Midway to Java: The Forgotten Javanese Village in Chicago that Once Thrilled America

A panorama of the Midway at the World’s Columbian Exposition with the Java Village featured in the bottom left corner, 1893 Chicago. From Harper’s Weekly, May 1893.

From NewCity

From its dawn, Newcity has been a kind of world’s fair. I was on the cultural and culinary beats when the publication began, shortly after I moved back to Chicago after living in far-off alien places such as Japan and New York City. About a year before, I finished a happy two years in Indonesia where I shared a bamboo house with bats and rats in a village inside the Special Region of Yogyakarta, the cultural heart of Java. In Chicago, Newcity allowed me to plumb the city’s museums, galleries and foods with a license to go wide and go deep. I gravitated to where I could experience the faraway up close, and my stories took their place in the pages that covered Chicago’s world of wonders—outsider art, black-box theaters producing Kabuki Shakespeare, samba in basement bars, the city’s little-known neighborhood museums that imported art and performance from this or that home country. The publication is a fair that’s never stopped. And for me, press credentials in hand, it has long been a passport to ...

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