“Then or now, no words can express the beauty of the Dream City, for it is beyond even the unearthly glamour of a dream.”
— Candace Wheeler

“The White City” is the most common moniker given to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This nickname—referring to the uniform alabaster color of most of the main exhibition palaces—was coined by H. C. Bunner in his essay “The Making of the White City” (Scribner’s October 1892).

A view of a portion of the “White City”—the Court of Honor of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, facing east. [Image from Bancroft, Hubert Howe The Book of the Fair. The Bancroft Company, 1893.]

Unearthly glamour

Another common nickname emerged later, when the fairground had opened to visitors. Overcome by breathtaking beauty and otherworldly order, many fairgoers experienced feelings of rapture as though they were walking through a fantastic “Dream City.” The origin of this second sobriquet was an article by Mrs. Candace Wheeler, published in the May 1893 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

An advertisement for the publication noted that her essay “A Dream City”

“gives a general view of the aesthetic side of the Columbian Exposition, especially as shown in those features which will impress the imagination of visitors—effects of sky and air and water, of architecture, and statuary, with interesting retrospective glimpses of the processes by which this magical Columbian city has been evoked from the genius of its makers.”

Mrs. Wheeler, a nationally known textile designer and artist from New York, supervised the interior decoration of the Women’s Building at the Fair. Just prior to the opening of the Fair, she described the city of dreams as being “like the white blossom of a lily shedding in the wide-open, sun-illumined air the perfume and saintliness which its grubbing roots send up from the mysterious sources which they follow in the ground.”

Treasures yet unexplored

The name stuck, and countless references to the “Dream City” danced in the heads of Columbian chroniclers as early as Opening Day on May 1, 1893. One out-of-town reporter described the fairgrounds just before the ceremonies as a “Dream City” shrouded in mist, [“Michigan at the Fair” Detroit Free Press May 1, 1893, p. 1] while another commentator noted that “the work accomplished by Chicago is simply inconceivable to one who did not see the sand barrens of two years ago, and who has not seen the beautiful dream city of wonderful buildings, gardens, drives, and lakes which now exists.” [“The Chicago Fair” Indianapolis News May 1, 1893, p. 4.] A hometown newspaper joined the chorus, writing that “with the treasures of the ‘Dream City’ yet unexplored, it is fitting, it is grateful, to chronicle how completely on opening day sentiment dominated materiality.” [“Ready for the World” Chicago Tribune May 2, 1893, p. 1.]

I am almost afraid of awaking

Typifying use of this new nickname was a question posed by a child in Mary Catherine Crowley’s 1894 novel The City of Wonders: A Souvenir of the World’s Fair: “Is it not all like a dream city? I am almost afraid of awaking and seeing it dissolve into air. It seems as if it must have been conjured up by some poet’s imagination or some magician’s skill.” Mrs. D. C. Taylor adopted the name for her 1894 memoir, Halcyon Days in the Dream City.

Histories of the World’s Fair embraced Wheeler’s descriptor of the ephemeral nature of the fairgrounds. In his A History of the World’s Columbian Exposition Held in Chicago in 1893, Rossiter Johnson describes the selection of the fairgrounds site in Jackson Park as laying the foundation of “a dream city that should rise as if by an effort of the imagination, exist for a season with tens of thousands walking wondering through its streets, and then pass away to be a beautiful remembrance forever.”

Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed by James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp (Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893) describes Dedication Day the “Great crowds flocked toward the Exposition grounds, making a continuous stream of humanity that surged in one great sentient, unbroken wave, only to divide around the magnificent structures that proudly lifted their ivory proportions skyward. A dream city was before them.” Even the Director-General of the Columbian Exposition, Col. George R. Davis, described the fairgrounds as “a city of ivory palaces, embodying architectural dreams.”

The fair closes in a blaze of splendor

This overwrought ode, accompanying the article “Death of the White City” in the November 11, 1893, Los Angeles Herald, laments the end of the Exposition:

Panegyric

O dream city, Venice of the new world! O city of delight, fair Bohemia! O mirage city of white palaces! Phantom flower of the ages! Cloud-built city of the mind, why must thou vanish like a mist? Reared at night, like the palace of Aladdin, why must thou perish in a day? Why must the future ravages of time demand they demolition? O for the age of the Greeks’ Medusa, that they structures might have been turned to stone by her gaze! For thou art a thing without soul; living in today, thou knowest no morrow nor yesterday, have no past nor future, thy life being spanned by the half year of thy present. Thy gilded domes and slender towers, they imperial colonnade and many-columned peristyle, they symmetrical bridges arch placid nature, wherein is mirrored a miracle by day and a dream by night. Thy realm has been reckoned the court of Valhalla, thy sculptured images the spirits of the immortals. Thine isles, gleaming at eventide with the mystery of electricity, have been ceded to the fairies, the enchanted shores seeming the home of an army of fireflies and glowworms sporting with the sprites. Thy silvery bells, chiming in the twilight, soothe thy weary guests and prelude the triumphs of coming night. The nymphs and naiads spring to life in thy fountains and dance to the rhythm of their flow. The million lamps flambeaux sonnets of flame and wreathing lights will no more illumine and garland thy fair features. The laurel chaplet is on thy brow, but thine eyes are forever closed. Thon wert indeed a rainbow bubble once, but only a gossamer vapor now. Bryant’s wisdom has proven only too true.

Loveliest of lovely things are they
On earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
is prized beyond the sculptured flower.

Like the sun, which is never so glorious as at its setting, the fair closes in a blaze of splendor, its golden orb, though vanished beyond the horizon, will leave its trailing streamers far across the vaulted heavens, melting down through myriad lingering tints to where the skies bend to kiss mother earth. So the after-image of this exposition, like the luminous rays of the reflected sun, will be granted us, to be ever enshrined in memory.

Dreamers had dreamed

After the close of the Fair, one publication memorialized the historic event by naming its series of art prints The Dream City. A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (N. D. Thompson, 1893). This subscription series was offered by newspapers across the country. A view of the lovely Court of Honor in Thompson’s Dream City included this caption text:

“Air, and sky, and sea, and sculpture conspired to allure the mind from care, and though the financial panic saddened the hearts of the people, it could not extinguish the ardor of their admiration for this scene; it could not wrench from their loyal lips a cry of American regret that dreamers had dreamed and artists had wrought as never artists wrought before.”

When Candice Wheeler invented the dreamy nickname, she reminder readers of the ultimate fate of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds: “It is a dream which will vanish when the purpose which called it into being is fulfilled.” Soon enough, the Dream City became the “Vanished City.”