The fair’s greatest impact lay in how it changed the way Americans perceived their cities and their architects. It primed the whole of America—not just a few rich architectural patrons—to think of cities in a way they never had before. Elihu Root said the fair led “our people out of the wilderness of the commonplace to new ideas of architectural beauty and nobility.” Henry Demarest Lloyd saw it as revealing to the great mass of Americans “possibilities of social beauty, utility, and harmony of which they had not been able even to dream. No such vision could otherwise have entered into the
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