Part III
The Court of Honor.
Opening Day
TWENTY-THREE GLEAMING BLACK CARRIAGES stood in the yellow mud of Michigan Avenue in front of the Lexington Hotel. President Cleveland boarded the seventh carriage, a landau. Burnham and Davis shared the sixth. Both men behaved, although they still had not shed their mutual distrust nor resolved their struggle for supreme control of the fair. The duke of Veragua, a direct descendent of Columbus, sat in the fourteenth carriage; the duchess occupied the fifteenth with Bertha Palmer, whose diamonds radiated an almost palpable heat. Mayor Harrison took the very last carriage and drew the loudest cheers. Assorted other dignitaries filled the remaining carriages. As the procession rumbled south along Michigan Avenue toward Jackson Park, the street behind became a following sea of 200,000 Chicagoans on foot and horseback, in phaetons, victorias, and stanhopes, and packed into omnibuses and streetcars. Many thousands of others boarded trains and jammed the bright yellow cars, dubbed “cattle cars,” built by the Illinois Central to haul as many people as possible to the fair. Anyone with a white handkerchief waved it, and white flags hung from every lamppost. Damp bunting swelled from building façades. Fifteen hundred members of the Columbian Guard in their new uniforms of light blue sackcloth, white gloves, and yellow-lined black capes met the throng and cordially directed everyone to the Administration Building, recognizable by its lofty gold dome.
The procession approached the fair from the west, through the Midway Plaisance. Just as the president’s carriage turned into the Avenue of Nations, which ran the thirteen-block length of the Midway, the sun emerged, igniting a roar of approval from spectators as it lit the forty concessions that lined the avenue, some the size of small towns. The carriages rolled past Sitting Bull’s Cabin, the Lapland Village, the compound of the allegedly cannibalistic Dahomans, and, directly opposite, the California Ostrich Farm, redolent of simmering butter and eggs. The farm offered omelets made from ostrich eggs, though in fact the eggs came from domestic chickens. The procession passed the Austrian Village and Captive Balloon Park, where a hydrogen balloon tethered to the ground took visitors aloft. At the center of the Midway, the procession veered around the woefully incomplete Ferris Wheel, which Burnham eyed with displeasure. It was a half-moon of steel encased in a skyscraper of wooden falsework.
When President Cleveland’s carriage came to Sol Bloom’s Algerian Village, at the Muslim core of the Midway, Bloom gave a nod, and the women of the village dropped their veils. Bloom swore it was a customary gesture of respect, but of course with Bloom one could never be sure. The carriages skirted the Street in Cairo—not yet open, another disappointment—and passed the Turkish Village and the Java Lunch Room. Outside Hagenback’s Animal Show, the most famous traveling zoo of the day, handlers prodded four trained lions into full roar. To the right, in the smoky distance, the president saw the banners of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West flying over the arena Colonel Cody had built at Sixty-second Street.
At last the carriages entered Jackson Park.
There would be miracles at the fair—the chocolate Venus de Milo would not melt, the 22,000-pound cheese in the Wisconsin Pavilion would not mold—but the greatest miracle was the transformation of the grounds during the long soggy night that had preceded Cleveland’s arrival. When Herbert Stead returned the next morning, a plain of wind-rippled water still covered portions of the park, but the empty boxcars and packing debris were gone. Ten thousand men working through the night had touched up the paint and staff and planted pansies and laid sod as a thousand scrubwomen washed, waxed, and polished the floors of the great buildings. As the morning advanced, the sun emerged more fully. In the bright rain-scrubbed air those portions of the landscape not still submerged looked cheerful, trim, and neat. “When the Fair opened,” said Paul Starrett, one of Burnham’s men, “Olmsted’s lawns were the first amazement.”
At eleven o’clock President Cleveland ascended the stairs to the speakers’ platform, erected outside at the east end of the Administration Building, and took his seat, the signal for the ceremony to begin. The crowd surged forward. Twenty women fainted. Reporters lucky enough to be in the front rows rescued one elderly woman by hauling her over a railing and laying her out on a press table. Members of the Guard waded in with swords drawn. Mayhem reigned until Director-General Davis signaled the orchestra to begin playing the introductory “Columbian March.”
Chastened by criticism of the stupefying length of October’s Dedication Day ceremony, the fair’s officers had kept the Opening Day program short and pledged to honor the timetable at all costs. First came a blessing, given by a blind chaplain to an audience made deaf by size and distance. Next came a poetic ode to Columbus that was as long and difficult to endure as the admiral’s voyage itself: “Then from the Pinta’s foretop fell a cry, a trumpet song, ‘Light ho! Light ho! Light!’ ”
That kind of thing.
Director-General Davis spoke next and offered a meaty helping of distorted reality, praising the way the National Commission, the Exposition Company, and the Board of Lady Managers had worked together without strife to produce such a brilliant exposition. Those privy to the warfare within and between these agencies watched Burnham closely but saw no change in his expression. Davis offered the podium to the president.
Cleveland, immense in black, paused a moment in sober examination of the crowd before him. Nearby stood a table draped in an American flag, on top of which lay a blue and red velvet pillow supporting a telegraph key made of gold.
Every bit of terrace, lawn, and railing in the Court of Honor was occupied, the men in black and gray, many of the women in gowns of extravagant hues—violet, scarlet, emerald—and wearing hats with ribbons, sprigs, and feathers. A tall man in a huge white hat and a white buckskin coat heavily trimmed in silver stood a full head above the men around him: Buffalo Bill. Women watched him. Sunlight fell between tufts of fast-shredding cloud and lit the white Panamas that flecked the audience. From the president’s vantage point the scene was festive and crisp, but at ground level there was water and mud and the mucid sucking that accompanied any shift in position. The only human form with dry feet was that of Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic—Big Mary—which stood hidden under a silo of canvas.
Cleveland’s speech was the shortest of all. As he concluded, he moved to the flag-draped table. “As by a touch the machinery that gives light to this vast Exposition is set in motion,” he said, “so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind.”
At precisely 12:08 he touched the gold key. A roar radiated outward as successive strata of the crowd learned that the key had been pressed. Workmen on rooftops immediately signaled to peers stationed throughout the park and to sailors aboard the warshipMichigan anchored in the lake. The key closed an electric circuit that activated the Electro-Automatic Engine Stop and Starter attached to the giant three-thousand-horsepower Allis steam engine at the Machinery Building. The starter’s silver-plated gong rang, a sprocket turned, a valve opened, and the engine whooshed to life on exquisitely machined shafts and bearings. Immediately thirty other engines in the building began to thrum. At the fair’s waterworks three huge Worthington pumps began stretching their shafts and pistons, like praying mantises shaking off the cold. Millions of gallons of water began surging through the fair’s mains. Engines everywhere took steam until the ground trembled. An American flag the size of a mainsail unfurled from the tallest flagpole in the Court of Honor, and immediately two more like-sized flags tumbled from flanking poles, one representing Spain, the other Columbus. Water pressurized by the Worthington pumps exploded from the MacMonnies Fountain and soared a hundred feet into the sky, casting a sheet rainbow across the sun and driving visitors to raise their umbrellas against the spray. Banners and flags and gonfalons suddenly bellied from every cornice, a huge red banner unscrolled along the full length of the Machinery Building, and the canvas slipped from Big Mary’s gold-leaf shoulders. Sunlight clattering from her skin caused men and women to shield their eyes. Two hundred white doves leaped for the sky. The guns of the Michigan fired. Steam whistles shrieked. Spontaneously the throng began to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” which many thought of as the national anthem although no song had yet received that designation. As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone.
The great fair had begun.
Although Burnham recognized that much work lay ahead—that Olmsted had to redouble his efforts and Ferris needed to finish that damned wheel—the success of the exposition now seemed assured. Congratulations arrived by telegraph and post. A friend told Burnham, “The scene burst on me with the beauty of a full blown rose.” The official history of the fair estimated that a quarter of a million people packed Jackson Park on Opening Day. Two other estimates put the total at 500,000 and 620,000. By day’s end there was every indication that Chicago’s fair would become the most heavily attended entertainment in the history of the world.
This optimism lasted all of twenty-four hours.
On Tuesday, May 2, only ten thousand people came to Jackson Park, a rate of attendance that, if continued, would guarantee the fair a place in history as one of the greatest failures of all time. The yellow cattle cars were mostly empty, as were the cars of the Alley L that ran along Sixty-third Street. All hope that this was merely an anomaly disappeared the next day, when the forces that had been battering the nation’s economy erupted in a panic on Wall Street that caused stock prices to plummet. Over the next week the news grew steadily more disturbing.
On the night of Thursday, May 5, officials of the National Cordage Company, a trust that controlled 80 percent of America’s rope production, placed itself in receivership. Next Chicago’s Chemical National Bank ceased operation, a closure that seemed particularly ominous to fair officials because Chemical alone had won congressional approval to open a branch at the world’s fair, in no less central a location than the Administration Building. Three days later another large Chicago bank failed, and soon after that a third, the Evanston National Bank, in Burnham’s town. Dozens of other failures occurred around the country. In Brunswick, Georgia, the presidents of two national banks held a meeting. One president calmly excused himself, entered his private office, and shot himself through the head. Both banks failed. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Nebraska Savings Bank had become the favorite bank of schoolchildren. The town’s teachers served as agents of the bank and every week collected money from the children for deposit in each child’s passbook account. Word that the bank was near failure caused the street out front to fill with children pleading for their money. Other banks came to Nebraska Savings’ rescue, and the so-called “children’s run” was quelled.
People who otherwise might have traveled to Chicago to see the fair now stayed home. The terrifying economy was discouraging enough, but so too were reports of the unfinished character of the fair. If people had only one chance to go, they wanted to do it when all the exhibits were in place and every attraction was in operation, especially the Ferris Wheel, said to be a marvel of engineering that would make the Eiffel Tower seem like a child’s sculpture—provided it ever actually worked and did not collapse in the first brisk wind.
Too many features of the fair remained unfinished, Burnham acknowledged. He and his brigade of architects, draftsmen, engineers, and contractors had accomplished so much in an impossibly short time, but apparently not enough to overcome the damping effect of the fast-degrading economy. The elevators in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, touted as one of the wonders of the fair, still had not begun operation. The Ferris Wheel looked only half finished. Olmsted had yet to complete grading and planting the grounds around the Krupp Pavilion, the Leather Building, and the Cold Storage Building; he had not yet laid the brick pavement at the fair’s train station or sodded the New York Central exhibit, the Pennsylvania Railroad exhibit, Choral Hall, and the Illinois State Building, which to many Chicagoans was the single most important building at the fair. The installation of exhibits and company pavilions within the Electricity Building was woefully behind schedule. Westinghouse only began building its pavilion on Tuesday, May 2.
Burnham issued stern directives to Olmsted and Ferris and to every contractor still at work. Olmsted in particular felt the pressure but also felt hobbled by the persistent delays in installation of exhibits and the damage done by the repeated comings and goings of drays and freight cars. General Electric alone had fifteen carloads of exhibit materials stored on the grounds. Preparations for the Opening Day ceremony had cost Olmsted’s department valuable time, as did the planting and grading required to repair the damage the day’s crowd had inflicted throughout the park. Many of the fair’s fifty-seven miles of roadway were still either submerged or coated with mud, and others had been gouged and trenched by vehicles that had used the roads while they were still sodden. Olmsted’s road contractor deployed a force of eight hundred men and one hundred teams of horses to begin regrading the roads and laying new gravel. “I remain fairly well,” Olmsted wrote to his son, on May 15, “but get horribly tired every day. It is hard to get things done; my body is so overworked, and I constantly fail to accomplish what I expect to do.”
First and foremost, Burnham knew, the fair had to be finished, but in the meantime lures had to be cast to encourage people to shed their fears of financial ruin and come to Chicago. He created the new post of director of functions and assigned Frank Millet to the job, giving him wide latitude to do what he could to boost attendance. Millet orchestrated fireworks shows and parades. He set aside special days to honor individual states and nations and to fete distinct groups of workers, including cobblers, millers, confectioners, and stenographers. The Knights of Pythias got their own day, as did the Catholic Knights of America. Millet set August 25 as Colored People Fete Day, and October 9 as Chicago Day. Attendance began to increase, but not by much. By the end of May the daily average of paying visitors was only thirty-three thousand, still far below what Burnham and everyone else had expected and, more to the point, far below the level required to make the fair profitable. Worse yet, Congress and the National Commission, bowing to pressure from the Sabbatarian movement, had ordered the fair closed on Sundays, thus withdrawing its wonders from a few million wage-earners for whom Sunday was the only day off.
Burnham hoped for an early cure to the nation’s financial malaise, but the economy did not oblige. More banks failed, layoffs increased, industrial production sagged, and strikes grew more violent. On June 5 worried depositors staged runs on eight Chicago banks. Burnham’s own firm saw the flow of new commissions come to a halt.
The World’s Fair Hotel
THE FIRST GUESTS BEGAN ARRIVING at Holmes’s World’s Fair Hotel, though not in the volume he and every other South Side hotelier had expected. The guests were drawn mainly by the hotel’s location, with Jackson Park a short trip east on the Sixty-third Street leg of the Alley L. Even though the rooms on Holmes’s second and third floors were largely empty, when male visitors asked about accommodations Holmes told them with a look of sincere regret that he had no vacancies and kindly referred them to other hotels nearby. His guest rooms began to fill with women, most quite young and apparently unused to living alone. Holmes found them intoxicating.
Minnie Williams’s continual presence became increasingly awkward. With the arrival of each dewy new guest, she became more jealous, more inclined to stay close to him. Her jealousy did not particularly annoy him. It simply became inconvenient. Minnie was an asset now, an acquisition to be warehoused until needed, like cocooned prey.
Holmes checked newspaper advertisements for a rental flat far enough from his building to make impromptu visits unlikely. He found a place on the North Side at 1220 Wrightwood Avenue, a dozen or so blocks west of Lincoln Park, near Halsted. It was a pretty, shaded portion of the city, though its prettiness was to Holmes merely an element to be entered into his calculations. The flat occupied the top floor of a large private house owned by a man named John Oker, whose daughters managed its rental. They first advertised the flat in April 1893.
Holmes went alone to examine the apartment and met John Oker. He introduced himself as Henry Gordon and told Oker he was in the real estate business.
Oker was impressed with this prospective tenant. He was neat—maybe fastidious was the better word—and his clothing and behavior suggested financial well-being. Oker was delighted when Henry Gordon said he would take the apartment; even more delighted when Gordon paid him forty dollars, cash, in advance. Gordon told Oker he and his wife would arrive in a few weeks.
Holmes explained the move to Minnie as a long-overdue necessity. Now that they were married, they needed a bigger, nicer place than what they currently occupied in the castle. Soon the building would be bustling with visitors to the fair. Even without the guests, however, it was no place to raise a family.
The idea of a large, sunny flat did appeal to Minnie. Truth was, the castle could be gloomy. Was always gloomy. And Minnie wanted everything as perfect as possible for Anna’s visit. She was a bit perplexed, however, as to why Harry would choose a place so far away, on the North Side, when there were so many lovely homes in Englewood. She reasoned, perhaps, that he did not want to pay the exorbitant rents that everyone was charging now that the world’s fair was under way.
Holmes and Minnie moved into the new flat on June 1, 1893. Lora Oker, the owner’s daughter, said Gordon “seemed to be very attentive to his wife.” The couple went on bicycle rides and for a time kept a hired girl. “I can only say that his behavior was all that could be wished during his sojourn with us,” Miss Oker said. “Minnie Williams he introduced as his wife and we always addressed her as ‘Mrs. Gordon.’ She called him ‘Henry.’ ”
With Minnie housed on Wrightwood Avenue, Holmes found himself free to enjoy his World’s Fair Hotel.
His guests spent most of their time at Jackson Park or on the Midway and often did not return until after midnight. While present in the hotel they tended to stay in their rooms, since Holmes provided none of the common areas—the libraries, game parlors, and writing rooms—that the big hotels like the Richelieu and Metropole and the nearby New Julien offered as a matter of routine. Nor did he supply the darkroom facilities that hotels closest to Jackson Park had begun installing to serve the growing number of amateur photographers, so-called “Kodak fiends,” who carried the newest portable cameras.
The women found the hotel rather dreary, especially at night, but the presence of its handsome and clearly wealthy owner helped dispel some of its bleakness. Unlike the men they knew back in Minneapolis or Des Moines or Sioux Falls, Holmes was warm and charming and talkative and touched them with a familiarity that, while perhaps offensive back home, somehow seemed all right in this new world of Chicago—just another aspect of the great adventure on which these women had embarked. And what good was an adventure if it did not feel a little dangerous?
As best anyone could tell, the owner also was a forgiving soul. He did not seem at all concerned when now and then a guest checked out without advance notice, leaving her bills unpaid. That he often smelled vaguely of chemicals—that in fact the building as a whole often had a medicinal odor—bothered no one. He was, after all, a physician, and his building had a pharmacy on the ground floor.
Prendergast
PATRICK PRENDERGAST BELIEVED HIS APPOINTMENT as corporation counsel was about to occur. He wanted to be ready and began making plans for how to staff his office once the appointment came through. On May 9, 1893, he got out another of his postcards and addressed it to a man named W. F. Cooling, in the Staats-Zeitung Building. Prendergast lectured Cooling on the fact that Jesus was the ultimate legal authority, then gave him the good news.
“I am candidate for corporation counsel,” he wrote. “If I become corporation counsel you shall be my assistant.”
