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World’s Columbian Exposition May 1 – October 31, 1893 The Paris Exposition of 1889 inspired Chicago’s businessmen and Mayor Carter Harrison to want the same for their city, now the subject of discussion the world over because of its astonishing growth and structural innovation. By the 1890s, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the country and assumed it would overtake New York’s population to become the biggest. And by virtue of its commercial power, Chicago became the upstart city that St. Louis hadn’t become. In the Nineteenth century, there was a noticeable rivalry between Cincinnati and Chicago but the longest lasting and most intense competition was that with New York City. Often, the East Coast city dismissed the midwestern capital as a “frontier town,” and it chose to look across the ocean for its construction inspiration, building fake palazzos and chateaux. In a last-minute “frontier-like” push for funds, the House of Representatives awarded the rights to a World’s Fair to Chicago. But then New York’s press stepped up the anti-Chicago rhetoric. The genesis of the term “Windy City” was actually begun with New York’s description of the newspaper boosterism for Chicago’s plans to host the next World’s Fair. On February 1, 1891, the New York Times printed an article on the progress of the fair buildings that was full of bile. Fearing that they would dwarf the foreign exhibits and writing: “There is more danger that the Chicago tendency will be to make it colossal and grandiose, rather than complete, systematized and well ordered.” It was simply the latest round of the competition between the two cities but they were half-right. Its well ordered looks were to transform America’s communities for decades. Chicago World’s Fair Because there would be no breathtaking technological achievement to introduce at the fair, “architecture” itself would be the main draw. As it was hoped the project would be more national as opposed to regional, the fair’s Director of Works, Daniel Burnham, gave Eastern architects the prime major pavilions around the Court of Honor to create. The local architects were awarded the more distant pavilions and were notably aghast. The enormous Manufactures and Liberal Arts pavilion went to George B. Post; the Agriculture pavilion was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead and White; and the Administration Building, the domed centerpiece structure, was given to Richard Morris Hunt.
Though Burnham had only specified a “monumental design,” the Eastern architects decoratively laid out the main court in classical grandeur making them feel more comfortable in an idiom they’d perfected from their school days in Paris’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was also the death knell for the Chicago School of Architecture. In a sad twist, Burnham’s partner, John Wellborn Root, a chief exponent of Chicago’s new commercial style and the lead architect for the entire fair, also died of pneumonia in the middle of January of 1891. To replace his engineering and design capability, Burnham quickly placed 60 pavilions in the hands of Charles B. Atwood and the only fair building still standing is his, the gigantic Palace of Fine Arts.
Construction Four times the size of the previous fair in Paris, the slightly delayed “World’s Columbian Exposition” was dedicated in October of 1892 on the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the American continent but opened to the public on May 1, 1893. Though the fair pavilions were built of iron trussed lathe covered sheds, their skins were made of “staff,” a combination of plaster and jute formed into a Beaux-Arts design. Known as the “White City” because of its blinding paint color, the imperial Roman architecture was so vast it made Rome, itself, seem small. Root’s death had altered Burnham’s aesthetic compass and he no longer felt constrained by the pragmatic utility of Chicago School construction. Greece and Rome became his models for the world’s newest empire. And it swept through nearly every new bank, railroad station, and commercial building in America for the next thirty years. Layout The fair’s sculptural centerpieces in the basin of the Court of Honor depicted superheroically scaled “marble” oarsmen driving the barge of Columbus toward a towering, golden Statue of the Republic. Working with the landscape designer of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, Burnham had turned the marshy shoreline on the far South Side into a magnificent stage.
Away from the monumental Greco-Roman buildings of the Court of Honor were the pavilions along the lagoon to the North. More eclectic in their exteriors, with Tudor, Chateauesque, Spanish, Renaissance and even Japanese forms, they were still arranged picturesquely along promenades or reflected in water.
The smaller “States” buildings were mainly clustered in a jumble of differing architectural styles North of (and behind) the Palace of Fine Arts. Facing the North Pond, the Fine Arts building by Atwood had been built of heavier fireproof brick and iron for insurance reasons though its skin of staff eventually weathered so heavily, it was replaced by limestone in the Nineteen-Thirties for its conversion to the Museum of Science and Industry. But while the main and most remembered parts of the fair were the magnificent “White City” of Greco-Roman Pavilions or the more eclectic buildings surrounding lagoons, gondolas, and wooded isles, the Midway shooting westward was a loud carnival of ethnic “villages” and side-show attractions. The belly-dancing “Little Egypt” shared the stages there with the towering Ferris Wheel in attracting raucous crowds.
