July 16, 2006

BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic

Disembarking from her private rail car in Chicago in 1896, the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt was nettled that the White City, the architectural gem of the World's Columbian Exposition of three years earlier, no longer existed. "Tell me," the Divine Sarah asked a Tribune reporter, "are any of the World's Fair buildings left? No? How I should love to see them."

Bernhardt was slightly misinformed -- the White City's Palace of Fine Arts, now known as the Museum of Science and Industry, stands to this day in Jackson Park -- but more than a century later, her disappointment still resonates. Many visitors to Chicago remain astonished that the grandest achievement of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which left many of its 27 million attendees dumbstruck by its sheer magnificence and gigantic scale, has largely disappeared.

"There's an intense poignancy for people when you talk about the fair, because it was so ephemeral," says Christopher Multhauf, a local executive and Chicago Architecture Foundation docent. "When you look at pictures of the buildings, they seem so substantial, and people always ask: Why did it only last six months? The White City has that magical Xanadu, Brigadoon kind of effect on people, which is part of why it's having such an impact 113 years later."

AN ARTIST FALLS UNDER THE SPELL One of the most striking aspects of artist/writer Chris Ware's masterful graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) is its use of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Ware balances a contemporary story -- about a young Chicagoan struggling to reconnect with his long-absent father -- against that of his grandfather, who recalls his childhood experience of an equally devastating estrangement from his own father at the fair.

Several of Ware's original drawings for the book are on display as part of a solo exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art through Aug. 27. Ware is currently in discussions with a production company about a film version, he said in an e-mail exchange, "and it appears as if it will be actually negotiated in a month or so."

More from the e-mail exchange:

Q. When and how did you first become aware of the White City, and what was your reaction to it?

A. In 1993, after moving to Chicago and shortly after not graduating from the School of the Art Institute, I broke both of my feet in an accident that can only be described as stupid, which nonetheless had the benefit of laying me up in bed for about two weeks with nothing to do but read. For some reason, I ended up reading a lot about Chicago history and Chicago architecture -- maybe because I suddenly couldn't leave the house and go out and see it.

Anyway, that was when I really found out about what a vast ambitious accomplishment the Chicago fair had been, and like most people who find out about it for the first time, I was astounded that so much effort and resources had been put into something that was so transitory. It took me a while to really understand that the buildings were essentially three-dimensional stage sets that were not designed to last more than a season.

When I was ambulatory again I took public transportation down to Jackson Park and tried to see where many of the buildings had been; my reading about it had filled my head with so many details it was a very odd and intoxicating experience.

Q. At what point did you decide to incorporate it into the story?

A. One night in late 1993 I was discussing the fair with a very good artist friend of mine, Jay Doering, and he began postulating what it might've been like to have lived in the neighborhood surrounding the site of the fair when it was being built in 1892; I realized then and there I wanted to include this scenario somehow in Jimmy Corrigan.

Q. How do you think the White City functions in Jimmy, thematically and in terms the book's system of images? I think it's romantic and contrapuntal with the contemporary scenes.

A. Most simply, those sections of the book are told in the past tense with third or first person narration, where everything else (i.e. the "modern world") is presented in the unaccompanied "narrative present" that only comics can show on paper. My aim with the 1893 sections of the book was to create as rich and all-encompassing sense of what I thought it might've felt like to be alive then as I possibly could, to counterbalance, as you say, the contemporary scenes (even though these sections happen in 1983). That section of the book is really the main thematic "exposition" of the story (pun intended) around which everything else revolves, and I suppose I tried to imply by its more cohesive narrative and emotional structure that memories of life are much more codified and refined than life as it actually happens.

Kevin Nance

That impact is national in scope. Erik Larson's immensely popular 2003 nonfiction book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, which today celebrates its 124th week in the top 10 of the New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list in paperback, introduced a new generation of Americans to the Columbian Exposition. A Hollywood version, optioned by Tom Cruise's production company and set to begin shooting next year, promises to transmit the fair's legend to an even wider public.

And in Chicago, the ghosts of the White City are whispering louder than ever. This year, Multhauf researched a new Devil in the White City companion tour, which has sold out twice and promises to become one of CAF's biggest draws. Chicago native Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has written songs that allude to the fair. And Chicago-based artist Chris Ware, who used the White City as the setting of the most heartbreaking chapter of his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, is currently negotiating with a production company for a film adaptation.

