by Erik Larson
Most Chicago residents had no choice but to drink the water. Burnham, however, believed from the start that the fair’s workers and visitors needed a better, safer supply. In this too he was ahead of the age. On his orders his sanitary engineer, William S. MacHarg, built a water-sterilization plant on the fairgrounds that pumped lake water through a succession of large tanks in which the water was aerated and boiled. MacHarg’s men set big casks of this sterilized water throughout the park and replenished them every day.
Burnham planned to close the purification plant by Opening Day and give visitors a choice between two other supplies of safe water: lake water purified with Pasteur filters and offered free of charge, or naturally pure water for a penny a cup, piped one hundred miles from the coveted springs of Waukesha, Wisconsin. In November 1891 Burnham ordered MacHarg to investigate five of Waukesha’s springs to gauge their capacity and purity, but to do so “quietly,” suggesting he was aware that running a pipeline through the village’s comely landscape might prove a sensitive issue. No one, however, could have imagined that in a few months MacHarg’s efforts to secure a supply of Waukesha’s best would lead to an armed encounter in the middle of a fine Wisconsin night.
What most worried Burnham was fire. The loss of the Grannis Block, with his and Root’s headquarters, remained a vivid, humiliating memory. A catastrophic fire in Jackson Park could destroy the fair. Yet within the park fire was central to the construction process. Plasterers used small furnaces called salamanders to speed drying and curing. Tinners and electricians used fire pots for melting, bending, and fusing. Even the fire department used fire: Steam engines powered the pumps on the department’s horse-drawn fire trucks.
Burnham established defenses that by prevailing standards seemed elaborate, even excessive. He formed an exposition fire department and ordered the installation of hundreds of fire hydrants and telegraphic alarm boxes. He commissioned the construction of a fire boat, the Fire Queen, built specifically to negotiate the park’s shallow canals and to pass under its many low bridges. Design specifications required that every building be surrounded by an underwater main and be plumbed with interior standpipes. He also banned all smoking on the grounds, although here he made at least two exceptions: one for a contractor who pleaded that his crew of European artisans would quit if denied their cigars, the other for the big hearth in his own shanty, around which he and his engineers, draftsmen, and visiting architects gathered each night for wine, talk, and cigars.
With the onset of winter Burnham ordered all hydrants packed in horse manure to prevent freezing.
On the coldest days the manure steamed, as if the hydrants themselves were on fire.
When Sol Bloom returned to the office of Mike De Young, he was confident De Young could not possibly accept his salary request, for he had decided to ask for the same salary as the president of the United States: $50,000. “The more I thought about it,” Bloom recalled, “the more I enjoyed the prospect of telling Mike De Young that no less a sum could compensate me for my sacrifice in leaving San Francisco.”
De Young offered Bloom a seat. His expression was sober and expectant.
Bloom said: “Much as I appreciate the compliment, I find that my interests lie right here in this city. As I look ahead I can see myself—”
De Young cut him off. Softly he said, “Now, Sol, I thought you were going to tell me how much you wanted us to pay you.”
“I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate—”
“You said that a minute ago,” De Young said. “Now tell me how much money you want.”
This was not going quite the way Bloom had expected. With some trepidation, Bloom told him the number: “A thousand dollars a week.”
De Young smiled. “Well, that’s pretty good pay for a fellow of twenty-one, but I have no doubt you’ll earn it.”
In August, Burnham’s chief structural engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, made a startling disclosure: He had failed to calculate wind loads for the fair’s main buildings. Burnham ordered his key contractors—including Agnew & Co., erecting the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—to stop work immediately. For months Burnham had been combating rumors that he had forced his men to work at too fast a pace and that as a result some buildings were unsafe; in Europe, press reports held that certain structures had been “condemned.” Now here was Gottlieb, conceding a potentially catastrophic error.
Gottlieb protested that even without an explicit calculation of wind loads, the buildings were strong enough.
“I could not, however, take this view,” Burnham wrote in a letter to James Dredge, editor of the influential British magazine Engineering. Burnham ordered all designs strengthened to withstand the highest winds recorded over the previous ten years. “This may be going to extremes,” he told Dredge, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.”
Gottlieb resigned. Burnham replaced him with Edward Shankland, an engineer from his own firm who possessed a national reputation as a designer of bridges.
On November 24, 1891, Burnham wrote to James Dredge to report that once again he was under fire over the issue of structural integrity. “The criticism now,” he wrote, “is that the structures are unnecessarily strong.”
Bloom arrived in Chicago and quickly discovered why so little had been accomplished at the Midway Plaisance, known officially as Department M. Until now it had been under the control of Frederick Putnam, a Harvard professor of ethnology. He was a distinguished anthropologist, but putting him in charge of the Midway, Bloom said years later, “was about as intelligent a decision as it would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” Putnam would not have disagreed. He told a Harvard colleague he was “anxious to get this whole Indian circus off my hands.”
Bloom took his concerns to Exposition President Baker, who turned him over to Burnham.
“You are a very young man, a very young man indeed, to be in charge of the work entrusted to you,” Burnham said.
But Burnham himself had been young when John B. Sherman walked into his office and changed his life.
“I want you to know that you have my full confidence,” he said. “You are in complete charge of the Midway. Go ahead with the work. You are responsible only to me. I will write orders to that effect. Good luck.”
