World's Columbian Exposition - Planning and Organization

Planning and Organization

The fair was planned in the early 1890s, the Gilded Age of rapid industrial growth, immigration, and class violence. World's fairs, such as London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, had been successful in Europe as a way to bring together societies fragmented along class lines. However, the first American attempt at world's fair in 1876 in Philadelphia, though hugely successful in attendance, lost money. Nonetheless, ideas about marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing started to take hold in the 1880s. Towards the end of the decade, civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City, Washington DC and Chicago expressed interest in hosting a fair, in order to generate profits, boost real estate values, and promote their cities. Congress was called on to decide the location. New York's financiers J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor, among others, pledged $15 million to finance the fair if Congress awarded it to New York, while Chicagoans Charles T. Yerkes, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Cyrus McCormick, offered to finance a Chicago fair. What finally persuaded Congress was Chicago banker Lyman Gage who raised several million additional dollars in a 24-hour period, over and above New York's final offer.

The exposition corporation and national exposition commission settled on Jackson Park as the fair site. Daniel H. Burnham was selected as director of works, and George R. Davis as director-general. Burnham emphasized architecture and sculpture as central to the fair and assembled the period's top talent to design the buildings and grounds including Frederick Law Olmsted for the grounds. The buildings were neoclassical, painted white, resulting in the name “White City” for the fair site.

Meanwhile Davis's team organized the exhibits with the help of G. Brown Goode of the Smithsonian. The Midway was inspired by the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition which included ethnological "villages". The Exposition's offices set up shop in the upper floors of the Rand McNally Building on Adams Street, the world's first all-steel-framed skyscraper.