The Night Starlight Lit the Fair

Out along the lakefront here once stood a fairground lit, quite literally, by starlight that began its journey decades before anyone in Chicago bought a ticket.

In nineteen thirty three, the city opened the Century of Progress Exposition on reclaimed land in Burnham Park, celebrating one hundred years since Chicago's founding and trying to lift Depression era spirits with a vision of technological optimism. For the opening ceremony, organizers reached for something more dramatic than a simple switch. Astronomers aimed telescopes at the star Arcturus, captured its faint light through photoelectric cells, and used that signal to trigger the current that lit the entire fairground at once.

The choice of Arcturus was deliberate. Light travels fast, but even so, the light arriving that night had left the star roughly forty years earlier, right around the time of Chicago's previous World's Fair in eighteen ninety three. The symbolism was the point: a beam of light already crossing space when the city hosted its first great fair had finally arrived just in time to switch on its second one.

Built on more than four hundred acres of lakefront fill stretching from around twelfth street down to thirty ninth, the fair ran for two seasons and drew nearly forty nine million visitors, an enormous number for a country still deep in economic hardship. Its motto, Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms, captured the mood of an era eager to believe technology could lead the way out of crisis.

Almost nothing of the fairground physically remains today. But the idea behind that opening night, an ancient point of starlight closing a circuit between two Chicago World's Fairs forty years apart, still counts as one of the more poetic tricks any city has pulled off just to turn on the lights.