World's Fair Annoyances | 1893-05-22 | The New York Times

World's Fair Annoyances From the New York Times, dated May 22, 1893. World's Fair Annoyances Visitors made as uncomfortable as they well could be. Impossible to get anything decent to eat or drink at Jackson Park, even at outrageous prices. Extortionate charges for common necessities. The exposition officials guilty of disgraceful mismanagement. Chicago people have overreached themselves. Chicago, May 21. Several weeks having elapsed since the opening of the Fair, it is interesting to note what the impression concerning the exposition as an institution is, based on the sensations experienced in that short time. The consensus of opinion is that, so far as the exposition proper is concerned, it will be, in a few weeks more, thoroughly complete, comprehensive and satisfactory, and there the high opinion of it stops. No such impression of the incidence of the exhibitions in the various buildings exists. The same confidence is not reposed in the management of the grounds, the hygienic and sanitary conditions, and the general comfort of visitors. Individually, in other words, the exhibits in the main buildings will be all that could be asked, but collectively, when all the things which go to make up the grand aggregate are considered, the Fair is in many respects a disappointment. This disappointment is not because of a lack of stupendous and marvellous things, but rather through the poor facilities for enjoying and studying them. A spectacle may be ever so gorgeous or unparalleled, but people want to feel comfortable properly to appreciate it. There is no great pleasure in looking at fireworks if the spectator is chilled through or ill. So also much of the pleasure to be derived from the splendid showing of the World's Fair is turned to gall and wormwood, at least for the people of ordinary means, by the manifest and palpable disadvantages and drawbacks which beset them at every step. The greatest of these is, of course, the great problem of food. How can a man be lifted up and improved by art when he studies the masters of France, England and Holland on an empty stomach? How can he have great and beautiful ideas during the process of digesting a sandwich made of staff and doughnuts that would sink an armour-clad cruiser? There is no hope that the food at the World's Fair will ever be better or lower in price than it is now. The pretense of the management that they would stop extortion was not conceived in good faith and was practically not executed at all. The only effect was to cause one restaurant to mark down its prices five cents here and ten cents there. The prices were high enough to stand a reduction of five and ten percent and still remain outrageously high. A New York Times correspondent has tested this matter of restaurant food and prices by visiting each day a different eating place, and the result was sufficient to justify the unequivocal condemnation of the concession system, which permits the most reprehensible features of a monopoly. The claim of the concessionaires that they paid a large bonus and must give the World's Fair a varying percentage of gross profits does not justify the condition of things that exist so far as the public is concerned. It merely makes the World's Fair management a party to petty robbery and shifts the responsibility where it doubtless belongs. In no eating place is it possible to get enough food to satisfy ordinary hunger for such a price as prevails in the best city restaurants for a thoroughly satisfactory meal. The German places were looked to to serve good food at moderate prices, but they are as bad if not worse than the French and the American. When two indifferent Frankfurter sausages, a tablespoonful of sauerkraut, two slices of bread, and a piece of butter cost sixty cents, the larceny is very little less than that of the French restaurateur who extorts the same price for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. In the Vienna cafe, a midway plaissance, when a man orders a bowl of soup, roast veal, and bread and butter, he pays one dollar thirty-five cents for it, and no potatoes go with the veal either. It is utterly out of the question eating the lunches served at the regular lunch counters, where the sandwiches are kept for a week and the beer and coffee are unspeakably bad. In one lunchroom, a hungry and tired woman must stand up at a counter and pay not less than fifty cents for what would cost twenty cents and be much better downtown. In a Turkish restaurant, two pint bottles of beer and two infinitesimal caviar sandwiches cost ninety cents. The story of the proprietor of this place fixes the blame where it belongs and is a sample of the tale of woe of every other concessionaire at the World's Fair. He is an Italian, long resident in Constantinople. He said, I paid to Mr. Levy, who has a concession for all things Turkish, six thousand dollars for permission to conduct the only Turkish restaurant and fifteen percent of the gross profits besides. What he pays the World's Fair management I do not know, but it is a large sum. I brought from Constantinople many rich and costly pieces of tapestry to furnish the restaurant, and my expenses so far have been three thousand dollars. I have not taken in fifteen dollars, and I have been open nearly a week. To make money on an expenditure of fifteen thousand dollars for a place thirty by twenty feet, I should have done a large business from May first. There was, however, a delay of the most trying kind in getting the cafe open, and now the people will not come. It is so everywhere. The people will not eat in the World's Fair grounds. I cannot say I blame them, but it is not our fault. It is the fault of those who tax us so outrageously. We must make it up by high charges or lose what we have invested. The policy of the management and the matter of food is duplicated