The Chicagoist will be launching later but in the meantime please enjoy our archives.

Revel In The White City: Field Museum Hosts World's Fair Exhibit Through September

By Marielle Shaw in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 24, 2014 10:01PM

One of the better things you can do when the weather is this abysmal, but you still need to get out, is to wander through one of the world-class museums sitting right outside our doors. The Field Museum is an excellent choice, since you can easily lose yourself for hours viewing artifacts and exploring different eras and areas of the world.

Currently, you can do some digging into Chicago’s past with the Wonders of the 1893 World's Fair exhibit. We were particularly excited about this. Chicago was the second largest city in the US in 1892 and had been rebuilding since the Great Chicago Fire 22 years prior. This was a time the city was on the world stage for all the right reasons and people were able to see its true beauty.

We were met with friendly guides as soon as we walked in the first room and were able to see beautiful artwork from the Fair. Jaunty ragtime played in the background throughout, as we stopped to hear about the two blue ribbon winners from the Fair—the often maligned PBR, and the Ward collection, which was the largest scientific display at the Fair that the Field Museum later bought in its entirety for $95,000.

Visitors to the fair paid a 50 cent admission fee. It was expensive for the time, but the Fair was often the first look that Americans had at the wonders of the world, for better or for worse. We walked through a curious and sometimes macabre collection of taxidermy and scientific samples of oils, plants and fossils.

Today at the Field, you can marvel at the same samples, and watch as some of the larger-scale features of the Fair are projected on various screens. There’s the well-known Ferris wheel, a Liberty Bell entirely constructed of fruit and interstitials of live action fairgoers observing. There’s also a beautiful collection of rare instruments like the gamelan and an interactive touch-screen table where you and your friends can pick an instrument and fail miserably at exotic Rock Band.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It’s nearly impossible to shrink down a world event like this into a single building, let alone a few rooms, but we found the exhibit immersive from start to finish; a museum within a museum that gave us a glimpse of what the Fair would have been like for its attendees, and a peek at the beginnings of the Field Museum.

The Wonders of the 1893 World's Fair exhibit opened in October and runs through September of 2014. It is a special exhibit with an additional fee, but if you’re savvy you can save on one of the Illinois Resident days. Get tickets here, and check it out. For us, any trip to the Field is well worth it. Wandering the world of the Columbian Exhibition felt like the cherry on top.