Chicago is selected on February 24, 1890, to host the World's Columbian Exposition, a world's fair to be held in 1893 to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.

Chicago has won the right to host the fair over several other cities, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.

The Exposition will be an influential social and cultural event and will have a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago's self-image, and American industrial optimism.

The fair is planned in the early 1890s during the Gilded Age of rapid industrial growth, immigration, and class tension.

World's fairs, such as London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, had been successful in Europe as a way to bring together societies fragmented along class lines.

The first American attempt at a world's fair in Philadelphia in 1876 had drawn crowds but was a financial failure.

Nonetheless, ideas about distinguishing the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus' landing had started in the late 1880s.

Civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City, Washington DC and Chicago had expressed an interest in hosting a fair to generate profits, boost real estate values, and promote their cities.

Congress had been called on to decide the location.

New York's financiers J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor, among others, had pledged fifteen million dollars to finance the fair if Congress awarded it to New York, while Chicagoans Charles T. Yerkes, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Cyrus McCormick had offered to finance a Chicago fair.

What finally persuades Congress is Chicago banker Lyman Gage, who had raised several million additional dollars in a twenty-four-hour period, over and above New York's final offer.

Chicago representatives had not only fought for the world's fair on monetary reasons, but also on practicality reasons.

On a Senate hearing held in January 1890, representative Thomas B. Bryan had argued that the most important qualities for a world's fair were 'abundant supplies of good air and pure water, ... ample space, accommodations and transportation for all exhibits and visitors ..."

He had argued that New York has too many obstructions, and Chicago would be able to use large amounts of land around the city where there is "not a house to buy and not a rock to blast.." and that it will be so located that "the artisan and the farmer and the shopkeeper and the man of humble means" would be able to easily access the fair.

Bryan had continued to say that the fair was of 'vital interest' to the West, and that the West wanted the location to be Chicago.

The city spokesmen would continue to stress the essentials of a successful Exposition and that only Chicago was fitted to fill these exposition requirements.