La Rabida and How the Hospital Got Its Name

 

I decided to stick with a theme of things that outlasted the Fair—in this case a name and a seawall. The designers built a peninsula into the lake to shelter the harbor where the three caravels would be, using the bedrock at the surface of the lake there.

 


When the countries were staking out Fair real estate, Spain seized the prominent point facing the lake for its life-size replica of the Franciscan monastery of Santa María de la Rábida, where Columbus took refuge in 1486. 
 

 

It held 400-year-old Columbiana, advertised as some of the most valuable objects at the Fair--letters from Columbus to Queen Isabella, a 1529 map of the world—and described since as having “dubious authenticity.” Most of the diaries I’ve seen thought the exhibit was a bore. The building is visually arresting on its high point because it was severely plain when everything else at the Fair was ornate. It’s also where folks could get some cool lake air without much of a crowd. 
 
 
After the Fair was over, the Spanish Consulate donated the building to Chicago for a fresh air sanitorium for children. The urban diseases of typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever were the first mission. A women’s board raised the money so that La Rabida could be open to children “regardless of race, religion, or ability to pay.” By 1910, the building was not in good shape and the child health services moved to other city locations. 
 

1910. Chicago Daily News photo



When the building burned in 1922, the board decided to move back and rebuild—with a Spanish tile roof as a nod to the original. More buildings were built over the decades but the name stayed. The seawalls from 1893 are still there, on the peninsula, though in bad shape with the recent lake damage. You can walk out there to take a look (the fossils in the bedrock south of it are also very cool).
 


 

The Norway Building

 

One of the things that’s interested me is how attached other nations are to their history at the Columbian Exposition. I thought it might be special to the Japanese because it was their time to step out onto the world stage. They have come back to finance the garden many times over in honor of their pavilion, but it’s also true of others, including the Norwegians. The Norwegian pavilion is one of the few structures at the fair that survives in its original condition, though it’s wandered quite a bit.

 

The country, state, and territory buildings were all arranged around the Fine Arts/MSI area. Because some of these were real buildings and needed the most time to build, they were mapped out in the one section of Jackson Park that had already been developed as dry land—basically from 56th to 58th. 

 

From the new website for the building. see link below

 

Countries and states also applied for exhibit space in the various themed buildings. Those were where the real promotion and display of the home culture were done. The outsides of the separate buildings were often seen as the important showpiece and the interior had small exhibits. Mostly this one served as offices for the various Norwegians working at the fair in various capacities. In this case, they built a stunning medieval stave church. It was built first near Trondheim, Norway, then disassembled and shipped to the fairgrounds, where it was reassembled.

 

1893. University of Chicago Photographic Archive [apf3-00040r], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

After the close of the Fair, the building was purchased by Norwegian-American Cornelius Kinsland Billings, president of People’s Gas of Chicago. He had it disassembled and shipped to his estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. That estate then was sold to William Wrigley Jr., who painted it bright yellow and used the building as a private movie theater. In 1935, a Norwegian-American, Isak Dahle, disassembled the building and moved it to Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. There it became a mini-Norwegian museum with other buildings and small exhibits about Norwegians in America. Several generations later, people rarely visited small museums. The cost of maintaining it wasn’t covered and damage was taking its toll.

 

All this time, the Norwegians hadn’t forgotten. Over the decades, royalty had visited, future King Olave in 1939 and future King Harald in 1965. Olav Sigurd Kvaale, the grandson of Peder Kvaale, one of the original woodworkers, came to visit, saw that it was in need of rescue and raised the money to buy it and bring it home—raising both private and government funds. 

 

The Norwegian workmen disassembling it in 2015. photo from the Chicago Tribune

Not only was it their showpiece from 1893, but it was an authentic example of a stave church, which were becoming rare in Norway. So, it’s now in its new home in Orkdal, Norway. 

 

As part of the celebration of bringing the pavilion home, the Norwegians erected a plaque where it had stood in Jackson Park in August 2018. They contacted Rahm Emanuel—and though the Park District has rules about markers in the park (have to be low subtle rocks), this is a tall metal plaque on the north side of Science Drive as you pull off Lake Shore Drive into the MSI surface parking lot.

 

c. plmorse

 

I checked out the Norwegian site advertising the rehabbed pavilion and found out something. Isak Dahle was gay. When he reassembled the pavilion in the 1930s, he rearranged the heads so that bearded kings were next to bearded kings and queens were next to queens—same sex royal couples. When the Norwegians reassembled it for the last time, they decided to keep his arrangement to show that the “Norway Building welcomes all, regardless of sexual preference, race, or faith.” The first wedding held in the rebuilt building was a gay couple.

 

And here it is, reassembled in all it's glory. https://www.thamspaviljongen.no/norway-building-from-1893/

 

I relied a lot on a great website with more detail: https://worldsfairchicago1893.com/.../the-long-journey.../

Lagoon, Bridge, and Comfort Station Predate the Fair

Continuing the theme of “things that survive the Fair”--

Most of Jackson Park was still a series of beaches, dunes, ridges with burr oaks, and swales with moisture-loving wildflowers when it was chosen for the Fair. There was one section that had been developed and was ready for the early use of the states and countries to stake out territory. 

