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- Hacker News
- For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book The Devil in the White City. It definitely includes some very disturbing subject matter (basically the nation's first heavily publicized serial killer) with an incredibly deep history of the fair so it's not for everyone but an amazing read. I love how brilliantly the author builds up the anticipation for how the American architects were going to respond to the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower at Paris's exposition a few years prior. I will not spoil it here and it's best if you don't know it when you read itby redwood
- I live 8 blocks from the fairs location. The parks it left are central to my daily life.by kasey_junk
- I have been maintaining a habit of reading about a place before travelling there. Mostly, it's either short story books telling about the cultural lore or history of the place.
Recently, I visited Budapest and read a book with the same name by Victor Sebestyen.
One critical topic stood out: "Budapest, the city, was rebuilt significantly in the two decades leading up to 1896 for a World Exhibition marking 1000 years of the country."
It was not a proper world fair, but we can call it so.
Since then, the same question has been running through my mind: what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?
Operationally, it gives me chills to imagine a "concert/festival" [in today's terminology] of such scale being pulled off across months.
by pravj - Fairly often and I'm not from Chicago. If I could time travel, 1893 would be on my short list of destinations because of the Chicago world fair.
Another one would be 1851, the year of the first world fair in London. The old fairs would already be awesome for a modern visitor, but I can't imagine what the people living then must have felt, seeing things like electricity for the first time.
I can't visit them, but I did at least dedicate 2 chapters of my game to the 1851 one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
by gxd - On a related note, I visited the St Louis Art Museum which is on the site of the 1904 World's Fair. Then it contained many ornate buildings made of plaster: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
The art museum is in a remodeled building that sits on the top of the same hill overlooking the pond. What it looks like now: https://nohomejustroam.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/St-Lou...
Those world's fairs were something else.
by hcrisp - “To Chicago and Back” is a travelogue book by the Bulgarian author Aleko Konstantinov describing his trip to the exposition. Very famous in Bulgaria, introducing America to us. Probably why the most Bulgarian immigrants still live in Chicago (based on the number of restaurants). There’s a bust of the author inside UChicago.
I personally love walking the grounds when I visit, imagining what it must’ve been.
by ssttoo - Fairly often. One idea I've been kicking around is to try and port UCLA's "digital reconstruction" of the White City to a modern game engine: https://idre.ucla.edu/wce
- The Devil in the White City stands out as one of my favorite books. And I live near the location of the prison in Philadelphia where HH Holmes was hanged, though it’s now the site of a grocery store. So I’m regularly reminded by the historical marker sign.by mbil