The Vanishing City: Excavating the World's Fair

Lasting for only six months before its structures “vanished,” the 1893 World’s Fair’s permanent impact on American consumer culture, city planning, questions around citizenry and foreignness was deeply tied to and reinforced by its ephemerality.

 

Rebecca Graff will speak about her archeological and archival research focused on the ephemeral “White City” and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair. The results of the excavation in Jackson Park revealed a robust archeological signature of the extensive sanitary infrastructure of the Fair and, surprisingly, delicate plaster remains of the Fair’s Ohio State Building. Graff’s work links the Fair, as a catalyst for structural change and its material record, to the larger social structures of late nineteenth-century America.