The Rainbow City

The Pan-American Exposition of nineteen-oh-one was not supposed to be about death. It was supposed to be about light.

Buffalo in nineteen-oh-one was the most electrically advanced city in the United States, possibly in the world. The hydroelectric power arriving from Niagara Falls had been supplying the city for five years. Buffalo had electric streetcars, electric streetlights, electric factory motors. When the city won the bid to host a world's fair celebrating the nations of the Western Hemisphere, the planners decided that electricity would be the central theme.

The fairgrounds covered three hundred fifty acres north of the city. At the center rose the Electric Tower, three hundred ninety-one feet tall, encrusted with forty thousand light bulbs. Every major building was outlined in colored incandescent lights. At night, a central switch controlled two million bulbs simultaneously, all of them powered by Niagara Falls from twenty-five miles away. Newspapers covering the fair called the effect the Rainbow City.

The buildings themselves were designed in a unified style called the Free Renaissance, an eclectic mix of Spanish colonial, Italian Renaissance, and baroque elements. Nearly all of them were made of plaster on a wooden frame, designed to be temporary. The colors were deliberately chosen: warm tones near the center shifting to cooler tones toward the edges, the whole composition meant to be read as a single artwork from the towers and observation points.

Eight million people attended the exposition between May and November of nineteen-oh-one. The world they saw there, a city illuminated as no city had been illuminated before, was a vision of what electricity would eventually make ordinary. Most of the buildings were torn down within about a year after the fair closed.

What remained was a changed landscape, a new model of civic ambition, and the memory of a summer when Buffalo showed what the century was going to look like.