Chicago Olympics would follow in footsteps of two World's Fairs

CHICAGO -- If Chicago hosts the 2016 Summer Olympics, it won't be the city's first coming out party.

In 1893 and 1933, Chicago hosted World's Fairs that drew tens of millions of spectators and thrust the city into the international spotlight with grandiose displays of architecture, culture and technology.

They helped show the rest of the world that the burgeoning city in the United States' industrial heartland was as advanced and sophisticated as any other, and helped soothe any feelings of inferiority.

The Olympic Games would provide another chance to show off for the world, but on an even grander scale.

Billions of people, either in person or on television, would see an even bigger, sleeker Chicago, said Patrick Ryan, who is leading the city's Olympic bid. U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman Darryl Seibel said more than 3 billion people worldwide watched the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Greece.

This artist's rendering of the proposed Olympic Sports complex at Northerly Island on Chicago's lakefront. (Chicago 2016)

The chance to bask in the spotlight, though, is just where the similarities begin between the Games and the fairs that helped to define this city.

Some of the locations would be the same and, like the fairs, Olympic organizers are counting on the largess of civic leaders to help finance their grand plans.

Even the late architect Daniel Burnham, who planned the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, is attached to the Olympic bid.

Burnham famously said, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood," and a takeoff of that oft-repeated quotation is part of the city's Olympic slogan: "Chicago 2016, Stir The Soul."

Officials won't know if the city has a shot at hosting the Games until April 14, when the U.S. Olympic Committee decides whether Chicago or Los Angeles will be the American bid city. The International Olympic Committee won't pick a host city until 2009, and other bidders are expected to include Madrid, Spain; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Rome and Tokyo.

But if the Games do come to Chicago, athletes and spectators will walk in the footsteps of fairgoers.

The Games would be centered on the downtown lakefront and the South Side at some of the same locations used in the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the 1933 to 1934 Century of Progress.

Olympic hockey fields would be built in Jackson Park, where the famous "White City" was built for the Columbian Exposition. That fair's carnival-like midway sported the world's first Ferris wheel and stretched west from Jackson Park to Washington Park, where a temporary Olympic stadium would be built.

The Century of Progress, held on the city's lakefront just south of downtown, was built on a peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan and on nearby land where the city's massive convention center now stands.

For the Olympics, a complex for cycling and beach volleyball would be built on the same peninsula and a $1.1 billion lakefront athletes' village would be built above existing truck parking lots near the convention center, which also would host events.

It's natural that the Olympics, like the fairs, would be centered in and around the city's lakefront and parks, said Thomas Kerwin, a managing partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architectural firm serving as the master planner for the Chicago 2016 Olympic organizing committee.

"Our forefathers left us this incredible network of open spaces," Kerwin said.

The Chicago firm, famous for designing the Sears Tower, has a link of its own to the fairs. Two of its founders -- Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings -- helped plan the 1933 fair, three years before they started their firm.

Not much survives from either fair. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only remaining building on the grounds of the Columbian Exposition.

But architecture from an Olympic Games would be left behind, including the athletes' village, which developers could sell afterward as condominiums, hotels and retail space. The temporary Olympic stadium in Washington Park would be scaled back into a smaller amphitheater that could host sporting events.

Financing also would borrow a page from the city's World's Fairs. Fair organizers counted on the city's monied crowd to help pay for them, and they did -- just like today's civic leaders who have already contributed more than $32 million to help finance an Olympic bid, Ryan said.

Private financial backing helped Chicago score the 1893 fair, and it was a particular point of pride for organizers of the Depression-era 1933 fair, said Peter T. Alter, a curator at the Chicago History Museum.

"They basically hired these guys who are captains of industry to ... at least make some kind of profit off of this fair because you know they didn't want to have something that would lose millions of dollars while hundreds of thousands of people are unemployed, a lot of them Chicagoans," Alter said.

Mayor Richard Daley is counting on the city's business heavyweights to make a Chicago Olympics a success. Daley chose Ryan, founder of the Aon insurance brokerage, to lead the Olympic effort, and other members of the organizing committee include billionaire businesswoman Penny Pritzker and McDonald's Corp. board chairman Andrew McKenna.

"We did not get into this to fail," Ryan said.

It's not just private dollars that are needed to lure the Games. The USOC wants the city to have a financial stake, too, and the City Council overwhelmingly backed a $500 million guarantee that puts taxpayers on the hook if the Games come here and lose money.

Despite Chicago's efforts to lure the Games, it won't be a blow to the city if it doesn't win them, said author Erik Larson who wrote "The Devil In the White City."

"Chicago and Chicagoans don't need the ego boost that they once felt they did need," he said.

Even so, the Olympics would allow the city to once again show the world what it's got, said historian Donald Miller at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. He said the city's first World's Fair allowed Chicago to flaunt its evolution from mud hole to metropolis.

"It announced Chicago's arrival as a great city," said Miller, who wrote "City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America."

Miller said people still are shocked by the handsomeness of Chicago when they visit for the first time because it's sometimes overlooked as a city tucked in the country's interior. The Olympics would help fix that.

"It really draws attention ... to a place," Miller said.

City Alderman Ed Burke already knows one way the city could commemorate the Olympic games. The municipal flag sports four red stars on a blue and white striped background, and two of the stars represent the World's Fairs.

"If we're successful in bringing that Summer Olympic Games to Chicago in 2016," Burke said, "we should add a fifth star to that flag to show the world how important we believe the Olympics is to the city of Chicago."