The World's Columbian Exposition and the White City

Jackson Park, on Chicago's South Side lakefront, is a public park now: a few hundred acres of lawns and lagoons, a harbor, the Museum of Science and Industry sitting at its north edge. In the summer of eighteen ninety-three, it was the most visited place on earth.

The World's Columbian Exposition ran from May through October of that year, and twenty-seven million people came. At the peak of American industrial expansion, with railroads having connected the continent and electricity just beginning to reshape what cities could be, Chicago decided to stage the largest fair in history on a swampy, undeveloped patch of South Side lakeshore. The man given the job of designing it was Daniel Burnham, and he had five years.

What Burnham and his collaborators produced was the White City: a set of Beaux-Arts buildings in gleaming white plaster facing a series of lagoons, lit at night by electric lamps in a country where most buildings still used gas. It introduced the Ferris Wheel to American culture, the original one designed by George Washington Gale Ferris, two hundred and sixty-four feet tall, carrying thirty-six gondolas, each holding sixty people. It also introduced the dishwasher, the zipper, and Juicy Fruit gum. Thomas Edison's laboratory exhibited there. Buffalo Bill's Wild West show ran nearby. Scott Joplin played in the clubs along the Midway.

The Palace of Fine Arts was the only exposition building constructed of permanent materials: brick and steel behind its limestone facade, designed to last. After the fair ended, it sat empty for decades, then became the Field Columbian Museum, then changed hands, and in nineteen thirty-three reopened as the Museum of Science and Industry. The building you can see from this road is the same building Burnham raised in eighteen ninety-two, wearing a different institution's name.

The fairgrounds themselves were demolished. The White City existed for six months. The photographs survive: a city of extraordinary ambition built on a wetland, opened to the world, then taken apart again. Chicago had proved something, though what exactly was debated for years afterward. That it could build anything, perhaps. That beauty and scale and electricity and commerce could be assembled on command. The fair ended in October. The White City burned in a fire the following summer. Almost nothing physical survived.