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From Chicago to Palm Beach: The Legacy of the 1893 World’s Fair by Geoffrey Baer

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2026
5:30 PM Cocktails, 6:00 PM Lecture

PBS television host and Chicago historian Geoffrey Baer takes audiences on a virtual tour of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and its breathtaking “White City.”Designed by Daniel Burnham and legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the Fair was a wonderland of architecture, planning, and progress – one that largely vanished within a year of its closing. It’s influence, however, endured. Baer will trace how the Fair inspired the City Beautiful movement and transformed the way cities were imagined and designed, with a legacy that can still be seen at Whitehall and throughout Palm Beach. Along the way, he will explore some of the Fair’s more unexpected contributions to American life, from the Ferris Wheel to familiar products introduced there, revealing how an ephemeral exposition left an extraordinary and lasting imprint on the modern world.