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Today’s track: Fake Plastic Trees — Radiohead

"You know Louisville had a world's fair, right? Right where St. James Court is."

I knew a little. I wrote about the Edison light bulbs in The Pride of Louisville. But I didn't really know. And the more I dug, the more it started to sound like the stories people tell about Chicago.

If you've spent any time on YouTube after midnight, you've heard the Chicago one.

In 1893, Chicago threw the World's Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago World's Fair. They built a "White City" of nearly 200 buildings that looked like marble palaces out of ancient Rome, on about 690 acres along Lake Michigan. More than 27 million people came in six months.

Then, the story goes, it all just disappeared.

There's a whole corner of the internet that says that doesn't add up. How do you build something that grand in two years, in the horse-and-buggy days, and then throw it away? The most popular theory has a name: Tartaria. The short version is that a lost worldwide civilization built these grand buildings, a disaster believers call the "mud flood" buried a lot of them, and the world's fairs were a cover story. Show off what was already there, then destroy it so nobody asks questions.

I'll be honest. I get the instinct. You look at an old photo of something that big, you know it's gone, and it feels like somebody isn't telling you the whole story.

So let's do it Louisville style. Let's go look at our own fair, the one my buddy was talking about, and see what the paperwork says.

It was called the Southern Exposition. It opened August 1, 1883, and came back every summer and fall through 1887.

Was it a "real" world's fair? Today there's an official group in Paris that decides that, the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE for short). It wasn't created until 1928, so it never ruled on ours. What we do know is that at the time, it was the biggest exhibition America had seen since Philadelphia's Centennial in 1876.

The idea started with a letter to the Courier-Journal in July 1880 suggesting Louisville host a big cotton show. Atlanta beat us to it. So Louisville went bigger: industry, art and agriculture, open to the world.

Here's the timeline that got me.

The Louisville Board of Trade (basically the chamber of commerce of its day) set up the committee in October 1882. They sold stock at $25 a share and raised about $221,000 between late November and New Year's Day. That was short of their $300,000 goal. They built it anyway.

Money in hand January 1. Doors open August 1.

The grounds covered about 45 acres, from Park Avenue down to Hill Street, between Fourth and Sixth. Before the fair, part of that land was a ballpark. It was the home field of Louisville's team in the National League's very first season, 1876.

The main building was two stories of wood and glass, about 600 by 900 feet. Roughly 13 acres under one roof. The Filson Historical Society says it may have been the largest wooden building ever put up in the United States. By 1884, the posters were bragging "15 acres under one roof." Real estate marketing has always been real estate marketing.

Inside, it was a small city. A branch post office. A barbershop. A shoeshine stand. Restaurants. Four big courtyards with fountains to let in light and air. Machines making everything from barbed wire to silk, right in front of you.

Out in the du Pont family's park, which is today's Central Park, there was an art gallery hung with paintings loaned by the Smithsonian and from the private collections of J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould and John Jacob Astor. Former President Ulysses S. Grant loaned the souvenirs he'd collected traveling the world. Swiss colonists living in Kentucky built a Swiss chalet. There was a working farm, a field of cotton growing south of the main building, concerts, and fireworks every week.

And then there was the light.

President Chester A. Arthur opened the fair by pulling a silk cord that set the machinery running. When the sun went down, 4,600 of Thomas Edison's brand-new light bulbs came on inside the main building. Edison had lived here as a teenage telegraph operator sixteen years earlier. It was the first large space ever lit with incandescent bulbs, and it made Louisville's the first successful nighttime exposition in the country. An electric train looped the grounds and ran through a tunnel lit by Edison bulbs.

You probably rode to the front gate on a streetcar pulled by mules.

Admission was 50 cents, 25 cents for kids under 12. In the first 88 days, 770,048 people came through the gates.

Louisville had about 124,000 people in 1880. That's more than six times the whole city, in one summer.

The last season ended in the fall of 1887. By 1889, the building was gone.

So where do 13 acres of building go?

Part of it went one block down the street. In 1889, a man named William Norton Jr. opened a theater at the southwest corner of Fourth and Hill, built with materials from the dismantled exposition building. They called it the Auditorium. It sat 3,072 people, had more than 2,000 electric lights, and had the second-largest stage in America. Edwin Booth acted there. John Philip Sousa played there. Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington spoke there.

That got torn down too, in 1905. Sixteen years old.

And the land? A man named W.H. Slaughter bought up the old exposition ground. In 1890, a group called the Victoria Land Company bought the whole tract from him for $300,000. That's roughly $11 million in today's dollars.

They laid it out like the fancy squares of London: St. James Court and Belgravia Court, a green down the middle, a fountain. The lots sold. The houses went up between 1892 and 1905.

That's the whole "mystery," at least in Louisville. Nobody hid it. The building was taken apart and reused, and the land got subdivided because the land was now worth more than the building sitting on it.

Okay. Back to the White City, because I promised I'd bring up the lore and I don't want to wave it off.

Here's what the records say.

Those marble palaces weren't marble. They were wood and steel frames covered in something called "staff." Staff is plaster mixed with jute fiber (the same rough fiber they make burlap out of), poured into molds and painted white. From a distance it looked like carved stone. Up close it was closer to a really nice movie set.

They were built to come down. In 1891, two years before opening day, the fair's own assistant engineer wrote in an engineering magazine that the big buildings were designed to get as much money back in salvage as possible when the fair closed.

The fair also had an official photographer, C.D. Arnold, who shot it from the start of construction in 1891 through the aftermath. The Chicago Public Library holds a set of his albums with more than 800 photos. Scaffolding, half-built walls, work crews, all of it.

