World's Columbian Exposition

Based on Wikipedia: World's Columbian Exposition

In the summer of 1893, a city rose from the swamps of Chicago's South Side. It had no residents. It would stand for only six months. And yet more than 27 million people would walk its pristine boulevards, gaze at its gleaming white palaces, and ride what was then the largest machine ever built by human hands. When it was over, almost all of it would be torn down or burned. But the ideas born in that temporary city would reshape America.

This was the World's Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

Why Chicago?

The fair was meant to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas. That anniversary fell in 1892, but organizing a world's fair takes time, so the actual celebration came a year late. The bigger question was where to hold it.

Four American cities wanted the honor: New York, Washington, St. Louis, and Chicago. This was not merely civic pride. Hosting a world's fair meant profits, soaring real estate values, and international prestige. The competition was fierce.

New York had money on its side. Financial titans J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor pledged $15 million to bring the fair to Manhattan. Chicago's business elite countered with their own fortunes. Charles Yerkes, the streetcar magnate. Marshall Field, the department store king. Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift, the meatpacking barons. Cyrus McCormick Jr., whose family had revolutionized farming with the mechanical reaper.

But what tipped the scales was a banker named Lyman Gage. In a single 24-hour period, he raised several million dollars more than New York's final offer. Congress voted, and Chicago won on the eighth ballot.

Chicago's representatives had made another argument that resonated. In a Senate hearing, Thomas Barbour Bryan pointed out that New York was too cramped, too obstructed. Chicago could offer something New York couldn't: vast open land where there was "not a house to buy and not a rock to blast." More importantly, Chicago was accessible to ordinary Americans. Bryan argued that the fair should be reachable by "the artisan and the farmer and the shopkeeper and the man of humble means." A fair in the heart of the country would belong to the whole country.

Rising From Ashes

Chicago had something to prove.

Just 22 years earlier, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had leveled much of the city. The fire killed hundreds and left a third of the population homeless. Chicago rebuilt with astonishing speed, but the rest of the world still thought of it as a rough frontier town, a city of stockyards and slaughterhouses, practical but not cultured.

The fair would change that perception forever.

Daniel Burnham, a Chicago architect, was named director of works. He gathered the greatest architects and artists in America and gave them an unprecedented challenge: design an entire city from scratch. Not just buildings, but lagoons, canals, promenades, and gardens. All of it would be temporary, built to last just one summer, but it would be built to inspire.

Burnham brought in Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who had designed Central Park in New York, to shape the grounds. The site chosen was Jackson Park, then a swampy wasteland on the shores of Lake Michigan. Olmsted transformed it into a network of waterways and islands, with a great central basin representing Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic.

The White City

The buildings were the stars.

Burnham insisted on a unified vision. The architecture would follow the Beaux-Arts style, a neoclassical approach emphasizing symmetry, balance, and grandeur. The French term Beaux-Arts means "fine arts," and the style drew heavily on ancient Greek and Roman models. Think columns, domes, pediments, and elaborate sculptures.

The buildings weren't made of marble or stone. They were constructed with a material called staff, a mixture of plaster, cement, and hemp fiber that could be molded into any shape and painted. The designers painted everything white.

The effect was stunning. Visitors entering the fairgrounds found themselves in what appeared to be an ancient city of gleaming palaces reflected in calm lagoons. The nickname was inevitable: the White City.

Fourteen "great buildings" anchored the exposition. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was the largest, covering 44 acres under a single roof. At the time, it was the largest building in the world. The Agricultural Building featured a massive statue of Diana atop its central dome. The Palace of Fine Arts, the only major structure built to last, would eventually become the Museum of Science and Industry, which still stands today.

The contrast with Chicago itself was striking. Just beyond the fairgrounds lay a real city of brick and smoke, of immigrant neighborhoods and industrial grit. The White City was a fantasy, but it was a fantasy of what a city could be.

The Wheel

The 1889 World's Fair in Paris had given the world the Eiffel Tower, a thousand-foot iron structure that seemed to defy gravity. Chicago needed something equally spectacular.

George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., a 33-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh, proposed a solution: a giant wheel. Not a small carnival ride, but something unprecedented in scale. His wheel would stand 264 feet tall, roughly the height of a 26-story building. It would carry 36 cars, each large enough to hold 40 passengers. When fully loaded, the wheel would lift more than 2,000 people into the air at once.

Many thought it impossible. Critics said the wheel would collapse under its own weight or that strong winds off Lake Michigan would topple it. Burnham was skeptical but gave Ferris a chance.

Ferris delivered. The wheel worked flawlessly throughout the fair, carrying 1.5 million passengers. It became the exposition's most popular attraction. The invention proved so successful that the ferris wheel (spelled with a lowercase f, having become a generic term) became a standard feature of amusement parks worldwide. In much of Latin America, the ferris wheel is still called a "rueda de Chicago," a Chicago wheel.

