Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story Of The Irish American Gangster - Plot & Excerpts
up from mud cityThe Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was a real doozy. Among the tens of thousands of revelers who came from all over the United States to partake of what had been advertised as “the greatest Public Expo in human history” were a phenomenal number of grifters, con artists, gamblers, whores, bunco men, pickpockets, sneak thieves, and mobsters.Officially, the fair was known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. Although the theme of the Expo changed from year to year, the festivities were an annual event. The previous World’s Fair had been held in Paris, the cultural center of Europe. The selection of Chicago as the site of the 1893 fair was an enormous tribute to the city. Chicago—not New York or Philadelphia—was being showcased as an example of the true American spirit. Money from all over the world was pumped into the local economy to finance the fair’s exhibits and underwrite the many social events that would entertain the hoi polloi during the exhibition’s long run, which began in late spring and continued well into the autumn months.Considering that much of the city had been burned to the ground just twenty-two years earlier in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Fair was trumpeted as a major coming out party for the Gem of the Prairie.
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