Before it became the dazzling White City that welcomed millions of visitors during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, it was a swamp – thick with mud, battered by icy winds coming off Lake Michigan. It took quite the imagination to take an otherwise unimpressive swath of land and transform it into a wonderland of ingenuity, culture, art, and architecture. Luckily for Chicago – eager to prove itself as a great American city – Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the laborers who built the fair had imagination and tenacity to spare... Read More

In the Electricity Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, fairgoers could get their first glimpse of a light bulb, see a moving picture through a kinetoscope, or watch eggs hatch in an electric egg incubator. Yet alongside these marvels of modern invention stood a far darker symbol of the electrical age: the electric chair. The Chicago World’s Fair showcased both astonishing innovation and some of the darker impulses of humanity. The fair took place at the tail end of the Gilded Age, when wealth inequality was reaching new heights in America and sometimes-violent labor conflicts made headlines. Even building the fair was dangerous in itself, with more than 700 accidents and 18 deaths in the 20 months it took to build the fairgrounds. Though rightfully remembered as a dazzling triumph of innovation and architecture, the White City was also marked by death, inequality, and exploitation... Read More

For all the planning and labor required to raise an entire city from Chicago’s swampy lakefront for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the White City was never meant to last. Most of the gleaming exhibition halls were made of wood and iron frames and coated with a material called staff – a mixture of plaster of paris mixed with hemp fiber. Ahead of a planned demolition of the fair’s buildings, many of the exhibition halls were destroyed by a fire in January 1894 only a few months after the fair ended. Though the White City is long gone, and the land it once occupied has been reshaped, remnants of the fair still linger in Chicago and beyond – if you know where to look... Read More