The Midway

World's fairs before Chicago had mixed high culture and popular entertainment together. The Columbian Exposition tried something different: it separated them.

The White City held the serious exhibits, the art and industry and science. But extending west from Jackson Park ran a mile-long strip called the Midway Plaisance, and this was where the fun lived.

A young music promoter named Sol Bloom organized the Midway's attractions. Bloom was just 23 years old but had a showman's instinct for what would draw crowds. He packed the Midway with exotic villages representing cultures from around the world, carnival rides, and performances that ranged from educational to scandalous.

The most notorious attraction was the "Street in Cairo," which featured a dancer known as Little Egypt. She performed a version of the belly dance that Americans had never seen, a suggestive, hip-swaying routine that shocked and titillated Victorian sensibilities. The dance became known as the "hootchy-kootchy." Sol Bloom improvised a tune for the dancers when they had no music, a melody now universally associated with snake charmers. He never copyrighted it, putting it immediately in the public domain and reportedly saying he made plenty of money from the shows anyway.

The word "midway" itself entered American English because of the fair. Before 1893, Americans didn't use this term to describe the amusement area of a carnival. After 1893, every county fair and traveling carnival had a midway.

One visitor to the Chicago midway was a man named George C. Tilyou. What he saw there inspired him to create Steeplechase Park on Coney Island, one of America's first modern amusement parks. The entire American amusement park industry traces its lineage to that mile-long strip in Chicago.

Who Was Included, Who Was Not

The fair presented itself as a celebration of progress, but the question of whose progress went unasked by most white visitors.

Civil rights leaders protested the refusal to include an African American exhibit. Frederick Douglass, the towering abolitionist leader who had escaped slavery and become one of America's most powerful orators, was now in his seventies. He joined forces with Ida B. Wells, a journalist who had been documenting the epidemic of lynching in the American South. Together with Irvine Garland Penn and Ferdinand Lee Barnett, they published a pamphlet with a title that captured their argument: "The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition."

The pamphlet's answer was blunt: slavery. Its legacy explained why African Americans were excluded from representing themselves at a fair supposedly celebrating American achievement.

Ten thousand copies were distributed from the Haitian Embassy on the fairgrounds. Haiti had selected Douglass as its national representative, giving him a platform within the White City even though his own country would not. Delegations from England, Germany, France, Russia, and India responded to the pamphlet. The contradiction was hard to miss: a fair celebrating freedom and progress that systematically excluded the descendants of enslaved people.

Some African Americans did appear at the fair, but usually in exhibits organized by white sponsors. Nancy Green, a former slave, was hired by the R.T. Davis Milling Company to portray a character called Aunt Jemima, a smiling mammy figure promoting pancake mix. The character would become one of America's most enduring and troubling commercial mascots.

A few African Americans broke through on their own terms. The sculptor Edmonia Lewis showed her work. George Washington Carver, then a young scientist not yet famous for his agricultural research, displayed paintings. But these were exceptions in a fair that largely told the story of American progress as a white story.

Native Americans appeared primarily in ethnological exhibits designed by white anthropologists. Near the Anthropology Building stood recreations of cliff dwellings and wigwams. A "model Indian school" brought Native American children to demonstrate how they were being educated in government boarding schools, institutions we now understand as instruments of cultural destruction.

The Ships

No one could forget why this fair existed. Christopher Columbus had crossed the Atlantic 400 years earlier, and the fair needed to honor that voyage.

Spain built full-size reproductions of Columbus's three ships: the Niña (whose actual name was the Santa Clara), the Pinta, and the Santa María. These weren't static displays. The Spanish sailed them across the Atlantic to Chicago, following roughly the same route Columbus had taken four centuries before.

The ships were a diplomatic project. American envoy William Eleroy Curtis coordinated with the Queen Regent of Spain and Pope Leo XIII to make them happen. Visitors could board the vessels and marvel at how small they were, how cramped the quarters, how audacious the voyage must have seemed.

Today we understand Columbus's arrival differently than the fair's organizers did. We know about the catastrophic diseases, the enslavement, the destruction of civilizations. The fair celebrated discovery; we now also remember conquest. But in 1893, the ships were simply a popular exhibit, drawing huge crowds eager to touch history.

Glimpses of the Future

World's fairs have always been showcases for technology, and Chicago was no exception.

Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer famous for proving that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground simultaneously, set up a Zoopraxographical Hall on the Midway. Inside, he projected moving images using his zoopraxiscope, a device that spun photographs in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. Audiences paid to see animals and people appear to move on a screen. This was, in effect, one of the first commercial movie theaters, a decade before the nickelodeon boom.