Night Is the Magician
DESPITE ITS INCOMPLETE EXHIBITS, rutted paths, and stretches of unplanted ground, the exposition revealed to its early visitors a vision of what a city could be and ought to be. The Black City to the north lay steeped in smoke and garbage, but here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage-processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers. There was daycare for the children of visitors, and much fun was made of the fact that when you left your child at the Children’s Building, you received a claim check in return. Chicago’s small but vocal censorians feared that impoverished parents would turn the building into a depository for unwanted children. Only one child, poor Charlie Johnson, was ever thus abandoned, and not a single child was lost, although anxiety invested the closing moments of each day.
Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon. Visitors also encountered the latest and arguably most important organizational invention of the century, the vertical file, created by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. Sprinkled among these exhibits were novelties of all kinds. A locomotive made of spooled silk. A suspension bridge built out of Kirk’s Soap. A giant map of the United States made of pickles. Prune makers sent along a full-scale knight on horseback sculpted out of prunes, and the Avery Salt Mines of Louisiana displayed a copy of the Statue of Liberty carved from a block of salt. Visitors dubbed it “Lot’s Wife.”
One of the most compelling, and chilling, exhibits was the Krupp Pavilion, where Fritz Krupp’s “pet monster” stood at the center of an array of heavy guns. A popular guide to the fair, called the Time-Saver, rated every exhibit on a scale of one to three, with one being merely “interesting” and three being “remarkably interesting,” and gave the Krupp Pavilion a three. For many visitors, however, the weapons were a disturbing presence. Mrs. D. C. Taylor, a frequent visitor to the fair, called Krupp’s biggest gun “a fearful hideous thing, breathing of blood and carnage, a triumph of barbarism crouching amid the world’s triumphs of civilization.”
Mrs. Taylor adored the Court of Honor and was struck by the oddly sober manner people adopted as they walked among its palaces. “Every one about us moved softly and spoke gently. No one seemed hurried or impatient, all were under a spell, a spell that held us from the opening of the fair until its close.”
In the Midway she found a very different atmosphere. Here Mrs. Taylor ventured into the Street in Cairo, open at last, and witnessed her first belly dance. She watched the dancer carefully. “She takes a few light steps to one side, pauses, strikes the castanets, then the same to the other side; advances a few steps, pauses, and causes her abdomen to rise and fall several times in exact time to the music, without moving a muscle in any other part of her body, with incredible rapidity, at the same time holding her head and feet perfectly rigid.”
As Mrs. Taylor and her companions left the Street, she sang quietly to herself, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” like a frightened child easing past a graveyard.
The fair was so big, so beyond grasp, that the Columbian Guards found themselves hammered with questions. It was a disease, rhetorical smallpox, and every visitor exhibited it in some degree. The Guards answered the same questions over and over, and the questions came fast, often with an accusatory edge. Some questions were just odd.
“In which building is the pope?” one woman asked. She was overheard by writer Teresa Dean, who wrote a daily column from the fair.
“The pope is not here, madame,” the guard said.
“Where is he?”
“In Italy, Europe, madame.”
The woman frowned. “Which way is that?”
Convinced now that the woman was joking, the guard cheerfully quipped, “Three blocks under the lagoon.”
She said, “How do I get there?”
Another visitor, hunting for an exhibit of wax figures, asked a guard, “Can you tell me where the building is that has the artificial human beings?”
He began telling her he did not know, when another visitor jumped in. “I have heard of them,” he said. “They are over in the Woman’s Building. Just ask for the Lady Managers.”
One male visitor, who had lost both his legs and made his way around the fair on false limbs and crutches, must have looked particularly knowledgeable, because another visitor peppered him incessantly with questions, until finally the amputee complained that the strain of answering so many questions was wearing him out.
“There’s just one more thing I’d like to know,” his questioner said, “and I’ll not trouble ye anymore.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I’d like to know how you lost your legs.”
The amputee said he would answer only on strict condition that this was indeed the last question. He would allow no others. Was that clear?
His persecutor agreed.
The amputee, fully aware that his answer would raise an immediate corollary question, said, “They were bit off.”
“Bit off. How—”
But a deal was a deal. Chuckling, the amputee hobbled away.
As the fair fought for attendance, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West drew crowds by the tens of thousands. If Cody had gotten the fair concession he had asked for, these crowds first would have had to pay admission to Jackson Park and would have boosted the fair’s attendance and revenue to a welcome degree. Cody also was able to hold performances on Sundays and, being outside the fairgrounds, did not have to contribute half his revenue to the Exposition Company. Over the six months of the fair an average of twelve thousand people would attend each of Cody’s 318 performances, for a total attendance of nearly four million.
Often Cody upstaged the fair. His main entrance was so close to one of the busiest exposition gates that some visitors thought his show was the world’s fair, and were said to have gone home happy. In June a group of cowboys organized a thousand-mile race from Chadron, Nebraska, to Chicago, in honor of the fair and planned to end it in Jackson Park. The prize was a rich one, $1,000. Cody contributed another $500 and a fancy saddle on condition the race end in his own arena. The organizers accepted.
Ten riders, including “Rattlesnake” Pete and a presumably reformed Nebraska bandit named Doc Middleton, set out from the Baline Hotel in Chadron on the morning of June 14, 1893. The rules of the race allowed each rider to start with two horses and required that he stop at various checkpoints along the way. The most important rule held that when he crossed the finish line, he had to be riding one of the original horses.
The race was wild, replete with broken rules and injured animals. Middleton dropped out soon after reaching Illinois. Four others likewise failed to finish. The first rider across the line was a railroad man named John Berry, riding Poison, who galloped into the Wild West arena on June 27 at nine-thirty in the morning. Buffalo Bill, resplendent in white buckskin and silver, was there to greet him, along with the rest of the Wild West company and ten thousand or so residents of Chicago. John Berry had to settle for the saddle alone, however, for subsequent investigation revealed that shortly after the start of the race he had loaded his horses on an eastbound train and climbed aboard himself to take the first hundred miles in comfort.
Cody upstaged the fair again in July, when exposition officials rejected a request from Mayor Carter Harrison that the fair dedicate one day to the poor children of Chicago and admit them at no charge. The directors thought this was too much to ask, given their struggle to boost the rate of paid admission. Every ticket, even half-price children’s tickets, mattered. Buffalo Bill promptly declared Waif’s Day at the Wild West and offered any kid in Chicago a free train ticket, free admission to the show, and free access to the whole Wild West encampment, plus all the candy and ice cream the children could eat.
Fifteen thousand showed up.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West may indeed have been an “incongruity,” as the directors had declared in rejecting his request for a concession within Jackson Park, but the citizens of Chicago had fallen in love.
The skies cleared and stayed clear. Roadways dried, and newly opened flowers perfumed the air. Exhibitors gradually completed their installations, and electricians removed the last misconnects from the elaborate circuits that linked the fair’s nearly 200,000 incandescent bulbs. Throughout the fairgrounds, on Burnham’s orders, clean-up efforts intensified. On June 1, 1893, workers removed temporary railroad tracks that had scarred the lawns near the lagoon and just south of the Electricity and Mines buildings. “A strikingly noticeable change in the general condition of things is the absence of large piles of boxes stacked up in the exterior courts around Manufactures, Agriculture, Machinery, and other large buildings,” the Tribune reported on June 2. Unopened crates and rubbish that just one week earlier had cluttered the interior of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, particularly at the pavilions erected by Russia, Norway, Denmark, and Canada, likewise had been removed, and now these spaces presented “an entirely different and vastly improved appearance.”
Although such interior exhibits were compelling, the earliest visitors to Jackson Park saw immediately that the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves. The Court of Honor produced an effect of majesty and beauty that was far greater than even the dream conjured in the Rookery library. Some visitors found themselves so moved by the Court of Honor that immediately upon entering they began to weep.
No single element accounted for this phenomenon. Each building was huge to begin with, but the impression of mass was amplified by the fact that all the buildings were neoclassical in design, all had cornices set at the same height, all had been painted the same soft white, and all were so shockingly, beautifully unlike anything the majority of visitors ever had seen in their own dusty hometowns. “No other scene of man’s creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honor,” wrote James Fullerton Muirhead, an author and guidebook editor. The court, he wrote, “was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.” Edgar Lee Masters, Chicago attorney and emerging poet, called the Court “an inexhaustible dream of beauty.”
The shared color, or more accurately the shared absence of color, produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky. In the early morning, when Burnham conducted his inspections, the buildings were a pale blue and seemed to float on a ghostly cushion of ground mist. Each evening the sun colored the buildings ochre and lit the motes of dust raised by the breeze until the air itself became a soft orange veil.
One such evening Burnham led a tour of the fair aboard an electric launch for a group that included John Root’s widow, Dora, and a number of foreign emissaries. Burnham loved escorting friends and dignitaries through the grounds but sought always to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, with the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order, as if he were still back in his library showing drawings instead of real structures. He had tried to impose his aesthetic will on all the fair’s visitors by insisting during the first year of planning that the number of entrances to Jackson Park be limited to a few and that these be situated so that people had to enter first through the Court of Honor, either through a large portal at the rail station on the west side of the park or an entry on the east from the exposition wharf. His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within. He did not get his way. The directors insisted on many gates, and the railroads refused to channel their exposition traffic through a single depot. Burnham never quite surrendered. Throughout the fair, he said, “we insisted on sending our own guests whose opinions we specially valued into the Grand Court first.”
The electric launch carrying Burnham, Dora Root, and the foreign dignitaries cut silently through the lagoon, scattering the white city reflected upon its surface. The setting sun gilded the terraces on the east bank but cast the west bank into dark blue shadow. Women in dresses of crimson and aquamarine walked slowly along the embankments. Voices drifted across the water, laced now and then with laughter that rang like crystal touched in a toast.
The next day, after what surely had been a difficult night, Dora Root wrote to Burnham to thank him for the tour and to attempt to convey the complexity of her feelings.
“Our hour on the lagoon last evening proved the crown of a charming day,” she wrote. “Indeed I fear we would have lingered on indefinitely had not our foreign friends prepared a more highly spiced entertainment. I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland.” The scenes elicited conflicting emotions. “I find it all infinitely sad,” she wrote, “but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. There is much I long to say to you about your work of the past two years—which has brought about this superb realization of John’s vision of beauty—but I cannot trust myself. It means too much to me and I think, I hope, you understand. For years his hopes and ambitions were mine, and in spite of my efforts the old interests still go on. It is a relief to me to write this. I trust you will not mind.”
If evenings at the fair were seductive, the nights were ravishing. The lamps that laced every building and walkway produced the most elaborate demonstration of electric illumination ever attempted and the first large-scale test of alternating current. The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago. These were important engineering milestones, but what visitors adored was the sheer beauty of seeing so many lights ignited in one place, at one time. Every building, including the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, was outlined in white bulbs. Giant searchlights—the largest ever made and said to be visible sixty miles away—had been mounted on the Manufactures’ roof and swept the grounds and surrounding neighborhoods. Large colored bulbs lit the hundred-foot plumes of water that burst from the MacMonnies Fountain.
For many visitors these nightly illuminations were their first encounter with electricity. Hilda Satt, a girl newly arrived from Poland, went to the fair with her father. “As the light was fading in the sky, millions of lights were suddenly flashed on, all at one time,” she recalled, years later. “Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven.”
Her father told her the lights were activated by electric switches.
“Without matches?” she asked.
Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.
At night the lights and the infilling darkness served to mask the exposition’s many flaws—among them, wrote John Ingalls in Cosmopolitan, the “unspeakable debris of innumerable luncheons”—and to create for a few hours the perfect city of Daniel Burnham’s dreams.
“Night,” Ingalls wrote, “is the magician of the fair.”
The early visitors returned to their homes and reported to friends and family that the fair, though incomplete, was far grander and more powerful than they had been led to expect. Montgomery Schuyler, the leading architectural critic of Burnham’s day, wrote, “It was a common remark among visitors who saw the Fair for the first time that nothing they had read or seen pictured had given them an idea of it, or prepared them for what they saw.” Reporters from far-flung cities wired the same observation back to their editors, and stories of delight and awe began to percolate through the most remote towns. In fields, dells, and hollows, families terrified by what they read in the papers each day about the collapsing national economy nonetheless now began to think about Chicago. The trip would be expensive, but it was starting to look more and more worthwhile. Even necessary.
If only Mr. Ferris would get busy and finish that big wheel.
Modus Operandi
AND SO IT BEGAN. A waitress disappeared from Holmes’s restaurant, where his guests ate their meals. One day she was at work, the next gone, with no clear explanation for her abrupt departure. Holmes seemed as stumped as anyone. A stenographer named Jennie Thompson disappeared, as did a woman named Evelyn Stewart, who either worked for Holmes or merely stayed in his hotel as a guest. A male physician who for a time had rented an office in the castle and who had befriended Holmes—they were seen together often—also had decamped, with no word to anyone.
Within the hotel chemical odors ebbed and flowed like an atmospheric tide. Some days the halls were suffused with a caustic scent, as of a cleanser applied too liberally, other days with a silvery medicinal odor, as if a dentist were at work somewhere in the building easing a customer into a deep sleep. There seemed to be a problem with the gas lines that fed the building, for periodically the scent of uncombusted gas permeated the halls.
There were inquiries from family and friends. As always Holmes was sympathetic and helpful. The police still did not become involved. Apparently there was too much else for them to do, as wealthy visitors and foreign dignitaries began arriving in ever-greater numbers, shadowed by a swarm of pickpockets, thugs, and petty swindlers.
Holmes did not kill face to face, as Jack the Ripper had done, gorging himself on warmth and viscera, but he did like proximity. He liked being near enough to hear the approach of death in the rising panic of his victims. This was when his quest for possession entered its most satisfying phase. The vault deadened most of the cries and pounding but not all. When the hotel was full of guests, he settled for more silent means. He filled a room with gas and let the guest expire in her sleep, or he crept in with his passkey and pressed a chloroform-soaked rag to her face. The choice was his, a measure of his power.
No matter what the approach, the act always left him in possession of a fresh supply of material, which he could then explore at will.
The subsequent articulation by his very talented friend Chappell constituted the final phase of acquisition, the triumphal phase, though he used Chappell’s services only sparingly. He disposed of other spent material in his kiln or in pits filled with quicklime. He dared not keep Chappell’s frames for too long a time. Early on he had made it a rule not to retain trophies. The possession he craved was a transient thing, like the scent of a fresh-cut hyacinth. Once it was gone, only another acquisition could restore it.
One Good Turn
IN THE FIRST WEEK of June 1893 Ferris’s men began prying the last timbers and planks from the falsework that had encased and supported the big wheel during its assembly. The rim arced through the sky at a height of 264 feet, as high as the topmost occupied floor in Burnham’s Masonic Temple, the city’s tallest skyscraper. None of the thirty-six cars had been hung—they stood on the ground like the coaches of a derailed train—but the wheel itself was ready for its first rotation. Standing by itself, unbraced, Ferris’s wheel looked dangerously fragile. “It is impossible for the non-mechanical mind to understand how such a Brobdingnag continues to keep itself erect,” wrote Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel; “it has no visible means of support—none that appear adequate. The spokes look like cobwebs; they are after the fashion of those on the newest make of bicycles.”
On Thursday, June 8, Luther Rice signaled the firemen at the big steam boilers seven hundred feet away on Lexington Avenue, outside the Midway, to build steam and fill the ten-inch underground mains. Once the boilers reached suitable pressure, Rice nodded to an engineer in the pit under the wheel, and steam whooshed into the pistons of its twin thousand-horsepower engines. The drive sprockets turned smoothly and quietly. Rice ordered the engine stopped. Next workers attached the ten-ton chain to the sprockets and to a receiving sprocket at the wheel. Rice sent a telegram to Ferris at his office in the Hamilton Building in Pittsburgh: “Engines have steam on and are working satisfactorily. Sprocket chain connected up and are ready to turn wheel.”
Ferris was unable to go to Chicago himself but sent his partner W. F. Gronau to supervise the first turn. In the early morning of Friday, June 9, as his train passed through the South Side, Gronau saw how the great wheel towered over everything in its vicinity, just as Eiffel’s creation did in Paris. The exclamations of fellow passengers as to the wheel’s size and apparent fragility filled him with a mixture of pride and anxiety. Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham’s pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower.
Last-minute adjustments and inspections took up most of Friday, but just before dusk Rice told Gronau that everything appeared to be ready.
“I did not trust myself to speak,” Gronau said, “so merely nodded to start.” He was anxious to see if the wheel worked, but at the same time “would gladly have assented to postpone the trial.”
Nothing remained but to admit steam and see what happened. Never had anyone built such a gigantic wheel. That it would turn without crushing its bearings and rotate smoothly and true were engineering hopes supported only by calculations that reflected known qualities of iron and steel. No structure ever had been subjected to the unique stresses that would come to bear upon and within the wheel once in motion.
Ferris’s pretty wife, Margaret, stood nearby, flushed with excitement. Gronau believed she was experiencing the same magnitude of mental strain as he.
“Suddenly I was aroused from these thoughts by a most horrible noise,” he said. A growl tore through the sky and caused everyone in the vicinity—the Algerians of Bloom’s village, the Egyptians and Persians and every visitor within one hundred yards—to halt and stare at the wheel.
“Looking up,” Gronau said, “I saw the wheel move slowly. What can be the matter! What is this horrible noise!”
Gronau ran to Rice, who stood in the engine pit monitoring pressures and the play of shafts and shunts. Gronau expected to see Rice hurriedly trying to shut down the engine, but Rice looked unconcerned.
Rice explained that he had merely tested the wheel’s braking system, which consisted of a band of steel wrapped around the axle. The test alone had caused the wheel to move one eighth of its circumference. The noise, Rice said, was only the sound of rust being scraped off the band.
The engineer in the pit released the brake and engaged the drive gears. The sprockets began to turn, the chain to advance.
By now many of the Algerians, Egyptians, and Persians—possibly even a few belly dancers—had gathered on the wheel’s loading platforms, which were staged like steps so that once the wheel opened six cars could be loaded at a time. Everyone was silent.
