How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?

I have been maintaining a habit of reading about a place before travelling there. Mostly, it's either short story books telling about the cultural lore or history of the place.

Recently, I visited Budapest and read a book with the same name by Victor Sebestyen.

One critical topic stood out: "Budapest, the city, was rebuilt significantly in the two decades leading up to 1896 for a World Exhibition marking 1000 years of the country."

It was not a proper world fair, but we can call it so.

Since then, the same question has been running through my mind: what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?

Operationally, it gives me chills to imagine a "concert/festival" [in today's terminology] of such scale being pulled off across months.

The Devil in the White City stands out as one of my favorite books. And I live near the location of the prison in Philadelphia where HH Holmes was hanged, though it’s now the site of a grocery store. So I’m regularly reminded by the historical marker sign.

Fairly often and I'm not from Chicago. If I could time travel, 1893 would be on my short list of destinations because of the Chicago world fair.

Another one would be 1851, the year of the first world fair in London. The old fairs would already be awesome for a modern visitor, but I can't imagine what the people living then must have felt, seeing things like electricity for the first time.

I can't visit them, but I did at least dedicate 2 chapters of my game to the 1851 one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

I live 8 blocks from the fairs location. The parks it left are central to my daily life.

I am obsessed with '58.-

As a Chicagoan... quite often. So many things were introduced there, it's not hard to find a reference with some regularity.

It's disappointing that the two promised movies around the events of Devil in the White City still have not come to pass. One was supposed to feature Tom Cruise in the role of Holmes, and the other Leonardo diCaprio.

Fairly often. One idea I've been kicking around is to try and port UCLA's "digital reconstruction" of the White City to a modern game engine: https://idre.ucla.edu/wce

I think about it quite often. Then it’s weird how many of the cities hosting them burned catastrophically, coincidentally.