What some visitors thought of as exorbitant prices for food and lodging in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition became the stuff of legend.

The fanciful tale told below, originally published in the July 2, 1895, Chicago Tribune and reprinted in newspapers across the country, captures one not-so-fond memory of the 1893 World’s Fair. We can only guess to the identity of the restaurant he had patronized.

A photograph by Charles Dudley Arnold of the lovely Café de la Marine (Marine Café) designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb. [Image from Arnold, C. D.; Higinbotham, H. D. Official Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Press Chicago Photo-gravure Co., 1893.]

A Precious Recollection

A stranger who was walking through Jackson Park the other day and noting the changes that time and the South Park Commissioners are gradually making in that historic locality was observed to stop under one of the trees, glance at the Wooded Island, squint at the Statue of the Republic in the distance, and carefully examine the tree itself.

Then he slowly nodded his head several times, emitted a sigh, and softly said to a bystander:

“I shall always look upon this spot where I am standing now as the dearest spot on earth.”

“It was here, perhaps,” ventured the other, “that you met the young lady to whom—to whom you were afterward—er—”

“It was here,” said the stranger, dreamily “that I paid $4.75 for a bowl of cold soup, a piece of asbestos beefsteak, a slab of baker’s bread, and four swallows of coffee.”

The former fairgrounds of the 1893 World’s Fair was a scene of desolation by 1895. [Image from the Inland Printer, May 1895.]