Dear Mr. Burnham,
Please take a look at the attached press release drafted by Chief Halsey Ives of the Fine Arts Department. Are we to proceed with this? I urge caution.
With concern,
Moses P. Handy
Publicity and Promotion

May 14, 1893

(Re)Introducing the Dana Palace of Fine Arts

The World’s Fair is open, the guidebooks are printed, and the maps are distributed. And yet, winds of change are blowing through the Windy City. The Palace of Fine Arts is getting a name change! No, not to the “Art Palace” (please stop calling it that) or the “Art Institute” (that’s up the street). Our newly prefixed name honors our great benefactor, a man who once lived and worked in Chicago but who years ago abandoned us for the East.

The Directory of the Columbian Exposition announces an historic naming gift from Charles Dana, editor and owner of the New York Sun. You may recall that he disparaged our beloved Lake Michigan as a “ghastly stretch of lifeless and insipid water,” and claimed visitors to our city become “saturated with a horrible sadness.” He did write that “the shams of the local architecture and the local commerce are exactly paralleled in the utter and splendacious falsity and bad form of the local clothing and the local manners.” He even insulted the Chicago female native for her “abnormally small” eyes and her nose “perilously like a pug or snub,” and claimed that “her lower jaw undergoes the most extraordinary spasms when she talks.”

Let us leave all that name-calling behind us. After all, Mr. Dana did not invent the moniker “Windy City” … though he did brand our metropolis the “porcine Babylon.” Perhaps Mr. Dana’s take on our fair/Fair city is simply a “choice example of glaring misrepresentation.”

Still … money is money, and we’ll take it. This historic donation will allow us to secure our future, create art exhibits geared toward a discerning East-coast eye, and provide a salve to ease Gotham’s painful loss in their bid to host the Exposition. Those caryatids outside can’t do all the heavy lifting.

Evolving an exhibit hall of our size does not happen overnight, and we expect that this much-loved landmark that means so much to so many, will forever and ever be named … the Dana Palace of Fine Arts.

Dear Mr. Handy,
I appreciate your concern but am currently dealing with another crisis. Following his visit on Opening Day, the executive officer of the nation wishes to construct a tower on the western shore of the lagoon and name it the “Cleveland Presidential Library.” Can you imagine? Mr. Olmsted will be livid! Could Mr. Dana not have lent his name to the State Building of his beloved Knickerbockers, or just bought some trinkets on the Midway?
Exhaustedly yours,
Daniel H. Burnham, Director of Works