by Erik Larson
For outsiders, it was the sheer size of the exposition that made it seem such an impossible challenge. That the fair’s grounds would be vast and its buildings colossal was something every Chicago resident took for granted; what mystified them was how anyone could expect to build the biggest thing ever constructed on American soil, far bigger than Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, in so little time. Burnham knew, however, that the fair’s size was just one element of the challenge. The gross features of the fair envisioned in the plan concealed a billion smaller obstacles that the public and most of the exposition’s own directors had no idea existed. Burnham would have to build a railroad within the fairgrounds to transport steel, stone, and lumber to each construction site. He would have to manage the delivery of supplies, goods, mail, and all exhibit articles sent to the grounds by transcontinental shipping companies, foremost among them the Adams Express Company. He would need a police force and a fire department, a hospital and an ambulance service. And there would be horses, thousands of them—something would have to be done about the tons of manure generated each day.
Immediately after the brown-paper plan received approval, Burnham requested authority to build “at once cheap wooden quarters in Jackson Park for myself and force,” quarters in which he would live almost continuously for the next three years. This lodging quickly became known as “the shanty,” though it had a large fireplace and an excellent wine cellar stocked by Burnham himself. With a power of perception that far outpaced his era, Burnham recognized that the tiniest details would shape the way people judged the exposition. His vigilance extended even to the design of the fair’s official seal. “It may not occur to you how very important a matter this Seal is,” he wrote in a December 8, 1890, letter to George R. Davis, the fair’s director-general, its chief political officer. “It will be very largely distributed throughout foreign countries, and is one of those trivial things by which these people will judge the artistic standard of the Fair.”
All these, however, were mere distractions compared to the single most important task on Burnham’s roster: the selection of architects to design the fair’s major buildings.
He and John Root had considered designing the whole exposition themselves, and indeed their peers jealously expected they would do so. Harriet Monroe, Root’s sister-in-law, recalled how one evening Root came home “cut to the quick” because an architect whom he had considered a friend “had apparently refused to recognize Mr. Burnham when they met at a club.” Root grumbled, “I suppose he thinks we are going to hog it all!” He resolved that to preserve his credibility as supervising architect, a role in which he would be compelled to oversee the work of other exposition architects, he would not himself design any of the buildings.
Burnham knew exactly whom he wanted to hire but was less aware of how incendiary his selections would prove. He wanted the best architects America had to offer, not just for their talent but also for how their affiliation instantly would shatter the persistent eastern belief that Chicago would produce only a country fair.
In December, though he lacked an official mandate to do so, Burnham secretly mailed inquiries to five men, “feeling confident that I would carry my point.” And indeed soon afterward the fair’s Grounds and Buildings Committee authorized him to invite the men to join the exposition. Unquestionably they were five of the greatest architects America had produced, but of the five, three were from the land of “unclean beasts” itself: George B. Post, Charles McKim, and Richard M. Hunt, the nation’s most venerable architect. The others were Robert Peabody of Boston and Henry Van Brunt, Kansas City.
None was from Chicago, even though the city took great pride in its architectural pioneers, in Sullivan, Adler, Jenney, Beman, Cobb, and the others. Somehow, despite his powers of anticipation, Burnham failed to realize that Chicago might see his choices as betrayal.
What troubled Burnham at the moment, as he rode in his Pullman compartment, was the fact that only one of his candidates, Van Brunt of Kansas City, had replied with any enthusiasm. The others had expressed only a tepid willingness to meet once Burnham arrived in New York.
Burnham had asked Olmsted to join him for the meeting, aware that in New York the landscape architect’s reputation exerted a force like gravity, but Olmsted could not get away. 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.
Why were they so unenthusiastic? How would they react to his attempts at persuasion? And if they declined and word of their refusal became public, what then?
The landscape outside his windows gave him little solace. As his train roared across Indiana, it overtook a cold front. Temperatures plunged. Strong gusts of wind buffeted the train, and ghostly virga of ice followed it through the night.
There was something Burnham did not know. Soon after receiving his letter the eastern architects, Hunt, Post, Peabody, and McKim, had held a meeting of their own in the offices of McKim, Mead and White in New York to discuss whether the fair would be anything more than a display of overfed cattle. During the meeting Hunt—the architect Burnham most hoped to recruit—announced that he would not participate. George Post persuaded him at least to hear what Burnham had to say, arguing that if Hunt stood down, the others would feel pressed to do likewise, for such was Hunt’s influence.
McKim had opened this meeting with a wandering talk about the fair and its prospects. Hunt cut him off: “McKim, damn your preambles. Get down to facts!”
In New York the wind blew hard and harsh all week. On the Hudson ice produced the earliest halt to navigation since 1880. Over breakfast at his hotel on Thursday morning, Burnham read with uneasiness about the failure of S. A. Kean & Co., a private bank in Chicago. It was one more sign of a gathering panic.