As the wheel began to turn, loose nuts and bolts and a couple of wrenches rained from its hub and spokes. The wheel had consumed 28,416 pounds of bolts in its assembly; someone was bound to forget something.
Unmindful of this steel downpour, the villagers cheered and began dancing on the platforms. Some played instruments. The workmen who had risked their lives building the wheel now risked them again and climbed aboard the moving frame. “No carriages were as yet placed in position,” Gronau said, “but this did not deter the men, for they clambered among the spokes and sat upon the crown of the wheel as easy as I am sitting in this chair.”
The wheel needed twenty minutes for a single revolution. Only when it had completed its first full turn did Gronau feel the test had been successful, at which point he said, “I could have yelled out loud for joy.”
Mrs. Ferris shook his hand. The crowd cheered. Rice telegraphed Ferris, who had been waiting all day for word of the test, his anxiety rising with each hour. The Pittsburgh office of Western Union received the cable at 9:10P.M., and a blue-suited messenger raced through the cool spring night to bring it to Ferris. Rice had written: “The last coupling and final adjustment was made and steam turned on at six o’clock this evening one complete revolution of the big wheel was made everything working satisfactory twenty minutes time was taken for the revolution—I congratulate you upon it complete success midway is wildly enthusiastic.”
The next day, Saturday, June 10, Ferris cabled Rice, “Your telegram stating that first revolution of wheel had been made last night at six o’clock and that same was successful in every way has caused great joy in this entire camp. I wish to congratulate you in all respects in this matter and ask that you rush the putting in of cars working day and night—if you can’t put the cars in at night, babbitt the car bearings at night so as to keep ahead.” By “babbitt” he no doubt meant that Rice should install the metal casings in which the bearings were to sit.
The wheel had worked, but Ferris, Gronau, and Rice all knew that far more important tests lay ahead. Beginning that Saturday workers would begin hanging cars, thus placing upon the wheel its first serious stresses. Each of the thirty-six cars weighed thirteen tons, for a total of just under one million pounds. And that did not include the 200,000 pounds of additional live load that would be added as passengers filled the cars.
On Saturday, soon after receiving Ferris’s congratulatory telegram, Rice cabled back that in fact the first car already had been hung.
Beyond Jackson Park the first turn of Ferris’s wheel drew surprisingly little attention. The city, especially its frappé set, had focused its interest on another event unfolding in Jackson Park—the first visit by Spain’s official emissary to the fair, the Infanta Eulalia, the youngest sister of Spain’s dead King Alfonso XII and daughter of exiled Queen Isabel II.
The visit wasn’t going very well.
The infanta was twenty-nine and, in the words of a State Department official, “rather handsome, graceful and bright.” She had arrived two days earlier by train from New York, been transported immediately to the Palmer House, and lodged there in its most lavish suite. Chicago’s boosters saw her visit as the first real opportunity to demonstrate the city’s new refinement and to prove to the world, or at least to New York, that Chicago was as adept at receiving royalty as it was at turning pig bristles into paintbrushes. The first warning that things might not go as planned should perhaps have been evident in a wire-service report cabled from New York alerting the nation to the scandalous news that the young woman smoked cigarettes.
In the afternoon of her first day in Chicago, Tuesday, June 6, the infanta had slipped out of her hotel incognito, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting and an aide appointed by President Cleveland. She delighted in moving about the city unrecognized by Chicago’s residents. “Nothing could be more entertaining, in fact, than to walk among the moving crowds of people who were engaged in reading about me in the newspapers, looking at a picture which looked more or less like me,” she wrote.
She visited Jackson Park for the first time on Thursday, June 8, the day Ferris’s wheel turned. Mayor Harrison was her escort. Crowds of strangers applauded her as she passed, for no other reason than her royal heritage. Newspapers called her the Queen of the Fair and put her visit on the front page. To her, however, it was all very tiresome. She envied the freedom she saw exhibited by Chicago’s women. “I realize with some bitterness,” she wrote to her mother, “that if this progress ever reaches Spain it will be too late for me to enjoy it.”
By the next morning, Friday, she felt she had completed her official duties and was ready to begin enjoying herself. For example, she rejected an invitation from the Committee on Ceremonies and instead, on a whim, went to lunch at the German Village.
Chicago society, however, was just getting warmed up. The infanta was royalty, and by God she would get the royal treatment. That night the infanta was scheduled to attend a reception hosted by Bertha Palmer at the Palmer mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In preparation, Mrs. Palmer had ordered a throne built on a raised platform.
Struck by the similarity between her hostess’s name and the name of the hotel in which she was staying, the infanta made inquiries. Upon discovering that Bertha Palmer was the wife of the hotel’s owner, she inflicted a social laceration that Chicago would never forget or forgive. She declared that under no circumstances would she be received by an “innkeeper’s wife.”
Diplomacy prevailed, however, and she agreed to attend. Her mood only worsened. With nightfall the day’s heat had given way to heavy rain. By the time Eulalia made it to Mrs. Palmer’s front door, her white satin slippers were soaked and her patience for ceremony had been extinguished. She stayed at the function for all of one hour, then bolted.
The next day she skipped an official lunch at the Administration Building and again dined unannounced at the German Village. That night she arrived one hour late for a concert at the fair’s Festival Hall that had been arranged solely in her honor. The hall was filled to capacity with members of Chicago’s leading families. She stayed five minutes.
Resentment began to stain the continuing news coverage of her visit. On Saturday, June 10, the Tribune sniffed, “Her Highness… has a way of discarding programs and following independently the bent of her inclination.” The city’s papers made repeated reference to her penchant for acting in accord with “her own sweet will.”
In fact, the infanta was coming to like Chicago. She had loved her time at the fair and seemed especially to like Carter Harrison. She gave him a gold cigarette case inlaid with diamonds. Shortly before her departure, set for Wednesday, June 14, she wrote to her mother, “I am going to leave Chicago with real regret.”
Chicago did not regret her leaving. If she had happened to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that Wednesday morning, she would have found an embittered editorial that stated, in part, “Royalty at best is a troublesome customer for republicans to deal with and royalty of the Spanish sort is the most troublesome of all… It was their custom to come late and go away early, leaving behind them the general regret that they had not come still later and gone away still earlier, or, better still perhaps, that they had not come at all.”
Such prose, however, bore the unmistakable whiff of hurt feelings. Chicago had set its table with the finest linen and crystal—not out of any great respect for royalty but to show the world how fine a table it could set—only to have the guest of honor shun the feast for a lunch of sausage, sauerkraut, and beer.
Nannie
ANNA WILLIAMS—“NANNIE”—ARRIVED from Midlothian, Texas, in mid-June 1893. While Texas had been hot and dusty, Chicago was cool and smoky, full of trains and noise. The sisters hugged tearfully and congratulated each other on how fine they looked, and Minnie introduced her husband, Henry Gordon. Harry. He was shorter than Minnie’s letters had led Anna to expect, and not as handsome, but there was something about him that even Minnie’s glowing letters had not captured. He exuded warmth and charm. He spoke softly. He touched her in ways that made her glance apologetically at Minnie. Harry listened to the story of her journey from Texas with an attentiveness that made her feel as if she were alone with him in the carriage. Anna kept looking at his eyes.
His warmth and smile and obvious affection for Minnie caused Anna’s suspicions quickly to recede. He did seem to be in love with her. He was cordial and tireless in his efforts to please her and, indeed, to please Anna as well. He brought gifts of jewelry. He gave Minnie a gold watch and chain specially made by the jeweler in the pharmacy downstairs. Without even thinking about it, Anna began calling him “Brother Harry.”
First Minnie and Harry took her on a tour of Chicago. The city’s great buildings and lavish homes awed her, but its smoke and darkness and the ever-present scent of rotting garbage repulsed her. Holmes took the sisters to the Union Stock Yards, where a tour guide led them into the heart of the slaughter. The guide cautioned that they should watch their feet lest they slip in blood. They watched as hog after hog was upended and whisked screaming down the cable into the butchering chambers below, where men with blood-caked knifes expertly cut their throats. The hogs, some still alive, were dipped next in a vat of boiling water, then scraped clean of bristle—the bristle saved in bins below the scraping tables. Each steaming hog then passed from station to station, where knifemen drenched in blood made the same few incisions time after time until, as the hog advanced, slabs of meat began thudding wetly onto the tables. Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage. The yards embodied everything Anna had heard about Chicago and its irresistible, even savage drive toward wealth and power.
The great fair came next. They rode the Alley L along Sixty-third Street. Just before the train entered the fairgrounds, it passed the arena of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. From the elevated trestle they saw the earthen floor of the arena and the amphitheater seating that surrounded it. They saw his horses and buffalo and an authentic stagecoach. The train passed over the fair’s fence, then descended to the terminal at the rear of the Transportation Building. Brother Harry paid the fifty-cent admission for each of them. At the fair’s turnstiles even Holmes could not escape paying cash.
Naturally they first toured the Transportation Building. They saw the Pullman Company’s “Ideal of Industry” exhibit, with its detailed model of Pullman’s company town, which the company extolled as a workers’ paradise. In the building’s annex, packed with trains and locomotives, they walked the full length of an exact duplicate of the all-Pullman New York & Chicago Limited, with its plush chairs and carpeting, crystal glassware, and polished wood walls. At the pavilion of the Inman line a full-sized slice of an ocean liner towered above them. They exited the building through the great Golden Door, which arced across the light-red face of the building like a gilt rainbow.
Now, for the first time, Anna got a sense of the true, vast scale of the fair. Ahead lay a broad boulevard that skirted on the left the lagoon and the Wooded Island, on the right the tall facades of the Mines and Electricity buildings. In the distance she saw a train whooshing over the fair’s all-electric elevated railway along the park’s perimeter. Closer at hand, silent electric launches glided through the lagoon. At the far end of the boulevard, looming like an escarpment in the Rockies, stood the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. White gulls slid across its face. The building was irresistibly huge. Holmes and Minnie took her there next. Once inside she saw that the building was even more vast than its exterior had led her to believe.
A blue haze of human breath and dust blurred the intricate bracing of the ceiling 246 feet above. Halfway to the ceiling, seemingly in midair, were five gigantic electric chandeliers, the largest ever built, each seventy-five feet in diameter and generating 828,000 candlepower. Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of “gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions,” according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition. At the center stood a clock tower, the tallest of the interior structures, rising to a height of 120 feet. Its self-winding clock told the time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, from a face seven feet in diameter. As tall as the tower was, the ceiling was yet another 126 feet above.
Minnie stood beaming and proud as Anna’s gaze moved over the interior city and upward to its steel sky. There had to be thousands of exhibits. The prospect of seeing even a fraction of them was daunting. They saw Gobelin tapestries at the French Pavilion and the life-mask of Abraham Lincoln among the exhibits of the American Bronze Company. Other U.S. companies exhibited toys, weapons, canes, trunks, every conceivable manufactured product—and a large display of burial hardware, including marble and stone monuments, mausoleums, mantels, caskets, coffins, and miscellaneous other tools and furnishings of the undertaker’s trade.
Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead. The gold form of the Statue of the Republic, Big Mary, stood like a torch aflame. The basin in which the statue’s plinth was set glittered with ripples of diamond. At the far end stood thirteen tall white columns, the Peristyle, with slashes of the blue lake visible between them. The light suffusing the Court was so plentiful and intense, it hurt their eyes. Many of the people around them donned spectacles with blue lenses.
They retreated for lunch. They had innumerable choices. There were lunch counters in most of the main buildings. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building alone had ten, plus two large restaurants, one German, the other French. The café in the Transportation Building, on a terrace over the Golden Door, was always popular and offered a spectacular view of the lagoon district. As the day wore on, Holmes bought them chocolate and lemonade and root beer at one of the Hires Root Beer Oases that dotted the grounds.
They returned to the fair almost daily, two weeks being widely considered the minimum needed to cover it adequately. One of the most compelling buildings, given the nature of the age, was the Electricity Building. In its “theatorium” they listened to an orchestra playing at that very moment in New York. They watched the moving pictures in Edison’s Kinetoscope. Edison also displayed a strange metal cylinder that could store voices. “A man in Europe talks to his wife in America by boxing up a cylinder full of conversation and sending it by express,” the Rand, McNally guidebook said; “a lover talks by the hour into a cylinder, and his sweetheart hears as though the thousand leagues were but a yard.”
And they saw the first electric chair.
They reserved a separate day for the Midway. Nothing in Mississippi or Texas had prepared Anna for what she now experienced. Belly dancers. Camels. A balloon full of hydrogen that carried visitors more than a thousand feet into the sky. “Persuaders” called to her from raised platforms, seeking to entice her into the Moorish Palace with its room of mirrors, its optical illusions, and its eclectic wax museum, where visitors saw figures as diverse as Little Red Riding Hood and Marie Antoinette about to be guillotined. There was color everywhere. The Street in Cairo glowed with soft yellows, pinks, and purples. Even the concession tickets provided a splash of color—brilliant blue for the Turkish Theater, pink for the Lapland Village, and mauve for the Venetian gondolas.
Sadly, the Ferris Wheel was not quite ready.
They exited the Midway and strolled slowly south back to Sixty-third Street and the Alley L. They were tired, happy, and sated, but Harry promised to bring them back one more time—on July 4, for a fireworks display that everyone expected would be the greatest the city had ever witnessed.
Brother Harry seemed delighted with Anna and invited her to stay for the summer. Flattered, she wrote home to request that her big trunk be shipped to the Wrightwood address.
Clearly she had hoped something like this would happen, for she had packed the trunk already.
Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel also went to the fair. He bought a souvenir for his son Howard—a tin man mounted on a spinning top. It quickly became the boy’s favorite possession.
Vertigo
AS FERRIS’S MEN BECAME accustomed to handling the big cars, the process of attaching them to the wheel accelerated. By Sunday evening, June 11, six cars had been hung—an average of two a day since the first turn of the wheel. Now it was time for the first test with passengers, and the weather could not have been better. The sun was gold, the sky a darkling blue in the east.
Mrs. Ferris insisted on being aboard for the first ride, despite Gronau’s attempts to dissuade her. Gronau inspected the wheel to make sure the car would swing without obstruction. The engineer in the pit started the engines and rotated the wheel to bring the test car to one of the platforms. “I did not enter the carriage with the easiest feeling at heart,” Gronau said. “I felt squeamish; yet I could not refuse to take the trip. So I put on a bold face and walked into the car.”
Luther Rice joined them, as did two draftsmen and the city of Chicago’s former bridge engineer, W. C. Hughes. His wife and daughter also stepped aboard.
The car swung gently as the passengers took positions within the car. Glass had not yet been installed in its generous windows, nor the iron grill that would cover the glass. As soon as the last passenger had entered, Rice casually nodded to the engineer, and the wheel began to move. Instinctively everyone reached for posts and sills to keep themselves steady.
As the wheel turned, the car pivoted on the trunnions that both connected it to the frame and kept it level. “Owing to our car not having made a trip,” Gronau said, “the trunnions stuck slightly in their bearings and a crunching noise resulted, which in the condition of our nerves was not pleasant to hear.”
The car traveled a bit higher, then unexpectedly stopped, raising the question of how everyone aboard would get down if the wheel could not be restarted. Rice and Gronau stepped to the unglazed windows to investigate. They looked down over the sill and discovered the problem: The fast-growing crowd of spectators, emboldened by seeing passengers in the first car, had leaped into the next car, ignoring shouts to stay back. Fearful that someone would be hurt or killed, the engineer had stopped the wheel and allowed the passengers to board.
Gronau estimated that one hundred people now occupied the car below. No one sought to kick them out. The wheel again began to move.
Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation. Gronau’s first reaction—soon to change—was disappointment. He had expected to feel something like what he felt when riding a fast elevator, but here he found that if he looked straight ahead he felt almost nothing.
Gronau stationed himself at one end of the car to better observe its behavior and the movement of the wheel. When he looked out the side of the car into the passing web of spokes, the car’s rapid ascent became apparent: “… it seemed as if every thing was dropping away from us, and the car was still. Standing at the side of the car and looking into the network of iron rods multiplied the peculiar sensation…” He advised the others that if they had weak stomachs, they should not do likewise.
When the car reached its highest point, 264 feet above the ground, Mrs. Ferris climbed onto a chair and cheered, raising a roar in the following car and on the ground.
Soon, however, the passengers became silent. The novelty of the sensation wore off, and the true power of the experience became apparent.
“It was a most beautiful sight one obtains in the descent of the car, for then the whole fair grounds is laid before you,” Gronau said. “The view is so grand that all timidity left me and my watch on the movement of the car was abandoned.” The sun had begun its own descent and now cast an orange light over the shorescape. “The harbor was dotted with vessels of every description, which appeared mere specks from our exalted position, and the reflected rays of the beautiful sunset cast a gleam upon the surrounding scenery, making a picture lovely to behold.” The entire park came into view as an intricate landscape of color, texture, and motion. Lapis lagoons. Electric launches trailing veils of diamond. Carmine blossoms winking from bulrush and flag. “The sight is so inspiring that all conversation stopped, and all were lost in admiration of this grand sight. The equal of it I have never seen, and I doubt very much if I shall again.”
This reverie was broken as more bolts and nuts bounded down the superstructure onto the car’s roof.
Spectators still managed to get past the guards and into the following cars, but now Gronau and Rice shrugged it off. The engineer in the pit kept the wheel running until the failing light made continued operation a danger, but even then thrill-seekers clamored for a chance. Finally Rice informed those who had shoved their way into the cars that if they remained he would run them to the top of the wheel and leave them there overnight. “This,” Gronau said, “had the desired effect.”
Immediately after leaving the car, Mrs. Ferris telegraphed her husband details of the success. He cabled back, “God bless you my dear.”
