Philly kicked off its second (and less successful) world’s fair on this week in Philly history

The 1876 Centennial Exhibition — the first world’s fair that Philadelphia hosted — was lauded at the time as the single greatest international exposition ever assembled.

In 1876, nearly 10 million visitors flocked from around the world to the west bank of the Schuylkill in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park between May and November. That crowd was an incredible draw, considering the limited transportation options of the time: The automobile, airplane, and electric trolley had not yet been invented.

They came to gawk at the awe-inspiring innovations: Thomas Edison demonstrated the Quadruplex telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell presented the telephone.

But the centennial’s sequel did not live up to the grand original, according to Thomas H. Keels' book Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926.

The sesquicentennial (sesqui is a Latin term meaning “one and a half”), which celebrated the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, struggled on several fronts before and after it officially debuted on May 31, 1926.

U.S. Rep. William Vare, leader of the city’s Republican Party and the city’s political machine, moved the event’s location. He took it away from Philly’s then-civic showpiece, the Fairmount Parkway (now Benjamin Franklin Parkway), down to then-swampy and mosquito-infested South Philadelphia, for personal and political reasons. He was from “The Neck,” which is where the stadium district is now, and it’s also where his political base resided.

Then delays in construction had twofold effects: alienating people in Harrisburg and Washington who could have given a lot of money to the fair, and ballooning costs, spiraling the city into unprecedented debt.

And all for having fewer than 5 million people attend, despite better transportation options available than in 1876.

It featured some good stuff: a 42-ton replica of the Liberty Bell, and a full reproduction of Philly’s main thoroughfare during its colonial heyday. It also featured the latest mechanical wonders, ranging from electrical refrigeration to talking pictures.

But Keels felt it was out of touch.

“It was trapped between the old and the new,” Keels wrote, “following the protocol for a nineteenth-century trade fair in the increasingly consumer-oriented culture of the twentieth century.”

And the weather did not cooperate. A deadly heat wave spread across the Northeastern United States at the beginning of the summer, followed by torrential rainstorms that saturated the already swampy South Philly grounds throughout the late summer and fall.

Overall, the city lost hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.

“So, at a certain point,” Keels told The Inquirer in 2017, “you just look at this affair and think, maybe it was built on a decorated Indian burial ground; it was the Pet Sematary of world’s fairs."