For six months in 1893, Chicago was the center of the world. The World's Columbian Exposition opened in Jackson Park on May 1 and ran through October 31, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. More than 27 million visitors passed through the gates — at a time when the entire U.S. population was around 65 million. What they found wasn't just a fair. It was a glimpse of a city that didn't exist yet, built almost overnight and gone almost as fast.
A City Built to Dazzle
Chicago architect Daniel Burnham served as chief planner, with Frederick Law Olmsted — the mind behind New York's Central Park — handling the landscape design, and Charles B. Atwood as designer in chief. Together they laid out 686 acres along the lakefront and filled them with more than 200 neoclassical buildings, all sharing a uniform 60-foot cornice line and a coat of white paint. The effect was so striking that visitors started calling it the "White City," and the nickname stuck.
The centerpiece of the midway was an engineering answer to a European boast. Paris had unveiled the Eiffel Tower at its own world's fair in 1889, and Chicago wanted its own showstopper. Engineer George Ferris delivered it: a 264-foot wheel that carried fairgoers in enclosed cars high above the fairgrounds. You can bring a piece of that spectacle home with our Ferris Wheel print, based on the original 1893 design.
An Illusion Made of Plaster and Ambition
Here's the twist: almost none of the White City was built to last. The grand facades were made from "staff" — a mix of plaster and hemp fiber stretched over wood frames — designed to look like carved stone under electric floodlights at night, then be torn down when the fair closed. Most of it was. Fires in 1894 destroyed the majority of the fairgrounds, and today only the Palace of Fine Arts survives, rebuilt in permanent stone as the Museum of Science and Industry.
Not everything vanished, though. The Japanese government's gift to the fair — a garden on the Wooded Island in Jackson Park — is still there today, tended and open to the public. We carry a print of it too: the Osaka Garden, one of the few pieces of the 1893 fair you can still walk through.
A Legacy Bigger Than the Buildings
The fair's real staying power wasn't architectural — it was the idea that a city could be planned around beauty and civic pride, not just commerce. That belief became the City Beautiful movement, which reshaped urban planning across the country for decades. It's also part of why Chicago's own history of grand, vanished landmarks resonates the way it does — you can explore more of that in our Lost Chicago collection, where the Ferris Wheel and Osaka Garden prints both live alongside other pieces of the city that used to be.