Behind the tour: White City Revisited

Each year, CAC staff and our team of more than 450 dedicated docents work together to create new ways to experience architecture. But have you ever wondered what inspires our tours? Here’s the story behind our White City Revisited tour.

By Dan O’Connell, Director of Communications and Public Affairs

Why white city?

White City Revisited is a two-hour walking tour through Jackson Park, site of the 1893 World’s Fair. The six-month exposition was a watershed moment that put Chicago on the map in the U.S. and around the world. With more than 27 million visitors, it was an immense undertaking for a regional city like Chicago, and other, larger cities like New York City and Washington D.C. were considered as hosts. But ultimately, the exposition was a great success that awed visitors and helped turn Chicago into a cultural and commercial capital. It also transformed Jackson Park, an area of the city that was mostly wilderness before Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted transformed its sandy stretch of marsh and scrub into the manicured grounds we see today.

The White City Revisited tour was developed by CAC docent Bill Hinchliff as a commemoration of the fair’s centennial in 1993. It is partly a detective story, since most of the exposition’s white stucco-clad buildings are long gone. An exception is the Palace of Fine Arts, now the Museum of Science and Industry, which can be seen from afar on the tour. In turn, CAC docents have to paint a picture of what the exposition looked like when it amazed visitors more than 120 years ago.

Recreating the magic

Daniel Burnham recruited the country’s finest architects to design the fair’s buildings: Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, Stanford White and George Post from the East Coast, along with Louis Sullivan, Charles Atwood, William LeBaron Jenny, William Boyington and Solon Beman from Chicago. While most of the 14 major buildings were designed in the Beaux-Arts style, Louis Sullivan thumbed his nose at that historical style for his Transportation Building in favor of something uniquely American and forward looking. He painted red, not the universal white that defined the “White City.”

That building is one of Tour Director Karen Buck Clapp’s favorites. Other highlights for Karen— who started leading the tour in 2006—are the Woman’s Building and the Haiti Building. Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate from MIT’s architecture program, designed the Woman’s Building near the Midway Plaisance for $1,000. Meanwhile, her male counterparts were designing the exposition’s other buildings for approximately $10,000. It would end up being the only building Sophia designed. The Haitian Pavilion became a home base for African Americans on the fairgrounds. It was the site of a speech by Frederick Douglass and served as journalist Ida B. Wells’ office while she reported on the fair.

While these buildings no longer exist, docents can still use the landscape to explain the fair. Karen especially enjoys the part of the tour that passes through the Garden of the Phoenix, near the former site of the “Ho-o-den” Japanese Phoenix Pavilion, on the north end of Wooded Island.

“Many of our tour goers are Chicagoans, but only about one in ten have seen Wooded Island,” Karen said. “Today it is the Paul Douglas Nature Sanctuary and showing it to our visitors is like revealing a gem.”

Popularity surge

White City Revisited is only offered six times a year, between May and October. It experienced a spike in popularity around 2006, not long after the novel “Devil in the White City” by Erik Larson was published.

“There was still lots of buzz around the book at the time,” Karen said. “I showed up to do my demonstration tour to be certified a docent and we found that 125 people had signed up for the tour that day. So the three certified docents and I led four individual tours. Good docents don’t turn people away.”

There will likely be another surge in the tour’s appeal in the next few years as a slice of Jackson Park becomes home to the Obama Presidential Center, designed by husband-wife team Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects. When the center opens in 2021, the world will once again be brought to the site that hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—and CAC docents will be ready to stir your imagination of it.