The White City & the Rainbow City
I remember back in school that most of my classmates thought that history was boring . . . nothing but names and dates and places. Memorize it all for the test and then forget it . . .
And if that’s what you boil history down to, it is in fact about as exciting as balancing a checkbook. But of course history is much more about context, antecedent, and atmosphere—the mood, manners, and beliefs of a given time. There are no isolated events in history; everything is hooked to many ‘something elses’ that came before. And it’s frequently that back-story that makes history so compelling.
Chicago World’s Fair, from the Peristyle. Public Domain.
It so happens that the back-story of Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition of 1901 is more compelling than most, and there’s more than one book that could be written about how it all came to be. But from a contextual point of view, in many ways the Pan’s overall design approach was a reaction to, and in competition with, its predecessor—the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair.
Chicago 1893 was by most every measure a big success. In the six months of the fair’s life, more than 27 million people visited the 690-acre grounds in Jackson Park beside Lake Michigan. That and several other ‘firsts’ made it one for the record books.
So when Buffalo’s turn to host a world’s fair came around, organizers faced the question of ‘what do we do for an encore?’. Many of them likely had been to the 1893 event, and no city wants to be upstaged by another . . . and so the Buffalo designers of the Pan had to figure out how—on less than half the available acreage and with a correspondingly reduced projected visitor count—they could make Buffalo’s world’s fair better, more memorable, and more successful than Chicago’s.
The answer they came up with was the extravagant application of electricity and color. Chicago did not have Niagara Falls’s unlimited hydropower, and the 1893 fair had been dubbed ‘The White City’ because all but one of the 200 buildings at that fair were, well, white. (The only colorful structure I know of was Louis Sullivan’s polychrome Transportation Building.)
Accordingly Buffalo decided to outdo Chicago by building an electrified ‘Rainbow City’, in which every building would be done up in shades of pastel that would show well in the daylight and yet not upstage the nightly Grand Electrical Illumination. After nightfall, little by little the entire Pan-American would re-emerge, outlined in electric light—250,000 individual bulbs, to be more precise. (It should be noted that Chicago had 56,000—the White City was by no means unsupplied by electric power, contrary to anything else you may have heard. In fact, the Pan-American bought its electrical wire from the salvage company that broke down the Chicago event.)
Pan-American Horticultural Building. Painting by C. Y. Turner. George Eastman House Collection. Used under Creative Commons license.
Organizers hired artist Charles Yardley Turner as the Pan’s Director of Color—and it’s well worth your time to read C.Y. ‘s own account (available online) of how he developed the Pan’s color scheme. Turner thought that the Pan-American ought to resemble a rainbow: with more vibrant colors at the far end of the park where the more ‘primitive’ accomplishments of humanity were on display, and then with increasingly mellow tones to reflect the presumed progress of the species.
The ‘rainbow’ scheme would reach its refined peak at the Electric Tower—in Turner’s words:
The electric tower is given over to a harmony of green and gold on an ivory ground. Here the color-key of the whole exposition is struck. The lovely green of Niagara water, rich as the green on the peacock’s wing, appears in its purity on the electric tower, to be echoed in every structure of the show-city. Not a building is there which is without its notes of Niagara-green.
For anyone who has been to Niagara Falls, ‘Niagara Green’ is the eerie bottle-green color of the sliding water. There is no other green quite like it anywhere, and Turner decided that Niagara Green would be the color that unified all of the works at the Exposition; every building would have at least a touch of this mysterious hue.
Designed by John G. Howard, the tower was literally the highlight of the exposition. Located at the top of the Court of Fountains, and just below the Triumphal Bridge, the structure stood 350 feet tall (Buffalo’s current City Hall tops out at just under 400 feet, for comparison), and was constructed of ‘staff’—a kind of plaster of Paris—over a steel superstructure. In a final dramatic touch, from its base gushed a miniature replica of Niagara Falls itself—at 13,000 gallons a minute.
Original from author’s collection. Color recovered image (c) Robert Brighton.
(Between all the fountains and other water-intensive features of the fair, the Pan used and recycled some 35,000 gallons of water per minute—and all of it supplied by the Buffalo Water Department. This was the vast majority of the department’s capacity; there were days when Buffalo residents couldn’t get water out of their taps. But as they say, ‘the show must go on’.)
Of all the Pan’s attractions, only the Electric Tower could make 100,000 people gasp simultaneously—each night, when its 30,000 eight-candlepower incandescent lights began to flicker and glow. All these bulbs were arranged in patterns invisible until the tower burst into full flame.
During one such illumination, an awestruck Buffalo Post reporter on hand said that when the lights came on, they gave “the vast pillar [the Electric Tower] the appearance of a gigantic oven through which fire gleamed”. The fountains sparkled, and the hidden patterns emerged. Spotlights at the tower’s summit shot out great beams of Niagara Green beneath a gilt statue of the Goddess of Light, standing triumphantly atop the summit cupola, her feet in a luminous pool of Niagara’s water. What a sight it must have been!
Original from author’s collection.
Alas, until now all we’ve had are black and white images of the Electric Tower at night—striking, to be sure, but leaving a lot to the imagination. The preceding image is the best one of the tower in my collection, an original made by a professional New York City photographer using a very large format (5″x7″ negative) camera. I asked my Irish expert to recover its colors, though not expecting much, since it was at night and all—until I learned that low ambient light can be a blessing when trying to tease out the original colors in black and white images. Presumably daylight ‘overexposes’ whatever color-capture capability such film possesses, and at night the dark is easier on the camera’s eye. There’s a lot to study here, but do note the effect of the time-lapse exposure on the Midway’s Aerio-Cycle, in the center-left background. The exposure took long enough to capture both wheels of the contraption as each rose into the frame.
Original from author’s collection. Color recovered image (c) Robert Brighton.
And so here you have it, for the first time anywhere. The great tower soaring upward to the gilt Goddess of Light, Niagara Falls gushing from its base, searchlights blazing . . . calling the whole world’s attention to Buffalo. And in the process throwing the White City into the shade.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.