On of my favorite books of 2003 was Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City (Crown 2003) (website here), the engaging tale of Chicago and the 1893 World’s Fair, which has just finished an astounding 124th straight week on the NY Times Bestseller List. A movie is currently being planned for the book, so the Chicago Sun-Times interviewed Larson and several other experts on the “White City” to determine the source of the fascination over the 1893 Fair:

On the one hand, Larson says, the White City was designed and built by the Gilded Age elite “as a way of demonstrating that America could come up with this level of sophistication. They went for drama at a time when architecture had very little relevance for most of the country, paving the way for things to come by inserting into the American psyche an appreciation for architecture. The sheer beauty in that array of buildings in the Court of Honor, ingeniously using the backdrop of the lake to stage the whole thing, was enough to knock anybody flat.”
But if the White City was a dream made real, much of the rest of Chicago was a nightmare.
“The fair gripped people,” [Chicago Architecture Foundation lecturer Christopher] Multhauf says, “partly because it was a vision of beauty in a place that was so squalid.” The streets were a quagmire of mud and manure, the air laced with soot and the rank aroma of stockyards and slaughterhouses. Poverty was widespread; labor unrest simmered and sometimes boiled. Prostitution flourished. Not far from the baronial mansions of Prairie Avenue, there were 31 brothels on Clark Street between Congress and Harrison, all of which were open at the time of the fair. The German writer Paul Lindau called Chicago “a peep show of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point.”

Read the entire article and, if you have not already done so, pick up this fine book.