Site of A World's Fair
After the state legislature created the South Park Commission in 1869, the designers of New York's Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, were hired to lay out the 1,055-acre (4.27 km2) park (which included the Midway Plaisance and Washington Park). Known originally as South Park, the landscape had eastern and western divisions connected by a grand boulevard named the Midway Plaisance. The eastern division became known as Lake Park; however, in 1880 the commission asked the public to suggest official names for both the eastern and western divisions. The names Jackson and Washington were proposed. In the following year, Lake Park was renamed Jackson Park to honor Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), the seventh president of the United States.
In 1890, Chicago won the honor of hosting the World's Columbian Exposition, and Jackson Park was selected as its site. Olmsted and Chicago's architect and planner, Daniel H. Burnham, laid out the fairgrounds. A team of architects and sculptors created the "White City" of plaster buildings and artworks in Beaux-Arts style. The historic World's Fair opened to visitors on May 1, 1893. After it closed six months later, the site was transformed back into parkland. Jackson Park featured the first public golf course west of the Alleghenies, which opened in 1899.
Read more about this topic: Jackson Park (Chicago)
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“That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is. When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The site of the true bottomless financial pit is the toy store. It’s amazing how much a few pieces of plastic and paper will sell for if the purchasers are parents or grandparent, especially when the manufacturers claim their product improves a child’s intellectual or physical development.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)
“Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)