Midway Plaisance

Jackson Park Historic Landscape District and Midway Plaisance
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
View of Collegiate Gothic architecture of The University of Chicago, taken looking northwest from the grassy, tree-lined Midway.
Location	Chicago, Illinois
Built	1871
Architect	Frederick Law Olmsted; Lorado Taft
Architectural style	Other
NRHP Reference #	72001565
Added to NRHP	December 15, 1972

The Midway Plaisance, known locally as the Midway, is a Chicago public park on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is one mile long by 220 yards wide and extends along 59th and 60th streets, joining Washington Park at its east end and Jackson Park at its west end. It divides the Hyde Park community area to the north from the Woodlawn community area to the south, 6 miles (10 km) south of the downtown "Loop", near Lake Michigan. Today, the Midway runs through the southern portion of the University of Chicago campus, with university and related buildings fronting it on both sides.

It early came to prominence when it hosted amusements at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, lending the name "Midway" to areas at county and state fairs with sideshows. Laid out with long vistas and avenues of trees at the start of the 20th century, the Midway in part followed the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the creators of New York City's famous Central Park, but without his impracticable dream of creating a Venetian canal linking the lagoon systems of Jackson and Washington parks. Instead, the Midway is landscaped with a fosse or dry ditch where the canal would have been.