As summer days get shorter and school supplies are added to the shopping list, we know Chicago prepares to enter a new season — fall.

But before these hot, humid days are gone for good, let’s step back and think about how previous generations spent their leisurely days or nights with friends or family. For many, it was a good excuse to get to an amusement park.

Here’s a look back at some of the parks, rides and attractions that brought visitors to the ticket stands.

Capt. Paul Boyton’s Water Chute (1894-1907)

63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, Woodlawn

Then Jackson Boulevard and Kedzie Avenue, East Garfield Park

Boyton (whose last name is sometimes spelled as Boynton) was a strong swimmer who traveled the world performing feats of endurance and also organized in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a monumental lifesaving service — of which he served as captain — according to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. The imaginative Pennsylvania native also publicized the use of a rubber suit that kept him dry while he swam the English Channel in 1875, and floated down the Mississippi River in 1879.

The showman’s biggest contribution to pop culture, however, may be his “shoot the chutes” ride. Originally produced for a London show, the concept was simple. With the purchase of a ticket, riders climbed aboard a flat-bottomed boat that was transported on a track to the top of a 60-foot ramp. The boat then descended down a 300-foot chute, which was essentially a water slide, before it splashed down into an artificial lake.

An eight-person boat took on riders for the first time on July 3, 1894. Admission was 25 cents. Just a few years later — relocated to the West Side — about 20,000 people visited Boyton’s chutes in one day to partake in or watch the slide ride.

The park lost its lease in 1907, and everything within it was sold at auction. By then, competing Chicago amusement parks had their own versions of the ride.

Billings Hospital opened on the park’s original site in 1927.

Forest Park (1908-1922)

Forest Park

When Boyton’s chutes ended, Forest Park began. Operators of the new amusement park — claiming to be the biggest and brightest in the area — purchased the “Chutes” ride at auction.

Yet not everyone was happy about the park’s placement next to cemeteries. Several Lutheran congregations opposed it with one local pastor calling it “a sacrilege that such a thing should be attempted within the hearing of those mourning their dead,” the Tribune reported.

Issues mounted before the park opened its doors to the public. A violent storm destroyed a chunk of the park in late May 1908. Temporary electrical lines that illuminated the park were mysteriously cut the night of its formal opening, leading then-president of the Chicago Sanitary District and future Tribune editor/publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick to offer a reward for information leading to the suspects.

Just weeks later, visitors packed Forest Park to catch a ride on its pneumatic tube that supposedly “shot (passengers) through a tunnel three-quarters of a mile long at the rate of a thousand miles or more a minute,” the Tribune reported. The Giant Safety Coaster and Grand Canyon rides followed, according to the Historical Society of Forest Park.

The park closed in 1922, and many of its fixtures were sold off in 1923.

Kiddieland (1950-2009)

North and First avenues, Melrose Park

In 1929, Arthur Fritz lost his contracting business to the Depression. Putting together whatever money he could, he and his wife, Ann, bought six ponies for children to ride. Within two years they were able to open the County Fair Pony Track. Later they added some little cars, a merry-go-round, and a Ferris wheel, and Kiddieland was born.

By the 1960s and 1970s, according to the village of Melrose Park, the ponies were gone and the park had added a Tilt-A-Whirl, The Whip, German carousel, log flume ride and swinging pirate ship.

As many as 600,000 people visited Kiddieland by 2008.

A dispute among descendants of the 17-acre park’s founder, however, forced Kiddieland to close in September 2009.

Four rides went to Santa’s Village Amusement & Water Park in East Dundee while Great America in Gurnee got the Little Dipper, Kiddieland’s old roller coaster.

The old miniature steam engine train that would pull passengers around the park has found new life as well, at the Hesston Steam Museum in LaPorte, Indiana.

The longtime amusement park was demolished and replaced by a Costco, but its memorable sign is still displayed outside the Melrose Park Public Library, 801 N. Broadway Ave.

Luna Park (1907-1912)

52nd and Halsted streets, New City

Frederic Thompson used his experience managing exhibits at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to build Luna Park with business partner Elmer “Skip” Dundy at Coney Island in New York in 1903. He opened a park with the same name here in 1907.

“Nearly 800 willow shade trees will make Luna cool on hot midsummer days, while at night myriads of vari-colored electric lights will festoon and entwine the boughs,” the Tribune wrote in its roundup of “summer gardens.”

Among its attractions for the 10-cent cost of admission were “a roller skating rink, an auto-ride coaster, the “rube fire show,” the Razzle-Dazzle, the electric theater,” the Tribune reported just before the park’s May 11, 1907, grand opening.

Just one month later, Thompson brought his successful production of “Brewster’s Millions” — the story eventually became the 1985 film starring Richard Pryor and John Candy — to Chicago’s Colonial Theatre. The Tribune loved its “masterly stagecraft” and and called its “dramatic flare” — “light and frivolous and accordingly admirably suited to the requirements of the summer season.”

James “Big Jim” O’Leary — son of Catherine O’Leary of the Great Chicago Fire fame and owner of a gambling establishment near the Union Stockyards — bought Luna Park in 1908, and immediately slashed admission to five cents.

“I’m going to make it into a high-class amusement resort,” O’Leary said. “Nothing disorderly will be permitted.”

O’Leary shut the park down after the 1912 season with plans to transform the site into a marketplace for meat, vegetables and groceries.

Old Chicago (1975-1980)

Bolingbrook

Turn-of-the-century themed Old Chicago amusement park/shopping center — the first enclosed one in the United States — opened in Bolingbrook. It went bankrupt and closed in March 1980.

Amazon purchased the site in early 2020, for $50 million.

Riverview Park (1904-1967)

Western and Belmont avenues, North Center

Riverview was something special. Tribune columnist Rick Kogan summed it up best in 2017:

A great deal of life is about loss, of people and things. Most landmarks of our youth have vanished. So much of the city and the suburbs have been razed, paved over, obliterated.