Then fire did a lot of the tearing down for them. A fire hit the Court of Honor in January 1894. In July 1894, during the Pullman railroad strike, fires swept the fairgrounds and burned most of what was left.

The two big survivors in Chicago kind of prove the point. The Palace of Fine Arts was built with brick under the plaster, because the people lending priceless paintings demanded a fireproof building. It still fell apart, got rebuilt in real limestone in the 1920s and '30s, and today it's the Museum of Science and Industry. The other one was built downtown to be permanent from day one. That's the Art Institute of Chicago.

And on the horse-and-buggy question, this is where I came around a little. The 1880s weren't the stone age. Railroads hauled lumber in by the trainload. Steam sawmills cut it. Louisville's fair literally had a lumber mill exhibit showing off modern milling. Builders had been framing with skinny boards and factory-made nails since the 1830s, in Chicago of all places. Plate glass, steam power and electric light were all here.

Want a receipt from the same decade? In 1886, Minneapolis built its own Industrial Exposition Building. Cornerstone laid April 29. Finished August 3. Just over three months.

One more connection. The man who laid out the White City's grounds, the lagoons and the wooded island, was Frederick Law Olmsted. While he was working on Chicago, he signed a contract in May 1891 to design Louisville's park system. Same guy, same years. I wrote about what that did for your home value in Olmsted Designed Your Property Value.

Here's what I think the "why would anybody tear it down" question misses.

They weren't throwing away something valuable. They were cashing in on it.

In 1883 the fair sat on the southern outskirts of town, mostly open land. A few years later, Harper's Weekly was drawing it with houses filling in all around it. The city's own landmarks commission calls the Southern Exposition the single most dramatic push for growth south of Broadway. The fair brought the crowds, the streetcar traffic, the electric light and the attention. Louisville's first electric streetcar line started running in 1889.

Once all that was in place, a 13-acre wooden shed was the worst possible use of that land. So the shed came down and the lots went up.

That's still how it works. Something temporary brings people to a place. People decide they like the place. The land under it ends up worth more than whatever is standing on it.

If you're an investor, the lesson from 1883 is simple. Don't fall in love with the building. Follow where the people, the transportation and the money are going, and buy the dirt before the lots hit the market. I went through what's actually funded around Louisville right now in Truth and Lies. Same idea, 143 years later.

This is the part that gives me chills.

In 1891, a tanner named Theophilus Conrad bought a lot at the top of brand-new St. James Court, right on the old fairgrounds. (I told you his story last Thursday in Two Tanners.) He hired the architects Clarke & Loomis and built a castle out of Bedford limestone between 1893 and 1895.

Run those dates back.

In July 1894, while the plaster White City was burning in Chicago, a stone house was going up on Louisville's old fairground. Built to last.

It did. After Conrad, William Caldwell bought it. He made water tanks. In 1947 it became a Presbyterian home for elderly women. In 1987, the neighbors on St. James Court bought it and turned it into the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum. You can tour it today.

The fair's lumber went into a theater. The fair's momentum went into those houses.

The first weekend of this month, the St. James Court Art Show had its 70th year. More than 600 artists. A quarter million people or more walking St. James, Belgravia, Magnolia, Third and Fourth.

Same ground. 143 years later.

It started in 1957 as a clothesline art sale to raise money to fix the fountain.

So did Louisville tear down its world's fair?

Kind of. The building went to a theater and the scrap pile. The crowd still shows up every October.

I'll leave the Tartaria stuff to you. Go watch the videos, they're fun. Then go look at C.D. Arnold's construction photos, walk Belgravia Court, and stand in front of the Conrad-Caldwell House for a minute.

That's the part I can't get over. Not that they built it so fast. That they had the nerve to build something that big, on purpose, knowing it wouldn't last. And that it worked.

Free tools for Louisville buyers, sellers and investors, no sign-up and no email wall: the investment property analyzer, the BRRRR calculator, the Kentucky seller and buyer closing cost calculators, and a lot more on the tools page.

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📊 Yesterday's poll: What should Kentucky be known for next? Healthcare and medicine won with 38%. "Something else, I'll tell you in a reply" came in second at 27%, wine got 21%, and tech and AI got 14%. Healthcare winning isn't a shock in a town full of hospitals and health companies. And to the 27% who picked something else: I want to hear it. Hit reply and tell me what Kentucky should be known for next.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

🏆 The people who bought St. James lots in 1890 weren't buying a fair. They were buying where the crowd was headed. Every morning I screen the whole Louisville MLS for the five best deals and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you. Reply "FIVE."

Curiously,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

PS: Here's where I'd click today. Every link below opens the real homes on the MLS (the Multiple Listing Service, the shared database real estate agents use), all for sale right now. The investor searches are Louisville addresses.

First, ours. Winner Realty has 17 listings for sale around Kentucky, from houses to multi-unit buildings to commercial space.

Then a few ways investors sort the rest of the market:

113 houses with 4 or 5 bedrooms, all under $250,000. A big house at a low price is what landlords hunt for, because more bedrooms can mean more rent. Cash flow just means the money left over each month after the mortgage, taxes, insurance and repairs, so run the numbers before you fall for one. My free investment property analyzer does that math for you.

151 houses that cut their asking price in the last three days. A seller who just dropped the price is often more willing to talk.

35 houses that came back on the market in the last two weeks. When a deal falls through (a buyer's loan or an inspection is a common reason), the seller is often more ready to work with the next person.

51 duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and other multi-unit buildings under $300,000. More than one door can mean rent coming in from more than one place.

Reply or text me if any of these catch your eye and I'll help you figure out what to offer.