This week in history features the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the scene of the world’s first Ferris Wheel and our nation’s first serial killer.
May 1, 1893
On this day in 1893 the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago, the culmination of years of effort by the city to claim the honor of hosting the event.
Although World’s Fairs continue today (the next one is slated for Astana, Kazakhstan later this year), they are not nearly as popular as they once were.
The closest modern equivalent to the World’s Fairs of the 1800s are the Olympic Games. Both world events share the same life cycle: on winning the honor, the selected city builds massive structures to house the games, beatifies the immediate area in which visitors to the games congregate, enjoys the short few weeks of international attention and inevitably abandons the newly built superstructures after the closing of the event.
Just as the Olympics today provide the host country a chance to dazzle the world with displays of its heritage, its present industry and future greatness (think opening and closing ceremonies), so too did the World’s Fairs of the 1800s.
At what is widely considered the first World’s Fair held in Hyde Park in London in 1851, the English constructed a nearly one million square foot building of glass and iron, a marvel of its time in an age when the all-glass skyscraper was still decades off.
They coined this marvel, appropriately, the Crystal Palace. Inside were exhibitions of people, artifacts and animals from all corners of the British Empire, a remarkable display of the reach of England and a potent reminder to the world of the island nation’s power.
America received its first World’s Fair in 1876, the centennial of the birth of the nation. Held in Philadelphia, the fair proved to be a financial disaster.
Following the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889, during which the Eiffel Tower was unveiled, America hoped to have another shot at the honor.
When Chicago won the bid for the fair by beating out New York City, people were understandably surprised. After all, by the early 1890s the only thing Chicago was known for was its massive slaughter house where thousands of cattle were butchered and processed on a daily basis – hardly the nation’s best foot to put forward.
To make matters worse, the city still hadn’t fully recovered from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire that had devastated over three square miles and killed hundreds of people.
Despite these challenges, the leaders of the exposition planning team succeeded in designing and building a remarkable park where visitors could walk through over 200 buildings painted brilliant white and designed by the nation’s leading architects.
These pearlescent structures stood amid a 600 acre park of green fields and neatly sculpted hedgerows. Delicate bridges spanned a series of canals that cut through from Lake Michigan, demarcating sections of the fair and reflecting on their cool surfaces the imposing structures that crowded around.
From the ashes of devastation, a new Chicago had emerged, if only for a few months’ time. In place of the city of coal smoke and animal carcasses arose one of culture, arts and imagination—truly a city deserving of the name “The White City.”
Between May 1 and the end of October, some 26 million people from around the world flocked to Chicago.
Visitors could wander through 14 “great buildings” and marvel at exhibitions highlighting agriculture, mining, arts and sciences, machinery and electricity.
For the first time in World’s Fair history, foreign nations were also given spaces to display their own heritage. Norway sent a recreated Viking long ship, which sailed across the Atlantic and sat docked during the fair alongside the life-sized replicas of Christopher Columbus’ three famous ships (after all the fair was ostensibly in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America).
Separate from these exhibition spaces was an entire area dedicated to entertainment where visitors could watch risqué and exotic dances, clamber aboard carnival rides and compete in games.
Unveiled for the first time at this fair was a remarkable ride that has since become a staple of amusement parks the world over: the Ferris Wheel.
Standing nearly 300 feet tall, the Ferris Wheel (so named for its designer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.) rotated on a 71 ton axle, turning in a slow roll some 36 passenger cars that could each accommodate up to 60 people.
This remarkable machine proved the centerpiece of the fair and the ticket sales went some ways into making the Chicago World’s Fair more of a financial success than the previous one.
For better or worse, however, the 1893 fair is not remembered today for the whimsical Ferris Wheel or any one of the thousands of wonders on display.
Thanks to Erik Larson’s narrative nonfiction book “The Devil in the White City,” the Chicago fair is instead known for being the hunting ground of America’s first known serial killer, H.H. Holmes.
Holmes confessed to killing 27 people, although authorities could only confirm nine.
For the next century pulp fiction authors would inflate the character of Holmes, at one time pushing the number of his victims to 200 and claiming that he had torture devices in a building he owned three miles from the fair itself.
These rumormongers and our very human love of the bizarre have blown out of proportion an admittedly sordid tale to the exclusion of all else.
In the end, no matter how amazing the spectacle, all World’s Fairs come to an end. By the close of 1893, most of the buildings that had taken years of planning and construction to come to fruition were taken down.
Of the over 200 structures built for the fair, only two remain today in place: the Palace of Fine Arts and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building.
All of those remarkable structures of stunning white were largely facades of easily dismantled material. An unthinkable amount of human effort and expense had gone into creating a temporary paradise of only six months. In many ways, the superfluity and waste of the whole venture was itself part of the show. In the end, the show must go on.
Antone Pierucci is the former curator of the Lake County Museum and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.