Although the buildings were not nearly ready, they were officially dedicated on October 21, 1892, four hundred years to the
day, by the revised calender, following Columbus's sighting of the West Indies. The next morning the city woke to the sound of
artillery, and at exactly nine o'clock Gen. Nelson A. Miles wheeled his horse in the street in front of the Auditorium Building, the
United States 5th Cavalry behind him, and led a parade of dignitaries, including Vice President Levi Morton (President
Benjamin Harrison was at his dying wife's bedside), to Jackson Park. More than one hundred thousand people crowded into
George Post's mammoth Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, to hear the dedication and listen to a five-thousand-member
chorus, a five-hundred-piece orchestra, and the usual barrage of holiday oratory. The only noteworthy speech was given by
Bertha Honore Palmer, wife of the wealthy Chicago hotelier Potter Palmer and the unchallenged leader of Chicago society. An
ardent feminist, she was president of the exposition's Board of Lady Managers, which had its headquarters in the only building
designed by a woman, the twenty-one-year-old Sophia G. Hayden of Boston. Bertha Palmers mere presence on the podium
was considered an unprecedented recognition of women, but she thought it perfectly fitting, she said, considering that it was a
woman, Queen Isabella, who was largely responsible for Columbus's voyage. 

Visiting the grounds the following January, a Chicago reporter found the buildings disfigured by coal dust, with great patches of
plaster peeling from their facades. Groups of desperate unemployed men had taken refuge in the Court of Honor, now a gray
and grimy city of the homeless. The following July, at the end of a day of violence between striking Pullman railroad workers
and federal troops commanded by General Miles, the former grand marshal of the fair, a fire of unknown origin swept through
the Court of Honor, and more than a hundred thousand people gathered on the grounds to watch a three-hour "spectacle that ...
exceeded anything of the kind that had occurred since the Great Fire of 1871 ." The orderly crowd looked on in silence as if it
was watching a fireworks display of the previous summer. "There was no regret; rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements
and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbian season," the Tribune reported. 

Like the Great Fire, the burning of the White City was seen by many Chicagoans as an opportunity for a fresh start. That
summer Daniel Burnham began conceiving plans for a series of civic improvements that would transform Jackson Park and the
entire municipal lakeshore into a vast pleasure ground, the la lakeshore into a vast pleasure ground, the landscape centerpiece of
his Chicago Plan of 1909, the greatest civic project to come out of the fair. Chicago owes its peerless lakefront and the
boulevard character of Michigan Avenue to Burnham's 

Available on InfoTrac
American Heritage, July-August 1993 v44 n4 p70(16) The white city. (1893 World's Columbian Exposition) Donald L.
Miller.
ndscape centerpiece of his Chicago Plan of