"Make No Small Plans." ... The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 "taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful." That's Erik Larson writing in The Devil in the White City, the story of the men who built the fair -- juxtaposed against the story of a serial killer adjacent to the fairgrounds.

Last week's Dispatch, Real Estate's (Short) Attention Span (Jun 29), prompted numerous suggestions for real estate reading, including two rave recommendations for Devil from Diane Schachner at Leo A. Daly and Jay Rickey at the Illinois Real Estate Journal. Wow, it's a fascinating book. I read it over the Fourth of July weekend.

In just two years, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Olmstead and virtually all of the nation's leading architects and urban planners designed and built a fair to rival the 1889 Paris World's Fair (which featured the new Eiffel Tower). The task was formidable, involving the construction of hundreds of buildings. The largest, the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, enclosed 32 acres, accommodating 140,000 people. The final push to completion in the spring of 1893 required almost 20,000 workers daily.

To outdo Eiffel's Tower, George Ferris built his first "Wheel." Two huge steel wheels, set 30-feet apart, looped 36 railroad cars holding over 2,000 people to a height of 264 feet above the ground, completing a revolution every 20 minutes. Along with Ferris, dozens of iconic Americans figured directly into the fair's story or were impacted by it, including Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz.

As we all battle our daily barrage of e-mail and company meetings, it's fun to think of real estate as a noble calling bigger than ourselves. So the final words go to Daniel Burnham: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood."

--Peter Pike