The World's Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago on May 1,1893. It was a year late, as it was supposed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America in 1892. The fair was the largest ever mounted up to that point in time and welcomed more than 21 million visitors before it closed in late October. From the perspective of the early 21st Century, when global events such as the Olympic Games and World's Fairs are commonplace, it is hard to comprehend the significance of this fair to Chicago and the nation. The idea of bringing together representatives of the entire world into an artificial community the size of a small town was still a novel one. In the late 1800s, World's Fairs were a new concept, born of the self-confidence and wealth of 19th-century Western society, and intended chiefly to celebrate economic, industrial, and cultural achievements. Previous fairs held in Berlin, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, Sydney, and Vienna, like Chicago's, each had their side shows and amusements, but the core of the fair was the serious business of promoting and awarding prizes for new products and technologies. Thus, as we see on the map, the largest and most elaborate buildings at the fair were warehouse-sized showcases for agriculture, machinery, electrical industries, mining, manufactures, transportation, and horticulture. Smaller buildings at the north end of the fair were sponsored by individual countries and U.S. states. The fair's carnival section-the famed Midway-lured as many visitors to the fair as the exhibits on the main grounds. George Ferris's "Wheel," the first ever, was a sensation, a modern marvel that at the time was thought a worthy rival of the Eiffel Tower, which had been built on the occasion of the Paris World's Fair of 1889.

The year 1892 seemed an appropriate date to stage a world's fair once again in the United States. Columbus's "discovery," after all, was an event of global historical and cultural significance, but was particularly appreciated by Americans, who regarded his explorations-more so than now-as the starting point of the national story. The anniversary was a logical point from which to measure national progress. Given the Columbian theme, Chicago seemed an odd place to stage the fair. Its selection over New York, Boston, and Washington reflected the fact that the fair was looking forward more than back. At the time, Chicago was the world's quintessentially modern city. Quite literally, it had been built from scratch in the aftermath of its Great Fire of 1871. The city, which had counted about 300,000 citizens in 1870, was now the home of more than one million. To accommodate the astronomical growth of the city center its architects had built the first skyscrapers. It was identified, too, with the railway age and the American West, which had already captured the imagination of the world.

It was expected, then, that the design of the exposition would embody the modern architectural styles for which Chicago was famous. As it turned out, Eastern architects designed most of the fair's buildings in the classically influenced Beaux Arts style. The design of the fairgrounds and buildings was overseen by the famed urban planner and architect Daniel Burnham, who in 1909 would co-author an influential master plan for the Chicago's 20th-century growth. Chicago-based critics, like Louis Sullivan, architect of the Transportation Building, were appalled, but the general public was captivated by the fair's illusion of a gleaming neoclassical city set amid lagoons and fountains.

The "White City," as the fair was dubbed, occupied what was then and is again today Jackson Park on the city's lakeshore, six miles south of the Loop (see the locational map from the backside of the core map for a rough orientation). The grounds were laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park. The map shows the importance of water to Olmsted's plan. The chain of lagoons and basins greatly added to the visual appeal of the fair's main buildings, but they were also a necessary means of draining what had formerly been a series of swamps. Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago would call for the establishment of an entire series of similar parks and lagoons along almost the entire length of Chicago's lakefront.

The map also makes clear the importance of railway access to the fairgrounds. (Automobiles were still in the experimental stage in 1893 and not available to consumers in the United States). One of the main arguments made in favor of Chicago as the site for the fair was its accessibility by rail. Rand McNally & Co.'s Handbook of the World's Columbian Exposition bragged that "any of the 88,000,000 of inhabitants of an entire continent of 8,000,000 square miles can, without a single change of cars, be landed in the heart of the city, or the very gates of the Columbian Exposition." A massive railway terminal constructed to accommodate these passengers deposited them in the midst of the fair's main buildings. Another station attached to the annex of the Transportation building served visitors arriving via the city's South Side Elevated Railroad. An "intramural" railroad which circled the exterior of the main fairgrounds is said to have been the inspiration for downtown Chicago's Loop "El," built in 1897.

The fair solidified Chicago's reputation as a world-class metropolis and exerted a marked influence on urban and recreational design in the coming decades, but ironically its time on this earth was fleeting. Modern visitors to the area can easily recognize the surviving patterns of lagoons in today's Jackson Park, but most of the fair's wood and plaster buildings, which only simulated the appearance of stone, were meant to be temporary and were destroyed within a year of the closing of the fair. The sole surviving edifice was the Palace of Fine Arts, at the north end of the fair, which today serves as the Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.