Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

1. The White City and the Gray City

13 N1 O The White City and the Gray City The Scottish writer James Fullarton Muirhead, author of the 1899 Baedeker’s guidebook to the United States, summed up Chicago as a “city of contrasts.” He knew that many outsiders called Chicago “Porkopolis” in reference to its slaughterhouses, but he warned, “Chicago ought never to be mentioned as Pork­ opolis without a simultaneous reference to the fact that it was also the creator of the White City, with its Court of Honour, perhaps the most flawless and fairy-like creation, on a large scale, of man’s invention.”1 It was a rare visitor to Chicago in 1893 who did not come away from the Columbian Exposition without a sense of wonder.And many marveled at the city’s variations and disparities.The White City represented what a city, any great city, might, and should, be—an idealization,to be sure,but a vision worth imitating.Another thing that most visitors remarked upon was that Chicago was enveloped in a vast cloud of smoke, the result of burning tons of bituminous coal.That was the other city—the Gray City.2 The White City The great Columbian Exposition was the crowning event of 1893. Even more, it was one of the most celebrated experiences in U.S. history and arguably the finest world’s fair ever staged. At first it seemed as if the exposition to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first 14 The White City and the Gray City voyage to the New World would not be held in Chicago at all. Other cities with more prestige were vying for that honor. When the idea of a great fair was first proposed, most people assumed that it would be held in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. However, other cities realized what a boost such an extravaganza would be to their economy and status, and soon New York and St. Louis were in the running. Chicago entered the competition in the summer of 1889. St. Louis and Washington gradually dropped out, and a heated rivalry between New York and Chicago emerged. For years a story has been passed down that it was during this competition for the fair that Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, called Chicago the “Windy City,” thus giving it its nickname (Dana, it has been said, was referring to the hot air being emitted by the city’s politicians and not to the gales The neoclassical architecture of the White City was meant to evoke the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome. (Library of Congress) The White City and the Gray City 15 blowing off the lake). However, historians have been unable to find an actual citation in which Dana used the term, although after Chicago won the fair, the Sun did run an article that said, “All of the talking, blowing, and boasting for years has been on the part of the Windy City.”3 But even if the use of the term in that article came from Dana himself, scholars have determined that the term “Windy City” had been in use long before 1893. As far back as 1858, the Chicago Tribune, in an article about young Chicagoans’ failed efforts to be accepted as volunteers in a federal military expedition to Utah, wrote, “An hundred militia officers, from corporal to commander, condemned to air their vanity and feathers only for the delectation of the boys and servant girls in this windy city.”4 That usage doesn’t amount to a city nickname, but the employment of “Windy City” in that manner can be traced to 1876, when it was being used in Cincinnati newspapers. Interestingly, in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century “Windy City” was used to refer both to Chicagoans’ bragging and to its winds. (Compared to other U.S. cities, meteorologists report, Chicago is not especially windy.) In any case, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on February 24, 1890, to give the fair to Chicago. “Great is Chicago ,” crowed the Chicago Tribune; “it gets the World’s Fair.”5 The common feeling was that Chicago had finally arrived as a city, a view shared around the nation, which is why the significance of 1893 as a pivotal year in Chicago’s history is both psychological and practical. Millions of people would come to appreciate that here, indeed, was a...