Chicago World's Fair Quotes

“One of the delights of the fair was never knowing who might turn up beside you.”

“Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”

“The burden of restoring the nation’s pride and prominence in the wake of the Paris exposition had fallen upon Chicago.”

“But the fair did more than simply stoke pride. It gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity.”

“It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”

“The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.”

“Young women drawn to Chicago by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared, last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything architects held dear.”

“There would be miracles at the fair—the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000 pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold—but the greatest miracle was the transformation of the grounds during the long soggy night that had preceded Cleveland’s arrival.”

“If evening at the fair were seductive, the nights were ravishing.”

“The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.”