In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Fair, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America. Designed by Daniel Burnham, the man who said, “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir man’s blood,” and Frederick Olmsted, the famed landscape architect, the Chicago Columbian Exposition, sent a clear signal to the rest of the world: Watch out, because America is coming.
A century later, the United States government decided not to fund expositions any more, probably scarred by the memory of the 1984 New Orleans Expo, which is the only Expo to ever go bankrupt. Everything we do now is paid for by corporate America.
This history all came to my mind as I read the story in today’s Washington Post about the opening of the Shanghai Expo. The Chinese are taking this event very seriously, as they usually do. They get the symbolism.
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