Searchlights stroked the night sky in alternating shades of red, white, and blue; a blimp glided into their cross fire, hovering above modernistic buildings poised along the lakefront, like the set of some fantastic science-fiction film. Moving beams of light rose from behind the lagoon theater and fanned out, painting the dark clouds with an aurora borealis.

On this cool if humid Saturday evening, wide-eyed visitors wandered a world that seemed quite apart from both Cleveland and the depression that racked it. Just two blocks from Public Square, citizens fleeing reality were greeted by seven seventy-foot pylons whose flat surfaces were rendered red, white, and blue by lighting. Beyond, for fifty cents admission, one could stroll, or take an open-air bus or grab a rickshaw to ride upon, freshly paved lanes through the immaculately landscaped gardens of the sprawling one hundred and fifty acres of the Great Lakes Exposition. Divided by its terrain into an upper and lower level, the expo's gifts to Clevelanders on the occasion of the city's hundredth birthday included starkly modern exhibition halls, where one might experience, via dioramas, models, and wall-size photographs, "The Romance of Iron and Steel"; an "International Village," where sidewalk cafes and shops sold authentic foods, drinks, and curios from forty countries; and a vast midway, where Spook Street, the "Strange as It Seems" museum, and the Midget Circus vied for attention.

It all seemed overly familiar to one patron this muggy evening, and not just because this was the expo's second year. Eliot Ness was a Chicago boy, and the Great Lakes Exposition was, he knew all too well, a rehashing of the even larger Century of Progress back home, in '33 and '34.