“The White City” is the nickname given to the buildings constructed for the 1893 World’s Fair ^[1] held in Chicago, Illinois. Officially known as the “World’s Columbian Exposition ^[2],” the 1893 Fair was the last and greatest of the nineteenth century’s World’s Fairs. The Exposition was considered a celebration of Columbus’ voyages ^[3] 400 years earlier, but was truly a reflection and celebration of American culture and society.

Located in Jackson Park ^[4] on Chicago’s South Side, the 1893 Exposition was known as “the White City” for its gleaming white, Beaux-Arts ^[5] style ^[6] buildings ^[7] designed by famed architect Daniel Burnham ^[8], famous for designing the Flatiron Building ^[9] in New York, among many others, and the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White ^[10], famous for the now-lost Pennsylvania Station ^[11] in New York among many others. The buildings of the so-called White City dotted a lagoon reminiscent of Venice.  Only two of the buildings from the World’s Fair survive to this day in their original location: the Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry ^[12]; and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which is now the Art Institute of Chicago ^[13].

“Stepping off the cable car that had brought him from the Loop, he stood on the Hyde Park prairie Paul Cornell had plated and drained, between Olmsted’s Washington and Jackson Parks, gazing with disappointment at the ‘unfinished gray stone buildings scattered loosely over the immense campus which was nothing more than a quagmire with a frog pond at the south end.’  Just a few blocks east of this chaotic construction scene, he could see the vastly larger building site of the great fair Chicago would host.  They stood next to each other, connected by Olmsted’s Midway Plaisance, two miniature cities in the making, Burnham’s White City and Harper’s Gray City, both of them planned by ‘ardent, ambitious businessmen eager to change the city’s image from one of barbarous materialism to one of refinement and culture.’”—Donald L. Miller ^[14], City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America ^[15]. (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 394.

The Exposition drew more than 27 million visitors from all over the world, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass ^[16], social reformer Jane Addams ^[17], writer Paul Laurence Dunbar ^[18], writer Henry Blake Fuller ^[19], and composer Scott Joplin ^[20].