Chicago hosts the World’s Columbian Exposition of…

Chicago hosts the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a spread of one hundred and fifty pompously neoclassical white-plaster façades with a common sixty-foot (eighteen-meter) cornice line relieved by a few outstanding designs, such as the Japanese Ho-o-den pavilion and an entry by Adler & Sullivan.

The second U.S. world’s fair, the Exposition is an influential social and cultural event and has a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago's self-image, and American industrial optimism.

The so-called “White City” establishes white, columnar architecture as the only acceptable public style in the United States.

Celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492, the centerpiece of the Fair, the large water pool, represents the long voyage Columbus took to the New World.

Chicago had won the right to host the fair over several other cities, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.

The layout of the Chicago Columbian Exposition has, in large part, been designed by John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles B. Atwood.

As the prototype of what Burnham and his colleagues think a city should be, it is designed to follow Beaux Arts principles of design, namely French neoclassical architecture principles based on symmetry, balance, and splendor.

The color of the material generally used to cover the buildings façades gives the fairgrounds its nickname, the White City.

Many prominent architects have designed its fourteen "great buildings".

Artists and musicians are featured in exhibits and many also make depictions and works of art inspired by the exposition.

The exposition covers six hundred and ninety acres (two point eight square kilometers), featuring nearly two hundred new (but deliberately temporary) buildings of predominantly neoclassical architecture, canals and lagoons, and people and cultures from forty-six countries.

More than twenty-seven million people attend the exposition during its six-month run.

Its scale and grandeur far exceed the other world's fairs, and it becomes a symbol of the emerging American Exceptionalism, much in the same way that the Great Exhibition became a symbol of the Victorian era United Kingdom.

Dedication ceremonies for the fair had been held on October 21, 1892, but the fairgrounds are not actually opened to the public until May 1, 1893.

The fair continues until October 30, 1893.

In addition to recognizing the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Europeans, the fair also serves to show the world that Chicago had risen from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871.

On October 9, 1893, the day designated as Chicago Day, the fair sets a world record for outdoor event attendance, drawing 751,026 people.

The debt for the fair is soon paid off with a check for one and a half million dollars (equivalent to forty-one million eight hundred thousand in 2018).