Hampton Park and World Fairs

 I’ve always been interested in World’s Fairs, ever since I marveled at the wonders of the New York World’s Fair in 1964.  I was only 12 at the time, but it made a lasting impression.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_New_York_World’s_Fair)

Twenty years later, I attended the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Louisiana_World_Exposition).   This ill-timed extravaganza coincided with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and was the only fair to declare bankruptcy.  Typical of the city where it was held, however, it was fun and colorful as only something of that sort could be in New Orleans. (L’aissez les bon temp rouler).   The local residents bought season passes and attended time and time again, but apparently not too many others did.

Subsequent research and interest in the subject in the years since then have led to a keen fascinating with the modern fairs’ forerunners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The World Cotton Centennial was held in New Orleans in 1884.   From December 1901 until May 1902, The South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_Inter-State_and_West_Indian_Exposition)  was held in Charleston, attracting an estimated 700,000 visitors, including such famous guests as President Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain.  As with other expos, it was a huge show and exhibit of the nation’s industry, agriculture and business, a showcase for the economy and progress of the time.  Always amazing to me is the fact that the huge and grandiose temporary buildings at these fairs were built of gypsum power and hemp that could be molded into many shapes.    Then, after the fairs were over, they were torn down

The Charleston exposition was held on donated land next to the Ashley River where a race course was located and where The Citadel Military College is now located, surrounded by a most beautiful old neighborhood of old early 20th century houses.  On a hot Sunday afternoon recently, I walk around the old neighborhood and adjacent Hampton Park taking pictures and thinking about  the long-ago excitement of those days during the exposition when thousands of people milled around the grounds of the fair.   Now it’s just a quiet neighborhood of genteel old houses, just the kind I like so much and which hold so much personal history of families living in a certain time and place in Charleston.

Here is as set of some of the photos I took that day:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/camas/sets/72157630488802464/