Landmarks: From Plaisance to Pullman to Chicago Heights, area place names take to the road

The directions were simple, but hard to say.

“Take a left from Stoney onto Midway Plaisance,” I told my wife, who was transporting our son to an appointment at University of Chicago Hospital.

“Play-A-Sance,” I said without a smidgen of French inflection.

That was years ago, but the oddly named boulevard in Hyde Park has remained a running joke in our family ever since. These days it’s taken on a distinctly Quebecian flavor: “Ple-zaan.”

In the early days of Google, I searched for information and came across a tiny street on a map in a remote portion of the upper Midwest, perhaps the Northwoods of Wisconsin or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, called Midway Plaisance. How odd, I thought, and vowed to someday look into it.

That memory was jarred when a friend on social media posted a photo of her alma mater, Pullman High School. “I didn’t know she grew up in Pullman,” I thought. “Wait — Pullman doesn’t even have a high school!”

Nichole Dailor, of Bourbonnais, created the post after a holiday visit to her hometown of Pullman, Washington. The rolling hills and mountains looming in the distance there make for a far different scene than the factory ruins, row houses and flat topography of Chicago’s first National Historic Park.

As one might suspect, Chicago’s Pullman and its counterpart in Washington share a namesake. The Washington town’s name was changed from Three Forks in the 1880s in an effort to lure rail service to a place originally settled because it was where three creeks came together.

It worked. Pullman, Washington, became a regional rail hub and later landed a college that became Washington State University. Its future was secured around the same time Pullman, Illinois, was heading for the history books, destined to be absorbed by Chicago.

The Dailors recently visited the National Historic Park, coming away with a new appreciation for the history behind the Pullman name, though Nichole had one caveat afterward.

“I wish Pullman, Illinois, had the kind of rolling hills that we do in Washington,” she said.

But the connection still resonates nearly a century and a half later with Dailor.

“I always think it is interesting how history ties things together in ways one might never consider,” she said. “My husband is also from Washington, so we both thought it was cool that they had the same name.”

While George Pullman’s railcar empire stretched across the country, the ploy by the former town of Three Forks in Washington didn’t have similar success elsewhere. A quick search shows only the small town of Pullman, West Virginia (population 134 in 2020) as well as some unincorporated areas in states such as Michigan and Texas.

It’s remarkable when familiar place names show up in unexpected places.

Such was the case a while back when a traveler posted on a community social media page a photo of a restaurant they came across in the United Kingdom.

They’d spotted a place called Chicago Heights in Fort William, a town on the shore of Loch Linnhe in the Scottish Highlands.

Billed as an “Italian American BBQ Smokehouse Cafe/Diner,” diners leaving mixed online reviews never mention Italian beefs or other specialties one might find in Chicago Heights. One reviewer enjoyed a hot dog covered with chili and cheese and served on a baguette. Another liked the “veggie haggis.” And the traditional Scottish breakfasts, perhaps containing meat haggis, seemed to go over well too.

I’d hoped to talk to someone associated with the restaurant to find out more about why they landed on their name. Beyond the reviews on Google and other sites, there was no contact information out there for the place. A message sent to the Fort William Chamber of Commerce wasn’t returned.

As it turned out, Chicago Heights — the restaurant — didn’t survive the pandemic and its storefront in Fort William has a large “For Let” sign out front, perhaps awaiting a restaurateur offering a beef/sausage combo with giardiniera, or chicken Vesuvio, or maybe just a steak burrito.

So I returned to searching for the tiny Midway Plaisance I’d stumbled across years ago. Search functions being vastly improved these days it should be no problem, I thought.

Turns out the intelligent robots I assume are behind the search algorithms these days have decided I only want to know about Chicago’s Plaisance in Hyde Park. Each related query ended up being changed to Midway Plaisance Park, no matter what I actually typed. Getting around that obstacle turned into one of those internet deep dives that can devour hours.

In the process, I found the Midway Plaisance in Toledo, Ohio, when it showed up in a few crime stories from newspapers there. Evidently it’s now a rough part of town, but the only link I can find to its namesake in Chicago points to a brighter past, when a large amusement park was built nearby in the early 1900s.

Called White City, the park, which operated from about 1900 to 1914 in Toledo, was modeled on the World’s Columbian Exhibition, the immensely popular Chicago World’s Fair featuring classical architecture that earned it the nickname White City and is still proudly referenced by one of the four stars in the Chicago flag.

A big part of the Chicago fair was the amusement rides and other attractions situated along Midway Plaisance. It was where the world’s first Ferris wheel rotated spectators high into the sky. The area made such a huge impression on fairgoers that “midway” has become the term for the gallery of games and attractions at carnivals large and small throughout the world.

But Chicago’s Midway Plaisance predates even the fair that made it famous.

It was proposed as a placid lagoon in a wide strip of greenery connecting Jackson and Washington parks as part of a green space development designed by a team led by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed New York’s Central Park.

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Then known simply as South Park, the Midway Plaisance was literally midway between the two larger park sections, where more Plaisance sections were to be incorporated according to the 1871 plan.

One became the lagoon in Jackson Park on the south side of what’s now the Museum of Science and Industry, but the waterway planned for the Midway section is long lost to history.

The waterways were important to the designers, as they wrote in the report accompanying the 1871 plan.

“In Chicago the banks of the navigable streams are unattractive for domestic purposes and cannot fail to be required for commerce,” they wrote, making most water access areas “less and less valuable” to live near, adding to the necessity of including water to areas “which are in no danger of being invaded for commercial purposes.”

In another fun element, the report accompanying the South Park plan puts the project in a class with London’s Hyde Park, a name that traveled from its historic birth city to the area south of Chicago that would become home to Midway Plaisance.

It’s just up the tracks from Pullman and a few miles down the Dixie Highway from Chicago Heights, other places that have sent their names across the world.

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.