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"You will enter A Century of Progress for the first time perhaps like an explorer-curious and eager-penetrating an amazingly rumored domain in search of treasure."

-Official Guide Book to the Fair, 1933

One century after Chicago's incorporation, the city hosted the 1933 World's Fair, which was so successful it was held over for 1934. Aptly named "A Century of Progress," the fair confirmed Chicago's emergence as a major American city. Like the phoenix from the ashes, Chicago emerged from its devastating fire of 1871 as one of the most architecturally significant and aesthetically inviting cities in the world.

On 424 lakeside acres located on Chicago's near south side, the Fair brought together innovators and inventors from around the world. Chicagoans hosted visitors from all corners of the globe, commemorating human progress, despite the Great Depression that was devastating the nation's economy.

The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair promised a new age of global communication, nationwide superhighways, and suburban living-and it delivered. Crafted by designers such as Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy, the twelve-hundred-acre fair in Flushing Meadows sold visitors a streamlined world of consumer goods-teardrop cars and smoking robots, electric dishwashers and nylon stockings-manufactured by companies such as Westinghouse, General Motors, and AT&T. In New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair, insightful narrative accompanies dazzling postcards, advertisements, and illustrations of Democracity, Futurama, the Lagoon of Nations, and the famed Trylon and Perisphere, recalling the promise and optimism of a fair that enchanted forty-five million visitors.