Hyde Park

This guide to Hyde Park in Chicago follows the construction of the original Ferris wheel for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, when engineer George Ferris had barely four months to build something that had never existed before. It traces the frozen ground crews had to thaw with live steam, the piles driven thirty-two feet to bedrock, and the separate Chicago machine shops that forged the wheel's axles and cars before they were trucked in and bolted together on site. Listen for how the guide treats this stretch of Jackson Park as a construction site first, a fairground second.