The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486130637
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

72. The White Star Steamship Company pavilion. To the right of it, the Puck Building. In the far distance at the left, the towers of Electricity and the Administration dome.

73. Puck Building.

74. Children’s Building.

75. Woman’s Building, with its southeast corner in the center of the photo.

76. The east (Lagoon) front of the Woman’s Building, with the Ferris Wheel in the distance.

Just to the west of the White Star pavilion, McKim, Mead and White struck again with the Puck Building (Fig. 73). This jolly pink-and-white confection housed the temporary Exposition branch of the famed New York magazine of political cartooning and satire. Visitors could view the latest five-color presses and other marvels of printing technology in operation. The statue of Puck was by Henry Baerer, sculptor of some Central Park and Prospect Park statuary. Supervising the Chicago operation was the founder and chief caricaturist of the magazine, Viennese-born Joseph Keppler. Apparently the unwonted problems at the fair put an excessive strain on Keppler; he left Chicago a very sick man and did not live through the following winter.

To the west of Puck—and protected, as it were, by the Woman’s Building, of which it was a dependency—stood the Children’s Building, by the French architect Alexandre Sandier (Fig. 74). Inside were a gymnasium, day nurseries and many instructional exhibits on child raising that elevated the Exposition’s Children’s Building far above its Paris 1889 counterpart, which had been dubbed a “hatcheck for babies.”

One of the most distinctive features of the World’s Columbian Exposition was the Woman’s Building (Figs. 75— 78). There had been a separate women’s pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and at the New Orleans Cotton Centenary of 1884, but they could not begin to compare in significance with Chicago’s contribution to feminism.

This was no accident. At an earlier period in Chicago’s history, the brides that successful but lonely businessmen “imported” from previously settled districts of the United States had done much to bring culture to the rough young city. After the Civil War, society had blossomed out and the clubwoman tradition remained very strong. It remained strong not only for amusement but also in the interests of community service, and of women’s rights in particular. Queen of Chicago society at the time of the Exposition, and guiding spirit of the Woman’s Department and Building, was Bertha Honoré Palmer, a Chicagoan of Kentucky patrician stock, and wife of Potter Palmer, the merchant and hotelkeeper extraordinary who developed State Street commercially and was the first to build a mansion on the Near North Side.

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