The next day, Monday, June 12, Rice cabled Ferris, “Six more cars hung today. People are wild to ride on wheel & extra force of guards is required to keep them out.” On Tuesday the total of cars hung reached twenty-one, with only fifteen more to add.
Burnham, obsessing as always over details, sought to decree the style and location of a fence for the wheel. He wanted an open, perforated fence, Ferris wanted it closed.
Ferris was fed up with Burnham’s pressure and aesthetic interference. He cabled Luther Rice, “… Burnham nor anyone else has any right to dictate whether we shall have a closed or open fence, any more than from an artistic standpoint.”
Ferris prevailed. The eventual fence was a closed one.
At last all the cars were hung and the wheel was ready for its first paying passengers. Rice wanted to begin accepting riders on Sunday, June 18, two days earlier than planned, but now with the wheel about to experience its greatest test—a full load of paying passengers, including entire families—Ferris’s board of directors urged him to hold off one more day. They cabled Ferris, “Unwise to open wheel to public until opening day because of incompleteness and danger of accidents.”
Ferris accepted their directive but with reluctance. Shortly before he left for Chicago, he cabled Rice, “If the board of directors have decided not to run until Wednesday you may carry out their wishes.”
It’s likely the board had been influenced by an accident that had occurred the previous Wednesday, June 14, at the Midway’s Ice Railway, a descending elliptical track of ice over which two coupled bobsleds full of passengers could reach speeds of forty miles an hour. The owners had just completed the attraction and begun conducting their first tests with passengers, employees only, when a group of spectators pushed their way into the sleds, eight in the first, six in the second. The interlopers included three of Bloom’s Algerians, who had come to the railway, one explained, because “none of us had ever seen ice,” a doubtful story given that the Algerians had just endured one of Chicago’s coldest winters.
At about six forty-five P.M. the operator released the sleds, and soon they were rocketing along the ice at maximum speed. “It was about sundown when I heard the sleds coming around the curve,” said a Columbian Guard who witnessed the run. “They seemed to be flying. The first went around the curve. It struck the angle near the west end of the road, but went along all right. The second struck the same point, but it jumped the track. The top of the car, with the people holding tightly to the seats, broke the railing and fell to the ground. As it fell, the sled turned over and the people fell under it.”
The sled plummeted fifteen feet to the ground. One passenger was killed; another, a woman, suffered fractures of her jaw and both wrists. Four other men, including two of the Algerians, sustained contusions.
The accident had been tragic and was a black mark for the fair, but everyone understood that the Ferris Wheel, with thirty-six cars carrying more than two thousand passengers, embodied the potential for a catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale.
Heathen Wanted
DESPITE HIS MISGIVINGS OLMSTED LEFT the completion of the exposition landscape in the hands of Ulrich and adopted a punishing schedule of work and travel that took him through sixteen states. By mid-June he was back at Vanderbilt’s North Carolina estate. Along the way, in railcars, stations, and hotels, he solicited the views of strangers about the fair while keeping his own identity a secret. The fair’s lackluster attendance troubled and perplexed him. He asked travelers if they had visited the fair yet, and if so what they had thought of it, but he was especially interested in the opinions of people who had not yet gone—what had they heard, did they plan to go, what was holding them back?
“Everywhere there is growing interest in the Exposition,” he told Burnham in a June 20 letter from Biltmore. “Everywhere I have found indications that people are planning to go to it.” Firsthand accounts of the fair were sparking heightened interest. Clergymen who had seen it were working the fair into sermons and lectures. He was delighted to find that what visitors liked best were not the exhibits but the buildings, waterways, and scenery and that the fair had surprised them. “People who have gone to the Fair have, in the main, found more than the newspapers… had led them to expect.” He concluded, “There is a rising tidal wave of enthusiasm over the land.”
But he saw that other factors were exerting a countervailing force. While personal accounts of the fair were enthusiastic, Olmsted wrote, “nearly always incompletenesses are referred to, favoring the idea that much remains to be done, and that the show will be better later.” Farmers planned to wait until after harvest. Many people had put off their visits in the expectation that the nation’s worsening economic crisis and pressure from Congress eventually would compel the railroads to reduce their Chicago fares. Weather was also an issue. Convinced that Chicago was too hot in July and August, people were postponing their visits until the fall.
One of the most pernicious factors, Olmsted found, was the widespread fear that anyone who ventured to Chicago would be “fleeced unmercifully,” especially in the fair’s many restaurants, with their “extortionate” prices. “This complaint is universal, and stronger than you in Chicago are aware of, I am sure,” he told Burnham. “It comes from rich and poor alike… I think that I have myself paid ten times as much for lunch at the Exposition as I did a few days ago, for an equally good one in Knoxville, Tenn. The frugal farming class yet to come to the Fair will feel this greatly.”
Olmsted had another reason to worry about high meal prices. “The effect,” he wrote, “will be to induce people more and more to bring their food with them, and more and more to scatter papers and offal on the ground.”
It was critical now, Olmsted argued, to concentrate on making improvements of a kind most likely to increase the gleam in the stories people took back to their hometowns. “This is the advertising now most important to be developed; that of high-strung, contagious enthusiasm, growing from actual excellence: the question being not whether people shall be satisfied, but how much they shall be carried away with admiration, and infect others by their unexpected enjoyment of what they found.”
Toward this end, he wrote, certain obvious flaws needed immediate attention. The exposition’s gravel paths, for example. “There is not a square rod of admirable, hardly one of passable, gravel-walk in all of the Exposition Ground,” he wrote. “It appears probable to me that neither the contractor, nor the inspector, whose business it is to keep the contractor up to his duty, can ever have seen a decently good gravel walk, or that they have any idea of what good gravel walks are. What are the defects of your walks?”—Your walks, he says here, not mine or ours, even though the walks were the responsibility of his own landscape department—“In some places there are cobbles or small boulders protruding from the surface, upon which no lady, with Summer shoes, can step without pain. In other places, the surface material is such that when damp enough to make it coherent it becomes slimy, and thus unpleasant to walk upon; also, without care, the slime is apt to smear shoes and dresses, which materially lessens the comfort of ladies.” His voyage to Europe had shown him that a really good gravel path “should be as even and clean as a drawing room floor.”
The cleanliness of the grounds also fell short of European standards, as he had feared it would. Litter was everywhere, with too few men assigned to clean it up. The fair needed twice as many, he said, and greater scrutiny of their work. “I have seen papers that had been apparently swept off the terraces upon the shrubbery between them and the lagoons,” Olmsted wrote. “Such a shirking trick in a workman employed to keep the terraces clean should be a criminal offence.”
He was bothered, too, by the noise of the few steam vessels that Burnham, over his repeated objections, had authorized to travel the exposition’s waters alongside the electric launches. “The boats are cheap, graceless, clumsy affairs, as much out of place in what people are calling the ‘Court of Honor’ of the Exposition as a cow in a flower garden.”
Olmsted’s greatest concern, however, was that the main, Jackson Park portion of the exposition simply was not fun. “There is too much appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A stint to be got through before it is time to go home. The crowd has a melancholy air in this respect, and strenuous measures should be taken to overcome it.”
Just as Olmsted sought to conjure an aura of mystery in his landscape, so here he urged the engineering of seemingly accidental moments of charm. The concerts and parades were helpful but were of too “stated or programmed” a nature. What Olmsted wanted were “minor incidents… of a less evidently prepared character; less formal, more apparently spontaneous and incidental.” He envisioned French horn players on the Wooded Island, their music drifting across the waters. He wanted Chinese lanterns strung from boats and bridges alike. “Why not skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines, such as one sees in Italy? Even lemonade peddlers would help if moving about in picturesque dresses; or cake-sellers, appearing as cooks, with flat cap, and in spotless white from top to toe?” On nights when big events in Jackson Park drew visitors away from the Midway, “could not several of the many varieties of ‘heathen,’ black, white and yellow, be cheaply hired to mingle, unobtrusively, but in full native costume, with the crowd on the Main Court?”
When Burnham read Olmsted’s letter, he must have thought Olmsted had lost his mind. Burnham had devoted the last two years of his life to creating an impression of monumental beauty, and now Olmsted wanted to make visitors laugh. Burnham wanted them struck dumb with awe. There would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen.
The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham’s dream. Everywhere it reflected the authoritarian spandrels of his character, from its surfeit of policemen to its strict rules against picking flowers. Nowhere was this as clearly evident as in the fair’s restrictions on unauthorized photography.
Burnham had given a single photographer, Charles Dudley Arnold, a monopoly over the sale of official photographs of the fair, which arrangement also had the effect of giving Burnham control over the kinds of images that got distributed throughout the country and explains why neat, well-dressed, upper-class people tended to populate each frame. A second contractor received the exclusive right to rent Kodaks to fair visitors, the Kodak being a new kind of portable camera that eliminated the need for lens and shutter adjustments. In honor of the fair Kodak called the folding version of its popular model No. 4 box camera the Columbus. The photographs these new cameras created were fast becoming known as “snap-shots,” a term originally used by English hunters to describe a quick shot with a gun. Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars, an amount beyond the reach of most visitors; the Midway’s Street in Cairo imposed an additional one-dollar fee. An amateur photographer bringing a conventional large camera and the necessary tripod had to pay ten dollars, about what many out-of-town visitors paid for a full day at the fair, including lodging, meals, and admission.
For all Burnham’s obsession with detail and control, one event at the fair escaped his attention. On June 17 a small fire occurred in the Cold Storage Building, a castlelike structure at the southwest corner of the grounds built by Hercules Iron Works. Its function was to produce ice, store the perishable goods of exhibitors and restaurants, and operate an ice rink for visitors wishing to experience the novelty of skating in July. The building was a private venture: Burnham had nothing to do with its construction beyond approving its design. Oddly enough, its architect was named Frank P. Burnham, no relation.
The fire broke out in the cupola at the top of the central tower but was controlled quickly and caused only a hundred dollars in damage. Even so, the fire prompted insurance underwriters to take a closer look at the building, and what they saw frightened them. A key element of the design had never been installed. Seven insurers canceled their policies. Fire Marshal Edward W. Murphy, acting chief of the World’s Fair Fire Department, told a committee of underwriters, “That building gives us more trouble than any structure on the grounds. It is a miserable firetrap and will go up in smoke before long.”
No one told Burnham about the fire, no one told him of the cancellations, and no one told him of Murphy’s forecast.
At Last
AT THREE-THIRTY P.M. on Wednesday, June 21, 1893, fifty-one days late, George Washington Gale Ferris took a seat on the speakers’ platform built at the base of his wheel. The forty-piece Iowa State Marching Band already had boarded one of the cars and now played “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Mayor Harrison joined Ferris on the platform, as did Bertha Palmer, the entire Chicago city council, and an assortment of fair officials. Burnham apparently was not present.
The cars were fully glazed, and wire grills had been placed over all the windows so that, as one reporter put it, “No crank will have an opportunity to commit suicide from this wheel, no hysterical woman shall jump from a window.” Conductors trained to soothe riders who were afraid of heights stood in handsome uniforms at each car’s door.
The band quieted, the wheel stopped. Speeches followed. Ferris was last to take the podium and happily assured the audience that the man condemned for having “wheels in his head” had gotten them out of his head and into the heart of the Midway Plaisance. He attributed the success of the enterprise to his wife, Margaret, who stood behind him on the platform. He dedicated the wheel to the engineers of America.
Mrs. Ferris gave him a gold whistle, then she and Ferris and the other dignitaries climbed into the first car. Harrison wore his black slouch hat.
When Ferris blew the whistle, the Iowa State band launched into “America,” and the wheel again began to turn. The group made several circuits, sipping champagne and smoking cigars, then exited the wheel to the cheers of the crowd that now thronged its base. The first paying passengers stepped aboard.
The wheel continued rolling with stops only for loading and unloading until eleven o’clock that night. Even with every car full, the wheel never faltered, its bearings never groaned.
The Ferris Company was not shy about promoting its founder’s accomplishment. In an illustrated pamphlet called the “Ferris Wheel Souvenir” the company wrote: “Built in the face of every obstacle, it is an achievement which reflects so much credit upon the inventor, that were Mr. Ferris the subject of a Monarchy, instead of a citizen of a great Republic, his honest heart would throb beneath a breast laden with the decorations of royalty.” Ferris could not resist tweaking the Exposition Company for not granting him a concession sooner than it did. “Its failure to appreciate its importance,” the souvenir said, “has cost the Exposition Company many thousands of dollars.”
This was an understatement. Had the Exposition Company stood by its original June 1892 concession rather than waiting until nearly six months later, the wheel would have been ready for the fair’s May 1 opening. Not only did the exposition lose its 50 percent share of the wheel’s revenue for those fifty-one days—it lost the boost in overall admission that the wheel likely would have generated and that Burnham so desperately wanted. Instead it had stood for that month and a half as a vivid advertisement of the fair’s incomplete condition.
Safety fears lingered, and Ferris did what he could to ease them. The souvenir pamphlet noted that even a full load of passengers had “no more effect on the movements or the speed than if they were so many flies”—an oddly ungracious allusion. The pamphlet added, “In the construction of this great wheel, every conceivable danger has been calculated and provided for.”
But Ferris and Gronau had done their jobs too well. The design was so elegant, so adept at exploiting the strength of thin strands of steel, that the wheel appeared incapable of withstanding the stresses placed upon it. The wheel may not have been unsafe, but it looked unsafe.
“In truth, it seems too light,” a reporter observed. “One fears the slender rods which must support the whole enormous weight are too puny to fulfill their office. One cannot avoid the thought of what would happen if a high wind should come sweeping across the prairie and attack the structure broadside. Would the thin rods be sufficient to sustain not only the enormous weight of the structure and that of the 2,000 passengers who might chance to be in the cars, but the pressure of the wind as well?”
In three weeks that question would find an answer.
Rising Wave
AND SUDDENLY THEY BEGAN to come. The enthusiasm Olmsted had identified during his travels, though still far from constituting a tidal wave, at last seemed to begin propelling visitors to Jackson Park. By the end of June, even though the railroads still had not dropped their fares, paid attendance at the exposition had more than doubled, the average for the month rising to 89,170 from May’s dismal 37,501. It was still far below the 200,000 daily visitors the fair’s planners originally had dreamed of, but the trend was encouraging. From Englewood to the Loop, hotels at last began to fill. The Roof Garden Café of the Woman’s Building now served two thousand people a day, ten times the number it had served on Opening Day. The resulting volume of garbage overwhelmed its disposal system, which consisted of janitors bumping large barrels of fetid garbage down the same three flights of stairs used by customers. The janitors could not use the elevators because Burnham had ordered them turned off after dark to conserve power for the fair’s nightly illuminations. As stains and stench accumulated, the restaurant’s manager built a chute on the roof and threatened to jettison the garbage directly onto Olmsted’s precious lawns.
Burnham retracted his order.
The fair had become so intensely compelling that one woman, Mrs. Lucille Rodney of Galveston, Texas, walked thirteen hundred miles along railroad tracks to reach it. “Call it no more the White City on the Lake,” wrote Sir Walter Besant, the English historian and novelist, in Cosmopolitan, “it is Dreamland.”
Even Olmsted now seemed happy with it, although of course he had his criticisms. He too had wanted to manage the first impressions of visitors by having a central entry point. The failure of this idea, he wrote in a formal critique for The Inland Architect,“deducted much” from the fair’s value, although he hastened to add that he was making this criticism “not in the least in a complaining way” but as a professional offering guidance to others who might confront a similar problem. He still wished the Wooded Island had been left alone, and he decried the unplanned proliferation of concession buildings that “intercepted vistas and disturbed spaces intended to serve for the relief of the eye from the too nearly constant demands upon attention of the Exposition Buildings.” The effect, he wrote, “has been bad.”
Overall, however, he was pleased, especially with the process of construction. “Really,” he wrote, “I think that it is a most satisfactory and encouraging circumstance that it could be found feasible for so many men of technical education and ability to be recruited and suitably organized so quickly and made to work together so well in so short a time. I think it a notable circumstance that there should have been so little friction, so little display of jealousy, envy and combativeness, as has appeared in the progress of this enterprise.”
He attributed this circumstance to Burnham: “too high an estimate cannot be placed on the industry, skill and tact with which this result was secured by the master of us all.”
Visitors wore their best clothes, as if going to church, and were surprisingly well behaved. In the six months of the fair the Columbian Guard made only 2,929 arrests, about sixteen per day, typically for disorderly conduct, petty theft, and pickpocketing, with pickpockets most favoring the fair’s always-crowded aquarium. The guard identified 135 ex-convicts and removed them from the grounds. It issued thirty fines for carrying Kodaks without a permit, thirty-seven for taking unauthorized photographs. It investigated the discovery on the grounds of three fetuses; a Pinkerton detective “assaulting visitors” at the Tiffany Pavilion; and a “Zulu acting improperly.” In his official report to Burnham Colonel Rice, commander of the Guard, wrote, “With the tens of thousands of employees and the millions of visitors, it must be admitted that our success was phenomenal.”
With so many people packed among steam engines, giant rotating wheels, horse-drawn fire trucks, and rocketing bobsleds, the fair’s ambulances superintended by a doctor named Gentles were constantly delivering bruised, bloody, and overheated visitors to the exposition hospital. Over the life of the fair the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included:
820 cases of diarrhea;
154, constipation;
21, hemorrhoids;
434, indigestion;
365, foreign bodies in the eyes;
364, severe headaches;
594 episodes of fainting, syncope, and exhaustion;
1 case of extreme flatulence;
and 169 involving teeth that hurt like hell.
