One description of the fair noted that the world, "then still mired in the malaise of the Great Depression, could glimpse a happier not-too-distant future, all driven by innovation in science and technology".

City officials designated three and a half miles of newly reclaimed land along the shore of Lake Michigan between 12th and 39th streets on the Near South Side for the fairgrounds.

[4] Held on a 427 acres (1.73 km2) portion of Burnham Park, the $37,500,000 exposition was formally opened on May 27, 1933, by U.S. Postmaster General James Farley at a four-hour ceremony at Soldier Field.

Other popular exhibits were the various auto manufacturers, the Midway (filled with nightclubs such as the Old Morocco, where future stars Judy Garland, the Cook Family Singers, and the Andrews Sisters performed), and a recreation of important scenes from Chicago's history.

In the planning stages, several African American groups from the city's newly growing population campaigned for Jean Baptiste Point du Sable to be honored at the fair.

[11] At the time, few Chicagoans had even heard of Point du Sable, and the fair's organizers presented the 1803 construction of Fort Dearborn as the city's historical beginning.

After circling Lake Michigan near the exposition for two hours, Commander Hugo Eckener landed the 776-foot airship at the nearby Curtiss-Wright Airport in Glenview.

The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game was held at Comiskey Park (home of the Chicago White Sox) in conjunction with the fair.

[28] This allowed the design and construction of a wide array of experimental buildings, that eventually included large general exhibition halls, such as the Hall of Science (Paul Cret) and the Federal Building (Bennet, Burnham, and Holabird); corporate pavilions, including the General Motors Building (Albert Kahn) and the Sears Pavilion (Nimmons, Carr, and Wright); futuristic model houses, most popular was the twelve-sided House of Tomorrow (George Frederick Keck); as well as progressive foreign pavilions, including the Italian Pavilion (Mario de Renzi and Adalberto Libera); and historic and ethnic entertainment venues, such as the Belgian Village (Burnham Brothers with Alfons De Rijdt),[29] and the Streets of Paris (Andrew Rebori and John W. Root) where fan dancer Sally Rand performed.

[30] These buildings were constructed out of five-ply Douglas fir plywood, ribbed-metal siding, and prefabricated boards such as Masonite, Sheetrock, Maizewood, as well as other new man-made materials.

[34][35][36] Joel Connolly of the Chicago Bureau of Sanitary Engineering brought the outbreak to an end when he found that defective plumbing permitted sewage to contaminate drinking water in two hotels.

[39] In conjunction with the fair, Chicago's Italian-American community raised funds and donated a statue of Genoese navigator and explorer Christopher Columbus.

The Polish Museum of America possesses the painting of Pulaski at Savannah by Stanisław Kaczor-Batowski, which was exhibited at the Century of Progress fair and where it won first place.

[41] The U.S. Post Office Department issued a special fifty-cent Air Mail postage stamp, (Scott catalogue number C-18) to commemorate the visit of the German airship depicting (l to r) the fair's Federal Building, the Graf Zeppelin in flight, and its home hangar in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Separate from this issue, for the Fair the Post Office also printed 1 and 3 cent commemorative postage stamps, showing respectively Fort Dearborn and the modernistic Federal Building.

From October 2010 through September 2011, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. opened an exhibition titled Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s.

The major archive for the Century of Progress International Exposition, including the official records from the event and the papers of Lenox Lohr, general manager of the fair, are housed in Special Collections at the University of Illinois, Chicago.