In 1893, Chicago set itself before the world as the city of the future. The World’s Columbian Exposition, as it opened in the summer of that year in Jackson Park, offered a boldly ambitious vision of the urban past and of its future; as historian James Gilbert writes in his new Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893, “the builders immodestly proposed to sum up all of human progress in their monuments and displays and their ecumenical conferences on the state of human knowledge.” But it was not merely the “White City”–that is, the vast conglomeration of monumental (if temporary) architecture dropped down in Jackson Park–that was on display. In the best American tradition, Chicago presented itself as utopian, a “city on a hill.” Faintly overwhelmed by the grandeur of it all, writer William Dean Howells declared that the sight of the fair had left him “in rapture and despair! Nothing like it was ever dreamed of.”
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When the fair’s White City–what one might call a life-size model of the utopian city–sprang up nearly overnight, in some ways it recapitulated Chicago’s rebirth after the Great Fire 22 years earlier. In the popular imagination, at least among the city’s boosters, this rebuilding took on an almost mythic cast. In this vision of Chicago, Gilbert notes, it was the “Phoenix City, brushing off the ashes of the Great Fire.” In the words of one city guidebook, “Here was a city which had no traditions but was making them. . . . Chicago was like no other city in the world [and] would outstrip [them all].”
As it turned out, visitors to this part of the fair were put off by its stiff formality; one observer reported that the crowds seemed to wear a “melancholy air,” that the relentlessly uplifting intentions left spectators feeling “business-like, common, dull, anxious, and care-worn.” They must have chafed at the attempts to impose a culture that was supposed to be good for them, and resisted other, similar efforts at cultural control, staying away from the fair’s classical-music concerts in droves.
Gilbert attempts to understand not only the fair but three other vaguely utopian “urban environments” that fair visitors were drawn to that summer: the “imagined city” that lived only in printed tourist guides, the urban evangelism represented by the sermons and actions of Dwight Moody, and the paternalistic company town of Pullman.
The American notion of utopia has not vanished altogether. But, as Frances Fitzgerald has shown in her Cities on a Hill, an account of more recent “visionary communities” in America, contemporary utopians have more modest goals. The communities Fitzgerald studied–including the gay Castro district in San Francisco and Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg–were quite explicitly what she calls “cultural enclaves” for cultural minorities, not grandiose attempts by cultural elites to remake the world in an instant. Those who entered them thought that they would be able to “reinvent themselves” in communities separated from the rest of the world. The organizers may have had broader visions than this–certainly Falwell wanted to remake the world–but no one today has the kind of faith in large-scale cultural regeneration that characterized Chicago’s elite utopians in 1893.
Outside the city, the new segregation is if anything even more evident. Joel Garreau’s recent Edge City predicts a society gathered around industrial parks and giant malls, in which all public space is controlled by huge corporations and from which the poor are excluded. Garreau, incidentally, likes the Edge Cities–they’re safe and clean, at least, and the poor can live elsewhere. I find them horrifying.