One of the delights of the fair was never knowing who might turn up beside you at the chocolate Venus de Milo or at the hearse exhibit or under the barrel of Krupp’s monster, or who might sit at the table next to yours at the Big Tree Restaurant or the Philadelphia Café or the Great White Horse Inn, a reproduction of the public house described by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers; or who might suddenly clutch your arm aboard the Ferris Wheel as your car began its ascent. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, described by an escort as being “half-boor, half-tightwad,” roamed the grounds incognito—but much preferred the vice districts of Chicago. Indians who had once used hatchets to bare the skulls of white men drifted over from Buffalo Bill’s compound, as did Annie Oakley and assorted Cossacks, Hussars, Lancers, and members of the U.S. Sixth Cavalry on temporary furlough to become actors in Colonel Cody’s show. Chief Standing Bear rode the Ferris Wheel in full ceremonial headdress, his two hundred feathers unruffled. Other Indians rode the enameled wooden horses of the Midway carousel.
There were Paderewski, Houdini, Tesla, Edison, Joplin, Darrow, a Princeton professor named Woodrow Wilson, and a sweet old lady in black summer silk flowered with forget-me-not-blue named Susan B. Anthony. Burnham met Teddy Roosevelt for lunch. For years after the fair Burnham used the exclamation, “Bully!” Diamond Jim Brady dined with Lillian Russell and indulged his passion for sweet corn.
No one saw Twain. He came to Chicago to see the fair but got sick and spent eleven days in his hotel room, then left without ever seeing the White City.
Of all people.
Chance encounters led to magic.
Frank Haven Hall, superintendent of the Illinois Institution for the Education of the Blind, unveiled a new device that made plates for printing books in Braille. Previously Hall had invented a machine capable of typing in Braille, the Hall Braille Writer, which he never patented because he felt profit should not sully the cause of serving the blind. As he stood by his newest machine, a blind girl and her escort approached him. Upon learning that Hall was the man who had invented the typewriter she used so often, the girl put her arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug and kiss.
Forever afterward, whenever Hall told this story of how he met Helen Keller, tears would fill his eyes.
One day as the Board of Lady Managers debated whether to support or oppose opening the fair on Sunday, an angry male Sabbatarian confronted Susan B. Anthony in the hall of the Woman’s Building to challenge her contention that the fair should remain open. (Anthony was not a lady manager and therefore despite her national stature could not participate in the board’s meeting.) Deploying the most shocking analogy he could muster, the clergyman asked Anthony if she’d prefer having a son of hers attend Buffalo Bill’s show on Sunday instead of church.
Yes, she replied, “he would learn far more…”
To the pious this exchange confirmed the fundamental wickedness of Anthony’s suffragist movement. When Cody learned of it, he was tickled, so much so that he immediately sent Anthony a thank-you note and invited her to attend his show. He offered her a box at any performance she chose.
At the start of the performance Cody entered the ring on horseback, his long gray hair streaming from under his white hat, the silver trim of his white jacket glinting in the sun. He kicked his horse into a gallop and raced toward Anthony’s box. The audience went quiet.
He halted his horse in a burst of dirt and dust, removed his hat, and with a great sweeping gesture bowed until his head nearly touched the horn of his saddle.
Anthony stood and returned the bow and—“as enthusiastic as a girl,” a friend said—waved her handkerchief at Cody.
The significance of the moment escaped no one. Here was one of the greatest heroes of America’s past saluting one of the foremost heroes of its future. The encounter brought the audience to its feet in a thunder of applause and cheers.
The frontier may indeed have closed at last, as Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in his history-making speech at the fair, but for that moment it stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear.
There was tragedy. The British draped their elaborate ship model of the H.M.S. Victoria in black bunting. On June 22, 1893, during maneuvers off Tripoli, this marvel of naval technology had been struck by the H.M.S. Camperdown. The Victoria’s commander ordered the ship to proceed full speed toward shore, intending to ground her there in accord with standing fleet orders meant to make it easier to raise a sunken ship. Ten minutes later, her engines still at full steam, the cruiser heeled and sank with many of her crew still trapped belowdecks. Others lucky enough to have jumped free now found themselves mauled by her whirling propellers or burned to death when her boilers exploded. “Screams and shrieks arose, and in the white foam appeared reddened arms and legs and wrenched and torn bodies,” a reporter said. “Headless trunks were tossed out of the vortex to linger a moment on the surface and sink out of sight.”
The accident cost four hundred lives.
The Ferris Wheel quickly became the most popular attraction of the exposition. Thousands rode it every day. In the week beginning July 3 Ferris sold 61,395 tickets for a gross return of $30,697.50. The Exposition Company took about half, leaving Ferris an operating profit for that one week of $13,948 (equivalent today to about $400,000).
There were still questions about the wheel’s safety, and unfounded stories circulated about suicides and accidents, including one that alleged that a frightened pug had leaped to its death from one of the car’s windows. Not true, the Ferris Company said; the story was the concoction of a reporter “short on news and long on invention.” If not for the wheel’s windows and iron grates, however, its record might have been different. On one ride a latent terror of heights suddenly overwhelmed an otherwise peaceful man named Wherritt. He was fine until the car began to move. As it rose, he began to feel ill and nearly fainted. There was no way to signal the engineer below to stop the wheel.
Wherritt staggered in panic from one end of the car to the other, driving passengers before him “like scared sheep,” according to one account. He began throwing himself at the walls of the car with such power that he managed to bend some of the protective iron. The conductor and several male passengers tried to subdue him, but he shook them off and raced for the door. In accord with the wheel’s operating procedures, the conductor had locked the door at the start of the ride. Wherritt shook it and broke its glass but could not get it open.
As the car entered its descent, Wherritt became calmer and laughed and sobbed with relief—until he realized the wheel was not going to stop. It always made two full revolutions. Wherritt again went wild, and again the conductor and his allies subdued him, but they were growing tired. They feared what might happen if Wherritt escaped them. Structurally the car was sound, but its walls, windows, and doors had been designed merely to discourage attempts at self-destruction, not to resist a human pile driver. Already Wherritt had broken glass and bent iron.
A woman stepped up and unfastened her skirt. To the astonishment of all aboard, she slipped the skirt off and threw it over Wherritt’s head, then held it in place while murmuring gentle assurances. The effect was immediate. Wherritt became “as quiet as an ostrich.”
A woman disrobing in public, a man with a skirt over his head—the marvels of the fair seemed endless.
The exposition was Chicago’s great pride. Thanks mainly to Daniel Burnham the city had proved it could accomplish something marvelous against obstacles that by any measure should have humbled the builders. The sense of ownership was everywhere, not just among the tens of thousands of citizens who had bought exposition stock. Hilda Satt noticed it in the change that came over her father as he showed her the grounds. “He seemed to take a personal pride in the fair, as if he had helped in the planning,” she said. “As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.”
But the fair did more than simply stoke pride. It gave Chicago a light to hold against the gathering dark of economic calamity. The Erie Railroad wobbled, then collapsed. Next went the Northern Pacific. In Denver three national banks failed in one day and pulled down an array of other businesses. Fearing a bread riot, city authorities called out the militia. In Chicago the editors of The Inland Architect tried to be reassuring: “Existing conditions are only an accident. Capital is only hidden. Enterprise is only frightened, not beaten.” The editors were wrong.
In June two businessmen committed suicide on the same day in the same Chicago hotel, the Metropole. One slit his throat with a razor at ten-thirty in the morning. The other learned of the suicide from the hotel barber. That night in his own room he tied one end of the silk sash of his smoking jacket around his neck, then stretched out on the bed and tied the other end to the bedstead. He rolled off.
“Everyone is in a blue fit of terror,” wrote Henry Adams, “and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.”
Long before the fair’s end, people began mourning its inevitable passage. Mary Hartwell Catherwood wrote, “What shall we do when this Wonderland is closed?—when it disappears—when the enchantment comes to an end?” One lady manager, Sallie Cotton of North Carolina, a mother of six children staying in Chicago for the summer, captured in her diary a common worry: that after seeing the fair, “everything will seem small and insignificant.”
The fair was so perfect, its grace and beauty like an assurance that for as long as it lasted nothing truly bad could happen to anyone, anywhere.
Independence Day
THE MORNING OF JULY 4, 1893, broke gray and squally. The weather threatened to dull the elaborate fireworks display that Frank Millet had planned as a further boost for the exposition’s attendance, which despite steady week-to-week increases still lagged behind expectations. The sun emerged late in the morning, though squalls continued to sweep Jackson Park through much of the day. By late afternoon a soft gold light bathed the Court of Honor and storm clouds walled the northern sky. The storms came no closer. The crowds built quickly. Holmes, Minnie, and Anna found themselves locked within an immense throng of humid men and women. Many people carried blankets and hampers of food but quickly found that no room remained to spread a picnic. There were few children. The entire Columbian Guard seemed to be present, their pale blue uniforms standing out like crocuses against black loam. Gradually the gold light cooled to lavender. Everyone began walking toward the lake. “For half a mile along the splendid sweep of the Lake-Front men were massed a hundred deep,” the Tribune reported. This “black sea” of people was restless. “For hours they sat and waited, filling the air with a strange, uneasy uproar.” One man began singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” and immediately a few thousand people joined in.
As darkness fell, everyone watched the sky for the first rockets of the night’s display. Thousands of Chinese lanterns hung from trees and railings. Red lights glowed from each car of the Ferris Wheel. On the lake a hundred or more ships, yachts, and launches lay at anchor with colored lights on their bows and booms and strung along their rigging.
The crowd was ready to cheer for anything. It cheered when the exposition orchestra played “Home Sweet Home,” a song that never failed to reduce grown men and women to tears, especially the newest arrivals to the city. It cheered when the lights came on within the Court of Honor and all the palaces became outlined in gold. It cheered when the big searchlights atop the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building began sweeping the crowd, and when colorful plumes of water—“peacock feathers,” the Tribune called them—began erupting from the MacMonnies Fountain.
At nine o’clock, however, the crowd hushed. A small bright light had arisen in the sky to the north and appeared to be drifting along the lakeshore toward the wharf. One of the searchlights found it and revealed it to be a large manned balloon. A light flared well below its basket. In the next instant bursts of sparks in red, white, and blue formed a huge American flag against the black sky. The balloon and flag drifted overhead. The searchlight followed, its beam clearly outlined in the sulphur cloud that trailed the balloon. Seconds later rockets began arcing over the lakeshore. Men with flares raced along the beach lighting mortars, as other men aboard barges set off large rotating flares and hurled bombs into the lake, causing the water to explode in extravagant geysers of red, white, and blue. Bombs and rockets followed in intensifying numbers until the climax of the show, when an elaborate wire network erected at Festival Hall, on the lakeshore, abruptly flared into a giant explosive portrait of George Washington.
The crowd cheered.
Everyone began moving at the same time, and soon a great black tide was moving toward the exits and the stations of the Alley L and Illinois Central. Holmes and the Williams sisters waited hours for their turn to board one of the northbound trains, but the wait did nothing to dampen their spirits. That night the Oker family heard joking and laughter coming from the upstairs flat at 1220 Wrightwood.
There was good reason for the merriment within. Holmes had further sweetened the night with an astonishingly generous offer to Minnie and Anna.
Before bed Anna wrote home to her aunt in Texas to tell her the excellent news.
“Sister, brother Harry, and myself will go to Milwaukee tomorrow, and will go to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, by way of the St. Lawrence River. We’ll visit two weeks in Maine, then on to New York. Brother Harry thinks I am talented; he wants me to look around about studying art. Then we will sail for Germany, by way of London and Paris. If I like it, I will stay and study art. Brother Harry says you need never trouble any more about me, financially or otherwise; he and sister will see to me.”
“Write me right away,” she added, “and address to Chicago, and the letter will be forwarded to me.”
She said nothing about her trunk, which was still in Midlothian awaiting shipment to Chicago. She would have to get along without it for now. Once it arrived, she could arrange by telegraph to have it forwarded as well, perhaps to Maine or New York, so that she could have all her things in hand for the voyage to Europe.
Anna went to bed that night with her heart still racing from the excitement of the fair and Holmes’s surprise. Later William Capp, an attorney with the Texas firm of Capp & Canty, said, “Anna had no property of her own, and such a change as described in her letter meant everything for her.”
The next morning promised to be pleasant as well, for Holmes had announced he would take Anna—just her—to Englewood for a brief tour of his World’s Fair Hotel. He had to attend to a few last-minute business matters before the departure for Milwaukee. In the meantime Minnie would ready the Wrightwood flat for whatever tenant happened to rent it next.
Holmes was such a charming man. And now that Anna knew him, she saw that he really was quite handsome. When his marvelous blue eyes caught hers, they seemed to warm her entire body. Minnie had done well indeed.
Worry
AT THE FAIRGROUNDS LATER that night the ticketmen counted their sales and found that for that single day, July 4, paid attendance had totaled 283,273—far greater than the entire first week of the fair.
It was the first clear evidence that Chicago might have created something extraordinary after all, and it renewed Burnham’s hopes that the fair at last would achieve the level of attendance he had hoped for.
But the next day, only 79,034 paying visitors came to see the fair. Three days later the number sagged to 44,537. The bankers carrying the fair’s debt grew anxious. The fair’s auditor already had discovered that Burnham’s department had spent over $22 million to build the fair (roughly $660 million in twenty-first-century dollars), more than twice the amount originally planned. The bankers were pressuring the exposition’s directors to appoint a Retrenchment Committee empowered not just to seek out ways of reducing the fair’s expenses but to execute whatever cost-saving measures it deemed necessary, including layoffs and the elimination of departments and committees.
Burnham knew that placing the future of the fair in the hands of bankers would mean its certain failure. The only way to ease the pressure was to boost the total of paid admissions to far higher levels. Estimates held that to avoid financial failure—a humiliation for Chicago’s prideful leading men who counted themselves lords of the dollar—the fair would have to sell a minimum of 100,000 tickets a day for the rest of its run.
To have even a hope of achieving this, the railroads would have to reduce their fares, and Frank Millet would have to intensify his efforts to attract people from all corners of the country.
With the nation’s economic depression growing ever more profound—banks failing, suicides multiplying—it seemed an impossibility.
Claustrophobia
HOLMES KNEW THAT MOST if not all of his hotel guests would be at the fair. He showed Anna the drugstore, restaurant, and barbershop and took her up to the roof to give her a broader view of Englewood and the pretty, tree-shaded neighborhood that surrounded his corner. He ended the tour at his office, where he offered Anna a seat and excused himself. He picked up a sheaf of papers and began reading.
Distractedly, he asked Anna if she would mind going into the adjacent room, the walk-in vault, to retrieve for him a document he had left inside.
Cheerfully, she complied.
Holmes followed quietly.
At first it seemed as though the door had closed by accident. The room was utterly without light. Anna pounded on the door and called for Harry. She listened, then pounded again. She was not frightened, just embarrassed. She did not like the darkness, which was more complete than anything she had ever experienced—far darker, certainly, than any moonless night in Texas. She rapped the door with her knuckles and listened again.
The air grew stale.
Holmes listened. He sat peacefully in a chair by the wall that separated his office and the vault. Time passed. It was really very peaceful. A soft breeze drifted through the room, cross-ventilation being one of the benefits of a corner office. The breeze, still cool, carried the morning scent of prairie grasses and moist soil.
Anna removed her shoe and beat the heel against the door. The room was growing warmer. Sweat filmed her face and arms. She guessed that Harry, unaware of her plight, had gone elsewhere in the building. That would explain why he still had not come despite her pounding. Perhaps he had gone to check on something in the shops below. As she considered this, she became a bit frightened. The room had grown substantially warmer. Catching a clean breath was difficult. And she needed a bathroom.
He would be so apologetic. She could not show him how afraid she was. She tried shifting her thoughts to the journey they would begin that afternoon. That she, a Texas schoolmarm, soon would be walking the streets of London and Paris still seemed an impossibility, yet Harry had promised it and made all the arrangements. In just a few hours she would board a train for the short trip to Milwaukee, and soon afterward she, Minnie, and Harry would be on their way to the lovely, cool valley of the St. Lawrence River, between New York and Canada. She saw herself sitting on the spacious porch of some fine riverside hotel, sipping tea and watching the sun descend.
She hammered the door again and now also the wall between the vault and Harry’s breeze-filled office.
The panic came, as it always did. Holmes imagined Anna crumpled in a corner. If he chose, he could rush to the door, throw it open, hold her in his arms, and weep with her at the tragedy just barely averted. He could do it at the last minute, in the last few seconds. He could do that.
Or he could open the door and look in on Anna and give her a big smile—just to let her know that this was no accident—then close the door again, slam it, and return to his chair to see what might happen next. Or he could flood the vault, right now, with gas. The hiss and repulsive odor would tell her just as clearly as a smile that something extraordinary was under way.
He could do any of these things.
He had to concentrate to hear the sobs from within. The airtight fittings, the iron walls, and the mineral-wool insulation deadened most of the sound, but he had found with experience that if he listened at the gas pipe, he heard everything much more clearly.
This was the time he most craved. It brought him a period of sexual release that seemed to last for hours, even though in fact the screams and pleading faded rather quickly.
He filled the vault with gas, just to be sure.
Holmes returned to the Wrightwood apartment and told Minnie to get ready—Anna was waiting for them at the castle. He held Minnie and kissed her and told her how lucky he was and how much he liked her sister.
During the train ride to Englewood, he seemed well rested and at peace, as if he had just ridden his bicycle for miles and miles.
Two days later, on July 7, the Oker family received a letter from Henry Gordon stating that he no longer needed the apartment. The letter came as a surprise. The Okers believed Gordon and the two sisters still occupied the flat. Lora Oker went upstairs to check. She knocked, heard nothing, then entered.
“I do not know how they got out of the house,” she said, “but there were evidences of hasty packing, a few books and odds and ends being left lying about. If there had been any writing in the books all traces were removed, for the fly leaves had been torn out.”
