The Ho-o-den Palace, as depicted in the book. Photos courtesy Turner Publishing.28252 Historic Photos of the Chicago&#39s World&#39s Fair, BOOK REVIEW, by Marie J. Kuda, 2010-09-01 Credit: Chicago History Museum

A gay aside is that the most prominent female sculptor in the world at the time of the 1893 Fair, lesbian Harriet Hosmer, was commissioned to execute a statute of Queen Isabella in the act of handing her jewels to Columbus to finance his voyage.  The Isabella faction objected to a separate Women’s Building, urging that women’s accomplishments stand equally with those of men. The internecine battles on that front were detailed in Jeanne Madeline Weimann’s excellent book, The Fair Women (Academy, 1981). She reports that after the Fair the statue ” appears to have traveled to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco from which it disappeared.”

Architect Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building was a radical departure from the neo-classical White City (which he claimed set architecture in America back a century). Not only did his have an elaborate golden arch as entryway, but the building itself was multicolored (think rainbow).

Some other gay connections to structures that survived the Fair include the little buildings at 57th and Stony Island Avenue that became an art colony of sorts for the denizens of the Chicago Renaissance. At one Margaret Anderson (HOF 2006) announced her creation of that clarion of Modernism The Little Review, at another (1547 E. 57th Street) dancer/poet Mark Turbyfill created a ballet studio and held classes for an aspiring Katherine Dunham who went on to become the doyenne of African-American dance.

In July, 1929 Turbyfill had a chance meeting with Henry Blake Fuller (HOF 2000) author of early gay works (a play published in 18, and a novel in 1917) alongside the deteriorating Palace of Fine Arts building. He writes that he was “musing over the decaying copy of a Greek frieze still clinging to the weathered wall of the … fading old building” when he saw Henry B., they found a bench, reminisced for a time, discussed Fuller’s forthcoming novels, and walked together to the Illinois Central station. Just two weeks later Fuller “died in his little room near Dorchester and 54th Street, alone.”

Another group of buildings left over from the Fair were 18 watchmen’s “cottages” along the Lakefront at 73rd Street (just North of the area that would become the South Shore Country Club in 1906). The corrugated metal cottages survived, and after moving to Chicago in the 1950s Velma Tate and her three sons lived in one —Tate wrote lesbian pulp novels under the name Valerie Taylor (HOF 1992). Activist and former Mattachine Midwest president Guy Warner’s (HOF 2008) family also rented two conjoined cottages housing him and his eight siblings from 1942 until all the cottages (known as The Colony) were sold and torn down in 1960.

In the 1970s, after being ordained as the first openly gay Unitarian Universalist minister, University of Chicago, Meadville graduate Sandra Szelag held her reception on the Wooded Island. The only remnant of the Ho-o-den Palace was a single stone Japanese garden lantern.

As a photo document of the 1893 Fair from first shovel to last ash Mr. Lewis’ book succeeds admirably. 

Copyright 2010 by Marie J. Kuda