The Portland one was apparently huge but has left shockingly little mark on the city! There are some single-family neighborhoods, but they filled in the lake and it's mostly light industrial
The Forestry Building was the world's largest log cabin and was built as a permeant structure. Unfortunately it burned down in a fire in the 1960's, otherwise that was meant to have been around. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_a...
We all can’t really picture how empty everything was 100 years ago
We expect the totally cemented, asphalted, tarmac-ed now to have been there forever but back then it was all just trees and fields everywhere
Yeah, basically you have to imagine the structures of the Palace of Fine Arts just expanding everywhere with different shit in each direction. As @thepines.bsky.social said, those events were just at such a scale that even a big-ass modern convention does nothing to give you a sense of it.
The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is still treated like the greatest achievement of the modern age when you live there. It's in the school curriculum, it gets promoted endlessly by the media, and we're taught that ~we~ invented the ice cream cone because God Loves STL. 🙄
We went to St. Louis years ago and the whole Forest Park area still contains some bits of it, and a museum about it, it was my favorite St. Louis thing.
The 1904 Olympics held in conjunction with the St. Louis World's Fair was the first held outside Europe.
The US era of international expositions, inspired by the 1876 Centennial Exposition, from 1893 in Chicago through 1964 in New York served to build up cities literally and reputationally.
