A St. Louis Museum Revisits a Famous but Complex World’s Fair

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.

In the final scene of the 1944 musical film “Meet Me in St. Louis,” the Smith family, dressed in fancy attire, wanders the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the 1904 World’s Fair. Daylight fades, the electric lights flash on and the group stops in its tracks.

“I can’t believe it,” Judy Garland, playing Esther Smith, says breathlessly. “Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.”

A new exhibit about the fair opens here this month at the Missouri History Museum. It shines a light on the wonder and complexity of the seven-month spectacle, still a mythical, sometimes pinnacle moment in the minds of many St. Louisans.

As the exhibit explains, the fair was where a vendor might have created the ice cream cone, but it was also where vendors might not have served Black people.

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