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Foreword by
Ron Grossman , chicago tribune senior reporter
To many visitors, Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair must have looked like something out of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D.” Like the popular comic strip of the day, the lakefront exhibition offered a tantalizing peek into the future. It showcased trains, airplanes and automobiles whose sleek lines made it seem they were speeding along even while standing still. One exhibit, the House of Tomorrow, looked more like a spaceship than anything to be seen in a residential neighborhood. Twelve sided, sheathed in glass and perched partially on stilts, it looked like it could have just landed with a visitor from a distant planet. Equally strange was a three-wheeled automobile shaped like a rocket and bearing a name — the Dymaxion car — that seemed drawn from the vocabulary of an alien world. But the fair itself might have been the biggest miracle. Hosted in the depths of the Great Depression, it overcame long odds to become wildly popular — nearly 50 million viewed the marvels — and even turned a modest profit. That despite the fact that 12 million people were out of work, and even the modest admission fee — 50 cents for adults, a quarter for kids — was a king’s ransom for many. Even attempting the daunting task vindicated the city’s motto: “I Will.” Pulling it off brought Chicago kudos for giving the nation a much-needed emotional shot in the arm. Of the fair’s May 27 opening, The New York Times wrote:
“With trumpet blasts and speeches heard round the world, Chicago yesterday hurled the challenge of A Century Of Progress in the face of more than three years of depression.” The exposition, Chicago’s second World’s Fair, occupied a lakefront site stretching from about Roosevelt Road to 39th Street. The “century” was the period since 1833 when Chicago was founded as a village. Yet despite its title, the fair was anything but a sentimental trip down memory lane — a rut into which its promoters thought previous fairs had slipped. The movers and shakers thought a heavy reliance on historical artifacts would give the fair a static, lifeless look of a taxidermist’s shelves. “People like to see wheels go ’round,” said Lenox R. Lohr, general manager of Chicago’s fair, explaining the thinking behind its design. “There is motion or the suggestion of movement — progress — in all exhibits.” Lohr and the fair’s backers shrewdly realized that history lessons weren’t likely to draw out-of-towners to Chicago’s exhibition when a quarter of the nation’s workforce was unemployed. Men and boys rode the rails from town to town, looking for a job, any job. Chicago’s homeless found sustenance at Al Capone’s soup kitchen. State and local governments, themselves in awful financial shape, couldn’t offer social services, let alone provide the financial support previous fairs enjoyed.
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“Who is there of so little faith as to believe that man will not find a remedy for the industrial ills that periodically make the world shiver with doubt and terror?” — . p r e s i d e n t f r a n k l i n d ro os e v e lt
With the country in dire straits, Americans hardly wanted to be reminded of the glories of the past. They craved reassurance that a better tomorrow was coming, a note that President Franklin D. Roosevelt struck in his opening-day message to the fair: “Who is there of so little faith as to believe that man will not find a remedy for the industrial ills that periodically make the world shiver with doubt and terror?” Box office returns demonstrated the brilliance of a marketing campaign based on a reading of the nation’s psychological pulse. The fair drew 48.7 million visitors, 39 million paying customers, over a two-year run. Italy dispatched a squadron of seaplanes as its salute to the exposition. Germany flew the Graf Zeppelin, its famed dirigible, to Chicago. Visitors who entered through the fairgrounds’ north gate got a quick demonstration of the exposition’s radical departure from Chicago’s first World’s Fair 40 years earlier. Adjacent to the fairgrounds were the Field Museum and Soldier Field, built in the classical style of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition and featuring Ionic and Doric columns that harked back to ancient Greece and Rome. But inside the fairgrounds, visitors saw what architects could do when, unshackled from the past, they could play with industrial age materials like glass and steel. No interior columns were needed in the immense Railroad Hall of the Travel and Transport Building. Its roof was hung from cables that ran between 150-foot steel towers, like those of a suspension bridge. A similar design was employed in the Sky Ride, a towering cable car system that carried riders 200 feet above the grounds for a bird’s-eye view of the fair. The twin towers between which the cars ran — from the shoreline to nearby Northerly Island — were taller than any building on Chicago’s skyline. The skyscrapers of that skyline marked the 19th century birthplace of modern architecture. But it had gone out of fashion after the Columbian Exposition show-
