Out Eiffel Eiffel
Back in the 1890s, Chicago won the bid to play host to the World’s Fair. At the time this was huge for Chicago, as the city was the dirty, ruthless, money hungry younger brother to sophisticated and refined New York. This was an opportunity to a) prove to the Gotham intellgentsia that Chicago isn’t just about pork and timber and b) trump Paris’ 1889 World’s Fair, where the Eiffel Tower made its debut as the tallest structure in the world.
Planning and executing the event was a nightmare, and I won’t go into details as this is all documented with unbelievable detail and color in Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. Suffice it to say that there was a unanimous desire to “out Eiffel Eiffel”, and this objective manifested itself in many forms at the fair. One of them was the Ferris Wheel, which at the time was a mind blowing feat of engineering.
The real shame is that the Fair’s memory has faded from American lore, and a lot of this may have to do with how the event was documented. Fair organizer Daniel Burnham was a control freak, and commissioned only one photograher, Charles Arnold, to photograph the event. Portable Kodak cameras were all the rage at the time, but “amateurs” needed to purchase incredibly expensive permits to photograph on the grounds.
It’s clear from written documents that the Fair was unlike anything built or seen before. Flickr and a standard web search don’t turn up too many visuals, but Google Book Search yielded great success.
I won’t go into the “we’re so overstimulated these days” discussion, but it’s definitely hard to understand how visually and emotionally significant the sights of the Fair were. I have moments of clarity when I think really hard about it, but that usually slips away in a matter of seconds.