by Erik Larson
Jackson Park was one square mile of desolation, mostly treeless, save for pockets of various kinds of oak—burr, pin, black, and scarlet—rising from a tangled undergrowth of elder, wild plum, and willow. In the most exposed portions there was only sand tufted with marine and prairie grasses. One writer called the park “remote and repulsive”; another, a “sandy waste of unredeemed and desert land.” It was ugly, a landscape of last resort. Olmsted himself had said of Jackson Park: “If a search had been made for the least parklike ground within miles of the city, nothing better meeting the requirement could have been found.”
In fact, the site was even worse than it appeared. Many of the oaks were dead. Given the season, the dead were hard to distinguish from the living. The root systems of others were badly damaged. Test borings showed that the earth within the park consisted of a top layer of black soil about one foot thick, followed by two feet of sand, then eleven feet of sand so saturated with water, Burnham wrote, “it became almost like quicksand and was often given this name.” The Chicago men understood the challenge that this soil presented; the New York men, accustomed to bedrock, did not.
The park’s gravest flaw, at least from Olmsted’s perspective, was that its shoreline was subject to dramatic annual changes in the level of the lake, sometimes as much as four feet. Such fluctuations, Olmsted recognized, would greatly increase the difficulty of planting the banks and shores. If the water level fell, visitors to the fair would be treated to an offensive band of bare earth at the waterline. If it rose too high, the water would submerge and kill shore plantings.
The architects climbed back into their carriages. 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…. Twenty-one months later was the day fixed by Act of Congress for the dedication of the buildings, and in the short space of twenty-seven and one-half months, or on May 1, 1893, the entire work of construction must be finished, the landscape perfected, and the exhibits installed.”
At the lake they again left their carriages. Peabody of Boston climbed atop a pier. He turned to Burnham. “Do you mean to say that you really propose opening a Fair here by Ninety-three?”
“Yes,” Burnham said. “We intend to.”
Peabody said, “It can’t be done.”
Burnham looked at him. “That point is settled,” he said.
But even he did not, and could not, grasp what truly lay ahead.
Root returned to Chicago while the architects were in Jackson Park. It was his forty-first birthday. He went directly from the train station to the Rookery. “He went down to the office in a gay humor,” Harriet Monroe said, “and that very day received a commission for a large commercial building.”
But that afternoon draftsman Paul Starrett encountered Root in one of the Rookery’s elevators “looking ill.” His good spirits had fled. He complained again of being tired.
The architects returned from their tour discouraged and full of regret. They gathered again in the firm’s library, where Root, suddenly revitalized, now joined them. He was gracious, funny, warm. If anyone could sway these men and ignite their passion, Burnham knew, Root was the one. Root invited the outside men to come to his house on Astor Place the next day, Sunday, for high tea, then went home at last to greet his children and his wife, Dora, who according to Harriet Monroe was in bed “ill almost unto death” from a recent miscarriage.
Root told Dora of his weariness and suggested that in the coming summer they should escape somewhere for a long rest. The last months had been full of frustration and long nights of work and travel. He was exhausted. The trip south had done nothing to ease his stress. He looked forward to the end of the week, January 15, when the architects would conclude their conference and go home.
“After the 15th,” he told his wife, “I shall not be so busy.”
The eastern and Chicago architects reconvened that night at the University Club for a dinner in their honor hosted by the fair’s Grounds and Buildings Committee. Root was too tired to attend. Clearly the dinner was a weapon meant to ignite enthusiasm and show the easterners that Chicago fully intended to follow through on its grand boasts about the exposition. It was the first in a sequence of impossibly rich and voluminous banquets whose menus raised the question of whether any of the city’s leading men could possibly have a functional artery.
As the men arrived, reporters intercepted them. The architects were gracious but closemouthed.
They were to sit at a large T-shaped table, with Lyman Gage, president of the exposition, at the center of the topmost table, Hunt on his right, Olmsted on his left. Bundles of carnations and pink and red roses transformed the tables into cutting beds. A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.
At precisely eight P.M. Gage took Hunt and Olmsted by the arm and led the way from the Club’s reception room to the banquet hall.
Oysters.
A glass or two of Montrachet.
Consommé of Green Turtle.
Amontillado.
Broiled Shad à la Maréchel.
Cucumbers. Potatoes à la Duchesse.
Filet Mignon à la Rossini.
Chateau Lafite and Rinnart Brut.
Fonds d’Artichaut Farcis.
Pommery Sec.
Sorbet au Kirsch.
Cigarettes.
Woodcock on Toast.
Asparagus Sala.
Ices: Canton Ginger.
Cheeses: Pont l’Eveque; Rocquefort. Coffee. Liquers.
Madeira, 1815.
Cigars.
