Carrying the Torch

12TH & CHESTNUT

At the turn of the 19th century, artist, the reported, “The unsightly figure of Liberty, clothed in her winter gown of tarpaulin, will no longer scare the trolleys off their wires as they round the corner of Twelfth and Pine.” Newly unveiled and shiny, she took her place downtown near an enormous Ulysses S. Grant statue and a reproduction of the . It was all the work of the St. Louis Autumnal Festivities Association, a short-lived group that aimed to entice tourists en route to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, in large part by lighting up 6 miles of downtown with bulb-studded arches and electric and gas lamps. There was a 100-foot tower where “great serpent-like sheets of fire of various colors” wound to the top, a revolving globe adorned with 3,000 bulbs, and a star suspended 120 feet above the ground. And Liberty, now properly oxidized to a shade as green as the real thing in New York Harbor, held a torch flaming with a 4-foot-high gas jet.