The Devil in the White City stands out as one of my favorite books. And I live near the location of the prison in Philadelphia where HH Holmes was hanged, though it’s now the site of a grocery store. So I’m regularly reminded by the historical marker sign.
It was only after reading that I learned that the "Ferris Wheel" was named after an individual (George Washington Gale Ferris Jr, which is a mouthful!)
Definitely a good read though, and a book I've recommended to a few friends.
“To Chicago and Back” is a travelogue book by the Bulgarian author Aleko Konstantinov describing his trip to the exposition. Very famous in Bulgaria, introducing America to us. Probably why the most Bulgarian immigrants still live in Chicago (based on the number of restaurants). There’s a bust of the author inside UChicago.
I personally love walking the grounds when I visit, imagining what it must’ve been.
Fairly often and I'm not from Chicago. If I could time travel, 1893 would be on my short list of destinations because of the Chicago world fair.
Another one would be 1851, the year of the first world fair in London. The old fairs would already be awesome for a modern visitor, but I can't imagine what the people living then must have felt, seeing things like electricity for the first time.
There isn't any good evidence of how many times Joplin played at the Midway. Most of the evidence is from interviews decades later. Similarly, we actually don't know what kind of music his band was playing. It could have been early rags, but if they were, they didn't make waves the way lots of other art and ideas that debuted at the fair did. Certainly, ragtime was not associated with the Fair in subsequent memory.
In next week's post I am actually going to discuss the way the fair is considered the beginning of certain ideas (in urban planning specificalyl) that already existed—but maybe need a big white puffy outfit to truly debut.
Since Maple Leaf Rag wasn't published until 1895 maybe they felt it wasn't ragtime until then? Although my understanding, which I thought was pretty conventionally agreed on, has always been that Joplin appearing at the fair was what helped make ragtime a national pop phenomenon of his time. But maybe I should reconsider that because ragtime didn't become big until after 96-97.
I have been maintaining a habit of reading about a place before travelling there. Mostly, it's either short story books telling about the cultural lore or history of the place.
Recently, I visited Budapest and read a book with the same name by Victor Sebestyen.
One critical topic stood out: "Budapest, the city, was rebuilt significantly in the two decades leading up to 1896 for a World Exhibition marking 1000 years of the country."
It was not a proper world fair, but we can call it so.
Since then, the same question has been running through my mind: what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?
Operationally, it gives me chills to imagine a "concert/festival" [in today's terminology] of such scale being pulled off across months.
> what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?
We do, just not every year. [0]
Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, was a very big deal. The tram/metro/bus system of this 500k pop city was significantly improved. Infrastructure was modernized.
At the exhibition you could visit very creative pavilions that tried to capture something like a national spirit (or whatever the national committee wanted to represent as such). Switzerland and Japan were my favourites. [1] The former fair grounds and some structures built specifically for Expo 2000 are still being used today for events [2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_fair#World_Expos_2
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2000#Pavilions and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_2000#Gallery
[2]: https://expowal-hannover.de/
People had to travel for many days or weeks to go. Cross oceans. Take wagons. No planes. Chocolate was a big deal back then. People weren't nearly as jaded. Now they should be. I used to think about things like that a lot. The 1893 World's Fair, I mean. The 1880s through the 1920s must have been something else.
It would have been a fascinating time to be alive, even with all the hardships and diseases. Hard as hell though.
Thank god time travel does not exist. I would hate to think of the idea of anyone being able to go back.
Prohibition also seemed like an interesting time to be alive. Not so much the Prohibition part, just the general other things going on on the planet at the time.
This is very interesting considering how much of Budapest was rebuilt or at least restored again most recently in the last couple of decades. It's absolutely incredible how far it has come from the 90s
Walt Disney spoke of his dad getting a job as a carpenter building this fair. He worked for a dollar a day. And with that, laughed Walt, saved up enough money to go into business.
Fairly often. One idea I've been kicking around is to try and port UCLA's "digital reconstruction" of the White City to a modern game engine: https://idre.ucla.edu/wce
As a Chicagoan... quite often. So many things were introduced there, it's not hard to find a reference with some regularity.
It's disappointing that the two promised movies around the events of Devil in the White City still have not come to pass. One was supposed to feature Tom Cruise in the role of Holmes, and the other Leonardo diCaprio.
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book The Devil in the White City. It definitely includes some very disturbing subject matter (basically the nation's first heavily publicized serial killer) with an incredibly deep history of the fair so it's not for everyone but an amazing read. I love how brilliantly the author builds up the anticipation for how the American architects were going to respond to the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower at Paris's exposition a few years prior. I will not spoil it here and it's best if you don't know it when you read it
Larson's book is a great read but it takes a lot of yellow journalism at face value, which is not backed up by government records about the trials and even the building plans.
The Devil in the White City stands out as one of my favorite books. And I live near the location of the prison in Philadelphia where HH Holmes was hanged, though it’s now the site of a grocery store. So I’m regularly reminded by the historical marker sign.
It was only after reading that I learned that the "Ferris Wheel" was named after an individual (George Washington Gale Ferris Jr, which is a mouthful!)
Definitely a good read though, and a book I've recommended to a few friends.
On a related note, I visited the St Louis Art Museum which is on the site of the 1904 World's Fair. Then it contained many ornate buildings made of plaster: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
The art museum is in a remodeled building that sits on the top of the same hill overlooking the pond. What it looks like now: https://nohomejustroam.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/St-Lou...