Urban Archaeology, a home design store in the Merchandise Mart, recently unveiled a 60-foot tile mural of the White City's central Court of Honor, joining Richard Haas' "Homage to the Chicago School" at 1211 N. La Salle -- which features a trompe l'oeil depiction of Louis Sullivan's iconic Golden Doorway to his Transportation Building -- as one of Chicago's most visible tributes to the fair. And the stately structure on the northwest corner of Millennium Park is a re-creation of an earlier Grant Park monument that provided an indirect link to Charles Atwood's Peristyle at the Columbian Exposition's dramatic junction with Lake Michigan.

To top things off, an architectural historian at UCLA is working on a three-dimensional computer model of the fair that eventually will allow Internet visitors to take a virtual tour of its buildings and grounds, including the raucous Midway and its most famous feature, the original Ferris wheel.

The fair, in short, haunts us still. But why? The quick answer is that the 1893 Exposition was simply so important -- "the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War," as Harper's put it that October -- but that feels too general. What is it, specifically, about the White City that looms so large in the collective memory and the imagination of artists?

It's partly to do with the fair's fleeting quality. To save time and expense, most of its buildings were clad in a temporary, plasterlike material called staff. The Peristyle and some nearby buildings burned to the ground in January 1894, and most of the rest followed in the next few months. (Because it contained valuable paintings and sculpture on loan, the Palace of Fine Arts was more sturdily constructed. In the late 1920s and early '30s, it was restored and substantially rebuilt, in marble and limestone, to contain the Museum of Science and Industry.)

"The White City was a dream -- probably the closest thing to experiencing a real dream as was ever created, if you were there -- that disappeared as quickly as it came," says Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson. "Part of what sustains it in people's memory is that it was so unreal and therefore so mysterious. If it had been permanent, in fact, that probably that would have spoiled some of its magic."

'A city of absolute opposites'

But even as its very brevity has made it tantalizing, the fair has also taken on a symbolic power that seems to grow with every passing decade. Viewed from this distance, the White City increasingly seems to be speaking to us about the American enterprise and Chicago's role in it: our self-esteem and self-doubt, our ambivalent attraction to grand civic gestures, and our twin capacities for splendor and squalor.

That last dichotomy -- as embodied by the fair's handsome organizer, the blue-eyed architect Daniel Burnham, and the (also blue-eyed) serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes, who preyed on young women in the shadow of the fair -- immediately captivated Larson from the start of his research on The Devil in the White City.

"It was this monumental act of civic goodwill juxtaposed against this consummate evil," says the Seattle resident and former Wall Street Journal reporter. "In a sense, that reflected what was happening in Chicago, which was a city of absolute opposites."

On the one hand, Larson says, the White City was designed and built by the Gilded Age elite "as a way of demonstrating that America could come up with this level of sophistication. They went for drama at a time when architecture had very little relevance for most of the country, paving the way for things to come by inserting into the American psyche an appreciation for architecture. The sheer beauty in that array of buildings in the Court of Honor, ingeniously using the backdrop of the lake to stage the whole thing, was enough to knock anybody flat."

But if the White City was a dream made real, much of the rest of Chicago was a nightmare.

"The fair gripped people," Multhauf says, "partly because it was a vision of beauty in a place that was so squalid." The streets were a quagmire of mud and manure, the air laced with soot and the rank aroma of stockyards and slaughterhouses. Poverty was widespread; labor unrest simmered and sometimes boiled. Prostitution flourished. Not far from the baronial mansions of Prairie Avenue, there were 31 brothels on Clark Street between Congress and Harrison, all of which were open at the time of the fair. The German writer Paul Lindau called Chicago "a peep show of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point."

This bipolar quality will be explored in the Devil in the White City film adaptation, which Kathryn Bigelow ("K-19: The Widowmaker," "Point Break") will direct next year from a script by Christopher Kyle ("Alexander").

The film's producer, Sigurjon "Joni" Sighvatsson, says the $30- to $50-million project has secured backing from a group of financiers (including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban) and is being cast now, with an unnamed Academy Award-winning actor having expressed interest in the part of Holmes. The White City will be re-created with a combination of built sets and computer-generated imagery.

"I think the film will be a kind of manic vision of the American dream, or the price of it, which is being questioned right now because of the Iraq war," Sighvatsson says. "Burnham is a symbol of what I would say America used to stand for, a visionary like Bill Gates, not like [convicted former Tyco CEO] Dennis Kozlowski, and on the flip side is Holmes. It's the light and the dark."

