The Columbian Exposition
If I had to choose one single event or episode over which our history crossed into the modern world, it would be Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The imprint it, and things Chicago, left on our profession and American urban history over the next several decades (until the Depression), was profound, and almost without exception formative and constructive to the profession. The 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair)—the “Great White City”, led by folk such as Olmsted Sr. and Calvert Vaux (who in the Exposition fused the Parks Movement, landscape architecture and the Planning Movements into one project). The Fair protected by arguably the most successful businessman mayor of the Gilded Age, Carter Harrison Sr.[1], lifted the career of American economic development’s first celebrity innovator, Daniel Burnham. The World’s Fair established, for a quarter of a century or more, Chicago, its universities and schools of thought, as the epicenter of urban affairs, and a beacon into the urban future. “The Chicago World’s Fair symbolized the rise of the city in American life.”[2]
Say what you will, this competition was sheer municipal boosterism that would make any economic developer proud. Chicago, as the consequence of its largest annexation ever, had leaped into being the nation’s second most populous city. It was “the undisputed mistress of the West, their civic pride at once catapulted them into a contest with New York, Philadelphia and Washington for the privileged of being designated by Congress as a city to hold the proposed exposition” commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus discovery of America.[3] The Exposition was to serve as a visible and successful symbol “of order and beauty” which hopefully would convince cities to adopt physical redevelopment as a strategy for remedying the obvious physical decay of the industrial city.
As might be expected a raft of big cities competed for certification by Congress. Each city was represented by a citizen’s and businessman’s host committee; each with the support of their municipal and state governments. Each out-promised the other and the lobbying which followed gave rise to one plausible explanation for Chicago’s nick-name, the Windy City.
The businessmen of [Chicago] realistically appraised as ‘hustlers’ by the New York Times matched this outburst of municipal activity by the vigor by which they organized to vanquish all other competitors for the World’s Fair, particularly New York. The Chicago Tribune saw it ‘not so much as a fight between Chicago and New York as between West and the East’.[4]
But in its favor, Chicago had developed a park system in the 1870’s, established a sewer district embracing much of Cook County that required the city’s ten foot rise in sea level, and had started construction of a ship canal that would reverse the flow of the Chicago river. Chicago was on a roll and was not about to lose the competition[5]. The Chicago delegation’s head was Daniel Hudson Burnham.
Daniel Burnham, an upstate New York native, had established himself in Chicago as a noted architect and co-founder of a firm which was nationally-known as a practitioner of the newly emerging Chicago school of architecture. The Chicago school’s signature distinction was the skyscraper. We pick up Burnham’s career in 1890 and the Chicago World Fair. Burnham, a leader of the Chicago delegation, was later chosen as the Fair’s chief planner and director of the works (its CEO or COO). As would be said today, the Columbian Exposition was very much “his baby”; while administered by a prestigious board, Burnham fit the design and plan into his perspective (making Louis Sullivan an enemy by imposing height limits, precluding the skyscraper) and imposing a Beaux Arts style on each structure. Olmsted, deeply involved, physically organized the buildings into three geographies, each representing his earlier described commercial, home and common “park”. Unable to convince city officials to locate significant public buildings in the campus, the Exposition did not include those elements which would be the core of the later City Beautiful.
In the spring of 1893, the Great White City opened its exhibits of America’s (and Chicago’s) technological and inventive achievements. Twenty-one million people attended (Burnham apparently was Chicago’s de facto tourism director). The architecture, the unified plan, the canals, as well as the infamous “little Egypt” (a stripper), ignited the crowds, and the imagination of the world. If timing is everything, Burnham timed it right (excepting that it coincided almost exactly with the Panic of 1893). He emerged from the Fair as the nation’s best known architect, the personification of the Great White City. Virtually every American city wanted to copy the Great White City and so Burnham’s architectural firm profited immensely. Given Burnham’s natural energy and entrepreneurship, his knack for coining a phrase, and impressing an audience, Burnham would preside over the next generation’s planning and city beautiful movements.
Burnham became known as the chief figure in the City Beautiful movement, which sought the transformation of the city through the creation of neoclassical civic centers, park systems, tree-lined boulevards and plazas with fountains and statuary. This Chicagoan was the spearhead of a cause spreading throughout the country, and because of him the Windy City captured the attention of Americans entranced by the possibilities of urban planning.[6]
[1] Carter Harrison and the World’s Fair were irretrievably linked—he was assassinated two days previous to its closing. Readers might read Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York, Crown Publishers, 2003)
[2] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3rd Edition) (New York, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), p. 260.
[3] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 31.
[4] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 32.
[5] Between 1890 and the First World War, Chicago would play a leading role in our history. The Pullman suburb, the industrial park, the Great White City, the skyscraper, Burnham, the Chicago Plan, Hull House, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the path-breaking University of Chicago disciplinal based dominance of the Policy World. I attribute much of this innovation to the wide open and highly permeable political and policy system in operation in Chicago at the time. The power and affluence of the Commercial Club, the leadership of father and son Carter Harrison, the ward-based Gray Hawk ethnic boss system with the very closest of connections to the emerging world of organized crime was a free for all into which the energetic and the affluent could pursue their initiatives. The prosperity and aggressive style which became characteristic of Chicago jelled to allow important initiatives to go forward, sufficient at least to convey momentum and success to its pioneering innovations.
[6] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: the Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, Indiana University Press,1994), p. 138.
Ron W. Coan 