Also on July 7 the Wells-Fargo agent in Midlothian, Texas, loaded a large trunk into the baggage car of a northbound train. The trunk—Anna’s trunk—was addressed to “Miss Nannie Williams, c/o H. Gordon, 1220 Wrightwood Ave., Chicago.”
The trunk reached the city several days later. A Wells-Fargo drayman tried to deliver it to the Wrightwood address but could not locate anyone named Williams or Gordon. He returned the trunk to the Wells-Fargo office. No one came to claim it.
Holmes called upon an Englewood resident named Cephas Humphrey, who owned his own team and dray and made a living transporting furniture, crates, and other large objects from place to place. Holmes asked him to pick up a box and a trunk. “I want you to come after the stuff about dark,” Holmes said, “as I do not care to have the neighbors see it go away.”
Humphrey showed up as requested. Holmes led him into the castle and upstairs to a windowless room with a heavy door.
“It was an awful looking place,” Humphrey said. “There were no windows in it at all and only a heavy door opening into it. It made my flesh creep to go in there. I felt as if something was wrong, but Mr. Holmes did not give me much time to think about that.”
The box was a long rectangle made of wood, roughly the dimensions of a coffin. Humphrey carried it down first. Out on the sidewalk, he stood it on end. Holmes, watching from above, rapped hard on the window and called down, “Don’t do that. Lay it down flat.”
Humphrey did so, then walked back upstairs to retrieve the trunk. It was heavy, but its weight gave him no trouble.
Holmes instructed him to take the long box to the Union Depot and told him where on the platform to place it. Apparently Holmes had made prior arrangements with an express agent to pick up the box and load it on a train. He did not disclose its destination.
As for the trunk, Humphrey could not recall where he took it, but later evidence suggests he drove it to the home of Charles Chappell, near Cook County Hospital.
Soon afterward Holmes brought an unexpected but welcome gift to the family of his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel. He gave Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, a collection of dresses, several pairs of shoes, and some hats that had belonged to his cousin, a Miss Minnie Williams, who had gotten married and moved east and no longer needed her old things. He recommended that Carrie cut up the dresses and use the material to make clothing for her three daughters. Carrie was very grateful.
Holmes also surprised his caretaker, Pat Quinlan, with a gift: two sturdy trunks, each bearing the initials MRW.
Storm and Fire
BURNHAM’S WORK DID NOT CEASE, the pace at his office did not slow. The fair buildings were complete and all exhibits were in place, but just as surely as silver tarnishes, the fair became subject to the inevitable forces of degradation and decline—and tragedy.
On Sunday, July 9, a day of heat and stillness, the Ferris Wheel became one of the most sought-after places to be, as did the basket of the Midway’s captive balloon. The balloon, named Chicago, was filled with 100,000 cubic feet of hydrogen and controlled by a tether connected to a winch. By three o’clock that afternoon it had made thirty-five trips aloft, to an altitude of one thousand feet. As far as the concession’s German aerialist was concerned, the day had been a perfect one for ascensions, so still, he estimated, that a plumb line dropped from the basket would have touched the winch directly below.
At three o’clock, however, the manager of the concession, G. F. Morgan, checked his instruments and noted a sudden decline in barometric pressure, evidence that a storm was forming. He halted the sale of new tickets and ordered his men to reel in the balloon. The operators of the Ferris Wheel, he saw, did not take equivalent precautions. The wheel continued to turn.
Clouds gathered, the sky purpled, and a breeze rose from the northwest. The sky sagged toward the ground and a small funnel cloud appeared, which began wobbling south along the lakeshore, toward the fair.
The Ferris Wheel was full of passengers, who watched with mounting concern as the funnel did its own danse du ventre across Jackson Park directly toward the Midway.
At the base of the captive balloon, Manager Morgan ordered his men to grab mooring ropes and hang on tight.
Within Jackson Park the sudden shift from sunlight to darkness drew Burnham outside. A powerful wind reared from all directions. Lunch wraps took flight and wheeled in the air like gulls. The sky seemed to reach into the exposition, and somewhere glass shattered, not the gentle tinkling of a window extinguished by a stone but the hurt-dog yelp of large sheets falling to the ground.
In the Agriculture Building a giant pane of glass fell from the roof and shattered the table at which, just a few seconds earlier, a young woman had been selling candy. Six roof panes blew from the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Exhibitors raced to cover their displays with duckcloth.
The wind tore a forty-square-foot segment from the dome of the Machinery Building and lifted the roof off the fair’s Hungarian Café. The crew of one of Olmsted’s electric launches made a hasty landing to evacuate all passengers and had just begun motoring toward shelter when a burst of wind caught the boat’s awning and whipped the five-ton craft onto its side. The pilot and conductor swam to safety.
Giant feathers rocked in the air. The twenty-eight ostriches of the Midway ostrich farm bore the loss with their usual aplomb.
In the wheel, riders braced themselves. One woman fainted. A passenger later wrote to Engineering News, “It took the combined effort of two of us to close the doors tight. The wind blew so hard the rain drops appeared to be flowing almost horizontal instead of vertical.” The wheel continued to turn, however, as if no wind were blowing. Passengers felt only a slight vibration. The letter-writer, apparently an engineer, estimated the wind deflected the wheel to one side by only an inch and a half.
The riders watched as the wind gripped the adjacent captive balloon and tore it from the men holding it down and briefly yanked Manager Morgan into the sky. The wind pummeled the balloon as if it were an inverted punching bag, then tore it to pieces and cast shreds of its nine thousand yards of silk as far as half a mile away.
Morgan took the disaster calmly. “I got some pleasure out of watching the storm come up,” he said, “and it was a sight of a lifetime to see the balloon go to pieces, even if it was a costly bit of sightseeing for the people who own stock in the company.”
Whether the storm had anything to do with the events of the next day, Monday, July 10, can’t be known, but the timing was suspicious.
On Monday, shortly after one o’clock, as Burnham supervised repairs and crews removed storm debris from the grounds, smoke began to rise from the cupola of the Cold Storage tower, where the fire of June 17 also had taken light.
The tower was made of wood and housed a large iron smokestack, which vented three boilers located in the main building below. Paradoxically, heat was required to produce cold. The stack rose to a point thirty inches short of the top of the tower, where an additional iron assembly, called a thimble, was to have been placed to extend the stack so that it cleared the top completely. The thimble was a crucial part of architect Frank Burnham’s design, meant to shield the surrounding wooden walls from the superheated gases exiting the stack. For some reason, however, the contractor had not installed it. The building was like a house whose chimney ended not above the roof but inside the attic.
The first alarm reached the fire department at 1:32P.M. Engines thundered to the building. Twenty firemen led by Captain James Fitzpatrick entered the main structure and climbed to its roof. From there they made their way to the tower and climbed stairs another seventy feet to the tower’s exterior balcony. Using ropes they hauled up a line of hose and a twenty-five-foot ladder. They secured the hose firmly to the tower.
Fitzpatrick and his men didn’t realize it, but the fire at the top of the tower had set a lethal trap. Fragments of burning debris had fallen into the space between the iron stack and the inner walls of the tower, made of smooth white pine. These flaming brands ignited a fire that, in those narrow confines, soon depleted the available air and extinguished its own flames, leaving in their place a superheated plasma that needed only a fresh supply of oxygen to become explosive.
As the firemen on the tower balcony concentrated on the fire above them, a small plume of white smoke appeared at their feet.
The Fire Department rang a second alarm at 1:41P.M. and activated the big siren at the exposition’s Machinery Building. Thousands of visitors now moved toward the smoke and packed the lawns and paths surrounding the building. Some brought lunch. Burnham came, as did Davis. The Columbian Guard arrived in force to clear the way for additional engines and ladder wagons. Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.
“Never,” the Fire Department reported, “was so terrible a tragedy witnessed by such a sea of agonized faces.”
Suddenly flames erupted from the tower at a point about fifty feet below Fitzpatrick and his men. Fresh air rushed into the tower. An explosion followed. To the firemen, according to the department’s official report, it appeared “as though the gaseous contents of the air-shaft surrounding the smokestack had become ignited, and the entire interior of the tower at once became a seething furnace.”
Fireman John Davis was standing on the balcony with Captain Fitzpatrick and the other men. “I saw there was only one chance, and I made up my mind to take it,” Davis said. “I made a leap for the hose and had the good luck to catch it. The rest of the boys seemed transfixed with horror and unable to move.”
Davis and one other man rode the hose to the ground. The firemen still on the balcony knew their situation was deadly and began to tell each other good-bye. Witnesses watched them hug and shake hands. Captain Fitzpatrick grabbed a rope and swung down through the fire to the main roof below, where he lay with a fractured leg and internal injuries, half his huge mustache burned away. Other men jumped to their deaths, in some cases penetrating the main roof.
Fire Marshal Murphy and two other firemen on the ground climbed a ladder to retrieve Fitzpatrick. They lowered him by rope to colleagues waiting below. He was alive but fading.
In all, the blaze killed twelve firemen and three workers. Fitzpatrick died at nine o’clock that night.
The next day attendance exceeded 100,000. The still-smoking rubble of the Cold Storage Building had proved irresistible.
The coroner immediately convened an inquest, during which a jury heard testimony from Daniel Burnham; Frank Burnham; officials of Hercules Iron Works; and various firemen. Daniel Burnham testified he had not known of the previous fire or the omitted thimble and claimed that since the building was a private concession he had no authority over its construction beyond approving its design. On Tuesday, July 18, the jury charged him, Fire Marshal Murphy, and two Hercules officers with criminal negligence and referred the charges to a grand jury.
Burnham was stunned but kept his silence. “The attempt to hold you in any degree responsible or censurable for the loss of life is an outrage,” wrote Dion Geraldine, his construction superintendent at the fair. “The men who gave this verdict must have been very stupid, or sadly misinformed.”
Under customary procedures, Burnham and the others would have been placed under arrest pending bail, but in this instance even the coroner’s office seemed taken aback. The sheriff made no move to arrest the director of works. Burnham posted bond the next morning.
With the stink of charred wood still heavy in the air, Burnham closed the roof walks of the Transportation and Manufactures and Liberal Arts buildings and the balconies and upper galleries of the Administration Building, fearing that a fire in the buildings or among their exhibits could start a panic and cause a tragedy of even greater magnitude. Hundreds of people had crowded the roof walk of the Manufactures Building each day, but their only way down was by elevator. Burnham imagined terrified men, women, and children trying to slide down the glass flanks of the roof and breaking through, then falling two hundred feet to the exhibit floor.
As if things could not get any blacker, on the same day that the coroner’s jury ordered Burnham’s arrest, July 18, the directors of the exposition bowed to bank pressure and voted to establish a Retrenchment Committee with nearly unrestricted powers to cut costs throughout the fair, and appointed three cold-eyed men to staff it. A subsequent resolution approved by the Exposition Company’s directors stated that as of August 1, “no expenditures whatever connected with the construction, maintenance or conduct of the Exposition shall be incurred unless authorized by said committee.” It was clear from the start that the committee’s primary target was Burnham’s Department of Works.
Equally clear, at least to Burnham, was that the last thing the fair needed right now, as he and Millet continued their fight to boost the rate of paid admissions—a campaign with its own necessary costs—was a troika of penny-pinchers sitting in judgment on every new expense. Millet had some extraordinary ideas for events in August, including an elaborate Midway ball during which fair officials, including Burnham, would dance with Dahoman women and Algerian belly dancers. That the committee would view the expense of this ball and other Millet events as frivolous seemed certain. Yet Burnham knew that such expenditures, as well as continued spending on police, garbage removal, and maintenance of roads and lawns, was vital.
He feared that the Retrenchment Committee would cripple the fair for once and for all.
Love
THE REMAINS OF THE Cold Storage fire were still visible as a party of schoolteachers arrived from St. Louis, accompanied by a young reporter. The twenty-four teachers had won a contest held by the St. Louis Republic that entitled them to a free stay at the fair at the newspaper’s expense. Along with assorted friends and family members—for a total of forty travelers—they had piled into a luxurious sleeper car, named Benares, provided by the Chicago & Alton Railroad. They arrived at Chicago’s Union Depot on Monday, July 17, at eight o’clock in the morning and went immediately by carriage to their hotel, the Varsity, located close enough to the fair that from its second-floor balcony the teachers could see the Ferris Wheel, the top of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, and Big Mary’s gilded head.
The reporter—Theodore Dreiser—was young and suffused with a garish self-confidence that drew the attention of the young women. He flirted with all but of course was drawn most to the one woman who seemed least interested, a small, pretty, and reserved woman named Sara Osborne White, whom a past suitor had nicknamed “Jug” for her tendency to wear brown. She was hardly Dreiser’s type: By now he was sexually experienced and in the middle of an entirely physical affair with his landlady. To him Sara White exuded “an intense something concealed by an air of supreme innocence and maidenly reserve.”
Dreiser joined the teachers on the Ferris Wheel and accompanied them on a visit to Buffalo Bill’s show, where Colonel Cody himself greeted the women and shook hands with each. Dreiser followed the ladies through the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building where, he said, a man “could trail round from place to place for a year and not get tired.” In the Midway Dreiser persuaded James J. Corbett to meet the women. Corbett was the boxer who had downed John L. Sullivan in the great fight of September 1892, a battle that had consumed the entire front page of the next morning’s Chicago Tribune. Corbett too shook the women’s hands, although one teacher declined the opportunity. Her name was Sullivan.
Every chance he got, Dreiser tried to separate Sara White from the Republic’s entourage, which Dreiser called the “Forty Odd,” but Sara had brought along her sister Rose, which complicated things. On at least one occasion Dreiser tried to kiss Sara. She told him not to be “sentimental.”
He failed at seduction, but was himself successfully seduced—by the fair. It had swept him, he said, “into a dream from which I did not recover for months.” Most captivating were the nights, “when the long shadows have all merged into one and the stars begin to gleam out over the lake and the domes of the palaces of the White City.”
Sara White remained on his mind long after he and the Forty Odd departed the fair. In St. Louis he wrote to her and courted her and in the process resolved to make more of himself as a writer. He left St. Louis for a job editing a rural Michigan newspaper but found that the realities of being a small-town editor did not live up to the fantasy. After a few other stops he reached Pittsburgh. He wrote to Sara White and visited her whenever he returned to St. Louis. He asked her to sit in his lap. She refused.
She did, however, accept his proposal of marriage. Dreiser showed a friend, John Maxwell of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, her photograph. Where Dreiser saw an enticing woman of mystery, Maxwell saw a schoolmarm of drab demeanor. He tried to warn Dreiser: “If you marry now—and a conventional and narrow woman at that, one older than you, you’re gone.”
It was good advice for a man like Dreiser. But Dreiser did not take it.
The Ferris Wheel became a vector for love. Couples asked permission to be married at the highest point on the wheel. Luther Rice never allowed it, but in two cases where the couples already had mailed invitations, he did permit weddings in his office.
Despite the wheel’s inherent romantic potential, however, rides at night never became popular. The favorite hour was the golding time between five and six in the evening.
Holmes, newly free and land rich, brought a new woman to the fair, Georgiana Yoke, whom he had met earlier in the year at a department store, Schlesinger & Meyer, where she worked as a saleswoman. She had grown up in Franklin, Indiana, and lived there with her parents until 1891, when she set out for a bigger, more glamorous life in Chicago. She was only twenty-three when she met Holmes, but her small size and sun-blond hair made her look much younger, almost like a child—save for the sharp features of her face and the intelligence that inhabited her very large blue eyes.
She had never met anyone like him. He was handsome, articulate, and clearly well off. He even possessed property in Europe. She felt a certain sadness for him, however. He was so alone—all his family was dead, save one aunt living in Africa. His last uncle had just died and left him a large fortune consisting of property in the South and in Fort Worth, Texas.
Holmes gave her many presents, among them a Bible, diamond earrings, and a locket—“a little heart,” she said, “with pearls.”
At the fair he took her on the Ferris Wheel and hired a gondola and walked with her on the dark fragrant paths of the Wooded Island, in the soft glow of Chinese lanterns.
He asked her to be his wife. She agreed.
He cautioned, however, that for the marriage he would have to use a different name, Henry Mansfield Howard. It was his dead uncle’s name, he said. The uncle was blood proud and had bequeathed Holmes his estate on condition he first adopt the uncle’s name in full. Holmes had obliged, out of respect for his uncle’s memory.
Mayor Harrison too believed he was in love, with a New Orleans woman named Annie Howard. He was sixty-eight and a widower twice over; she was in her twenties—no one knew exactly where in her twenties, but estimates put her between twenty-one and twenty-seven years old. She was “very plump,” by one account, and “full of life.” She had come to Chicago for the duration of the fair and was renting a mansion near the mayor’s. She spent her days at the fair buying art.
Harrison and Miss Howard had some news for the city, but the mayor had no plans to reveal it until October 28, when the exposition would host American Cities Day. His day, really—two days before the official close, but the day when he would get to stand before several thousand mayors from around the country and revel in his stature as mayor of Chicago, the city that built the greatest fair of all time.
Freaks
ON JULY 31, 1893, after two investigative hearings, the Retrenchment Committee gave its report to the exposition’s Board of Directors. The report stated that the financial management of the fair “can only be characterized as shamefully extravagant.” Drastic cuts in spending and staff were necessary, immediately. “As to the Construction Department, we hardly know what to say,” the report continued. “We had no time to go into details, but have formed the decided impression that this is being run now, as in the past, upon the general theory that money is no object.”
The Retrenchment Committee made it clear that, at least for its three members, the financial success of the fair was as important as its obvious aesthetic success. The honor of Chicago’s leading men, who prided themselves on their unsentimental—some might say ruthless—pursuit of maximum profit, was in peril. The report closed, “If we are not to be disgraced before the public as business-men, this matter must be followed up sharply and decisively.”
