From the Steel City to the White City: Western Pennsylvania and the World’s Columbian Exposition

The publication of Robert W. Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair (1984) birthed a cottage industry for historians to mine the importance of international expositions and fairgoers’ responses to them. In the decades since, Bruno Giberti, Lawrence Samuel, Sarah Nilsen, Susanna W. Gold, Mary Elizabeth Boone, and others have filled in the picture, covering exhibitions from Philadelphia and San Francisco to Brussels and New York.1 Though no two were identical, all fairs were bound by a common purpose: to inspire awe and patriotism through industry, technology, and the built environment. In this welcome volume, Zachary L. Brodt revisits the familiar grounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition but adds a Pennsylvanian twist: he finds that citizens, elected officials, and business leaders of greater Pittsburgh were peerless contributors in creating the fabled “White City,” making Chicago’s event arguably the nineteenth century’s most influential US-hosted fair. In turn, those visiting the Exposition from western Pennsylvania returned home to “mold Pittsburgh in its image” and hoped to stage a future exposition of their own (7). What follows the author’s concise introduction is a compelling story of urban ambition and civic reciprocity between two of Gilded Age America’s leading cities.An archivist at the University of Pittsburgh, Brodt explains this reciprocity predated the planning and execution of the 1893 fair. After Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871, Pittsburgh’s industrial might (including coal, iron, steel, and electric engineering) propelled the former’s reconstruction; indeed, as one Columbian Exposition promoter noted in 1889, “Pittsburgh has been like a mother to us” (174). Philadelphia hosted the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the first held in the United States and for years after, fairs took place in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Louisville, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. To showcase Chicago’s emergence from the ashes, the city bested New York and won the honor of hosting a fair to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Pittsburgh’s boosters warmly supported Chicago’s bid, for as Brodt finds, its companies helped construct the fairgrounds while ensuring its own offerings and achievements had “an extensive showing in Chicago” (41). From Pittsburgh came a cast of characters that heralded the region’s growing importance after the Civil War and the country’s broader shift from the Victorian to the modern eras.Brodt introduces the now-familiar names of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, H. J. Heinz, George Westinghouse, and George Ferris and ties their respective achievements in coal and steel production, food processing and marketing, electrical inventions, and architecture to the 1893 fair. Industrialists Frick and Carnegie, who’d formed a working relationship during the event’s planning, later disagreed on the scope of their displays, and as Brodt finds, saw that relationship sunder by opening day. Both men harbored reservations about the era’s labor militancy (the Haymarket Riot, Homestead Strike, and an 1892 attempt on Frick’s life) and worried such discontent might appear on the fairgrounds; refusing to have a prominent installation at Chicago, Carnegie grumbled “rather than a spread-eagle thing, I should vote to have no exhibit at all” (74). Still recovering from his wounds, Frick soldiered on. His Coke and Coal Company built a replica of their Standard plant and mine, a display that earned public praise as well as an exposition award. In the Agricultural Building, the overwhelming favorite of the fair was Heinz’s “pyramid” of pickles, preserves, and relishes as well as his personal art collection; the display’s popularity led to a memorabilia boom, guards keeping crowds in check, and structural reinforcement of the flooring on which it stood. In the Electricity Building Westinghouse gave fairgoers a glimpse of alternating current (AC) power and presaged the larger electric displays at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. But Pittsburgh’s most memorable contribution was the Ferris Wheel, the centerpiece of the Midway Plaisance and architectural challenger to Paris’s Eiffel Tower, which had anchored the 1889 Exposition Universelle. As the fair drew to a close in October, wares and efforts from western Pennsylvania left parting attendees with “a greater appreciation for Pittsburgh’s citizens” (71).World’s fairs remained integral to the American cultural landscape well into the Cold War, with New York hosting perhaps the last one of true significance in 1964. Yet, for all of their efforts and civitas, the citizens of Pittsburgh never played host to an International Exposition. In Brodt’s final chapters, he discovers that despite not receiving the honor, the White City’s influence manifested itself in the construction of libraries, parklands, collegiate campuses, and public sculpture on “an unassuming tract of farmland” (150). Eventually, the Oakland neighborhood, its top-flight research universities, and the makeover of Schenley Park (complete with an amusement midway) shifted Pittsburgh’s cultural epicenter east from downtown. And in 2024, the area’s landmarks remained a lasting tribute to practitioners of the City Beautiful Movement, whose grand aesthetic ran aground with changing tastes and the Great Depression of the 1930s.The strengths of Brodt’s work rest in his clear prose, deft research, and obvious affinity for the subject matter; for readers who share such a Pittsburghian affinity, his appendix provides a complete listing of all western Pennsylvania-related companies and products that made their way to Chicago. More refreshingly, this is an archivist’s brand of history that forsakes theoretical baggage and ideological revisionism that in many cases robs from the narrative power of the story. Given that the White City commemorated Columbus’ role in American history, a work of recent scholarship might have offered more critical points of view, specifically regarding the controversies over removing the Columbus statue in Schenley Park; as of this writing, the sculpture remains cloaked in tarping. But the proper contextual balance is there, as Brodt dutifully sets his story within the race relations, gender roles, labor militancy, and economic uncertainties that plagued the nation in the Gilded Age. With these merits in mind, From the Steel City to the White makes an important scholarly contribution and will appeal to Americanists of all specialties.