With the election for a new Mayor of Chicago on the horizon, citizens are demanding cleaner streets, a crackdown on crime and vice, and safer public transportation. The year was 1893.

The mayoral election of the spring of 1893 would decide who would become the “World’s Fair Mayor” as the city prepared for the May 1 opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Bartow Adolphus Ulrich (1840-1930) had some thoughts on the direction the host city should take and published his views in a small booklet titled How Should Chicago be Governed? (Hazlitt & Company, 1893). Reprinted below is an excerpt relating to the World’s Fair.

[As a public service announcement for our Chicago readers, this year’s mayoral election will be held on February 26, 2019.]

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World’s Columbian Exposition

Before the visitors from the great cities of the old world come to Chicago to participate in the celebration of the Columbian Exposition, this city, with so many attractions to commend it, should remodel its present system of government, and place itself upon a higher plane equaling the importance of the great metropolis.

Our visitors from the cleanest city of the world, the beautiful Paris of the nineteenth century, should find our streets thoroughly cleansed, and the railroads, street cars and other corporations respecting and obeying the city ordinances. The mayor whom Chicago is to elect soon should arrest, with the aid of a newly organized police force, and punish all gamblers and criminals permitting no guilty one to escape for personal or political reasons.

THE PROHIBITION DISTRICTS SHOULD REMAIN IN TACT. Those residence districts annexed to Chicago where saloons are now prohibited, must be watched or else they may be changed to non-prohibition districts at some future election.

The cable death-traps to surprise uninitiated visitors at Madison and State streets, Michigan avenue and Randolph street, Randolph and Wabash avenue, Randolph and LaSalle and many other cable and railway crossings should be continually guarded by flag-men employed by the companies, or tracks lowered or elevated, otherwise there will be numerous lives uselessly sacrificed.

Rest assured our city methods of government as well as everything else connected with Chicago will be investigated by these foreign visitors, and written up in French, German, Italian, Russian, etc., as well as English.

Bartow A. Ulrich