ATDTDA (2): "still some weeks till the fair closes" (52.24)

[Tim Strzechowski]

"Still some weeks till the fair closes," said Randolph.
 
"I'll be gone by then.  They're sending me west, fellows, and I guess it's so long."
 
Randolph had a sympathetic look.  "At least they tell you where it is you'll be sent off to.  After the closing-day ceremonies here, our future's all a blank" (p. 52).
 

[...] Due to the temporary building material used, only two of the 200 buildings of the Fair survived – the Columbus Memorial Building, which is now La Rabida, a hospital for cardiac children, and the Fine Arts Building, which eventually became the Museum of Science and Industry. In addition, the current Osaka Gardens, originally the Ho-o-den exhibit from the Wooded Island, continues to this day in Jackson Park. Between the time of the Fair and the 1933-1934 Century of Progress Exposition, the Fine Arts Building was the original Field Museum of Natural History. After the exposition, the museum moved to it’s current Grant Park location. A 24-foot replica of the original 65-foot Statue of the Republic stands at the foot of 65th Street. Another building, the German Building, served as a museum till a fire destroyed it on 31 March 1925.

During the six months that the Fair was open, 27,539,000 visited the Fair. The Fair’s last day was 30 October 1893. The biggest single day of the Fair was Chicago Day, which commemorated the anniversary of the Great Fire of 1871. 716,881 people attended that day.

The Fair, however, did not close on a very positive note. Just three days prior to its closing, Chicago’s mayor, Carter H. Harrison, Sr., was shot five times by a visitor in his home. This visitor was Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, a follower of the single tax enthusuast [sic], Henry George. The motive of Mr. Prendergast was to get even with the mayor for not appointing him as corporation counsel. Mr. Pendergast turned himself in and the jury took only an hour to find him guilty of first degree murder. It was a very somber closing of the Fair.

http://chicagology.com/columbiaexpo/

http://homicide.northwestern.edu/crimes/carter/

http://homicide.northwestern.edu/database/916/


[...] Multiple tragedies marked the end of the fair. A smallpox epidemic that originated at the fair in midsummer spread throughout the city by early autumn. Then, just before the gala closing ceremonies were to be held, Mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated. Finally, shortly after the fair's close, a fire swept through the fairgrounds, destroying many of the buildings. 

The fair was gone, but not its influence. It lifted the spirits of over 20 million people who paid to visit the exposition just as the Panic of 1893 hit. Furthermore, many of the exhibits found their way into museums around the country, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Philadelphia Commercial Museum. Chicago's Field Museum owed its origin to the fair and opened in 1894 in the former Palace of Fine Arts, a building that would later be reconstructed to become the Museum of Science and Industry. And the building that had housed delegates to world's congresses would become the Art Institute of Chicago. On another level, the triumph of the World's Columbian Exposition revivified the American world's fair movement and set a standard against which every subsequent exposition would be measured. Forty years later, the promoters of the Century of Progress Exposition made clear their indebtedness to the 1893 fair when they triggered the opening of their exposition with a beam of 
starlight that left Arcturus the same year that the World's Columbian Exposition had illuminated Chicago's skies.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386.html


Off the subject, kind of, I stumbled across this, for anyone who's a gamer:

http://www.cdaccess.com/html/shared/1893.htm


Anyways ...

[...] Attendance figures vary, but it is generally agreed that a total of over 27.5 million people visited the fair (21.5 million paid admissions, 6 million free). Figures for the number of American visitors is not available, nor is the percentage of those admissions that were repeat visits. However, it can be safely assumed that approximately 25% of the United States' population visited the Fair, and the majority of the rest of the country experienced it through newspaper accounts, photographic guidebooks, and the pictures and stories of friends and family who visited it themselves. 

The Fair was incredibly popular until it closed on October 31, 1893. The World's Columbian Exposition paid off all of its operating expenses, even returning $1 million to its 30,000 subscribers, a portion of their initial investments. It had a great influence on turn of the century American society, as well as social, economic, cultural, and political legacies to modern America. [...]

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/history.html