cased historical-revival styles like the Field Museum’s neoclassical architecture. In 1933, modernism returned to Chicago with the Century of Progress’ cutting-edge structures — buildings composed of simple geometric shapes with soaring, unadorned facades, playfully exploiting new materials. The Owens-Illinois Co.’s pavilion was a multistory building and tower constructed of glass bricks it had recently developed for outdoor use. The Enchanted Island, the children’s area of the fair, featured a house said to be made of a million marbles. Of course, not everyone was pleased with the emergence of the new, among them Fahreda Mahzar. A belly dancer billed as Little Egypt, she had been a hit in 1893. At 62, she tried to reprise her act for the Century of Progress, only to be upstaged by Sally Rand, a fan-and-bubble dancer who left little or nothing of her anatomy to the audience’s imagination. Mahzar huffed and puffed that she never revealed a sliver of her osculating midriff. She wouldn’t perform nude like “the nonchalant young things of 1933.” Girly shows might seem out of keeping with a fair trumpeting the marvels of science. Its motto was “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.” But as practical men, the fair management realized that brainy exhibits could only draw so many through the turnstiles. While the fair “must have its appeal through those higher concepts of education, science and culture,” Lohr said, “people visit an exposition with a carnival spirit, hoping to be amused and diverted from humdrum routine existence by dreams of fancy.” The fair did, indeed, provide much to fantasize about. A Tribune reporter proclaimed Julia Taweel’s act the most creative, since “she was the only solo dancer on the grounds who hasn’t dropped her veils nor shaken a single shimmy.” Among other lowbrow exhibits, the “Official Guidebook of the Fair” touted “The Midget Village, where
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Looking north from the bottom left of the midway are the famous Travel and Transport Building, the Chrysler Motors Building and Northerly Island at top right, where the Sky Ride can be faintly seen.
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More sideshow than science and innovation, a snake handler performs at the fair Oct. 4, 1933.
Two children pose with a woman in traditional clothing in the German Village’s Black Forest in 1934. The Black Forest was a new addition to the 1934 fairgrounds.
o p p os i t e :
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Rehearsal for the Jewish pageant “The Romance of a People,” featuring a cast of 3,500 actors, singers and dancers, takes place at Soldier Field in July 1933. The pageant coincided with Jewish Day at the fair and depicted thousands of years of Jewish religious history. “It is religious, but it is more than religion as such. It is also historical, but more than mere history: it is prophetic!” the Tribune wrote.
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A crowd of 125,000 would end up filling Soldier Field for the Jewish Day pageant “The Romance of a People.” “Attendance was one of the largest of the entire Exposition, more than 244,000 admissions being recorded,” the Tribune wrote of the day’s fair attendance. “The occasion was the first presentation of Jewry’s supreme contribution to the ethics and the aesthetics of our history-making World’s Fair summer.”
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An ironworker, perched on the west tower of the Sky Ride, drinks an Edelweiss beer during construction of the World’s Fair in 1933. When completed, the Sky Ride consisted of two, 625-foottall towers that straddled the lagoon between Northerly Island and the lakefront. The ride had rocket-shaped cars that transported 36 fairgoers at a time across the lagoon.
foreword by Ron Grossman
This extensive collection of historical photographs documents the Century of Progress International Exposition, the World’s Fair held in Chicago from 1933 to 1934 to celebrate the city’s centennial. The images collected here—more than 100 in total—were culled from the Chicago Tribune’s expansive subterranean archive of glass-plate and acetate negatives. The fair attracted more than 48 million visitors to its lakefront grounds at a time when the entire U.S. population numbered just over 125 million people. It was considered such a milestone event in the city’s history that it is represented by the fourth star on Chicago’s municipal flag. From construction to demolition, Chicago Tribune photographers were present to document this historic event. Rare, striking and often humorous, these images capture attendees, performers and
the technological feats and futuristic exhibits that characterized the fair. However, they also reveal elements of lasciviousness and insensitivity that, despite being clearly on display during the exposition, may prove shocking to modern readers. This unique volume captures an important moment in Chicago history as the city emerged from the Great Depression to celebrate the previous 100 years of technological advancement and to imagine the next century of progress.
The CHICAGO TRIBUNE, founded in 1847, is the flagship newspaper of the Tribune Company. Its staff comprises dedicated, award-winning journalists who have written many bestselling books.
PHOTOGRAPHY/HISTORY Publication date: December 15, 2015 | $24.95 | 8.5 × 11 | 136 pages ISBN: 978-1-57284-183-3 For more information, call Agate Midway at 847.475.4457 or inquire via agatepublishing.com. Please supply two tear sheets of any published review. 1328 Greenleaf St., Evanston, IL 60202
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