The Pan-American Exposition, with all its glory, tragedy and intrigue, is luminously alive in City of Light (The Dial Press, 1999), the acclaimed novel by Buffalo native Lauren Belfer. Set in Buffalo and Niagara Falls before, during and immediately after the fair, it tells the story of Louise Barrett, headmistress of the Macaulay School for Girls, and other fictional characters whose lives intertwine with those of real-life individuals painstakingly recreated from the annals of history. It's also a story about the harnessing of Niagara Falls to deliver electricity to the masses, and powerful civic leaders who help-or hinder-this process.

    Fabulous electric lighting-including that used to special effect in the decorative pools and fountains, and the centerpiece Electric Tower, illuminated nightly and visible from more than 20 miles away-was perhaps the most striking feature of the Pan-American Exposition. Electric launches and gondolas were available to transport visitors along the one-mile Grand Canal. Thomas Edison was on hand to witness the regular illumination from the Esplanade on the evening of July 31, 1901.

    When the exposition opened on May 1, 1901, Buffalo was, enviably, the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of nearly 400,000. Plans for the exposition, originally intended for Cayuga Island (upriver from Niagara Falls), were put on hold when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. In July 1898, the war having ended, Buffalo was chosen for the event, and Congress pledged $500,000 to support the enormous undertaking. According to a Congressional resolution, the "Pan-American Exposition [would] undoubtedly be of vast benefit to the commercial interests of the countries of North, South, and Central America." The State Department invited the participation of all countries in the Western Hemisphere, and many states had their own buildings. (Only the New York State Building, now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, remains today.)

    Over the exposition's six months, more than eight million people took in such sites as the midway, offering attractions like "Trip to the Moon, Dreamland, House-Upside-Down, Darkness and Dawn, Scenic Railroad, Merry-Go-Round, Colorado Gold Mine, Ostrich Farm, Wild Animal Arena, and villages occupied by Indians, Mexicans, Africans, Eskimos and other groups," according to Isabel Vaughan James in a 1961 essay for the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. More substantively, they could also visit "monumental temporary buildings housing hundreds of exhibits displaying the greatest material, scientific and technological achievements of their time and place," Thomas Leary and Elizabeth Sholes state in their book, Images of America: Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition (Arcadia, 1998).

    The promise and glory of the Pan-American Exposition were shattered by the assassination of a U.S. president in the midst of all the hoopla and excitement. As Lauren Belfer observes in a historical note to her novel, "Buffalo never regained the sense of glory it had experienced before the assassination of President McKinley."

    The nation's 25th president had planned to visit the exposition on Flag Day, but the visit was delayed because of the illness of his wife, Ida. A special President's Day was then scheduled for September 5, the biggest day of the fair thus far, with an attendance of 116,660. A crowd estimated at 50,000 heard McKinley's exposition address, in which he called for a reciprocal tariff policy so as to improve trading among the nations of the Americas.

    The next day-September 6-McKinley greeted the public at a reception inside the Temple of Music (he prided himself on his ability to shake some 45 hands per minute). At 4:07 p.m., the stunned guards heard two muffled shots. Leon Czolgosz, a 28-year-old former factory worker from Detroit who called himself an anarchist, had shot the president, his .32-caliber revolver concealed beneath a white handkerchief wrapped around his right hand. McKinley was taken to his host's residence, the John G. Milburn house on Delaware Avenue. While his physicians at first gave him an optimistic prognosis, he succumbed eight days later, on September 14. (Quickly convicted of the assassination, Czolgosz was electrocuted seven weeks later in Auburn, New York.)

    UB professor of surgery and exposition medical director Roswell Park, one of the best known surgeons of that era, was unable to reach the president immediately, as he had just operated on a patient in Niagara Falls with a malignant lymphoma of the neck. When he did arrive, he found that fellow UB professor Matthew D. Mann, a skilled physician-but whose specialty was obstetrics rather than wounds of the upper abdomen-had already completed an operation; there was apparent concern about not repeating mistakes following the ultimately fatal attack on president James Garfield 20 years earlier. "There is little doubt that the management of McKinley's care was influenced by the failure of Garfield's doctors to decide on immediate surgery," wrote Selig Adler, the late distinguished UB professor of history in a March 1963 Scientific American article covering the medical issues surrounding McKinley's treatment and death.

    According to UB archivist Christopher Densmore, medical historians continue to consult the archives' extensive scrapbook of materials relating to the McKinley assassination collected by Roswell Park and Charles G. Stockton, who, like Park, was on the UB faculty and was a member of the medical team that treated McKinley.

    Among the special events at the exposition in the aftermath of McKinley's assassination was University of Buffalo Day on October 18, which included morning ceremonies and a concert in the Temple of Music, and an afternoon football game with Oberlin College at the exposition stadium. According to Densmore, the intention of what became UB's "Greater University" campaign was to build a more fully comprehensive University of Buffalo. (One must remember that UB in 1901 consisted of only the four founding professional schools-medicine, law, dentistry and pharmacy. The creation of a College of Arts and Sciences in 1913 was a major step toward that goal, as the university added undergraduate and liberal arts education to the professional schools already functioning.)

    At closing ceremonies at the Temple of Music on November 2, taps were played, fittingly enough, given the melancholy mood in the exposition's closing days. One observer, Harriet Mack, left a record of the somber moment: "[Buffalo attorney and exhibition president] John Milburn touched the button, the lights of the Electric Tower faded out to the strain [of] ŒNearer My God To Thee.'There were tears in every eye. Something very beautiful was lost to us forever."

    In the end, the exposition was a financial disaster because of the number of free admissions and the expenditures-some estimated the ratio of expenses to revenues at 2:1. Even so, those closest to the event could still appreciate its beauty and grandeur. "If the benefits of the Pan-American Exposition are doubted," the Buffalo Evening News editorialized in 1908, "one has but to examine the city chronicles of the past six years, which constitute the most progressive period in Buffalo's history-the transition of this community from a large, unwieldy, cumbersome town to the eighth [largest] city of the United States, foremost in many classes of industry, and admittedly the most finely situated city anywhere in the country."

    It was, as Isabel Vaughan James noted, a time of "goodwill, fun and prosperity"-despite the tragedy and controversies that had briefly eclipsed the light.