World’s Fair architects on “Jeopardy!”

The November 29, 2024, episode of Jeopardy! offered contestants this $400 clue in the Double Jeopardy! round under the category of “Do You Want to Build a Building?”: In 1873 Daniel Burnham & John Root started a firm to build together in this city; 2 decades later, Burnham built a fair there. Debbie Mercer, a retired special education teacher from (nearby) Oak Park, Illinois, gave the correct answer of Chicago. Daniel Burnham and John Root in their office [...]

By |2024-11-30T10:23:45-06:00November 30th, 2024|Categories: NEWS|Tags: , , |0 Comments
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Nov. 9, 2024: “H. H. Holmes & New Links to Chicago & the White City” (Hazel Crest, IL, and online)

The South Suburban Genealogical and Historical Society (SSGHS) will host a presentation on “H. H. Holmes & New Links to Chicago & the White City” at their meeting on Saturday, November 9, 2024. Guest speaker Ray Johnson, known as “The History Cop,” will discuss his research into new links between killer H. H. Holmes and Thomas B. Bryan and Daniel H. Burnham, and a possible link to a swindle in England. The society meeting will take place from 10–11 [...]

By |2024-11-02T17:38:21-05:00November 3rd, 2024|Categories: EVENTS|Tags: , , |0 Comments
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“No Holmes Barred!” A World’s Fair Radio Show Podcast Concludes

History, hilarity, and histrionics characterize a new satirical radio-show podcast about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. No Holmes Barred! is written, directed, and produced by Daniel Ciarrocchi (you may have seen him on Jeopardy!) and tells the dual stories of Daniel Burnham’s construction of the fairgrounds in Jackson Park and the bloody trail of murderer H. H. Holmes in nearby Englewood. If this premise sounds like a certain best-selling work of narrative nonfiction that introduced millions of readers [...]

By |2024-08-23T13:17:26-05:00August 23rd, 2024|Categories: AUDIO, NEWS|Tags: , , , , , , , |1 Comment
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May 7, 2024: DREAM CITY musical (Chicago)

A new musical about the 1893 World’s Fair takes the stage at Theater Wit in Chicago for one night only. Dream City, with book and lyrics by June Finfer and music by Elizabeth Doyle, will be offered as a staged reading on May 7, 2024, at 7:30 PM. Finfer and Doyle’s musical is a revision of Burnham’s Dream: The White City, staged in 2018. This new version featured five new songs, two new characters (including a villain), and no [...]

By |2024-06-04T09:23:08-05:00April 22nd, 2024|Categories: EVENTS (past), THEATER|Tags: , , , , , , |0 Comments
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“No Holmes Barred!” A World’s Fair Radio Show Podcast

History, hilarity, and histrionics characterize a new satirical radio-show podcast about the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. No Holmes Barred! is written, directed, and produced by Daniel Ciarrocchi (you may have seen him on Jeopardy!) and tells the dual stories of Daniel Burnham’s construction of the fairgrounds in Jackson Park and the bloody trail of murderer H. H. Holmes in nearby Englewood. If this premise sounds like a certain best-selling work of narrative nonfiction that introduced millions of readers [...]

By |2023-10-09T07:59:11-05:00October 6th, 2023|Categories: AUDIO, NEWS|Tags: , , , , , , , |1 Comment
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The Making of the White City (Part 2)

[Continued from Part 1] A great stage decked with ambitious scenery Perhaps the first thing that would strike a stranger entering the World’s Fair grounds in the summer of 1892 would be the silence of the place, the next the almost theatrical unreality of the impression by the sight of an assemblage of buildings so startlingly out of the common in size and form. When I speak of the silence, I mean the effect of silence. There are seven [...]

By |2023-02-12T10:58:10-06:00February 13th, 2023|Categories: REPRINTS|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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Daniel Burnham on Architecture and “The Intellectual Reflex of the Exposition”

What influence would the White City erected for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago likely have on the development of American architecture in the years to come? Pondering that question, architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler noted that Daniel Burnham, Director of Works for the Columbian Exposition, offered a vision that was able to “crystallize into a lucid and specific form a general hazy expectation.” Burnham’s made his comments in this passage for a Chicago newspaper, and Schuyler reprinted them in [...]

By |2022-08-14T06:57:13-05:00August 14th, 2022|Categories: REPRINTS|Tags: , |0 Comments
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Mar 29, 2022: “Daniel Burnham: Make No Little Plans” (Council Bluffs, IA)

Historical dramatist R.J. Lindsey will become Daniel Burnham, Director of Works for the 1893 World's Fair, in a living history program at the Council Bluffs Public Library on March 29, 2022. In "Daniel Burnham: Make No Little Plans," the famed Chicago architect narrates a slide program, including many photographs, detailing the Chicago Fire of 1871, the building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, and the Chicago Development Plan of 1909. He will also discuss several of his innovative buildings: [...]

By |2023-08-05T08:36:54-05:00March 27th, 2022|Categories: EVENTS (past)|Tags: |0 Comments
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“The eighth wonder of the world” Gilded Age author Charles Dudley Warner extols the 1893 World’s Fair

“The bigger Chicago is, the more important this world becomes.” —Charles Dudley Warner American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) is perhaps best remembered as the co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Their 1873 novel satirizes the greed and political corruption endemic in the United States after the Civil War. The “Gilded Age” moniker eventually came to describe the era of excess and deception in late-nineteenth-century America. The pinnacle of Gilded Age [...]

By |2022-01-24T06:08:30-06:00January 24th, 2022|Categories: HISTORY|Tags: , , |0 Comments
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Prominent Petunias

On April 29, 1893, gardeners at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held a christening ceremony for a pair of plants. Inside the greenhouse behind the Horticultural Building, they sprinkled water from a can onto the opening blossoms of two petunias, baptizing the large white bloom as “Mrs. Potter Palmer” (named after the President of the Board of Lady Managers) and the black one having one tiny white fleck as “The Burnham” (named after the Director of Works for the [...]

By |2021-05-08T14:32:44-05:00May 8th, 2021|Categories: HISTORY|Tags: , , |0 Comments
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