If New York had gotten the 1893 fair

Early proposals for the Observatory

I’ve seen some of the whacky ideas for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition signature observatory—I’ve even seen that Eiffel himself volunteered to outdo himself—but I’d never seen the ones I stumbled into today.

In January 1890, the fight over who should get the World’s Fair was on. An article in the Howard, Kansas, Citizen lamented that the cranks were coming out of the woodwork with ideas of how to outdo the 1,082 foot Eiffel Tower, which wowed everyone at the Paris World’s Fair just the year before. The battle over who should host the fair was on, so New York City residents were boosting their chances by proposing their versions of the Eiffel Tower.

The Citizen likened it all to the Tower of Babel, with the difference that the “confusion of tongues” was happening before it was built: “There is no scheme so wild or extravagant that it does not find advocates.” It’s of course the battle of boosters that earned Chicago the name “Windy City” from the disgruntled New York newspapers. Chicago’s boosters were LOUD.

One of New York’s proposals was an iron arch 2000 feet tall that would stretch across the whole of Manhattan as a cantilevered bridge. In 1890, the tallest building in New York was just 350 feet. Not to stop at a paltry 2000 feet, there was also an arch and tower structure that would reach 4,700 feet to an observatory. It included the thrill of traveling to heights most people couldn’t have imagined in that new invention, the elevator, just an open iron cage.

The New York fair in Central Park would have been very compact, so the next idea would have been both observatory and transportation. People would get into the observatory on ground level, then the 1,000 foot tower would swing upward, raising the visitor as high as the Eiffel Tower, and then it would drop down on the other side, saving the weary visitor a lot of footsteps.

The most costly idea was the Driveway Spiral Tower, 1,600 feet tall, 400 feet wide. The open lattice work of iron would contain a double spiral roadway with a grade that horse teams could handle at a trot for a drive of 4 miles to the top. The other spiral would be for cars on a “threadless screw system,” a term that baffled the writer in the Citizen.

The Citizen snarked that of course New York wanted to have the world and so proposed to build one with a giant iron globe suspended in the air.

Which I found a bit startling because of course that’s what New York built for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.