CDT Roundup: 10 Deals, 8 Firms, 98 Lawyers, $8.9B

Numbers don’t lie, but they need context to have any real meaning.

For the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the City of Chicago built an expansive assemblage of 200 buildings in less than two years. Sprawling across 690 acres south of downtown, the beaux arts structures came to be known as The White City — so named for the gleaming whitewash that adorned their walls. Those walls, however, were made of “staff” — an impermanent mixture of plaster, cement and jute. And after an amazingly successful exposition, most of the buildings were left to turn gray from pollution until they were finally destroyed by fire.