Situating the Sites in Chicago

This chapter introduces the two Chicago-based archaeological sites that provide the material signature of this book: Jackson Park, the former site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; and the Charnley-Persky House, today the headquarters for the Society of Architectural Historians and an operating museum. After an introduction to Chicago’s natural and anthropogenic landscapes and an overview of the Chicago Fair’s predecessor exhibitions and its planning, the chapter provides historical background on Chicago’s Gold Coast, the Charnley family, and their home designed by Adler and Sullivan. Results from archaeological research in Jackson Park (2007, 2008) and at the Charnley-Persky House (2010, 2015) are framed with attention to the elite social networks of wealthy, white, Protestant Chicagoans in whose hands these projects were entangled. The archaeological results from the sites provide a powerful testament to the lasting ties of commerce and concomitant ideology that suffused the forms of both fairscape and home.

Introduction

This chapter begins with two Chicago vignettes to frame the discussion to come. The first is an account of public responses to the end of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in the months after it closed for good. Alternately used as a space for homeless “tramps,” souvenir hunters, and incipient preservationists, the fairgrounds exerted a powerful emotional hold on the many tourists who visited it. Next, the chapter introduces James and Helen Charnley as they moved into their new Louis Sullivan- and Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on the Gold Coast—a startlingly modern home from 1892 that looked nothing like the elaborate Victorian mansions that surrounded it. Finally, the chapter introduces the Chicago Fair as we consider it today: a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society that invites further investigation to understand the myriad social and cultural processes still part of American urban experiences today.

Conclusion

The final chapter concludes by deliberately returning to present day, presentist concerns—ones explicitly engaged through the archaeology of the contemporary. Here, Jackson Park’s current reappearance on the world stage as the future home of the Obama Presidential Center is reckoned with, along with the Charnley House and related contemporary archaeological and architectural preservation efforts. By looking at these “strangely familiar” experiences of time, domesticity, consumption, and disposal of the recent past through the frame of contemporary archaeology, the chapter argues that these historical trends that impact the present are, in fact, of the present itself.

Consumption and Conspicuous Disposal

This chapter refocuses attention on the archaeological elements of both sites: the goods people consumed as evidenced via their garbage, waste management regimes, and the “conspicuous disposal” practices of the time. Many of the products recovered and identified from both the Charnley-Persky House and the Jackson Park excavations first debuted at world’s fairs. An overview of the ways world’s fairs were used as marketplaces for new products is followed by a close look at the brands, advertising, and origin of the products recovered from the Charnley House, and how these shed light on modern conceptions of hygiene and foodways. Next, the chapter looks at waste disposal infrastructure in Chicago, and how that created the conditions for the Charnley midden. The midden seems at odds with the sanitary future the fair demonstrated, yet it echoes the phenomena of world’s fairs themselves as exemplars of conspicuous disposal by their very design.

Temporalities as Ideologies

This chapter focuses on temporalities at both sites. First, it looks at the six-month lifespan and subsequent material erasure of the World’s Columbian Exposition, and how its ephemerality provided transformative potential. This is followed by discussion of the fair’s architecture and exhibits from the imagined past, present, and future, and how tourists consumed them and their ideological messages as an unproblematic totality. The archaeological research likewise centered upon Fair temporalities: monumental ephemerality (the fair’s enormous structures made of temporary building materials) and infrastructural permanence (systems of sewerage, water, gas, and electricity). The chapter then turns to the Charnley House, designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as an aesthetically modern home, whose façade looked “out of time” with the rest of the domestic architecture of the city. Finally, an 1890s alarm clock from the Charnley midden reinforces and makes materially possible the keeping of modern, industrial time.

Domesticity and Social Life

This chapter considers domesticity and social life within two “houses”: the fair’s Ohio Building and the Charnley House. It begins with an overview of American ideologies of domesticity and domestic spaces through historical and archaeological accounts. Next discussion moves to the Ohio Building, a small structure from the fair that operated as a sort of clubhouse for tourists. Many conceived of the fair’s quasi-domestic state buildings as domestic because of their non-monumental scale, their intended use as spaces for informal social life, and the cutting-edge sanitary infrastructure, such as toilets, that tourists could experience within them. The chapter turns to a detailed residential history of the Astor Street home, to reveal further interconnections and entanglements of elite social networks in Chicago. Adding to these experiences, a look at the limited documentary record of servants from the Charnley House and the Ohio Building expands upon domestic life, architecturally, materially, and socially.