Only one great building of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition survives, and you are facing it. This colossal classical structure was built as the Palace of Fine Arts for the fair that drew 27 million visitors to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. The fairgrounds, nicknamed the White City for their gleaming plaster facades, were meant to be temporary, and nearly all of them were demolished or burned soon after.
This one building, because it held priceless art, was made of sturdier stuff, and it survived. Rebuilt in permanent stone, it reopened in 1933 as the Museum of Science and Industry, where today a captured German U-boat and a full coal mine wait inside. Look across the lagoon of Jackson Park, landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted for the fair; you are seeing the one surviving fragment of the dream city that briefly stood here and shaped American architecture for a generation.