in catalogs, steam launches, gondolas, rolling chairs, typewriters, in short, everything one is obliged or is not obliged to bring or hire. The exclusive concession to one typewriter company results in a man paying two dollars twenty-five cents to have ten letters written, and he can't get it done any cheaper because no competition is permitted. Such a policy, in the opinion of pretty much everybody, is short-sighted. It may be true that people can bring their lunches or get a late breakfast and leave the grounds for an early dinner, but some people cannot do either and must eat on the grounds. Neither, it may be said, does one have to hire a rolling chair or pay fifty cents to go from one station to another in a steam launch. They can walk, however tired they may be, but for the thousands whom business, not pleasure, calls to the fair, this is poor consolation. The post office in the World's Fair grounds is likewise a delusion and a snare. Collections are made about four times a day, but it requires the better part of a day to get mail from the post office in the fairground to the Chicago post office where it must go to be sorted and distributed. It would seem that it should be sorted at Jackson Park and that time saved. There are enough inconveniences to the person who visits Jackson Park on business or pleasure to make a reverse side to the picture which portrays the beauties of the World's Fair. This reverse side becomes more emphatic when it is known that the management dines and whines almost daily on the representation that this is necessary to promote foreign and domestic interest in an exhibition which should enlist that interest by other means, it would seem, and that it makes up the expenses thus incurred by extorting money from concessionaires who in turn must get it back from the people. No wonder the bottom has dropped out of the golden expectations of so many Chicagoans who had no doubt whatever of making tremendous fortunes from the people who came from elsewhere. There has been the biggest slump imaginable in the hotel, the restaurant, and other lines which would be pitiable to look upon but for the greed which has been displayed. So far there have been no big fortunes made. Several small ones are being lost. The hotels are not one-third full and half the new ones are not open yet. Of course when warm weather comes, if it ever does, more people will come to the fair but Chicago made preparations to entertain 500,000 strangers a day and the largest number ever seen in Chicago yet has been much less than 100,000. And somehow the better class of people cannot blame their fellow citizens of other cities for entertaining their own opinions about the fair. The fault found is in no case with exhibitors, states, or nations. It is with the management that takes from the people and gives in return only what it feels it has to give to get them to come, that extracts enormous sums from foreigners on gilded representations of tremendous immediate returns and takes its time about giving them lights and decent roads that is constantly in a snarl with somebody in which to a man up a tree presents the most palpable evidence of either incompetency, willful neglect, or something worse. Time and pleasant weather may cure some of the world's fair's defects but they will not reduce food prices, heal the sores of exhibitors whose wares are left unprotected from the ravages of the elements and thieves, nor remedy the grave mistakes that have already been made and must of necessity have effects which will be lasting in their influence on the complete success of the exposition. The white buildings can scarcely, with all their architectural charms, make amends for the unaesthetic appearance of the popcorn and chair booths, nor the great exhibits themselves entirely dispel the tired feeling which there are no benches to relieve. Since President Cleveland pressed the telegraph key on the platform of the grandstand May 1st, the ruling powers appear to have been stricken with apathy and as far as a complete exposition is concerned, it appears to be as far in the future now as it did the first day. They seem to have been paralyzed by the paucity of performances besides the plethora of promise. Their expectations have been keyed up to such a pitch that anything less than a complete fulfillment of them struck them as no fulfillment at all. And there can be no question that the reason the people have not flocked to Chicago as it was confidently expected they would, is to be found in the existence of conditions that the management of the fair could have prevented if they would. It may be too late to change them now, but as they made a mistake in accepting $2,500,000 from Congress on the terms imposed, they may find that they will have to revoke a few other contracts in order to restore confidence and convince the world that existing arrangements are not all one-sided, as against the people and in favor of a corporation of Chicago capitalists. The latter has all along labored under the big disadvantage of mistaking the intemperate enthusiasm of Chicago's hotel keepers and small businessmen and the schemers of the Chamber of Commerce, Unity and other 16-story buildings for the sentiment of the American people. The latter differ with the Chicago boomers on the good judgment of declaring an exhibition complete a month before it is nearly finished and bringing people from long distances at great expense to spend money in Chicago in order to be able to go away and say they did not see the exposition. Yet this small section of Chicago's citizenry is getting its reward for overzealousness. The failure of banks will, on the judgment of many, be followed by collapses than other, if smaller, lines and it is safe to say that Chicago has already learned enough to build her next exposition on something more substantial than wind and sand. End of article