Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge by Lindy Woodhead

opponent couldn’t fail to be secretly impressed. Thousands of daily visitors travelled on the newly built South Side ‘L’, an elevated railroad that dropped them off at the Jackson Park Terminal where they could walk through Louis Sullivan’s monochrome, futuristic Transportation Building before touring the Fair on its own elevated electric railway.
    An off-site ‘amusement area’ in the Midway Plaisance, segregated from the exhibition halls but an integral part of the concept, offered round-the-clock excitement. The most thrilling was a ride on the ‘Giant Wheel’ built by the brilliant young design engineer GeorgeFerris. The Fair’s organizing committee had long wanted something to ‘top’ the Eiffel Tower, which had dominated the 1889 Paris International Exposition. After months of indecisive bickering, they eventually settled on the Ferris concept with the proviso that George Ferris should fund not only the plans and specifications (which alone cost him $25,000) but also the construction costs. Ferris and his team worked round the clock through the severe Chicago winter. When they had finished, his triumphant wheel towered majestically to a height of 266 feet, giving the passengers who paid 50 cents to ride in one of its 36 carriages – each big enough to hold 40 people – a view of three different States from the windows. During the nineteen weeks the Ferris wheel operated, it carried nearly one and a half million people and was the greatest single attraction at the Fair. Tragically, the strain of raising the cash and the stress of building the wheel exhausted Ferris. He died destitute and alone in a Pittsburgh hospital just three years after his prototype wheel had astounded the world.
    Other than the Ferris wheel, the biggest draws at the Midway Plaisance were Buffalo Bill Cody and his ‘Wild West Show’, and Fahreda Mahzar, an exotic dancer who called herself ‘Little Egypt’ and who performed her signature belly dance – the ‘hootchy-kootchy’ – wearing layers of transparent chiffon which, as one eager reporter noted, ‘showed every muscle in her body rippling at the same time’. ‘Little Egypt’ wasn’t the only one flexing her muscles. Assigned to tour Europe to procure military bands to play at the fair, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr, showing his potential for showmanship, had brought back the acclaimed German strongman Eugen Sandow, who subsequently became the father of modern-day body building. Flo put him under a management contract and masterminded his performance at the Fair. Sandow started his act lying in a black velvet-lined box, his body dusted in white powder, and then slowly rose from it like a muscled classical God, dressed in little more than a leopard-skin loincloth. Some women were so overcome at the sight that they fainted – even Bertha Palmer was persuaded to ‘touch’ Sandow’s rock-hard muscles, pronouncing them ‘very impressive’.
    During the six months of the Fair, there wasn’t a visiting VIP who didn’t make their way downtown to Marshall Field, where Harry Selfridge personally conducted them around the store. Field himself was usually nowhere to be seen when these celebrity visits were made, finding them as distasteful as he did talking to the press. Field neither liked nor trusted journalists, whereas Harry instinctively understood the power of publicity, giving them all the help he could. Harry was now being described in the newspapers as the ‘genial personality in charge of the retail division of Marshall Field’, and his job there fitted him like a second skin.
    As the Fair drew to a close, visitors could reflect on what they had seen. First and foremost, they had been exposed to the wonders of electricity, in itself an icon of technological advance. They had drunk the world’s first carbonated drinks, eaten the world’s first hamburgers, and admired the world’s largest cheese – which weighed in at thirteen tons. Visitors had sent picture postcards