In separate statements, the Retrenchment Committee urged the directors to make the committee permanent and invest it with the power to approve or deny every expenditure at the exposition, no matter how small.
This was too much, even for the equally hardened businessmen of the exposition board. President Higinbotham said he would resign before he would cede such power to anyone. Other directors felt likewise. Stung by this rejection, the three men of the Retrenchment Committee themselves resigned. One told a reporter, “If the directory had seen fit to continue the committee with power as originally intended, it would have dropped heads enough to fill the grand court basin…”
The retrenchers’ report had been too harsh, too much a rebuke, at a time when the mood throughout Chicago was one of sustained exultation at the fact that the fair had gotten built at all and that it had proven more beautiful than anyone had imagined. Even New York had apologized—well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the New York Dry Goods Reporter and no relation to Burnham’s dead partner, published an editorial on Thursday, August 10, 1893, in which he cited the ridicule and hostility that New York editors had expressed ever since Chicago won the right to build the exposition. “Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World’s Fair…” The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the “amende honorable” that now clearly was due Chicago. He compounded his heresy by adding that if New York had won the fair, it would not have done as fine a job. “So far as I have been able to observe New York never gets behind any enterprise as Chicago got behind this, and without that splendid pulling together, prestige, financial supremacy, and all that sort of thing would not go far toward paralleling the White City.” It was time, he said, to acknowledge the truth: “Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world.”
None of the exposition directors or officers had any illusions, however. The rate of paid admissions, though rising steadily, had to be increased still more, and soon. Only three months remained until the closing ceremony on October 30. (The closure was supposed to happen at the end of October, meaning October 31, but some unidentified crafter of the federal legislation erred in thinking October only had thirty days.)
The directors pressured the railroads to lower fares. The Chicago Tribune made fare reductions a crusade and openly attacked the railroads. “They are unpatriotic, for this is a national not a local fair,” an editorial charged on August 11, 1893. “They are also desperately and utterly selfish.” The next day the newspaper singled out Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central, for a particularly caustic appraisal. “Mr. Depew all along has posed as the special friend of the World’s Fair and has been lavish in his declarations that his roads would do the fair thing and would enable tens of thousands to come here beyond Niagara Falls…” Yet Depew had failed to do what he promised, the Tribune said. “It is in order for ChaunceyM. Depew to hand in his resignation as Chicago’s adopted son. Chicago wants no more of him.”
Frank Millet, director of functions, meanwhile stepped up his own efforts to promote the fair and arranged an increasingly exotic series of events. He organized boat races in the basin of the Court of Honor that pitted inhabitants of the Midway villages against one another. They did battle every Tuesday evening in vessels native to their homelands. “We want to do something to liven up the lagoons and basin,” Millet told an interviewer. “People are getting tired of looking at the electric launches. If we can get the Turks, the South Sea Islanders, the Singalese, the Esquimos, and the American Indians to float about the grand basin in their native barks, it will certainly add some novelty as well as interest to the scene.”
Millet also organized swim meets between the Midway “types,” as the press called them. He scheduled these for Fridays. The first race took place August 11 in the lagoon, with Zulus swimming against South American Indians. The Dahomans also competed, as did the Turks, “some of them as hairy as gorillas,” the Tribune said, with the anthropological abandon common to the age. “The races were notable for the lack of clothing worn by the contestants and the serious way in which they went at the task of winning five-dollar gold pieces.”
Millet’s big coup was the great Midway ball, held on the night of Wednesday, August 16. The Tribune called it “The Ball of the Midway Freaks” and sought to whet the nation’s appetite with an editorial that first noted a rising furor within the Board of Lady Managers over the belly dancers of the Midway. “Whether the apprehensions of the good ladies… were due to infringements of morality or to the anticipation that the performers may bring on an attack of peritonitis if they persist in their contortions is not clear, but all the same they have taken the position that what is not considered very much out of the way on the banks of the Nile or in the market places of Syria is entirely improper on the Midway between Jackson and Washington Parks.”
But now, the Tribune continued, the belly dancers and every other depraved jiggling half-dressed woman of the Midway had been invited to the great ball, where they were expected to dance with the senior officers of the fair, including Burnham and Davis. “The situation therefore, as will be seen, is full of horrifying possibilities,” the Tribune said. “It should cause a shiver in the composite breast of the Board of Lady Managers when they consider what may happen if Director-General Davis should lead out some fascinating Fatima at the head of the grand procession and she should be taken with peritonitis in the midst of the dance; or if [Potter] Palmer should escort a votary of the Temple of Luxor only to find her with the same ailment; or if Mayor Harrison, who belongs to all nations, should dance with the whole lot. Will they suppress their partners’ contortions by protest or by force, or, following the fashion of the country, will they, too, attempt Oriental contortions? Suppose that President Higinbotham finds as his vis-ŕ-vis an anointed, barebacked Fiji beauty or a Dahomeyite amazon bent upon the extraordinary antics of the cannibal dance, is he to join in and imitate her or risk his head in an effort to restrain her?”
Further enriching the affair was the presence at Jackson Park of George Francis Train—known universally as “Citizen Train”—in his white suit, red belt, and red Turkish fez, invited by Millet to host the ball and the boat and swim races and anything else that Millet could devise. Train was one of the most famous men of the day, though no one knew quite why. He was said to have been the model for Phileas Fogg, the globe-trotter in Around the World in Eighty Days. Train claimed the real reason he was invited to the exposition was to save it by using his psychic powers to increase attendance. These powers resided in his body in the form of electrical energy. He walked about the fairgrounds rubbing his palms to husband that energy and refused to shake hands with anyone lest the act discharge his potency. “Chicago built the fair,” he said. “Everybody else tried to kill it. Chicago built it. I am here to save it and I’ll be hanged if I haven’t.”
The ball took place in the fair’s Natatorium, a large building on the Midway devoted to swimming and bathing and equipped with a ballroom and banquet rooms. Bunting of yellow and red hung from the ceiling. The galleries that overlooked the ballroom were outfitted with opera boxes for fair officials and socially prominent families. Burnham had a box, as did Davis and Higinbotham and of course the Palmers. The galleries also had seats and standing room for other paying guests. From railings in front of the boxes hung triangles of silk embroidered with gold arabesques, all glowing with the light of adjacent incandescent bulbs. The effect was one of indescribable opulence. The Retrenchment Committee would not have approved.
At nine-fifteen that night Citizen Train—dressed in his usual white, but now for some reason carrying an armful of blooming sweet pea—led the procession of exotics, many barefoot, down the stairway of the Natatorium to the ballroom below. He held the hand of a ten-year-old Mexican ballerina and was followed by scores of men and women in the customary clothing of their native cultures. Sol Bloom kept order on the ballroom floor.
The official program dedicated dances to particular officials and guests. Director-General Davis was to lead a quadrille, Burnham a “Berlin,” Mayor Harrison a polka. Once the dances were completed, the crowd was to sing “Home Sweet Home.”
It was hot. Chief Rain-in-the-Face, the Sioux chief who had killed Custer’s brother and now occupied Sitting Bull’s cabin in the Midway, wore green paint that streamed down his face. A Laplander wore a fur shirt; Eskimo women wore blouses of walrus skin. The maharajah of Kapurthala, visiting that week from India, sat in a makeshift throne on the ballroom stage fanned by three servants.
The ballroom burst with color and energy: Japanese in red silk, Bedouins in red and black, Romanians in red, blue, and yellow. Women who ordinarily would have come wearing almost nothing—like Aheze, an Amazon, and Zahtoobe, a Dahoman—were given short skirts constructed of small American flags. The Tribune, in an unintended parody of its own penchant for describing the gowns of the rich, noted that Lola, a South Sea Islander, wore her “native costume of bark cloth covering about half the body, with low cut and sleeveless bodice.” As the night wore on and the wine flowed, the line to dance with Lola grew long. Sadly, the belly dancers came in robes and turbans. Men in black dress suits circled the floor, “swinging black Amazons with bushy hair and teeth necklaces.” Chicago—and perhaps the world—had never seen anything like it. The Tribune called the ball “the strangest gathering since the destruction of the Tower of Babel.”
There was food, of course. The official menu:
RELISHES.
Hard boiled potatoes, ŕ la Irish Village.
International hash, ŕ la Midway Plaisance
COLD DISHES.
Roast Missionary, ŕ la Dahomey, west coast of Africa.
Jerked buffalo, ŕ la Indian Village.
Stuffed ostrich, ŕ la Ostrich Farm.
Boiled camel humps, ŕ la Cairo street.
Monkey stew, ŕ la Hagenbeck.
ENTREES.
Fricassee of reindeer, ŕ la Lapland.
Fried snowballs, ŕ la Ice Railway.
Crystallized frappé, from Libby glass exhibit.
PASTRY.
Wind doughnuts, ŕ la Captive Balloon.
Sandwiches (assorted), especially prepared by the
Leather Exhibit.
And for dessert, the program said, “Twenty-five percent of gross receipts.”
The ball ended at four-thirty A.M. The exotics walked slowly back to the Midway. The guests climbed into their carriages and slept or softly sang “After the Ball”—the hit song of the day—as their liverymen drove them home over empty streets that echoed with the plosive rhythm of hooves on granite.
The ball and Frank Millet’s other inventions imparted to the exposition a wilder, happier air. The exposition by day might wear a chaste gown of white staff, but at night it danced barefoot and guzzled champagne.
Attendance rose. The daily average of paid admissions for August was 113,403—at last topping the vital 100,000 threshold. The margin was slim, however. And the nation’s economic depression was growing steadily worse, its labor situation more volatile.
On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed. Burnham’s firm had long been a client. On the night of August 10 Charles J. Eddy, a former top official of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, one of the first casualties of the panic, walked into Washington Park just north of the Midway and shot himself. Of course he had been staying at the Metropole. He was the hotel’s third suicide that summer. Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the Tribune called it a riot. A few days after that, 25,000 unemployed workers converged on the downtown lakefront and heard Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker’s wagon No. 5, ask, “Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?”
For the city’s industrialists and merchant princes who learned of Gompers’s speech in their Sunday morning newspapers, this was a particularly unsettling question, for it seemed to embody a demand for much more than simply work. Gompers was calling for fundamental change in the relationship between workers and their overseers.
This was dangerous talk, to be suppressed at all costs.
Prendergast
IT WAS EXCITING, THIS PROSPECT of becoming one of the city’s most important officials. At last Prendergast could leave behind the cold mornings and filthy streets and the angry newsboys who disobeyed and taunted him. He was growing impatient, however. His appointment as corporation counsel should have occurred by now.
One afternoon in the first week of October Prendergast took a grip-car to City Hall to see his future office. He found a clerk and introduced himself.
Incredibly, the clerk did not recognize his name. When Prendergast explained that Mayor Harrison planned to make him the city’s new corporation counsel, the clerk laughed.
Prendergast insisted on seeing the current counsel, a man named Kraus. Certainly Kraus would recognize his name.
The clerk went to get him.
Kraus emerged from his office and extended his hand. He introduced Prendergast to the other men on his staff as his “successor.” Suddenly everyone was smiling.
At first Prendergast thought the smiling was an acknowledgment that soon he would be in charge, but now he saw it as something else.
Kraus asked if he’d like the position immediately.
“No,” Prendergast said. “I am in no hurry about it.”
Which was not true, but the question had thrown Prendergast. He did not like the way Kraus asked it. Not at all.
Toward Triumph
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING on Monday, October 9, 1893, the day Frank Millet had designated as Chicago Day, ticket-takers at the fair’s Sixty-fourth Street gate made an informal count of the morning’s sales thus far and found that this one gate had recorded 60,000 paid admissions. The men knew from experience that on any ordinary day sales at this gate accounted for about one-fifth of the total admissions to the fair for any given time, and so came up with an estimate that some 300,000 paid visitors already had entered Jackson Park—more than any other full day’s total and close to the world’s record of 397,000 held by the Paris exposition. Yet the morning had barely begun. The ticket-takers sensed that something odd was happening. The pace of admissions seemed to be multiplying by the hour. In some ticket booths the volume grew so great, so quickly, that silver coins began piling on the floors and burying the ticket-takers’ shoes.
Millet and other fair officials had expected high attendance. Chicago was proud of its fair, and everyone knew that only three weeks remained before it would close forever. To assure maximum attendance, Mayor Harrison had signed an official proclamation that urged every business to suspend operation for the day. The courts closed, as did the Board of Trade. The weather helped, too. Monday was an apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies. Every hotel had filled to capacity, even beyond capacity, with some managers finding themselves compelled to install cots in lobbies and halls. The Wellington Catering Company, which operated eight restaurants and forty lunch counters in Jackson Park, had braced for the day by shipping in two traincar loads of potatoes, 4,000 half-barrels of beer, 15,000 gallons of ice cream, and 40,000 pounds of meat. Its cooks built 200,000 ham sandwiches and brewed 400,000 cups of coffee.
No one, however, expected the sheer crush of visitors that actually did arrive. By noon the chief of admissions, Horace Tucker, wired a message to fair headquarters, “The Paris record is broken to smithereens, and the people are still coming.” A single ticket-seller, L. E. Decker, a nephew of Buffalo Bill who had sold tickets for Bill’s Wild West for eight years, sold 17,843 tickets during his shift, the most by any one man, and won Horace Tucker’s prize of a box of cigars. Lost children filled every chair at the headquarters of the Columbian Guard; nineteen spent the night and were claimed by their parents the next day. Five people were killed in or near the fair, including a worker obliterated while helping prepare the night’s fireworks and a visitor who stepped from one grip-car into the path of another. A woman lost her foot when a surging crowd knocked her from a train platform. George Ferris, riding his wheel that day, looked down and gasped, “There must be a million people down there.”
The fireworks began at eight o’clock sharp. Millet had planned an elaborate series of explosive “set pieces,” fireworks affixed to large metal frames shaped to depict various portraits and tableaus. The first featured the Great Fire of 1871, including an image of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. The night boomed and hissed. For the finale the fair’s pyrotechnicians launched five thousand rockets all at once into the black sky over the lake.
The true climax occurred after the grounds closed, however. In the silence, with the air still scented with exploded powder, collectors accompanied by armed guards went to each ticket booth and collected the accumulated silver, three tons of it. They counted the money under heavy guard. By one forty-five A.M., they had an exact total.
Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059—four percent—were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringing the total admission for the day to 751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history. The Tribune argued that the only greater gathering was the massing of Xerxes’ army of over five million souls in the fifth century B.C. The Paris record of 397,000 had indeed been shattered.
When the news reached Burnham’s shanty, there were cheers and champagne and stories through the night. But the best news came the next day, when officials of the World’s Columbian Exposition Company, whose boasts had been ridiculed far and wide, presented a check for $1.5 million to the Illinois Trust and Savings Company and thereby extinguished the last of the exposition’s debts.
The Windy City had prevailed.
Now Burnham and Millet made final arrangements for Burnham’s own great day, the grand closing ceremony of October 30 that would recognize once and for all that Burnham really had done it and that his work was now complete—that for once there was nothing left to do. At this point, Burnham believed, nothing could tarnish the fair’s triumph or his own place in architectural history.
Departures
FRANK MILLET HOPED THE closing ceremony would attract even more people than the fair’s Chicago Day. While Millet did his planning, many of the other men who had helped Burnham construct the fair began the return to ordinary life.
Charles McKim disengaged reluctantly. For him the fair had been a brilliant light that for a time dispelled the shadows that had accumulated around his life. He left Jackson Park abruptly on the morning of October 23 and later that day wrote to Burnham, “You know my dislike for saying ‘Good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that I was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.
“You gave me a beautiful time and the last days of the Fair will always remain in my mind, as were the first, especially identified with yourself. It will be pleasant for the rest of our natural lives to be able to look back to it and talk it over and over and over again, and it goes without saying that you can depend upon me in every way as often hereafter as you may have need of me.”
The next day McKim wrote to a friend in Paris of the deepening consensus among himself, Burnham, and most of Chicago that the fair was too wonderful a thing to be allowed simply to fall into disrepair after its official closure on October 30, just six days thence: “indeed it is the ambition of all concerned to have it swept away in the same magical manner in which it appeared, and with the utmost despatch. For economy, as well as for obvious reasons, it has been proposed that the most glorious way would be to blow up the buildings with dynamite. Another scheme is to destroy them with fire. This last would be the easiest and grandest spectacle except for the danger of flying embers in the event of a change of wind from the lake.”
Neither McKim nor Burnham truly believed the fair should be set aflame. The buildings, in fact, had been designed to maximize the salvage value of their components. Rather, this talk of conflagration was a way of easing the despair of watching the dream come to an end. No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, “Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”
Later, these musings about fire would come to seem like prophecy.
Olmsted too severed his connection. Toward the end of summer his busy schedule and the stifling heat caused his health to fail once again and reactivated his insomnia. He had many projects under way, chief among them Biltmore, but he felt himself nearing the end of his career. He was seventy-one years old. On September 6, 1893, he wrote to a friend, Fred Kingsbury, “I can’t come to you and often dream of a ride through our old haunts and meeting you and others but have pretty well surrendered to Fate. I must flounder along my way to the end.” Olmsted did, however, allow himself a rare expression of satisfaction. “I enjoy my children,” he told Kingsbury. “They are one of the centers of my life, the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man.”
Louis Sullivan, engorged with praise and awards for his Transportation Building—especially its Golden Door—again took up his work with Dankmar Adler but under changed circumstances. The deepening depression and missteps by the two partners had left the firm with few projects. For all of 1893 they would complete only two buildings. Sullivan, never easy on his peers, became furious with one of the firm’s junior architects when he discovered the man had been using his free time to design houses for clients of his own. Sullivan fired him.