Most of the park was undeveloped because it was miserable for farming and so was relatively cheap to buy up when Paul Cornell and friends decided to launch the South Parks Commission and create two large parks connected by boulevards that would hook up into the park and boulevard system surrounding the city on the West and North. And it was still undeveloped because they had the bad luck to draw up a plan in 1871, just in time for the great fire. There was no money for parks. Then, in 1879, John Sherman, founder of the Union Stockyards, joined the board of the South Parks Commission. His son-in-law had just set up an architecture practice with a partner and they were struggling to find work, so Sherman had the commission toss a small part of the project their way. 

They developed the stretch of Jackson Park that was north of 59^th Street. They created two oblong lakes running north and south along Stony Island Avenue and added in paths and a carriageway. A bridge carried the paths over the ponds.

Further south, a natural inlet and swale was dug out to become the “North Pond,” the lagoon that’s now south of the Museum of Science and Industry. They leveled off the rest for lawns and landscaping (1879). To make the beach nice for strolling, granite pavers were laid into the water from 56^th to 59^th (1884). A limestone picnic shelter and concession stand was built near 56^th, a small limestone “comfort station” was built east of the North Pond (1888), and a bridge was built over the inlet to the North Pond for a circular carriage drive (1884).

 

John Sherman’s son-in-law was Daniel Burnham, and it wasn't long before his fortunes improved immensely, but he remembered Jackson Park. Olmsted recycled the Burnham and Root features already in the park into the plan for the Fair. Three of them still survive (though barely)-- a bridge, a lagoon, and a limestone bathroom.

 

Art Institute--Home of the 1893 Congresses

 MSI was reconstructed to look like the original Palace of Fine Arts, but there’s a building built for the fair that was meant to last because Bertha Honoré Palmer had a purpose for it. It was built where planners originally thought the Fair would go. There were several problems  with the location, but the biggest was the Army Corps of Engineers, which wouldn’t allow legal landfill near the river. (The Streeterville landfill you can see was illegal.) The fair organizers continued building the structure they had already started and held the congresses there. These were week long gatherings of authorities and experts around a single topic like Religion or Education. Over 750,000 people attended the lectures and in their various fields the Congresses were wildly influential, launching thinking into the 20th Century. 

 

You can see several reasons it was a bad location but one was the coal soot over everything. Brand new and the building is already covered with grime. Chicago burned Illinois coal, which covered everything in black grit. That was another reason the gleaming white paint of the fair amazed people into calling it White City. Chicago was the Black City and the University, which opened in 1892, started calling itself the Grey City because it was in limestone. So next time you’re near the Art Institute say hi to the fair.

Darrow Bridge, Fine Arts, Merchant Tailors Building

There’s so much to choose from when toddling around the Fair but I decided to focus on things that survive the Fair--at least in some form. 

This view has three surviving landmarks. The electric boats are heading under what we know as the Darrow Bridge toward the Palace of Fine Arts. The bridge was built by Burnham and Root before the Fair, so Olmsted repurposed it in the fair layout. The railing that the Chicago Park District and the Illinois Department of Transportation have neglected is the railing you see in this photo. The main entrance to the Fine Arts was here on the lagoon side, now the backside of the Museum of Science and Industry. 

So what’s the third? That “little” building on the left was the Merchant Tailors Building, put up by the guild to celebrate their craft. It is based on a building on the Acropolis in Athens. It was designed by Solon S. Beman. And when Timothy Blackstone’s will called for building a library, his widow Isabella hired Beman and they agreed that this should be the model as a call back to the Fair and Athens. So when you go to the Blackstone Library, you see a bit of the Fair. Even more so, the murals in the library rotunda are meant to capture the murals of the fair so you can see the kind of decoration the buildings had inside.

I decided to distract myself by talking about the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, which I've been thinking about and giving tours for a number of years.

Because so much of the Fair in photos were the relatively empty official photos of buildings, I love this one of a family that looks footsore and weary, walking the length of the Midway, probably to get to the entrance at Cottage Grove and the streetcar stop, their guidebooks clutched in their hands. They have made it to Ellis Avenue (which was blocked off for the fair). They have brought extra wraps, so it might be in the fall, but everyone wore a lot of clothes in public, so even in the summer heat, women and men were all bundled up in the photos. There was no air conditioning!! I totally would have just melted onto a bench somewhere or spent all my money riding the ice railway--a toboggan that ran over actual ice. 

One thing else you can see is that the Midway was not yet dug down the way it is now. The central flat wide avenue went up the middle from Cottage to Stony. And the avenue was dirt--so when it rained, people referred to the Mudway Nuisance. The Midway was all concessions--everything there cost extra to go in--and it's why the Fair made money even during the deep depression that was building that summer. And every concession had a barker or something out front trying to lure people in. So, this family is hearing a roar of sounds--music, drumming, Chinese opera singing, barkers. And there are the smells--strange cooking and lots of animals on the Midway. At least the bathrooms had flush toilets! I think there's a men's "comfort station" to the right of the photo.