Lightness and darkness also collide at the White City in Jimmy Corrigan, in which Ware presents the fair as a dazzling vision of heaven on earth -- even as he uses it as the scene of the book's most hellish episode, the abandonment of a child. The boy's father, who helped build the fair before being injured there (which helps bring about a financial downturn in the family) finally leaves him on the roof promenade of George B. Post's Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which, at 787 feet by 1,687 feet, was the largest building in the world. "I just stood there, watching the sky, and the people below, watching for him to return," the boy recalls years later. "Of course, he never did."

'Architecture as fantasy'

The fair's architectural legacy is a matter of considerable debate, but at the time its main buildings were a sensation with the public, many members of which burst into awestruck tears at the sight.

Burnham's team of famous architects (including Frederick Law Olmsted, who was responsible for many of the White City's most dramatic landscape and water effects) had designed the Court of Honor in the Beaux Arts neoclassical style, derived from ancient Greece and Rome. Daniel Chester French's towering Statue of the Republic -- affectionately called Big Mary -- surveyed the scene from one end of a long lagoon, facing Richard Morris Hunt's stately Administration Building, taller than the U.S. Capitol, at the other. On either side, each monumental building was more graceful and elegant than the next.

With its strictly enforced uniformity of style, cornice height and color (all the buildings were painted white), the Court of Honor was a triumph of order and unity, a romantic, monumental, utopian vision of urban ensemble. It all had a distinctly European feel, but there were also touches of American ingenuity everywhere, from water and sewage systems to the great trusses that held up the massive roofs and the thousands of electric lights that illuminated the fair at night.

"For the first time, people saw what an ideal city could look like," says Lynn Osmond, president of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. "Most real cities were dirty and congested, but the fair showed how master planning could work. It changed the way people across the country saw themselves, kicking off the City Beautiful movement."

The architectural legacy of the fair can be glimpsed in Chicago and other cities to this day. Local examples of structures inspired in part by the White City include Burnham's Field Museum, Soldier Field, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Art Institute of Chicago's Allerton Building, which was built in conjunction with the original fair and housed many of its related meetings and lectures.

But from the beginning, not everyone was enthusiastic about the White City's design. Louis Sullivan and his young protege, Frank Lloyd Wright (who was nonetheless inspired by structures in the fair's Japanese exhibit), viewed it as Eurocentric, retrograde and antithetical to the cause of an organic American architecture. "The damage wrought by the World's Fair," Sullivan wrote in his autobiography, "will last for half a century from its date, if not longer."

Later critics accused the fair's theatrical, self-consciously uplifting design -- "architecture as fantasy," as Alvin Rosenbaum put it -- of having inspired a Pandora's box of latter-day American kitsch, from shopping malls to Disneyland.

But the fair's legion of devotees is unperturbed. "Louis Sullivan criticized Burnham's neoclassical charter for the fair at the time as not 'adjusting to the reality and the pathos of man's follies,' an amazing statement, which I've thought also applies to much of American architecture and art since, well, about 1893," Chris Ware says in an e-mail exchange.

"Ironically, to the modern mind, the whole fair seems a wondrous and practically inconceivable 'folly,' something I think people today unconsciously hunger for, though they might not be willing to admit it," Ware continues. "The scale and expenditure that went into the 1893 Exposition is really only matched today by Hollywood blockbuster movies, and is just about as transitory, but there's still something so much more reassuring, dignified and hopeful about it being a real place to visit and encounter rather than simply a brief flickering of colored shadows on a screen."

As it happens, the White City is emerging on a different kind of screen. Lisa M. Snyder, an architectural historian and member of UCLA's Urban Simulation Team who specializes in three-dimensional computer models of historic environments, is working on Web project that will allow visitors to take an interactive, real-time virtual-reality tour of the White City. Still under construction, the site can be previewed at www.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/Projects/columbian_expo.htm.

"Using a mouse, you'll be able to navigate through the fair, which should give you the sense of scale and the monumentality of the fair," Snyder says. "You'll be able to fly above the fair, see it as a pedestrian would, or even take a gondola ride. The idea is to bring it alive for people."

Wherever he is -- having a convivial, ghostly tea with Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps -- Daniel Burnham's blue eyes are smiling.