SORRY, WINDY, YOU BLEW IT!
Chicago’s dazzling world expo (almost) put Second City in first
IT may be hard to believe, but for one shining moment, Chicago had a chance to shed its Second City status and take the mantle of America’s greatest city. New York wouldn’t have it. The faceoff happened 125 years ago, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the White City World’s Fair in Chicago.
New Yorkers already felt snubbed by the fact that the World’s Fair — which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage — was being held somewhere other than the Big Apple.
It didn’t help that Chicago was expanding incredibly fast. When Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocked down that lamp in 1871 and set the city ablaze, Chicago’s population hovered at around 300,000. When it launched its campaign for the fair two decades later, the population exceeded 1 million, only a half-million less than New York City. Unchecked, Chicago would soon become the nation’s largest metropolis.
What if the World’s Fair convinced people Chicago represented the real America?
As Chicago campaigned hard for the fair, New York’s newspapers went nuts. The Evening World wondered if violent Chicago would host “bull-baitings and executions of martyrs,” and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle suggested that “highly cultivated” foreign visitors to a Chicago fair would go home thinking all Americans were country bumpkins, with “large feet and coarse manners.”
Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, summed up New York’s worries best, when he (allegedly) said, “Don’t pay attention to the nonsensical claims of that Windy City. Its people could not build a world’s fair even if they won it.”
BUT win it they did, and from May 1 to Oct. 30, 1893, 27 million people — nearly 25 percent of America’s population at the time — enjoyed the White City, a sprawling complex of neoclassical buildings designed under the guidance of architect Daniel Burnham. The centerpiece of the midway was George Ferris’ wheel — a gimmick designed to outshine the Eiffel Tower. The wheel was a huge hit with fairgoers and soon became a staple of amusement parks and carnivals.
The fair lasted only six months, and when it was over, neglect led to an accidental fire that burned it to the ground. Meanwhile, New York officials wondered: If Chicago could construct the White City as an elaborate theme park, why couldn’t New York build the White City for real?
The Gilded Age architect Stanford White kicked off the neoclassical craze with the Washington Square Arch in 1890. While the Chicago fair was taking place, White was hard at work on the Bowery Savings Bank (today’s Capitale restaurant), which set the stage for all the grand Beaux Arts banks and public buildings that followed.
Over the next 20 years, New York improved upon the White City concept with the US Custom House (now the Museum of the American Indian; Cass Gilbert, 1907); Penn Station (Charles McKim, 1910, demolished 1964); the main branch of the New York Public Library (Carrère & Hastings, 1911); and Grand Central Terminal (Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem, 1913).
That’s not to mention the incredible private homes that were built in that era, such as Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion (1914, now The Frick Collection museum), the best preserved Gilded Age home in the city.
But it wasn’t just grand buildings that New York knew it could do better. Entrepreneur George C. Tilyou visited the fair, rode the Ferris wheel, and saw the future. He immediately returned to Coney Island to found Steeplechase Park. Quickly, other entertainment complexes sprang up around the metropolitan area, from the Eldorado Amusement Park in Weehawken, NJ, to Clason Point Park in The Bronx to the Fort George Amusement Park, which opened in 1895 at West 192nd Street and ultimately boasted two Ferris wheels that defined the upper Manhattan skyline for years.
IN fact, at 264 feet tall, George Ferris’ White City wheel might actually have broken the law. In 1892 — just as Chicago was scrambling to build the White City in time — the city passed an anti-skyscraper ordinance, limiting building heights to 150 feet. This meant that the city that had invented the skyscraper with the Home Insurance Building in 1884 now couldn’t build anything taller than about 15 stories.
New York was happy to take up the slack. Soon, Manhattan was on its way to becoming what Kurt Vonnegut would later call “Skyscraper National Park.” Between 1890 and 1972, 10 New York City buildings claimed the title of tallest in the world, from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World Building (torn down in 1955) to icons such as the Woolworth Building (1913), Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931) — three of the most important skyscrapers ever built. By the time Chicago altered its height restrictions in the 1940s, New York had already created the greatest modern skyline. Sure, the Sears Tower was big, but it never had a chance.
And whatever happened to Chicago leaping from Second City status to first?
New York’s civic leaders proposed a radical solution: Expand beyond Manhattan and The Bronx by consolidating Staten Island, Queens and — most importantly — Brooklyn into a giant Greater New York. With consolidation accomplished on Jan. 1, 1898, this new metropolis boasted a population of nearly 3.5 million, forever dwarfing Chicago. Even as the capital of thehe Midwest grew, New York wouldd always grow faster.
As New York expanded, it built a new subway system, monumen-tal bridges over the East River, and train tunnels under the Hudson. And the city didn’t just grow outward or upward — it became the capital of sports, theater, finee arts, media, finance. Chicago has . . . “Home Alone”?
So while Chicagoans chew on what they call a pizza, New Yorkers can rest secure in the knowledge that while we might have lost out hosting that 1893 World’s Fair, we took home the real prize: greatest city in the country.