Burnham met the eastern architects Monday evening, December 22, at the Players Club, for dinner. Their cheeks were red from the cold. They shook hands: Hunt, McKim, Post, and Peabody—Peabody, down from Boston for the meeting. Here they were, gathered at one table, the nation’s foremost practitioners of what Goethe and Schelling called “frozen music.” All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones. They wore dark suits and crisp white collars. All had mustaches, some dark, some gray. Post was huge, the largest man in the room. Hunt was fierce, a frown in a suit, with a client list that included most of America’s richest families. Every other mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and along Fifth Avenue in New York seemed to have been designed by him, but he also had built the base for the Statue of Liberty and was a founder of the American Institute of Architects. All the men had one or more elements of shared background. Hunt, McKim, and Peabody had all studied at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris; Van Brunt and Post had studied under Hunt; Van Brunt had been Peabody’s mentor. For Burnham, with his failed attempts at getting into Harvard and Yale and his lack of formal architectural training, sitting down to dinner with these men was like being a stranger at someone else’s Thanksgiving.
The men were cordial. Burnham described his vision of a fair larger and grander than the Paris exposition. He played up the fact of Olmsted’s participation. Both Olmsted and Hunt were hard at work on George Washington Vanderbilt’s manor, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, and together had built the Vanderbilt family’s mausoleum. But Hunt was skeptical and not shy about expressing his doubts. Why should he and the others interrupt their already full schedules to build temporary structures in a far-off city where they would have little control over the final product?
Their skepticism shook Burnham. He was accustomed to the headlong civic energy of Chicago. He wished Olmsted and Root were beside him: Olmsted, to counter Hunt; Root because of his wit, and because the other architects all knew him from his role as secretary of the American Institute of Architects. Ordinarily it was in situations like this that Burnham could be most effe
ctive. “To himself, and indeed to most of the world in general, he was always right,” wrote Harriet Monroe, “and by knowing this so securely he built up the sheer power of personality which accomplished big things.” But this night he felt ill at ease, a choirboy among cardinals.
He argued that Chicago’s fair, unlike any other before it, would be primarily a monument to architecture. It would awaken the nation to the power of architecture to conjure beauty from stone and steel. Olmsted’s plans alone would make the exposition unique, with lagoons, canals, and great lawns all set against the cobalt-blue steppe of Lake Michigan. In exhibit space, he told them, the fair would be at least one-third larger than what the French had allotted in Paris. This was no mere dream, he said. Chicago had the resolve to make this exposition a reality, the same resolve that had made the city the second largest in America. And, he added, Chicago had the money.
The architects’ questions became slightly less challenging, more practical. What kind of structures did he envision, and in what style? The issue of the Eiffel Tower arose: What could Chicago do to equal that? On this score Burnham had no plan other than somehow to surpass Eiffel. Secretly, he was disappointed that the engineers of America had not yet stepped forward with some novel but feasible scheme to eclipse Eiffel’s achievement.
The architects worried that anyone who joined the fair would find himself in the grip of innumerable committees. Burnham guaranteed complete artistic independence. They wanted to know in detail how Olmsted felt about the sites selected for the fair, in particular about a central feature called the Wooded Island. Their insistence prompted Burnham to telegraph Olmsted immediately and urge him once again to come. Again Olmsted demurred.
One question came up repeatedly throughout the evening: Was there enough time?
Burnham assured them that ample time remained but that he had no illusions. The work had to start at once.
He believed he had won them. As the evening ended, he asked, would they join?
There was a pause.
Burnham left New York the next morning on the North Shore Limited. Throughout the day his train pushed through a landscape scoured by snow as a blizzard whitened the nation in a swath from the Atlantic to Minnesota. The storm destroyed buildings, broke trees, and killed a man in Barberton, Ohio, but it did not stop the Limited.
While aboard the train, Burnham wrote a letter to Olmsted that contained a less-than-candid description of the meeting with the architects. “They all approved the proposition to have them take hold of the artistic part of the main buildings…. The general layout seemed to meet the hearty approval, first of Mr. Hunt then of the others, but they were desirous of knowing your views of the landscape on and about the island. Therefore I telegraphed you urgently to come. They were very much disappointed, as was I, when it was found impossible to get you. The gentlemen are all to be here on the 10th of next month and at that time they urgently request, as do I, that you will be here personally. I find that Mr. Hunt especially lays large stress upon your opinions in the entire matter.”
In fact, the evening had ended rather differently. At the Player’s Club, sips of cognac and exhalations of smoke had filled that last difficult pause. The dream was an appealing one, the architects agreed, and no one doubted Chicago’s sincerity in imagining this fantasy precinct of lagoons and palaces, but the reality was something else entirely. The only real certainty was the disruption that would be caused by long-distance travel and the myriad other difficulties inherent in building a complex structure far from home. Peabody did commit to the fair, but Hunt and the others did not: “they said,” as Burnham later revealed, “they would think it over.”
