Having now been to two former World’s Fair sites, I felt compelled to round it out with a third. Weeks before COVID hit, I was in the planning phase for a trip to Buffalo when I discovered that they had held a World’s Fair in 1901. I had found my third site, though the visit was delayed several years from the fallout of COVID and life.
As I got off the bus at the end of a bridge over an expressway, I had moment of panic before seeing I was right next to the History Museum and a quiet residential neighborhood, just as I had intended. There were several parallels between this site and those I explored in San Francisco and Chicago, but the feel of the place was completely different. There was the characteristic lagoon, or in this case lake, surrounded by park, but the park and lake were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted long before the idea of the fair was born. Like Chicago, the remaining fair building(s) was used as a museum, and while the architecture is intended to inspire awe and perhaps intimidation, it is the normal awe and intimidation of the average temple to art or history seen in many cities and not the massive scale of San Francisco’s Palace. The park is also bisected by a road with dangerously fast traffic, but there are multiple safe pedestrian crossing points over and under (including the Whirly-Twirly Bridge). There was a Japanese Garden here as well, but it was installed decades after the fair and was illustrative of the fact that this site had a life before the fair and continues to have an on-going life after the fair.
The remainder of the fair site between the park and the railroad tracks where the fair had a station has been fully redeveloped. Over half of that area is now residential neighborhood(s) with a variety of housing types from modest single-family dwellings to large homes with security fencing and landscaping staff. (Passing these houses and taking photos, I again felt the potential for someone to approach and question my belonging and right to explore.) There were also two-family dwellings and apartments. I passed two schools, a former church, some industrial properties, a paddock, and a strip mall. One of the residential streets had a sign acknowledging the past as the site of the 1901 Pan American Exposition. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have know I was on the site of a former World’s Fair without having carefully studied the map of the fair beforehand. I felt as though I was in any other neighborhood of any other city that is flat and that has residents who have at least a little, though in many parts it was clear that the residents had a lot.
As I had unintentionally read about the World’s Fairs in San Francisco and Chicago before visiting those sites, I decided that I needed to intentionally read about Buffalo’s before going so that there would be some consistency in my approach. One of the points that Margaret Creighton reiterated in her book The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City was that Buffalo was trying to outdo Chicago (they picked the Rainbow City theme and lighting scheme to be in direct contrast to Chicago’s White City). In the end, and certainly not helped by the fact that President McKinley was shot at the fair, Buffalo did not have the success they sought in receipts or in numbers of visitors.
Having now visited both Chicago and Buffalo’s fair sites, I would say that over 100 years later, Buffalo has had the greater long-term success on its fair site than Chicago. The entire area once covered by the fair is now, and has been for some time, an actively used location. From the park with a number of tourists and residents enjoying all the amenities (even in the middle of a Monday at the beginning of the school year) to the homes to the businesses, Buffalo’s fair site must by this point have long outstripped Chicago’s in number of visitors/residents/users and in tax revenue/receipts.
urbantraipsing 