For 63 years, a 74-acre stretch of Chicago's North Center neighborhood was home to the loudest, largest promise in the city: laugh your troubles away. That was Riverview Park's slogan, and for roughly half its run, it wasn't just marketing — Riverview was, for a time, the largest amusement park in the world.
The World's Largest Amusement Park
Riverview opened on July 2, 1904, built by William Schmidt on the grounds of his former private skeet-shooting range along the Chicago River. Over the following decades it grew into a sprawling 74-acre complex of roller coasters, midway games, and rides that drew families from every corner of the city — including the legendary Bobs, one of the most feared wooden coasters ever built. For a stretch of its six-decade run, Riverview held the title of the largest amusement park anywhere in the world.
Laugh Your Troubles Away
The slogan wasn't hype — it was a genuine civic institution. Generations of Chicagoans spent their summers on the midway, and the park became as much a part of the city's identity as its parks and its ballfields. Our Riverview Park print is part of our Lost Chicago collection, a series honoring landmarks that shaped the city and then quietly disappeared.
Why It Closed — and What's Left
Riverview closed abruptly on October 3, 1967, its 63-year run ending almost overnight amid rising maintenance costs, changing neighborhoods, and shifting entertainment habits nationwide. The site today holds a police station, a shopping center, and blocks of North Center housing — almost nothing remains to mark where the world's largest amusement park once stood.
That's the idea behind Lost Chicago: the city is full of places like Riverview — landmarks that mattered enormously to the people who lived through them, then vanished so completely that most Chicagoans today have never heard of them. Explore the rest of the Lost Chicago collection to see what else the city left behind.