World's Fairs

A world's fair was a complete city, built at enormous expense, occupied by millions of people for a single summer, and then demolished. That is the fact that makes the photographs valuable: they are all that remains.

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 set the pattern and remains the most consequential. Daniel Burnham assembled the leading architects in the country and imposed a single classical style, a uniform cornice line and a uniform color — white — across a set of enormous temporary buildings on reclaimed swampland. Twenty-seven million people came, at a time when the national population was sixty-three million.

The buildings were not stone. They were staff — plaster and hemp fiber over wood frames — which is why they could be built in three years and why nothing survives. The White City was a stage set at the scale of a city, and everyone knew it.

Its influence was out of all proportion. The City Beautiful movement, the classical courthouses and libraries and railway stations built across America for the next thirty years, the very idea that a city ought to be planned — all of it traces to a fair that lasted six months.

The Midway Plaisance is the other half and the more honest one. A mile-long strip of concessions running off the main grounds, with the first Ferris wheel, dancers, a captive balloon, and a series of ethnological villages that displayed human beings from around the world as exhibits. The fairs did this routinely and the photographs record it plainly. It was popular, it was profitable, and it was exactly what it looks like.

The fairs also functioned as product launches at national scale. The telephone, the elevator, the Ferris wheel, shredded wheat, the ice cream cone, air conditioning, television and nylon all reached the American public through an exposition. A photograph of a crowd around an exhibit is frequently a photograph of people seeing a thing for the first time.

The later fairs each had a character. Buffalo in 1901, where McKinley was shot. St. Louis in 1904, the largest of them all. San Francisco in 1915, built to announce the city had recovered from the earthquake. Chicago again in 1933 and New York in 1939, both looking forward rather than back — streamlined, colored, industrial, and full of promises about the future that the following six years made painful.

The scale of attendance is the thing hardest to picture now. St. Louis in 1904 drew nearly twenty million admissions across seven months to a site of twelve hundred acres, with over fifteen hundred buildings on it. Nothing in American public life has approached that since, and every one of those buildings came down afterward.

The photography is unusually good throughout, because the fairs hired official photographers and because the exhibition halls were lit for display. Night views are common from 1893 onward, and electric illumination was itself one of the exhibits.

One thing to watch for. Official photographs show the buildings empty at dawn to make them look monumental. The crowd pictures are the more interesting ones.

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