Those world's fairs were something else.
“To Chicago and Back” is a travelogue book by the Bulgarian author Aleko Konstantinov describing his trip to the exposition. Very famous in Bulgaria, introducing America to us. Probably why the most Bulgarian immigrants still live in Chicago (based on the number of restaurants). There’s a bust of the author inside UChicago.
I personally love walking the grounds when I visit, imagining what it must’ve been.
Fairly often and I'm not from Chicago. If I could time travel, 1893 would be on my short list of destinations because of the Chicago world fair.
Another one would be 1851, the year of the first world fair in London. The old fairs would already be awesome for a modern visitor, but I can't imagine what the people living then must have felt, seeing things like electricity for the first time.
I can't visit them, but I did at least dedicate 2 chapters of my game to the 1851 one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
I definitely think of the 1893 world's fair in the context of time travel, mainly to see Scott Joplin https://medium.com/luminasticity/ten-concerts-you-must-see-i...
Yes, I was confused by the article’s claim there was no ragtime at the fair. Was his work not ragtime by that point?
There isn't any good evidence of how many times Joplin played at the Midway. Most of the evidence is from interviews decades later. Similarly, we actually don't know what kind of music his band was playing. It could have been early rags, but if they were, they didn't make waves the way lots of other art and ideas that debuted at the fair did. Certainly, ragtime was not associated with the Fair in subsequent memory.
In next week's post I am actually going to discuss the way the fair is considered the beginning of certain ideas (in urban planning specificalyl) that already existed—but maybe need a big white puffy outfit to truly debut.
Since Maple Leaf Rag wasn't published until 1895 maybe they felt it wasn't ragtime until then? Although my understanding, which I thought was pretty conventionally agreed on, has always been that Joplin appearing at the fair was what helped make ragtime a national pop phenomenon of his time. But maybe I should reconsider that because ragtime didn't become big until after 96-97.
what the fuck did i just read?
I have been maintaining a habit of reading about a place before travelling there. Mostly, it's either short story books telling about the cultural lore or history of the place.
Recently, I visited Budapest and read a book with the same name by Victor Sebestyen.
One critical topic stood out: "Budapest, the city, was rebuilt significantly in the two decades leading up to 1896 for a World Exhibition marking 1000 years of the country."
It was not a proper world fair, but we can call it so.
Since then, the same question has been running through my mind: what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?
Operationally, it gives me chills to imagine a "concert/festival" [in today's terminology] of such scale being pulled off across months.
> what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?
We do, just not every year. [0]
Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, was a very big deal. The tram/metro/bus system of this 500k pop city was significantly improved. Infrastructure was modernized.
At the exhibition you could visit very creative pavilions that tried to capture something like a national spirit (or whatever the national committee wanted to represent as such). Switzerland and Japan were my favourites. [1] The former fair grounds and some structures built specifically for Expo 2000 are still being used today for events [2].
People had to travel for many days or weeks to go. Cross oceans. Take wagons. No planes. Chocolate was a big deal back then. People weren't nearly as jaded. Now they should be. I used to think about things like that a lot. The 1893 World's Fair, I mean. The 1880s through the 1920s must have been something else.
It would have been a fascinating time to be alive, even with all the hardships and diseases. Hard as hell though.
Thank god time travel does not exist. I would hate to think of the idea of anyone being able to go back.
Prohibition also seemed like an interesting time to be alive. Not so much the Prohibition part, just the general other things going on on the planet at the time.
in a sense, World Fairs as a designated space-time for everyone in the world to get to has been replaced by Olympiads
This is very interesting considering how much of Budapest was rebuilt or at least restored again most recently in the last couple of decades. It's absolutely incredible how far it has come from the 90s
I live 8 blocks from the fairs location. The parks it left are central to my daily life.
Walt Disney spoke of his dad getting a job as a carpenter building this fair. He worked for a dollar a day. And with that, laughed Walt, saved up enough money to go into business.
Fairly often. One idea I've been kicking around is to try and port UCLA's "digital reconstruction" of the White City to a modern game engine: https://idre.ucla.edu/wce
Do it! It is very feasible with AI tools.
As a Chicagoan... quite often. So many things were introduced there, it's not hard to find a reference with some regularity.
It's disappointing that the two promised movies around the events of Devil in the White City still have not come to pass. One was supposed to feature Tom Cruise in the role of Holmes, and the other Leonardo diCaprio.
I am obsessed with '58.-
What? How can you talk about the 1893 worlds fair and somehow fail to mention Tesla's "Egg of Columbus"? Shame.
I had never heard of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%27s_Egg_of_Columbus
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book The Devil in the White City. It definitely includes some very disturbing subject matter (basically the nation's first heavily publicized serial killer) with an incredibly deep history of the fair so it's not for everyone but an amazing read. I love how brilliantly the author builds up the anticipation for how the American architects were going to respond to the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower at Paris's exposition a few years prior. I will not spoil it here and it's best if you don't know it when you read it
Larson's book is a great read but it takes a lot of yellow journalism at face value, which is not backed up by government records about the trials and even the building plans.
I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1510713433/ref=as_li_qf_sp...?
I think about it quite often. Then it’s weird how many of the cities hosting them burned catastrophically, coincidentally.