This photograph is so worthy of study because the small refreshment stands, dance halls, illegal saloons, and “fakir booths” in or near the “Minnehaha Midway” were nearly never photographed. Only a handful of images from the era have come to light so far.
We don’t know who ran these businesses. But there probably is a little more information about the left-hand, southern pavilion. We probably have another picture of it. Like nearly all of these Midway pictures, this is considered to be a unique, one-of-a-kind image:
Is this the “Lunches” pavilion? That’s the most likely guess. We see tables and curved back chairs in both the MNHS picture and the Cracker Jack picture. The aesthetic of displaying plenty of advertising is clear in both. And we know where this isn’t: It’s not the Park Board’s work in their two refreshment pavilions, not the burned down pavilion from 1903-1904, nor the second one from 1905. That second one is still standing, after all.
There’s a bit of question about the supports for the roof. In the Cracker Jack picture, the supports appear to have a slight curve which we only see in the “Lunches” picture when looking at the Depot, not the pavilion. But, since we are not looking at the exact same uprights in both pictures, there’s room to believe that these are both the same pavilion in these pictures.
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