A Dream In John Larson's The White City

Utopia- an imagined place or state in which everything is perfect. This is can also be referred to “The White City” in which Chicago was named for its enchanting and beautiful World’s Fair hosted in 1893. The city ultimately changed in just sixteen-months from ugly and crime-filled streets to what many claimed to be a dream. This dream like concept, for many, was easy to be hold, but for numerous women who came to Chicago it was a living, breathing nightmare. Granted that many people came for the fair, many women came before the fair looking for jobs. “...single young women who had never seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home” (Larson 11). These young women came in search of jobs such as typewriters,

“An inexhaustible dream of beauty” Edgar Lee Masters wrote, quoted by Larson, about the Court, meaning it was an endless supply of beauty, not only to the Court but everywhere. Doro Root, John’s Root’s widow wrote, “I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland” (Larson 253). Which she meaning by this quote is she would not want to leave the city, let alone burn it down like Burnham does. The city did not only feel like a dream, it had qualities people only dreamt about. For example, on page 247, Larson explains the difference between the ‘Black City’ and ‘White City’, “The Black City to the north lay stepped in smoke and garbage, but here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage-processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers.” These things may seem like nothing to us now, but in 1893, having clean water in a huge city like Chicago was a

Burnham’s job was not only to establish the most beautiful fair in world history, but he needed to establish a good name for America and its architects, which had been crushed by Champ de Mars, hosted in Paris, France in 1889. The Chicago Tribune wrote, “We shall be ranked among those nations who have shown themselves careless of appearances,” (Larson 15). This quote from the newspaper explains that America doesn’t care how we make ourself look or how we look to outsiders. Not only did the mean face global humiliation, but they faced horrible landscape problems, unpredictable weather, bank crashes and labor union strikes. Building this dreamland did not come easy, but it did turn out beautiful.
In the end, the White City come to be the dream that many people came to know and love. It also came to be the thing that many people came to be the end of many women's lives at the hands of a psychopath, who used the dream to his fulfill his wicked nightmares. Yet, the legacy of Burnham and his White City still live on, “On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the twinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars” (Larson