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As the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America approached, several leading
cities vied for the right to host a great world's fair. Chicago's political and business
leaders, eager to demonstrate their city's triumphant recovery, convinced Congress that the
great inland capital was the proper site for the festivities--and that they had the financial
resources to make it work. The World's Columbian Exposition opened a year after the
quadricentennial, but it more than justified Congress's choice. This most successful fair in
American history ran from May to October, attracting over twenty-seven million people. It
was located in a completely relandscaped Jackson Park (according to a plan by Frederick
Law Olmsted, who had written about "Chicago in Ruins" for the Nation twenty-two years
earlier), and the center of the fair was the grand Court of Honor, a magnificent arrangement
of enormous neoclassical exhibition halls, all with the same cornice height and painted
white.
At the western end of the Court of Honor was New York architect Richard Morris Hunt's
Administration Building. This structure, like most of the fair's major buildings, was
surrounded and adorned by allegorical statuary (under the supervision of Augustus St.
Gaudens, sculptor of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the south end of Lincoln Park),
including one representing "Fire Controlled," by Karl Bitter.
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Columbian Carnival 