Morning on the Fairgrounds

This is Part 1 of our series “Opening Day of the World’s Fair,” which explores the events of May 1, 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The full series can be found here.

The day of days dawned with gray skies. Jupiter Pluvius, giver of rain, held an uplifted threatening fist over Chicago this morning. Throughout the city, bunting hung to celebrate the opening of the World’s Fair sagged, damp and listless. A bleak and chilled mist filled the air, and a general tone of gloom pervaded the streets. The sun, as if ashamed of his recent desertion of the earth, showed his face now and then indistinctly in the east.

A ghostly city raised up in the night

In Jackson Park, the White City by the lake was in cloudland when daylight slowly crept upon the fairgrounds. Beyond the Peristyle, cloud and waters mingled into a gray field over Lake Michigan.

Anyone standing in the great Court of Honor would think that the surroundings–stupendous in plan, pondering in their extent, and soft white in the morning light–was a ghostly city that had been raised up in the night. Empty of visitors, the White City felt like a town deserted by some strange race of Titans who had moved to other shores. One colossus remained, shrouded in cloth and waiting patiently for her unveiling.

Across the basin, the Administration Building, with its golden dome half-wrapped in vapors, towered above all and stood dark and sentinel-like in the midst of this great white camp.

Early dawn of the opening day was a depressing one

For anxious officers of the exposition who were preparing for the Opening Ceremony, this early dawn was depressing. The forest of columns showed dimly through the fog, their capitals lost in vapor. Rain-charged clouds swept across the towers of the great buildings, trailing down the steep slopes of the giant roofs like banks of vapor across a mountain flank. Occasional gusts of wind momentarily revealed dripping minarets and flag staffs with flapping halyards, then a general dull lead-colored veil of chilling mist shrouded every object again.

The bunting came back up in triumph

At six o’clock that morning officials made the decision that no outdoor ceremonies would be possible in such weather. Workers hastily shifted their preparations for the exercises to be held in the Administration Building rotunda. Wagons that were carrying heavy loads of banners, streamers, and flags to the various structures stopped and turned back to the storehouses.

Scarcely had the order been given, though, then the mist began to lift. A solitary patch of blue sky showed itself to the windward, the rain stopped, and the clouds changed from heavy lead to a liquid gray. The statue of Diana atop the Agricultural Building emerged from the haze, her arrow pointing straight into the northeast by the wind coming off the lake. Great white-winged gulls circled above the blue basin as a soft light grew in the eastward sky.

Within the hour, thousands of men returned to work, encouraged and cheered by the prospect of clearing weather. The bunting came back up in triumph, and flags–rolled up in readiness to be unfurled at the special signal–soon began to appear at the flagstaffs.

Notes of a bugle call

Before 9 o’clock a solitary bugle call rang out from somewhere away off on the edge of the fairgrounds, almost immediately swallowed up by a burst of melody from the throats of brass instruments carried by the band of the Fifteenth Regiment Infantry from Fort Sheridan, arriving for duty on Opening Day of the World’s Fair.

That same morning just a few miles north of the fairgrounds, another bugle call could be heard coming from a small boy sitting in a window of the Lexington Hotel.

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SOURCES    (See our note about sources here.)
“Epoch in History” Chicago Herald May 2, 1893, p. 1.

“‘White City’ Half in Cloud Land” Chicago Daily Tribune May 2, 1893, p. 1.

Pickett, Montgomery Breckinridge “Opening of the Great Fair” Harper’s Weekly May 13, 1893, p. 442.