Gage spoke first. He offered a rousing oration on the brilliance of the future exposition and the need now for the great men in the banquet hall to think first of the fair, last of themselves, affirming that only through the subordination of self would the exposition succeed. The applause was warm and enthusiastic.
Burnham spoke next. He described his own vision of the fair and Chicago’s resolve to make that vision real. He too urged teamwork and self-sacrifice. “Gentlemen,” he said, “1893 will be the third great date in our country’s history. On the two others, 1776 and 1861, all true Americans served, and so now I ask you to serve again!”
This time the room erupted. “The men left the banquet hall that night united like soldiers in a campaign,” Burnham said.
It was the Chicagoans, however, who did all the marching. At Root’s house the next day Harriet Monroe met the eastern architects and came away shaken. “In talking with them I was amazed at their listless and hopeless attitude,” she said. “Beautiful effects were scarcely to be expected in buildings so enormous and so cheaply constructed; the level of monotony of ground surfaces in Chicago made effective grouping practically impossible; the time for preparation and construction was too short: these and other criticisms indicated a general feeling of disparagement.”
At tea’s end Root escorted the visitors to their carriages. It was dark and bitterly cold. A sharp wind scythed along Astor Place. Much was made, in retrospect, of the fact that Root, in evening dress, charged into the rock-cold night without first putting on a coat.
Vanishing Point
AFTER YEARS SPENT DRIFTING from town to town and job to job, a young jeweler named Icilius Conner—he preferred the nickname “Ned”—moved to Chicago with his wife Julia and their eight-year-old daughter Pearl and quickly found that Chicago was indeed a city of opportunity. At the start of 1891 Ned found himself managing a jewelry counter that occupied one wall of a thriving drugstore on the city’s South Side, at Sixty-third and Wallace. For once in Ned’s adult life, the future gleamed.
The owner of the drugstore, though very young, was prosperous and dynamic, truly a man of the age, and seemed destined for even greater success given that the World’s C
olumbian Exposition was to be built just a short streetcar ride east, at the end of Sixty-third. There was talk too that a new elevated rail line, nicknamed the Alley L for the way its trestles roofed city alleys, would be extended eastward along Sixty-third directly to Jackson Park, thus providing visitors with another means of reaching the future fair. Already traffic on the street had increased sharply, as each day hundreds of citizens drove their carriages to the park to see the chosen site. Not that there was much to see. Ned and Julia had found the park an ugly, desolate place of sandy ridges and half-dead oaks, although Pearl had enjoyed trying to catch tadpoles in its pools of stagnant water. That anything wonderful could rise on that ground seemed beyond possibility, although Ned, like most new visitors to Chicago, was willing to concede that the city was a place unlike any he had encountered. If any city could make good on the elaborate boasts circulated thus far, Chicago was the one. Ned’s new employer, Dr. H. H. Holmes, seemed a perfect example of what everyone called the “Chicago spirit.” To be so young, yet own a block-long building, would be incredible in any other place of Ned’s experience. Here it seemed an ordinary accomplishment.
The Conners lived in a flat on the second floor of the building, near Dr. Holmes’s own suite of rooms. It was not the brightest, most cheerful apartment, but it was warm and close to work. Moreover, Holmes offered to employ Julia as a clerk in the drugstore and to train her to keep his books. Later, when Ned’s eighteen-year-old sister, Gertrude, moved to Chicago, Holmes asked to hire her as well, to manage his new mail-order medicine company. With three incomes, the family might soon be able to afford a house of their own, perhaps on one of the wide macadam streets of Englewood. Certainly they’d be able to afford bicycles and trips to Timmerman’s theater down the street.
One thing did make Ned uneasy, however. 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. It was clear to Ned, clear in fact from the first moment, that Holmes was a man who liked women and whom women liked in return. Lovely young women seemed drawn to the drugstore. When Ned tried to help them, they were remote and uninterested. Their manner changed markedly if Holmes happened then to enter the store.
Always a plain man, Ned now seemed to become part of the background, a bystander to his own life. Only his daughter Pearl was as attentive to him as always. Ned watched with alarm as Holmes flattered Gertie and Julia with smiles and gifts and treacly praise—especially Gertie—and how the women glowed in response. When Holmes left them, they appeared crestfallen, their demeanor suddenly brittle and snappish.
Even more disconcerting was the change in how customers responded to Ned himself. It was not what they said but what they carried in their eyes, something like sympathy, even pity.
One night during this period Holmes asked Ned a favor. He led him to the big vault and stepped inside, then told Ned to close the door and listen for the sound of his shouting. “I shut the door and put my ear to the crack,” Ned recalled, “but could hear only a faint sound.” Ned opened the door, and Holmes stepped out. Now Holmes asked Ned if he would go inside and try shouting, so that Holmes could hear for himself how little sound escaped. Ned did so but got back out the instant Holmes reopened the door. “I didn’t like that kind of business,” he said.