The junior man was Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ten thousand construction workers also left the fair’s employ and returned to a world without jobs, already crowded with unemployed men. Once the fair closed, many thousands more would join them on Chicago’s streets. The threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn. Mayor Harrison was sympathetic and did what he could. He hired thousands of men to clean streets and ordered police stations opened at night for men seeking a place to sleep. Chicago’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported, “Never before has there been such a sudden and striking cessation of industrial activity.” Pig iron production fell by half, and new rail construction shrank almost to nothing. Demand for railcars to carry visitors to the exposition had spared the Pullman Works, but by the end of the fair George Pullman too began cutting wages and workers. He did not, however, reduce the rents in his company town.
The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.
Holmes too sensed it was time to leave Chicago. The pressure from creditors and families was growing too great.
First he set fire to the top floor of his castle. The blaze did minimal damage, but he filed a claim for $6,000 on a policy acquired by his fictional alter ego, Hiram S. Campbell. An investigator for one of the insurance companies, F. G. Cowie, became suspicious and began a detailed investigation. Though he found no concrete evidence of arson, Cowie believed Holmes or an accomplice had started the fire. He advised the insurers to pay the claim, but only to Hiram S. Campbell and only if Campbell presented himself in person.
Holmes could not claim the money himself, for by now Cowie knew him. Ordinarily he simply would have recruited someone else to masquerade as Campbell and claim the money, but of late he had become increasingly wary. The guardians of Minnie Williams had dispatched an attorney, William Capp, to look for Minnie and to protect the assets of her estate. Anna’s guardian, the Reverend Dr. Black, had hired a private detective who had come to Holmes’s building. And letters continued to arrive from the Cigrands and Smythes and other parents. No one yet had accused Holmes of foul play, but the intensity of this new wave of inquiry was greater, more obliquely accusatory, than anything he previously had experienced. Hiram S. Campbell never claimed the money.
But Holmes found that Cowie’s investigation had a secondary, more damaging effect. In the course of digging up information about Holmes, he had succeeded in stirring up and uniting Holmes’s creditors, the furniture dealers and iron suppliers and bicycle manufacturers and contractors whom Holmes had cheated over the previous five years. The creditors now hired an attorney named George B. Chamberlin, counsel for Chicago’s Lafayette Collection Agency, who had been pestering Holmes ever since he failed to pay the furnace company for improving his kiln. Later Chamberlin would claim to be the first man in Chicago to suspect Holmes of being a criminal.
In the fall of 1893 Chamberlin contacted Holmes and requested he come to a meeting at his office. Holmes believed he and Chamberlin would be meeting alone, one on one, but when Holmes arrived at the office, he found it occupied by two dozen creditors and their attorneys and one police detective.
This surprised Holmes but did not faze him. He shook hands and met the angry gazes of his creditors head on. Tempers immediately cooled a few degrees. He had that effect.
Chamberlin had planned the meeting as a trap to try to shatter Holmes’s imperturbable façade, and was impressed with Holmes’s ability to maintain his insouciance despite the rancor in the room. Chamberlin told Holmes that all together he owed the creditors at least $50,000.
Holmes adopted his most sober expression. He understood their concerns. He explained his lapses. His ambition had gotten ahead of his ability to pay his debts. Things would have been fine, all the debts resolved, if not for the Panic of 1893, which had ruined him and destroyed his hopes, just as it had for countless others in Chicago and the nation at large.
Incredibly, Chamberlin saw, some of the creditors nodded in sympathy.
Tears filled Holmes’s eyes. He offered his deepest, most heartfelt apologies. And he suggested a solution. He proposed to settle his debts by giving the group a mortgage secured by his various properties.
This nearly made Chamberlin laugh, yet one of the attorneys present in the room actually advised the group to accept Holmes’s offer. Chamberlin was startled to see that Holmes’s false warmth seemed to be mollifying the creditors. A few moments earlier the group had wanted the detective to arrest Holmes the moment he entered the room. Now they wanted to talk about what to do next.
Chamberlin told Holmes to wait in an adjacent room.
Holmes did so. He waited peacefully.
As the meeting progressed—and grew heated—the attorney who previously had wanted to accept Holmes’s mortgage stepped out of Chamberlin’s office and entered the room where Holmes waited, ostensibly for a drink of water. He and Holmes talked. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Chamberlin claimed later that this attorney had been so angry at having his recommendation rebuffed that he tipped Holmes to the fact the creditors were again leaning toward arrest. It is possible, too, that Holmes simply offered the attorney cash for the information, or deployed his false warmth and teary regret to seduce the attorney into revealing the group’s mounting consensus.
The attorney returned to the meeting.
Holmes fled.
Soon afterward Holmes set out for Fort Worth, Texas, to take better advantage of Minnie Williams’s land. He had plans for the property. He would sell some of it and on the rest build a three-story structure exactly like the one in Englewood. Meanwhile he would use the land to secure loans and to float notes. He expected to lead a very prosperous and satisfying life, at least until the time came to move on to the next city. He brought along his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and his new fiancée, the small and pretty Miss Georgiana Yoke. Just before leaving Chicago Holmes acquired a life insurance policy, from the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia, to insure Pitezel’s life for $10,000.
Nightfall
THROUGHOUT OCTOBER ATTENDANCE AT the fair rose sharply as more and more people realized that the time left to see the White City was running short. On October 22 paid attendance totaled 138,011. Just two days later it reached 244,127. Twenty thousand people a day now rode the Ferris Wheel, 80 percent more than at the start of the month. Everyone hoped attendance would continue rising and that the number of people drawn to the closing ceremony of October 30 would break the record set on Chicago Day.
To attract visitors for the close, Frank Millet planned a day-long celebration with music, speeches, fireworks, and a landing by “Columbus” himself from the exposition’s full-sized replicas of the Nińa, Pinta, and Santa María, built in Spain for the fair. Millet hired actors to play Columbus and his captains; the crew would consist of the men who had sailed the ships to Chicago. Millet arranged to borrow tropical plants and trees from the Horticulture Building and have them moved to the lakeshore. He planned also to coat the beach with fallen oak and maple leaves to signify the fact that Columbus landed in autumn, even though live palms and dead deciduous leaves were not precisely compatible. Upon landing, Columbus was to thrust his sword into the ground and claim the New World for Spain, while his men assumed positions that mimicked those depicted on a two-cent postage stamp commemorating Columbus’s discovery. Meanwhile, according to the Tribune, Indians recruited from Buffalo Bill’s show and from various fair exhibits would “peer cautiously” at the landing party while shouting incoherently and running “to and fro.” With this enactment Millet hoped to carry visitors “back 400 years”—despite the steam tugboats that would nudge the Spanish ships toward shore.
First, however, came Mayor Harrison’s big day, American Cities Day, on Saturday, October 28. Five thousand mayors and city councilmen had accepted Harrison’s invitation to the fair, among them the mayors of San Francisco, New Orleans and Philadelphia. The record is silent as to whether New York’s mayor attended or not.
That morning Harrison delighted reporters by announcing that yes, the rumors about him and the very young Miss Annie Howard were true, and not only that, the two planned to marry on November 16.
The glory time came in the afternoon, when he rose to speak to the assembled mayors. Friends said he had never looked so handsome, so full of life.
He praised the remarkable transformation of Jackson Park. “Look at it now!” he said. “These buildings, this hall, this dream of poets of centuries is the wild aspiration of crazy architects alone.” He told his audience, “I myself have taken a new lease of life”—an allusion perhaps to Miss Howard—“and I believe I shall see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America, and the third city on the face of the globe.” He was sixty-eight years old but announced, “I intend to live for more than half a century, and at the end of that half-century London will be trembling lest Chicago shall surpass it…”
With a glance at the mayor of Omaha, he graciously offered to accept Omaha as a suburb.
He changed course. “It sickens me when I look at this great Exposition to think that it will be allowed to crumble to dust,” he said. He hoped the demolition would be quick, and he quoted a recent remark by Burnham: “‘Let it go; it has to go, so let it go. Let us put the torch to it and burn it down.’ I believe with him. If we cannot preserve it for another year I would be in favor of putting a torch to it and burning it down and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven.”
Prendergast could stand it no longer. His visit to the corporation counsel’s office—by rights his office—had been humiliating. They had humored him. Smirked. Yet Harrison had promised him the job. What did he have to do to get the mayor’s attention? All his postcards had achieved nothing. No one wrote to him, no one took him seriously.
At two o’clock on American Cities Day Prendergast left his mother’s house and walked to a shoe dealer on Milwaukee Avenue. He paid the dealer four dollars for a used six-chamber revolver. He knew that revolvers of this particular model had a penchant for accidental discharge when bumped or dropped, so he loaded it with only five cartridges and kept the empty chamber under the hammer.
Later, much would be made of this precaution.
At three o’clock, about the time Harrison was giving his speech, Prendergast walked into the Unity Building in central Chicago where Governor John P. Altgeld had an office.
Prendergast looked pale and strangely excited. An official of the building found his demeanor troubling and told him he could not enter.
Prendergast returned to the street.
It was nearly dark when Harrison left Jackson Park and drove north through the cold smoky evening toward his mansion on Ashland Avenue. Temperatures had fallen sharply over the week, down to the thirties at night, and the sky seemed perpetually overcast. Harrison reached his home by seven o’clock. He tinkered with a first-floor window, then sat down to supper with two of his children, Sophie and Preston. He had other children, but they were grown and gone. The meal, of course, included watermelon.
In the midst of supper, at approximately seven-thirty, someone rang the bell at the front door. Mary Hanson, the parlor maid, answered and found a gaunt young man with a smooth-shaven face and close-cut black hair. He looked ill. He asked to see the mayor.
By itself, there was nothing peculiar about the request. Evening visits by strangers were a regular occurrence at the Ashland house, for Harrison prided himself on being available to any citizen of Chicago, regardless of social stature. Tonight’s visitor seemed seedier than most, however, and behaved oddly. Nonetheless, Mary Hanson told him to come back in half an hour.
The day had been an exciting one for the mayor but also exhausting. He fell asleep at the table. Shortly before eight o’clock his son left the dining room to go up to his room and dress for an engagement in the city later that night. Sophie also went upstairs, to write a letter. The house was cozy and well lit. Mary Hanson and the other servants gathered in the kitchen for their own supper.
At precisely eight o’clock the front bell again rang, and again Hanson answered it.
The same young man stood at the threshold. Hanson asked him to wait in the hall and went to get the mayor.
“It must have been about eight o’clock when I heard a noise,” Harrison’s son Preston said. “I was startled; it sounded like a picture falling.” Sophie heard it, too, and heard her father cry out. “I thought nothing of it,” she said, “because I thought it was some screens falling on the floor near the back hall. Father’s voice I took to be a yawn. He had a way of yawning very loud.”
Preston left his room and saw smoke drifting up from the entry hall. As he came down the steps, he heard two more reports. “The last shot was clear and penetrating,” he said. “I knew it to be a revolver shot.” It sounded “like a manhole explosion.”
He ran to the hall and found Harrison lying on his back surrounded by servants, the air silvered with gunsmoke. There was very little blood. Preston shouted, “Father is not hurt, is he?”
The mayor himself answered. “Yes,” he said. “I am shot. I will die.”
Three more shots sounded from the street. The coachman had fired his own revolver once in the air to alert police, once at Prendergast, and Prendergast had returned the shot.
The commotion brought a neighbor, William J. Chalmers, who folded his coat under Harrison’s head. Harrison told him he had been shot over the heart, but Chalmers did not believe it. There was too little blood.
They argued.
Chalmers told Harrison he had not been shot over the heart.
Harrison snapped, “I tell you I am; this is death.”
A few moments later his heart stopped.
“He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”
Prendergast walked to the nearby Desplaines Street police station and calmly told desk sergeant O. Z. Barber, “Lock me up; I am the man who shot the mayor.” The sergeant was incredulous, until Prendergast gave him the revolver, which smelled strongly of blown powder. Barber found that its cylinder contained four spent cartridges and a single live one. The sixth chamber was empty.
Barber asked Prendergast why he had shot the mayor.
“Because he betrayed my confidence. I supported him through his campaign and he promised to appoint me corporation counsel. He didn’t live up to his word.”
The Exposition Company canceled the closing ceremony. There would be no Jubilee March, no landing by Columbus, no address by Harlow Higinbotham, George Davis, or Bertha Palmer; no presentation of awards, no praise for Burnham and Olmsted; no “Hail Columbia”; no mass rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” The closing became instead a memorial assembly in the fair’s Festival Hall. As the audience entered, an organist played Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the hall’s giant pipe organ. The hall was so cold, the presiding officer announced that men could keep their hats on.
Reverend Dr. J. H. Barrows read a blessing and benediction and then, at the request of exposition officials, read a speech that Higinbotham had prepared for the originally planned ceremony. The remarks still seemed appropriate, especially one passage. “We are turning our backs upon the fairest dream of civilization and are about to consign it to the dust,” Barrows read. “It is like the death of a dear friend.”
The audience exited slowly into the cold gray afternoon.
At exactly four forty-five, sunset, the warship Michigan fired one of its cannon and continued to fire twenty times more as one thousand men quietly took up positions at each of the exposition’s flags. With the last boom of the Michigan’s gun, the great flag at the Administration Building fell to the ground. Simultaneously, the thousand other flags also fell, as massed trumpeters and bassoonists in the Court of Honor played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America.” Two hundred thousand visitors, many in tears, joined in.
The fair was over.
The six hundred carriages in Carter Harrison’s cortege stretched for miles. The procession moved slowly and quietly through a black sea of men and women dressed for mourning. A catafalque carrying Harrison’s black casket led the cortege and was followed immediately by Harrison’s beloved Kentucky mare, stirrups crossed on its empty saddle. Everywhere the white flags that had symbolized the White City hung at half mast. Thousands of men and women wore buttons that said “Our Carter” and watched in silence as, carriage by carriage, the city’s greatest men drove past. Armour, Pullman, Schwab, Field, McCormick, Ward.
And Burnham.
It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.
So grand was the procession, it needed two hours to pass any one point. By the time it reached Graceland Cemetery, north of the city, darkness had fallen and a soft mist hugged the ground. Long lines of policemen flanked the path to the cemetery’s brownstone chapel. Off to the side stood fifty members of the United German Singing Societies.
Harrison had heard them sing at a picnic and, joking, had asked them to sing at his funeral.
Harrison’s murder fell upon the city like a heavy curtain. There was the time before, there was the time after. Where once the city’s newspapers would have run an endless series of stories about the aftereffects of the fair, now there was mostly silence. The fair remained open, informally, on October 31, and many men and women came to the grounds for one last visit, as if paying their respects to a lost relative. A tearful woman told columnist Teresa Dean, “The good-by is as sad as any I have known in all the years that I have lived.” William Stead, the British editor whose brother Herbert had covered the fair’s opening, arrived in Chicago from New York on the night of its official close but made his first visit to the grounds the next day. He claimed that nothing he had seen in Paris, Rome, or London was as perfect as the Court of Honor.
That night the exposition illuminated the fairgrounds one last time. “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre,” Stead wrote, “but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.”
The Black City
THE EXPOSITION PROVED UNABLE to hold the Black City at bay for very long. With its formal closure thousands more workers joined the swelling army of the unemployed, and homeless men took up residence among the great abandoned palaces of the fair. “The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World’s Fair,” wrote novelist Robert Herrick in The Web of Life. “In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed… The city’s huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenant-less buildings.” It was the contrast that was so wrenching. “What a spectacle!” wrote Ray Stannard Baker in his American Chronicle. “What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair which had so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.”
In that first, brutal winter Burnham’s photographer, Charles Arnold, took a very different series of photographs. One shows the Machinery Building soiled by smoke and litter. A dark liquid had been thrown against one wall. At the base of a column was a large box, apparently the home of an out-of-work squatter. “It is desolation,” wrote Teresa Dean, the columnist, about a visit she made to Jackson Park on January 2, 1894. “You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”
Six days after her visit the first fires occurred and destroyed several structures, among them the famous Peristyle. The following morning Big Mary, chipped and soiled, stood over a landscape of twisted and blackened steel.
The winter became a crucible for American labor. To workers, Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers came increasingly to seem like saviors, Chicago’s merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company’s treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman’s friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On May 11, 1894, two thousand Pullman workers went on strike with the support of Debs’s American Railway Union. Other strikes broke out around the country, and Debs began planning a nationwide general strike to begin in July. President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago and placed them under the command of General Nelson A. Miles, previously the grand marshal of the exposition. Miles was uneasy about his new command. He sensed in the spreading unrest something unprecedented, “more threatening and far-reaching than anything that had occurred before.” He followed orders, however, and the former grand marshal of the fair wound up fighting the men who had built it.
Strikers blocked trains and burned railcars. On July 5, 1894, arsonists set fire to the seven greatest palaces of the exposition—Post’s immense Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, Hunt’s dome, Sullivan’s Golden Door, all of them. In the Loop men and women gathered on rooftops and in the highest offices of the Rookery, the Masonic Temple, the Temperance Building, and every other high place to watch the distant conflagration. Flames rose a hundred feet into the night sky and cast their gleam far out onto the lake.
Belatedly, Burnham had gotten his wish. “There was no regret,” observed the Chicago Tribune, “rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbian season.”
Later, in the next year, came the wonder:
“There are hundreds of people who went to Chicago to see the Fair and were never heard from again,” said the New York World. “The list of the ‘missing’ when the Fair closed was a long one, and in the greater number foul play suspected. Did these visitors to the Fair, strangers to Chicago, find their way to Holmes’ Castle in answer to delusive advertisements sent out by him, never to return again? Did he erect his Castle close to the Fair grounds so as to gather in these victims by the wholesale… ?”
Initially the Chicago police had no answers, other than the obvious: That in Chicago in the time of the fair, it was so very easy to disappear.
The secrets of Holmes’s castle eventually did come to light, but only because of the persistence of a lone detective from a far-off city, grieving his own terrible loss.