst into action the second he gave the call. Turning to the fellow who would be in the frame as shooting began, he asked: “Could you do something with the horse, maybe stroke him? It looks like you’re waiting for a scene to begin.
“Well, hello there,” says Joe Liss, a Second City-trained actor who prepared this guy-from-the-past schtick by watching Jimmy Cagney movies. A half dozen people stand just behind camera, acting as if some extraordinary act of nature is revealing itself to them for the first time. “McBride’s the name. Been delivering ice for 11 years…”