Why anyone would even want a soundproof vault was a question that apparently did not occur to him.
For the police there were warnings of a different sort—letters from parents, visits from detectives hired by parents—but these were lost in the chaos. Vanishment seemed a Chicago pastime. There were too many disappearances, in all parts of the city, to investigate properly, and too many forces impeding the detection of patterns. Patrolmen, many of them, were barely competent, appointed solely at the direction of ward bosses. Detectives were few, their resources and skills minimal. Class obscured their vision. Ordinary vanishings—Polish girls, stockyard boys, Italian laborers, Negro women—merited little effort. Only the disappearance of moneyed souls drew a forceful response, and even then there was little that detectives could do other than send telegrams to other cities and periodically check the morgue for each day’s collection of unidentified men, women, and children. At one point half the city’s detective force was involved in investigating disappearances, prompting the chief of the city’s central detective unit to announce he was considering the formation of a separate bureau, “a mysterious disappearances department.”
Women and men vanished in equal proportion. Fannie Moore, a young visitor from Memphis, failed to return to the home where she was boarding and was never seen again. J. W. Highleyman left work one day, caught a suburban train, and vanished, the Tribune said, “as completely as though swallowed by the earth.” 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. The hair was sold for wigs, the clothing given to settlement houses.
Like the Union Stock Yards, Chicago wasted nothing.
Alone
THE EASTERN AND CHICAGO ARCHITECTS met again on Monday morning, January 12, in Burnham & Root’s library on the top floor of the Rookery. Root was absent. William R. Mead had come from New York to stand in for his grieving partner, McKim. As the men waited for everyone to arrive, the visitors from time to time would drift to the library’s east-facing windows and stare out at the vastness of Lake Michigan. The light entering the room was preternaturally intense, carrying with it the surplus radiance of the lake and its frozen shore.
Burnham rose to offer the men a formal welcome, but he did not seem at ease. 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. “Himself not especially susceptible to flattery except in a sentimental way, he soon learned its efficacy when plastered thick on big business men,” Sullivan wrote. “Louis saw it done repeatedly, and at first was amazed at Burnham’s effrontery, only to be more amazingly amazed at the drooling of the recipient. The method was crude but it worked.”
Said Sullivan, “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.”
Hunt noticed it too. “Hell,” he snapped, “we haven’t come here on a missionary expedition. Let’s get to work.”
Murmurs of agreement rose through the room. Adler was cheered; Sullivan smirked. Olmsted watched, deadpan, as he listened to a roaring in his ears that would not subside. Hunt grimaced; the trip from New York and the excursion to Jackson Park had worsened his gout.
Hunt’s interjection startled Burnham. It brought back in a rush the hurt of the great dual snub by the East, his rejection by Harvard and Yale; but the remark and the obvious support it garnered in the room also caused Burnham to shift focus to the work at hand. As Sullivan saw it, “Burnham came out of his somnambulistic vagary and joined in. He was keen enough to understand that ‘Uncle Dick’”—meaning Hunt—“had done him a needed favor.”
Burnham told the men that henceforth they would serve as the fair’s Board of Architects. He invited them to choose a chairman. They elected Hunt. “The natural dominance of the master again asserted itself without pretension,” wrote Van Brunt, “and we once more became his willing and happy pupils.”
For sec
retary they elected Sullivan, who most decidedly was not a happy pupil of Hunt’s. To him, Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular. Burnham, too. Both men symbolized all that stood in the way of Sullivan’s own emerging ethos that a building’s function should express itself in its design—not merely that form should follow function but that “the function created or organized its form.”
To Sullivan, Hunt was merely a relic, Burnham something far more dangerous. In him Sullivan saw a kindred capacity for obsession. Sullivan had come to see Chicago architecture as dominated by only two firms: Burnham & Root and Adler & Sullivan. “In each firm was a man with a fixed irrevocable purpose in life, for the sake of which he would bend or sacrifice all else,” Sullivan wrote. “Daniel Burnham was obsessed by the feudal idea of power. Louis Sullivan was equally obsessed by the beneficent idea of Democratic power.” Sullivan admired both Root and Adler but believed they functioned on a lesser plane. “John Root was so self-indulgent that there was a risk he might never draw upon his underlying power; Adler was essentially a technician, an engineer, a conscientious administrator…. Unquestionably, Adler lacked sufficient imagination; so in a way did John Root—that is to say, the imagination of the dreamer. In the dream-imagination lay Burnham’s strength and Louis’s passion.”
Shortly before noon Burnham left the room to take a telephone call from Dora Root. She told him her husband had awakened with a bad cold and would not be able to attend the meeting. Several hours later she called again: A doctor had come and diagnosed pneumonia.
Root’s spirits were good. He joked and sketched. “I haven’t escaped sickness all my life to get off easily now,” he told Harriet Monroe. “I knew when my turn came, it would be a Tartar.”