125 years after the World’s Columbian Exhibition closed in Chicago, Hamilton: The Exhibition, will open in this city. Broadway World reports that the interactive exhibit, which uses the smash musical Hamilton to tell the story of the American Revolution and the creation of the United States of America, will open in Chicago on November 17, 2018. What comes next is a tour of other U.S. cities.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the producer of the Broadway show, Jeffrey Seller, picked Chicago as the first stop of the touring exhibit because … wait for it … “he had been inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.”
The New Jersey State Building was a reproduction of Alexander Hamilton’s home. [Image from The Dream City. A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (N. D. Thompson, 1893).]
I’m not throwing away my shot to note that Alexander Hamilton had a small presence at the 1893 World’s Fair.
Visitors could step inside the New Jersey State Building, a reproduction of a house from Morristown, New Jersey, in which Hamilton and one of the Schuyler sisters lived. Hubert Howe Bancroft’s The Book of the Fair (Bancroft Company, 1893) notes that Alexander Hamilton “wooed and won the daughter of General Schuyler” in this house, which also served as General George Washington’s headquarters during the winter of 1779-80.
Fairgoers looking to take a break inside the Palace of Fine Arts could view William Ordway Partridge’s plaster replica of the statue of Alexander Hamilton that he created for the Hamilton Club of Brooklyn, New York.