Louis Sullivan Just a few steps from the Classical and overwhelmingly white grouping of the main pavilions surrounding the Court of Honor was Louis Sullivan’s red “Transportation Exhibit.” Nearly 1,000 feet long and mirrored by its reflection in the lagoon, nothing could have been more stylistically divergent from the Beaux-Arts Classicism of the fair’s main parlor.
Though it kept to the 65 foot cornice height of the major pavilions, it was defiantly polychromatic in “autumnal” shades. Oddly, Burnham saw it as Romanesque but suggested a slight change leading to its most memorable feature. Instead of the two planned entrances at either end of the 960-foot long building, Burnham suggested that Sullivan place a single grand entrance in a 100-foot wide triumphal arch at its center. What history calls the “Golden Door” was built as diminishing crescents leading to three sets of human-sized doors and deeply overhanging eave that glittered with a frame of gold and silver “Sullivanian” ornament. Grandeur Awestruck visitors, even those who’d travelled to the capitals of Europe, had never seen such gargantuan splendor. The plaster shelled Manufactures Building alone was so enormous that today’s tallest Chicago skyscraper could have reclined spaciously within its central room. Its chandeliers were made from 70 foot diameter hoops of electric lights.
Arriving at the downtown train stations in the grimy, sooty Loop and traveling to the pristine whiteness of the South Side fair couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the fairgoer. However, the 27 million visitors not only took in the fair itself but a big, crowded, noisy city that forever changed their perceptions of America. Both the actual Roman Forum clothed in marble and Chicago’s White City coated in plaster were transitory affairs for just a moment in time. However, while the original builders of the Forum were re-using symbolic structures to proclaim their control, the designers of the fair were using Classical forms to communicate grandeur. The fact that Chicago itself had been creating modern solutions in authentic iron, steel, and brick in a Commercial Style now known as the Chicago School of Architecture couldn’t compete in symbolism with the Classical look of the fair. From then on, every new bank, library and train station resembled Roman temples and basilicas in the time of Augustus. And Burnham, ever the businessman, got the commissions to build them. Louis Sullivan, the artistic soul of the modern movement, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, wrote decades later, “The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer.” He never forgave Burnham for turning his back on pure structural expression in favor of the archaic Classicism of the fair, calling it alternately “feudal” and “imperial.” Sullivan bitterly wrote: “(Burnham) was a colossal merchandiser whose megalomania concerning the largest, the tallest, the most costly and sensational, moved on in its sure orbit, as he painfully learned to use the jargon of big business.” City Beautiful The fair had introduced middle America to a grandiose Beaux-Arts salad of colonnades, domes, and vistas. Bankers and corporate chieftains wanted just the same olympian grandeur for their new edifices and the renamed “D.H. Burnham and Company” was only too glad to accommodate their historicist tastes. The entire fair was situated on reconfigured Olmsted designed lagoons and islands planned cohesively for grand vistas and promenades. Its look was not lost on the giant hordes who took back to their own towns the lessons of re-development starting the “City Beautiful Movement” across America. Demise Just before the fair’s close at the end of October, Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison Sr., was assassinated in his home by an unemployed immigrant, placing a pall over the festivities. After a few weeks, the pavilions’ close proximity and wood lathe of the structures saw fires jump easily from one to another. Chicago’s winter weather degraded the plaster coating into rivulets of slurry on promenades. And by 1894’s summer, one final fire left only huge trusses as the bones of a once great memory. Chicago Through a figurative competition with much older European cities and its very literal political will, the look of the Fair became the direction for a new Chicago. Unlike Daniel Burnham’s plans for San Francisco and Manila in 1905, the White City’s fanciful and almost grandiose visuals acted as a kind of philosophy for the actual city’s future trajectory and later look of grandeur along the lakefront. Today, Chicago’s 55 million yearly visitors have not only transformed its rivalry with New York into a sporadic, cultural measurement, it converted its competition to a primarily monetary one against Las Vegas and Orlando for convention tourist dollars. But it may never have achieved great beauty without that competition and the World’s Columbian Exposition pointing the way. |
