The city’s latest marketing campaign, “Chicago Not in Chicago,” is an effort to show potential visitors how other cities have benefited from Chicago-born innovations such as the skyscraper and house music, an electronic-driven dance genre pioneered by Chicago disc jockeys. In one TV ad, the point is driven home through a clip of a tour guide acknowledging New York’s various debts to Chicago as a double-decker bus passes along Manhattan’s streets.
The goal is to compel viewers living elsewhere to quickly develop a desire to buy airline tickets to O’Hare International Airport and book rooms at a Loop hotel.
Critics might note that a less expensive response would be for those intrigued by the commercials to simply experience those wonders that originated in Chicago in places closer to their hometown. On top of that, some of Chicago’s celebrated achievements are no longer viewable in the city. When passing New York’s packinghouse district, for example, the tour bus guide pays homage to Chicago’s Union Stockyards. They vanished in 1971.
The story of Chicago’s efforts to put its best foot forward begins on the morrow of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. With 17,000 buildings destroyed and 100,000 residents homeless, Chicago had to rebuild quickly — a feat rival cites gloatingly doubted could be pulled off.
A New Orleans newspaper predicted: “Chicago will be like the Carthage of old,” referring to a long-vanished ancient city. “Its glory will be of the past, not the present.”
Yet in the midst of the disaster, some Chicagoans displayed a remarkable resilience. Merchants set up shop on the rubble of their stores. A real estate dealer pounded a sign into the ashes: “All gone but wife, children and energy.”
Hoping to communicate Chicago’s resiliency to Eastern bankers and workers, William Bross hopped aboard the first available train. The co-owner of the Tribune was a font of rhetoric and he deployed it freely in a speech to the New York Chamber of Commerce.
“Go to Chicago now!” he declaimed. “Young men hurry there! Old men send your sons! Women send your husbands! You will never again have such a chance to make money.”
As a mark of his salesmanship, carpenters and stonemasons headed to Chicago. But to some ears, Bross’ pitch sounded like the stump speech of a windbag politician: long on purple prose, short on facts.
Because of such overblown hype, Bross’ hometown became known as the Windy City. Only later was the nickname attributed to the winds off Lake Michigan. Outsiders considered verbosity a telltale Chicago foible. Chicagoans assumed it was a politician’s inherent style.
In the 1870s, Tribune headlines characterized City Council sessions as a “Windy Debate” or a “Windy Discussion.”
“The Windy City” became the put-down of choice when Chicago mounted a full-throated campaign to host a World’s Fair on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America.
The U.S. had scarcely announced the celebration when Chicago began lobbying Congress and Washington’s diplomatic corps. “Chicago executed a flank movement on other candidates for the world’s fair by opening headquarters here today,” a Tribune dispatch reported on Oct. 15, 1889.
“Why, every express package that comes East from Chicago is labeled in large letters ‘World’s Fair at Chicago in 1892,'” a New York congressman told the New York Herald. “Every congressman has been deluged with papers filled with the World’s Fair in Chicago to the extent of a column or more daily.”
New York was caught flat-footed, and the stakes were high. The world’s fair would attract myriad visitors and pump big bucks into the host city’s economy. So New York’s partisans belittled Chicago in a blistering counterattack that only alienated other cities.
The Baltimore American reported: “Every feature of Chicago’s political, economic, moral and domestic life is distorted for the purpose of creating the impression that the city is not a fit place to hold the Fair.”
The Toledo Blade fired the coup de grace: “New York has made fuss enough for a dozen World’s Fairs. Chicago is no longer entitled to the name ‘Windy City.'”
When Chicago got the fair, one New York newspaper acknowledged Gotham’s self-destruction:
“Perhaps we failed to realize that Chicago itself is one of the miracles of civilization — an eighth wonder of the world,” wrote the New York Tribune. “Probably many were not aware of mechanical facilities which made feasible what only a few years ago would have been impossible.”
Indeed, in the decades since the Great Chicago Fire, a frontier outpost had become an industrial giant. Its meteoric growth — from 298,977 residents in 1870 to 1,099,850 in 1890 — was in itself a tourist attraction. Some visitors published their impressions, preselling Chicago’s World’s Fair pitch. Even those put off by factories that belched smoke recognized such nuisances as a sign of a booming economy.
“No place in the United States has attracted more attention or been more closely watched than Pullman,” the Times of London wrote in 1887. “It is the extension of the broadest philanthropy to the working man, based upon the strictest business principles.”
British tourists who put George Pullman’s factory town on their must-see list could scarcely guess it would be wracked by a bitter strike in 1894, a year after Chicago’s World’s Fair closed.
Postponed a year because of construction delays, the fair was a public relations bonanza. Many of its 27 million visitors raved about Chicago.
“Those who come here will wonder how, in less than 50 years, that is, in less than a man’s lifetime, it has been possible to transform a swamp, producing only a sort of wild onion, into a powerful and flourishing city,” marveled F. E. Bruwaert, a French travel writer.
Chicago’s second World’s Fair was a riskier business. Years of planning for a “Century of Progress” celebration of the city’s centennial were interrupted by the stock market crash of Oct. 24, 1929.
While New York financiers were trying to stabilize Wall Street, Rufus Dawes, president of the exposition, could assure Chicago’s architects that money was on hand to carry out their plans for the exposition.
But Chicago’s image had been tarnished by the newspaper fodder of Prohibition-era gang wars.
Would tourists be drawn to the city of Al Capone?
Fortunately President Herbert Hoover endorsed the Century of Progress and appointed a U.S. attorney in Chicago who declared war on crime in a speech at the Union League Club.
“He predicted that by the time of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair this city will be the most law abiding in the country,” the Tribune reported.
Capone was indicted and Chicago freed to argue that its fair wouldn’t be mobbed up or a casualty of the Depression, but a herald of better times. Its exposition focused on science and technology, underscoring their economic potential.
The Tribune spread the message by distributing windshield stickers advertising, “Come to the Word’s Fair,” to interstate truckers. Loop parking lots placed them on cars, and the combination of words and shtick turned the trick.
“A Century of Progress, biggest single enterprise undertaken by private industry during the depression, will open its doors for business next Saturday,” the Tribune proclaimed on May 21, 1933.
It was a resounding success. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the fair held over for another year, a sentiment echoed in letters from Tribune readers. “Many, many people who have been hit by the Depression could not get here this year, and they are now getting on their feet and can come next year, and they want to see it,” wrote W.H. Allen, upon returning from the West Coast.
Reopened in 1934, the fair drew 48,469, 227 visitors in all.
After that, Chicago lost its moxie. Bids for a third World’s Fair and the 2016 Olympics were duds. Its current tourism campaign begs for deciphering. It lacks the fiery rhetoric of Bross’ 1871 pitch. Or the fierce competitiveness of the Columbian Exposition’s partisans.
Perhaps “Chicago Not in Chicago” is like a Zen master’s enigmatic teaching: aimed at provoking audiences to explore hidden layers of meaning.
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