The White City Redux

In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival on the continent. Like the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Columbian celebrated one of the defining American moments. It also brought a lot of tourist dollars to Chicago; some 27 million visitors are estimated to have attended, nearly a quarter of the country’s population at the time.

The prototype for such events was the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in the Crystal Palace in London. Along with the pavilions art and natural history displays, the Great Exhibition showcased the latest technologies and manufactured goods from around the world: a Jacquard loom, telegraphs, an envelope machine, the world’s first voting machine, McCormick’s reaper, plus some less obviously utilitarian devices—a kite-drawn carriage, furniture made of coal, and a set of choppers fitted with a swivel that enabled the user to yawn without losing his teeth.

The Columbian Exposition was cut of much the same cloth. Visitors could see Remington typewriters, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, sewing machines, and the world's largest conveyor belt. The Ferris wheel made its debut there as did a grocery list of iconic American food products: Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit, and Cracker Jacks.

But the men who designed the fair had other, higher ambitions. Led by Daniel Burnham, whose firm had built many of Chicago’s signature skyscrapers, the group included, among others, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles McKim, Richard Morris Hunt, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. All proponents of the City Beautiful movement, which proposed urban planning as a remedy to the poverty and blight that characterized so many American cities of the day. The City Beautiful would, its advocates argued, sweep away tenements and the moral turpitude they fostered while elevating American cities to the same cultural level as the great European capitals.

The Columbian Exposition gave them the perfect platform for staging their ideas. Taking advantage of the site’s Lake Michigan setting, Olmstead laid out the exhibition grounds in a series of lagoons and connecting waterways that served as reflecting pools and transportation channels. Standing on the Grand Basin at the heart of the complex was the Court of Honor, which quickly got dubbed “the White City” for the dazzling effect of its assemblage of white-stuccoed Beaux-Arts buildings.

At night, a rapidly growing technology enhanced the effect. Electricity—and electric lighting in particular—was one of the big-news stories at the Exposition, so big that it got its own dedicated building. Exhibits in the Electricity Building featured elevators, fans, sewing machines, burglar alarms, stoves, laundry machines, irons, that telegraph, the first seismograph, and a kinetoscope. Thomas Alva Edison contributed an 82-foot Tower of Light, which used more than 18,000 lightbulbs. And, each night, the buildings and promenade of the Court of Honor were ablaze with outdoor electric lighting.

Imagine yourself, standing at the foot of the Great Basin and seeing, perhaps for the first time in your life, the dazzling nighttime illumination of the facades of a whole suite of grand buildings.

And people were dazzled. Owen Wister wrote of his experience at the fair, “[B]efore 1 had walked for two minutes, a bewilderment at the gloriousness of everything seized me ... until my mind was dazzled to a stand still…. I studied nothing, looked at no detail, but merely got at the total consummate beauty and grandeur of the thing: -which is like a great White Spirit evoked by Chicago out of the blue water upon whose shore it reposes.”

Not everyone swooned so. Henry Adams may have been overwhelmed—he wrote that the Exposition “defied philosophy”—but his sense of wonder is restrained by his understanding that the spectacle in Chicago represented a decisive moment for the country. “For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893,” he wrote on his return, “the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.”

A few weeks ago, I stopped in at the Fleisher Art Memorial for a look at its latest Challenge exhibition. Standing before Tetsugo Hyakutake’s image Pathos and Irony: Industrial Still-Life in Japan #3, I saw the White City, reimaged for the 21st century.

There was the same transportingly beautiful image, the same shimmering collection of buildings that seemed to imply something celestial, the same shining city beckoning to us.

Bu what’s so striking about these images is their double meaning. For make no mistake, these structures are every bit as beautiful, every bit as awe-inspiring, as the White City. Hyakutake speaks of “the ironic beauty” and “sublime scale” of the industrial sites he photographs, and you can’t be blamed for suspecting, when first entering the gallery, that you’re glimpsing images of Oz.

Linger before these images and you discover their deeper, more sinister meaning. For here, the White City is the oil refinery, the subway platform, the expressway overpass. Rather than awe, these photographs describe the calamity that our faith in technology, so unquestioningly celebrated at the Columbian and its ilk, has unleashed on an unsuspecting world. 

Even back in 1893, not everyone swooned over the sight of the White City. Henry Adams may have been overwhelmed—he wrote that the Exposition “defied philosophy”—but his sense of wonder was restrained by his understanding that the spectacle in Chicago represented a decisive moment for the country, by his sense of the price we would pay for the spectacle. “For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893,” he wrote on his return, “the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical.”

More than a hundred years on, Hyakutake is here to remind us that we are, like Adams, of two minds about the White City and its industrial spawn.

To see a further selection of Tetsugo Hyakutake's work, check out the Gallery 339 website. For a virtual tour of the Columbian Exposition, check out this site.