108

Chicago Evening Journal
May 29/93.

THE CHICAGO EVE

ALL FIGHT FOR SPACE

SHOWMEN AND BILL-POSTERS
ENGAGE IN LIVELY WAR

Lack of Bill Boards for the Multiplicity
of Attractions Causes Strife and Leads
to Midnight Trickery--Forepaugh's
Coming Likely to Increase the Rivalry
to the Point of Danger

Bill-posters are embarrassed with riches,
as a rule, but Chicago's knights of the paste
brush are doubly so just now. They are
literally suffering from a plethora of boodle,
and, after the fashion of a South American
republic, their inflation is based on paper.
On the other hand, the people who are filling
the bill-posters' pockets--the managers
of theaters, museums, circuses and the
hundred and one enterprises which allege
they amuse the public--are convinced that
their chief troubles lie in the bucket of
paste, the brush appertaining to it, and the
sheets of paper which make fences and
dead walls scream with color.

The World's Fair has multiplied Chicago's
places of amusement by ten, to put it
mildly. A very large number of these rely
more or less upon the bill-poster to blazon
forth their attractions before the public
eye. The theaters cover a great many acres
of space each week with advertising bills.
For miles around Chicago the names and
titles of the actors and plays to be seen in
the city theaters may be read on hundreds
of stands. Now, on top of all the theaters,
the World's Fair side shows, Buffalo Bill's
Wild West, and other attractions already
open and more or less certain to run as long
as the World's Fair is open, which kept the
bill-posters hustling to provide for, Forepaugh's
circus looms up on the horizon.
The arrival of Forepaugh's promises to
bring the tangled and often riotous disputes
between the theaters and the bill-posters
to a crisis.

It is an open secret that for one thing it is
to be war to the knife from the start between
Buffalo Bill and Forepaugh. The
former has been adding to his resources all
the space he could lay his hands upon, so
as to snow under Forepaugh's paper
wherever it is posted up. This is the hottest
spot in the battle, but it is not the whole
fight by any means.

Now here is the trouble as it has manifested
itself among the theaters proper: A
theater is anxious to make the best possible
showing with its bill boards, and the manager
goes to George A. Treyser Bill-posting
Company, which virtually controls all the
advertising privileges in the city, and contracts
for the putting out of so much paper.
An ordinary display used to cost a theater
$60 or $70 a week. It is an index of how
the World's Fair has swelled the expenses
of theater-running, that to make the same
impression upon the public a manager must
spend from $300 to $350. The life of a bill is
commonly a week; that is the bases upon
which the poster makes his charges.