The Century of Progress, Depression-Era Ambition on the Lakefront

In nineteen thirty-three, the worst year of the Great Depression, Chicago opened a World's Fair. Unemployment nationally was approaching twenty-five percent. Banks had collapsed. The Hoovervilles were visible from the fairground gates. The theme the organizers chose was scientific progress, which under the circumstances required either magnificent optimism or a certain defiance of reality, and the result looked like both.

The Century of Progress Exposition ran across two seasons, nineteen thirty-three and nineteen thirty-four, on a stretch of lakefront south of the Loop. Where the eighteen ninety-three World's Fair had been entirely white, a deliberate classical statement in plaster and marble, the Century of Progress was a riot of color: buildings in pastel blue, red, yellow, and orange, art deco geometry instead of Beaux-Arts columns. Over thirty-nine million people attended across both seasons. Sally Rand performed her fan dance with large ostrich-feather fans, and became the most photographed woman in America that summer.

Among the fair's exhibitors were the major corporations that had survived the Depression intact, presenting technological futures that the fair's visitors could not afford to purchase. General Motors showed the Futurama. Ford showed a V-eight engine being assembled. The fair sold a vision of prosperity as imminent when it was, for most visitors, not imminent at all.

After the fair closed, eleven houses that had been built as demonstration homes on a lagoon island were not demolished. They were loaded onto barges and floated across Lake Michigan to Beverly Shores, Indiana, where they were placed on permanent foundations. Five survive inside what is now Indiana Dunes National Park, representing an accidental time capsule of nineteen thirties modernist domestic design: a House of Tomorrow with twelve-sided walls and an airplane hangar, a Rostone House in experimental artificial stone, a Florida Tropical House in pastel stucco.

They are still there, if you know where to look.