Riverview Park was an amusement park in Chicago, Illinois, which operated from 1904 to 1967. It was located on in an area bound on the south by Belmont Avenue, on the east by Western Avenue, on the north by Lane Tech College Prep High School, and on the west by the North Branch of the Chicago River. It was located in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago's North Center community area. Founding Riverview was established in 1904 by William Schmidt, on the grounds of his private skeet shooting range. The Schmidt family owned and operated the park throughout its lifetime. "Big Bill" Haywood, the Industrial Workers of the World leader, once spoke here to a crowd of almost 80,000 people. Rides and attractions Riverview was most known for The Bobs wooden roller coaster. Other popular coasters were The Comet, The Silver Flash, The Fireball and the Jetstream. Aladdin's Castle was a classic fun house with a collapsing stairway, mazes and turning barrel. Shoot the Chutes, Hades, the Rotor, Tilt-a-Whirl, Wild Mouse, the Mill on the Floss (Tunnel of Love), and Flying Turns were just a few of the many classic rides. "The Pair-O-Chutes at Riverview Park'll shake us up all day" is a line from the Beach Boys' song "Amusement Parks U.S.A." from their 1965 album, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). There were over 120 rides in the park. Racism and closing Riverview closed in 1967. Urban myths endure, describing the park's "seedy" atmosphere in the 1960s, as it coincidentally became more integrated. Contemporaneous articles in black publications, such as the Chicago Defender, described black patrons being subject to both latent and overt racism; the most overt being a longstanding attraction named "Dunk the Nigger", later renamed "African Dip", which the NAACP successfully lobbied to shut down in the 1950s. In 1966, when Martin Luther King visited Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley shut the park for several days, believing it would become a site of racial unrest. According to Victoria Wolcott, author of 2012 book Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters Chuck Wlodarczyk, author of Riverview Gone But Not Forgotten, once performed shows about the park and reported people often approached him afterwards to report hearsay of someone raped in the park restrooms by a black man, however no actual record of these crimes exist. A Chicago Tribune article from late 1967 also blames violence for the park's closure, however Wolcott