They did, however, agree to come to the January 10 meeting in Chicago to confer again and examine the chosen ground.
None of the architects had been to Jackson Park. In its raw state, Burnham knew, it was not a setting likely to win anyone’s heart. This time Olmsted had to be present. In the meantime Root too would have to become involved in the courtship. The architects respected him but were leery of his powers as supervising architect. It was critical that he go to New York.
Outside the sky was blank, the light pewter. Despite Pullman’s vestibules ice as fine as dust settled between coaches and filled Burnham’s train with the tang of deep winter. Wind-felled trees appeared beside the railbed.
Daniel Burnham arrived in Chicago to find the city’s architects and members of the exposition board outraged that he had gone outside the city—to New York, of all godforsaken places—to court architects for the fair; that he had snubbed the likes of Adler, Sullivan, and Jenney. Sullivan saw it as a sign that Burnham did not truly believe Chicago had the talent to carry the fair by itself. “Burnham had believed that he might best serve his country by placing all of the work exclusively with Eastern architects,” Sullivan wrote; “solely, he averred, on account of their surpassing culture.” The chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee was Edward T. Jefferey. “With exquisite delicacy and tact,” Sullivan said, “Jefferey, at a meeting of the Committee, persuaded Daniel, come to Judgment, to add the Western men to the list of his nominations.”
Hastily, Root and Burnham conferred and chose five Chicago firms to join the effort, among them Adler & Sullivan. Burnham visited each the next day. Four of the five put aside their hurt feelings and accepted immediately. Only Adler & Sullivan resisted. Adler was sulking. “I think he, Adler, had hoped to be in the position I was in,” Burnham said. “He was rather disgruntled and did ‘not know.’”
Ultimately, Adler did accept Burnham’s invitation.
Now it was Root’s turn to go to New York. He had to go anyway to attend a meeting of the directors of the American Institute of Architects and planned afterward to take a train to Atlanta to inspect one of the firm’s buildings. Root was in his office at the Rookery on the afternoon of New Year’s Day 1891, shortly before his departure, when an employee stopped by to see him. “He said he was tired,” the man recalled, “and felt inclined to resign the secretaryship of the Institute. This was alarming, as he had never been heard to complain of too much work, and while it only indicated extreme physical exhaustion and before he went home he became cheerful and hopeful again, it has its significance in the light of subsequent events.”
In New York, Root assured the architects again and again that he would do nothing to interfere with their designs. Despite his charm—the Chicago Inter Ocean once called him “another Chauncey M. Depew in postprandial wit and humor”—he failed to arouse their enthusiasm and left New York for Atlanta feeling the same degree of disappointment Burnham had felt two weeks earlier. His journey south did little to cheer him up. Harriet Monroe saw him upon his return to Chicago. He was depressed, she said, “by the attitude of the Eastern men, whom he found singularly apathetic, utterly incredulous that any association of Western businessmen would give art a free hand in the manner he set forth. The dream was too extravagant ever to be realized, and they were extremely reluctant to undertake its realization against the hampering and tampering, the interferences petty and great, which they felt were certain to ensue.”
Root was tired and discouraged. He told Monroe he just could not get the men interested. “He felt that this was the greatest opportunity ever offered to his profession in this country, and he could not make them appreciate it,” she said. The architects did plan to come to Chicago for the January meeting, he told her, “but reluctantly; their hearts were not in it.”
On January 5, 1891, the Committee on Grounds and Buildings authorized Burnham to offer formal commissions to all ten architects and pay each $10,000 (equivalent today to about $300,000). It was a rich fee, considering that all Burnham wanted them to do was provide working drawings and make a few visits to Chicago. Burnham and Root would see to the construction of the buildings and manage the niggling details that typically haunted an architect’s life. There would be no artistic interference.
The eastern men gave their tentative acceptance, but their concerns
had not diminished.
And they still had not seen Jackson Park.
A Hotel for the Fair
HOLMES’S NEW IDEA WAS TO turn his building into a hotel for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition—no Palmer House or Richelieu, certainly, but just comfortable enough and cheap enough to lure a certain kind of clientele and convincing enough to justify a large fire insurance policy. After the fair he intended to burn the building to collect the insurance and, as a happy dividend, destroy whatever surplus “material” might remain in its hidden storage chambers, although ideally, given other disposal measures available to him, the building by then would contain nothing of an incriminating nature. The thing was, one never knew. In the most transcendent moment, it was easy to make a mistake and forget some little thing that a clever detective might eventually use to propel him to the gallows. Whether the Chicago police even possessed that kind of talent was open to question. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the more dangerous entity, but its operatives of late seemed to be spending most of their energy battling strikers at coalfields and steel mills around the country.