The Devil in the White City: Part I

The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers.

On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph..."

In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy.

He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs.

They had participated in secret conversations, received certain assurances, and gone so far as to make reconnaissance forays to outlying parts of the city.

Other nations, he wrote, had mounted exhibits of dignity and style, while American exhibitors erected a mélange of pavilions and kiosks with no artistic guidance and no uniform plan.

Even Eiffel’s tower, forecast by wishful Americans to be a monstrosity that would disfigure forever the comely landscape of Paris, turned out to possess unexpected élan, with a sweeping base and tapered shaft that evoked the trail of a skyrocket.

In Washington the New York contingent, including Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central and one of the most celebrated orators of the day, sensed a tide change and asked for a recess until the next day.

One day in 1874 a man walked into their office and in a single galvanic moment changed their lives.

A cascade of work flowed to their firm, partly because Root managed to solve a puzzle that had bedeviled Chicago builders ever since the city’s founding.

He issued instructions that anticipated by many years Louis Sullivan’s famous admonition that form must follow function.

He read broadly in philosophy, science, art, and religion and was known throughout Chicago’s upper echelon for his ability to converse on almost any subject and to do so with great wit.

A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.

The city convened a coroner’s inquest, which focused its attention on the building’s design.

In his autobiography, in which he always referred to himself in the third person, he described himself as “an innocent with his heart wrapped up in the arts, in the philosophies, in the religions, in the beatitudes of nature’s loveliness, in his search for the reality of man, in his profound faith in the beneficence of power.”

Years later a villager with a blind spot for the macabre would write, “While at times there was considerable need of a police force in the Stock Yards district, Englewood pursued the even tenor of its way with very little necessity for their appearance other than to ornament the landscape and see that the cows were not disturbed in their peaceful pastures.”

All doctors were in a sense amateurs. The best of them bought cadavers for study. They paid cash, no questions asked, and preserved particularly interesting bits of diseased viscera in large clear bottles.

Skeletons hung in offices for easy anatomical reference; some transcended function to become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated—every bleached bone hitched to its neighbor with brass, under a skull grinning with slap-shoulder bonhomie—that they appeared ready to race chattering down the street to catch the next grip-car.

“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health,” he wrote, “but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession.”

Holmes knew—everyone knew—that as skyscrapers soared and the stockyards expanded their butchery, the demand for workers would remain high, and that workers and their supervisors would seek to live in the city’s suburbs, with their promise of smooth macadam, clean water, decent schools, and above all air untainted by the stench of rotting offal from the Union Yards.

He and Calvert Vaux had built and refined Central Park from 1858 through 1876, but forever afterward Olmsted found himself defending the park against attempts to tinker with its grounds in ways he considered tantamount to vandalism.

Olmsted had a reputation for brilliance and tireless devotion to his work—but also for an acerbic candor that emerged most predictably in the presence of men who failed to understand that what he sought to create were not flower beds and ornamental gardens but expanses of scenery full of mystery, shadow, and sun-stippled ground.

The city’s stern Protestant upper class saw him as a civic satyr whose tolerance of prostitution, gambling and alcohol had allowed the city’s vice districts, most notably the Levee—home of the infamous bartender and robber Mickey Finn—to swell to new heights of depravity.

Nearby, at the distribution warehouse of the Chicago Inter Ocean, a widely read and respected newspaper, a young Irish immigrant—and staunch supporter of Carter Harrison—completed his workday.

He ran a squad of obstreperous newsboys, whom he loathed, and who loathed him in return, as was clear by their taunts and practical jokes.

She became an immediate obsession, her image and need locked in his brain. He traveled to Minneapolis, ostensibly on business.

He begged their forbearance for his lengthy absences from the Wilmette house.

The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building’s secrets.

If all the writs of mechanic’s lien that have been levied on this structure were pasted on these three walls, the block would look like a mammoth circus billboard. But I never heard of a lien being collected.

Now Burnham faced the prospect of having to go alone to meet these legendary architects—one of them, Hunt, a man also of legendary irascibility.

The architects respected him but were leery of his powers as supervising architect.

Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing.

Holmes apologized, claiming a dire need for money, and was so persuasive and abject that even Belknap felt mollified, although his distrust of Holmes persisted.

The inner box would serve as an elongated kiln. Although he had never built a kiln before, he believed his design would generate temperatures extreme enough to incinerate anything within.

They drove toward the lake over the park’s rough roads at the pace of a funeral cortege and with equal gloom.

Burnham wrote: “a feeling of discouragement allied to hopelessness came over those who then first realized the extent and magnitude of the proposed undertaking, and appreciated the inexorable conditions of a time-limitation to the work...."

Holmes seemed inordinately attentive to Gertie and Julia. On one level this was natural and something to which Ned had become accustomed, for both women were great beauties, Gertie slim and dark, Julia tall and felicitously proportioned.

The women were presumed to have been ravished, the men robbed, their corpses plunged into the turgid waters of the Chicago River or the alleys of Halsted and the Levee and that hard stretch of Clark between Polk and Taylor known to veteran officers as Cheyenne.

Found bodies went to the morgue; if unclaimed, they traveled next to the dissection amphitheater at Rush Medical College or perhaps Cook County Hospital and from there to the articulation laboratory for the delicate task of picking flesh and connective tissue from the bones and skull, washing all with bleach, and remounting same for the subsequent use of doctors, anatomy museums, and the occasional private collector of scientific novelties.

He was aware of the lingering reticence of the eastern men and seemed hell-bent on winning them with flattery that verged on unction—a tactic that Louis Sullivan had known Burnham to deploy with great effect.

“It soon became noticeable that he was progressively and grossly apologizing to the Eastern men for the presence of their benighted brethren of the West.”

For secretary they elected Sullivan, who most decidedly was not a happy pupil of Hunt’s. To him, Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.

This choice was anathema to Sullivan, who abhorred derivative architecture, but during the meeting he made no objection.

The architects also made what would prove to be one of the most important decisions of the fair: They set a uniform height, sixty feet, for the cornice of each of the palaces of the Grand Court.

Root’s office next to his was silent, draped in bunting.