Another inventor, Ottomar Anschütz, demonstrated his electrotachyscope, which used a Geissler tube (an early kind of electrical discharge tube) to project similar illusions. The movies were coming, and the fair offered glimpses.

The John Bull locomotive made an appearance. Built in 1831, this British-designed engine was already a museum piece at 62 years old. The Smithsonian Institution had acquired it, making it the museum's first locomotive. Remarkably, the John Bull ran under its own power from Washington to Chicago for the fair and back again when it closed. In 1981, it ran again, making it the oldest surviving operable steam locomotive in the world.

A newer locomotive also drew crowds: a Baldwin 2-4-2 design that proved so impressive that the 2-4-2 wheel arrangement became known as the "Columbia" type, named for the exposition.

An Ending, and a Beginning

October 9, 1893, was designated Chicago Day at the fair. The city turned out in force. That single day drew 751,026 visitors, a world record for outdoor event attendance that would stand for years. The fair's debts were paid off with a check for $1.5 million, an enormous sum worth over $50 million today.

Then tragedy struck.

On October 28, just two days before the fair's scheduled closing, Chicago's popular mayor Carter Harrison was shot and killed at his home by a disgruntled office seeker named Patrick Eugene Prendergast. The city was stunned. Closing ceremonies were canceled. Instead of celebration, Chicago held a public memorial.

The White City itself did not survive long. Most of its buildings were temporary structures never meant to last. Some burned in fires the following year. Others were demolished. Jackson Park returned to being a public park, though now with proper landscaping instead of swamp.

But the fair's influence proved permanent.

Daniel Burnham went on to apply the lessons of the White City to actual cities. His 1909 Plan of Chicago became one of the most influential urban planning documents in American history, reshaping Chicago's lakefront and inspiring city planning movements nationwide. The "City Beautiful" movement, which emphasized grand civic spaces and classical architecture, traced directly to the Columbian Exposition.

The Midway Plaisance became a permanent boulevard, eventually forming the southern boundary of the University of Chicago, which was being built as the fair closed. The university's football team was called the Maroons, and they became the original "Monsters of the Midway" long before that nickname attached to the Chicago Bears. The university's alma mater still references the fair: "The City White hath fled the earth, but where the azure waters lie, a nobler city hath its birth, the City Gray that ne'er shall die."

Louis Comfort Tiffany, the master of stained glass, built a chapel for the exposition that made his reputation. After changing hands several times, even returning to Tiffany's own estate, the chapel was eventually restored and now resides at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Florida.

Chicago commemorated the fair by adding one of the stars to its municipal flag. The city remembers.

A Historian Speaks

Just outside the fairgrounds, a different kind of event was taking place. Buffalo Bill Cody had been denied space at the fair itself, so he set up his Wild West Show nearby, drawing his own crowds with sharpshooting, trick riding, and reenactments of frontier battles.

Meanwhile, a historian named Frederick Jackson Turner was giving academic lectures at a conference associated with the fair. His subject was the American frontier, and his argument would reshape how Americans understood their own history.

Turner declared that the frontier was closed. The 1890 census had shown that there was no longer a clear line of settlement moving westward. The great era of westward expansion, which had defined American identity for three centuries, was over. Americans would have to find new frontiers.

The irony was perfect. Buffalo Bill performed nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, while yards away, a historian explained why it had vanished. The fair itself offered a vision of a different American future: urban, industrial, technological, organized. The White City was a prophecy.

The Persistence of Memory

Why does an event from 1893 still matter?

Partly because it was simply big. Twenty-seven million visitors in six months, at a time when the entire population of the United States was about 63 million. Nearly half the country either attended or knew someone who did. The fair became a shared reference point, a common memory.

Partly because it shaped physical places we still inhabit. The Museum of Science and Industry occupies the fair's Palace of Fine Arts. Jackson Park still exists. The Midway Plaisance still runs through Chicago's South Side.

Partly because it demonstrated what was possible. A swamp could become a city. A city could become a dream. Americans came away from the fair believing that the future could be designed, that progress could be planned, that beauty could be democratized.

And partly because the fair captured a moment of transformation. The Gilded Age was at its height. Immigration was reshaping American cities. Class tensions were severe. The previous year had seen the violent Homestead Strike. The year after the fair would bring the Pullman Strike. America was being remade by industrial capitalism, and no one quite knew what would emerge.

The White City offered one answer: a vision of order and beauty imposed on chaos. It was an illusion, a temporary fantasy that required erasure and exclusion to maintain its pristine image. But it was also genuinely inspiring, a demonstration that human beings could collaborate to create something magnificent.

That contradiction sits at the heart of the Columbian Exposition. It celebrated progress while excluding those who had been most harmed by that progress. It imagined a future while romanticizing a past. It built a city of dreams in a country that was, in reality, deeply divided.

We still live with that contradiction. The fair just made it visible.