 |
| Home » Notable Events » 1933 Century of Progress Exposition |
|
| 1933 Century of Progress Exposition Documents |
Babylon of Tall Towers Springs Up Overnight to Make World's Fair;
Village Grows Old as
You Watch
|
Source: Chicago Daily News, 6 May 1933, pg. 1, 5.
|
By Robert J. Casey.
A babylon of tall towers, miles in its
extent, steps up from a weird chaos of building iron, flower gardens,
plaster piles, mud and formal terraces. Walls of mauve and scarlet and
green and silver, stand against a chill blue sky.
Up the scarred surface of a winding road moves Birnam's wood of
trees on ponderous trucks. Carpets of green grass are unrolling down the
slopes of bleak and barren mounds. Armies of gnomes, with monkey
wrenches and shovels and coils of wire and Chinese brooms dash about in
dizzy informality—each army its own calling.
And the shocked eyes of a dazzled visitor would close as on an
unbelievable dream if he were not aware that all this strange spectacle
is reality in its ultimate development—the rocketing rise of Chicago's
second world's fair—A Century of Progress.
One who traveled the empty miles of the lake front when only the
queer looking administration building and the log stockade of Fort
Dearborn gave a hint of the city that was to be built here cannot
believe that so much has been done in so short a time. Where three
months ago were mere piles of iron girders today extend labyrinths of
chaste white halls, pillared with light and strangely etched with neon
tubing.
Out of yesterday's chaos rise grand staircases out of glass-walled
courts. Along an island that some months ago had no existence stretch
palaces of chrome and lacquer. From towers completed within the last few
hours flow waterless waterfalls. And across the sky—so high that one
who looks at it had best lie flat on his back—swing the cables of the
Sky Ride, where within another few hours cars will be gliding to and fro
in the clouds above the exposition grounds.
Spring Up Overnight.
The visitor is conscious as he looks with amazement on what has
thus sprung into being virtually overnight that the world's fair's best
exhibit of progress will be one that cannot be contained in any of the
glittering halls—an exhibit that probably will be overlooked by most
of the thousands who come to Chicago during the summer—the
construction of the exposition city itself.
In all the apparent disorder of the grounds is a plan whose
existence has not been suspected until recently even by those who have
seen the mountains of material dwindle to nothing
[pg. 5] and the towers
rising day by day to their angular heights.
Buildings, some of which are sturdy enough to class with
loop skyscrapers in
permanence, have come up with a speed which should set some new records
for steel construction. And as the riveters were still working toward
their summits a tide of workmen was flowing in and out of their lower
floors—covering their skeleton frames with plaster and lath and steel
plate and their floors with resilient tiles. Somewhere in the offing
waited the impatient exhibitors with samples of their wares and devices
to show them—the last of the shock troops mobilized for the fair.
Already some of them are charging the side gates and their complete
advance will be well under way next week. And the slogan of an unnamed
hero of the contracting business has received its full verification: "When
we get 'em up, they're done."
A Colorful Skyline.
It is not so much the queer architecture of the buildings that
impresses one who looks at them for the first time as their amazing
extent. The skyline of the lake front, as one views it between the
geometrical standards of the avenue of flags, is blatant with chrome and
color, zig-zagging to heights beyond which the more familiar spikes of
south shore hotels seem almost
puny.
To the right, on a hill that one cannot remember ever having seen
before, a Belgian village is nearly completed. Its cobbled roadway
stretches between ranks of stone buildings and facades of timbered
brick. All of this including the rubble of the walls, is shiny white and
new—whiter even than those villages which took speedy root in the
shell-pitted chalk of Flanders after the war.
But this is being quickly remedied by squads of men with squirt
guns and pails of artificial mold. As an astonished spectator looks on
they move about the village shooting three or four hundred years of
patina on to the white cobbles and strewing the roofs with generations
of mosses and lichen. Already a part of the street which was finished
two days ago has the appearance of something that Cæsar built and
left as a heritage to the Gauls.
Air brushes have brought uncanny shadows to arched doorways and
under the green-molded lanterns of the courtyard at the end is a
mysterious area that has seen empires burned and murder done. One who
knew the Belgium from which this scene has been lifted so completely
misses only the banner of the Red Cross and the placard of the Belgium
Relief Commission and the broken glass in the roadway.
Speed Up Antiquity.
Farther down the road the modernists are making a further
contribution to antiquity in the preparation of a home for some
mechanical dinosaurs. White plaster rocks are turning to granite over
night and the crevices are blossoming with sprigs of fern and shrubbery
that ceased to exist thousands of years ago. The prehistoric animals who
presently will be wagging their heads and waving their tails over this
reconstructed back-lot of the good old days are reposing somewhere in a
Michigan avenue warehouse getting in training for their season's work.
Farther still toward the south in this bewildering vista is a scene
which instantly blots out all consciousness of the building refuse
strewn about it the railroad tracks that flank it and the masses of
colored wall that clutter the horizon behind it. For here a more slowly
moving battalion of workers is putting the last touches on a Mayan
temple.
Copying Mayan Temple.
There is nothing quite like this in the world save the original
from which it was so carefully copied. Where its counterpart in Central
America rose from the gnarled roots of an ancient jungle, this gleaming
white structure is based upon a broad waste of made land whose ancestry
was tin cans, kitchen refuse and wreckage that comes with civic
progress. But one is aware of this only on closer inspection.
The temple itself, despite the fact that its walls still smell of
fresh plaster, carries an atmosphere of dignity and antiquity unlike
that of any other building on the grounds. It is a huge step pyramid
surmounted by a square building and skirted by hundreds of stairs.
Carving that recalls the upper stages of Angkor has been reproduced to
the last chisel mark. And the air of authenticity that enwraps it has no
need for the moss that comes in cans and squirt guns.
The surroundings of this building presently will be altered—possible
are being altered as this, a current account, is being written.
Skillfully designed landscaping will take the eye away from the
ramshackle wooden atrocities of "The Days of '49." Shrubs will
conceal the near presence of the railroad and the approaches will lead
the spectator to it at angles from which the eye-stunning kaleidoscope
of the skyline is not visible.
One goes down the road to see the great dome of the travel and
transport building, one of the first on the grounds, coming at last into
practical use—with a new blaze of color on its pylons and batteries of
trucks lined about it delivering exhibits.
Gardens While You Wait.
On Ballyhoo boulevard—the Midway of the new fair—is a picture
like something out of a high fever. Small buildings, whose planes and
angles make them resemble houses of cards, are taking shape as one looks
at them. A workman rushes across one's vision with a yard of sod which
he tosses onto a black mound. A little caterpiller tractor rolls over to
smooth the adjacent surface. Two men come staggering from somewhere with
a tree just bursting into leaf. They toss it into a hole and other
workers tamp down the earth about it.
Some artisans who seem to be perfect strangers to all the others
wander in from behind a building with an armload of white stone which
they begin to upend in the outline of a winding path. On their heels is
a squad with wheelbarrow loads of flowering shrubs which go into niches
already cut for them. In five minutes a bare plot as large as the front
yard of a suburban villa has blossomed like the rose and a gardener in
blue denim is out with a hose and sprinkler apparently unaware that
anything has happened more exciting than the usual day's work.
One comes back to Chicago somewhat dizzy and looks upon what used
to seem a scene of tremendous activity. Somehow it doesn't seem to
amount to much.
[End of news article]
|
|
Page compiled: 29 December 2005
|
|
|