By December 1891 the two buildings farthest along were the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. Construction of the Mines Building had gone smoothly, thanks to a winter that by Chicago standards had been mercifully benign. Construction of the Woman’s Building, however, had become an ordeal, both for Burnham and its young architect, Sophia Hayden, mainly because of modifications demanded by Bertha Honore Palmer, head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers, which governed all things at the fair having to do with women. As the wife of Potter Palmer, she was accustomed by wealth and absolute social dominance to having her own way, as she had made clear earlier in the year when she suppressed a revolt led by the board’s executive secretary that had caused open warfare between factions of elegantly coiffed and dressed women. In the thick of it one horrified lady manager had written to Mrs. Palmer, “I do hope that Congress will not become disgusted with our sex.”
Hayden came to Chicago to produce final drawings, then returned home, leaving their execution to Burnham. Construction began July 9; workers began applying the final coat of staff in October. Hayden returned in December to direct the decoration of the building’s exterior, believing this to be her responsibility. She discovered that Bertha Palmer had other ideas.
In September, without Hayden’s knowledge, Palmer had invited women everywhere to donate architectural ornaments for the building and in response had received a museum’s worth of columns, panels, sculpted figures, window grills, doors, and other objects. Palmer believed the building could accommodate all the contributions, especially those sent by prominent women. Hayden, on the other hand, knew that such a hodgepodge of materials would re
sult in an aesthetic abomination. When an influential Wisconsin woman named Flora Ginty sent an elaborately carved wooden door, Hayden turned it down. Ginty was hurt and angry. “When I think of the days I worked and the miles I traveled to achieve these things for the Woman’s building, my ire rises a little yet.” Mrs. Palmer was in Europe at the time, but her private secretary, Laura Hayes, a gossip of virtuosic scope, made sure her employer learned all the details. Hayes also relayed to Palmer a few words of advice that she herself had given the architect: “‘I think it would be better to have the building look like a patchwork quilt, than to refuse these things which the Lady Managers have been to such pains in soliciting.’”
A patchwork quilt was not what Hayden had in mind. Despite Mrs. Palmer’s blinding social glare, Hayden continued to decline donations. A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy. Mrs. Palmer pecked and pestered and catapulted icy smiles into Hayden’s deepening gloom. Finally Palmer assigned the decoration of the Woman’s Building to someone else, a designer named Candace Wheeler.
Hayden fought the arrangement in her quiet, stubborn way until she could take it no longer. She walked into Burnham’s office, began to tell him her story, and promptly, literally, went mad: tears, heaving sobs, cries of anguish, all of it. “A severe breakdown,” an acquaintance called it, “with a violent attack of high nervous excitement of the brain.”
Burnham, stunned, summoned one of the exposition surgeons. Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest. She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.
At Jackson Park aggravation was endemic. Simple matters, Burnham found, often became imbroglios. Even Olmsted had become an irritant. He was brilliant and charming, but once fixed on a thing, he was as unyielding as a slab of Joliet limestone. By the end of 1891 the question of what kind of boats to allow on the fair’s waterways had come to obsess him, as if boats alone would determine the success of his quest for “poetic mystery.”
In December 1891 Burnham received a proposal from a tugboat manufacturer arguing the case for steam launches at the exposition. Olmsted got wind of it from Harry Codman, who in addition to being his chief operating man in Chicago served as a kind of spy, keeping Olmsted abreast of all threats to Olmsted’s vision. Codman sent Olmsted a copy of the letter, adding his own note that the tugboat maker seemed to enjoy Burnham’s confidence.
On December 23 Olmsted wrote to Burnham: “I suspect that even Codman is inclined to think that I make too much of a hobby of this boat question and give an amount of worry, if not thought, to it that would be better expended on other and more critical matters, and I fear that you may think me a crank upon it.”
He proceeded, however, to vent his obsession yet again. The tug-maker’s letter, he complained, framed the boat question solely in terms of moving the greatest number of passengers between different points at the exposition as cheaply and quickly as possible. “You perfectly well know that the main object to be accomplished was nothing of this sort. I need not try to make a statement of what it was. You are as alive to it as I am. You know that it was a poetic object, and you know that if boats are to be introduced on these waters, it would be perfect nonsense to have them of a kind that would antagonize this poetic object.”
Mere transportation was never the goal, he fumed. The whole point of having boats was to enhance the landscape. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition. I say destroy deliberately. A thousand times better [to] have no boats.”
Despite increasing committee interference and intensified conflict between Burnham and Director-General Davis, and with the threat of labor strikes ever present, the main buildings rose. Workers laid foundations of immense timbers in crisscrossed layers in accord with Root’s grillage principle, then used steam-powered derricks to raise the tall posts of iron and steel that formed each building’s frame. They cocooned the frames in scaffolds of wood and faced each frame with hundreds of thousands of wooden planks to create walls capable of accepting two thick layers of staff. As workers piled mountains of fresh lumber beside each building, jagged foothills of sawdust and scrap rose nearby. The air smelled of cut wood and Christmas.
In December the exposition experienced its first death: a man named Mueller at the Mines Building, dead of a fractured skull. Three other deaths followed in short order:
Jansen, fractured skull, Electricity Building;
Allard, fractured skull, Electricity Building;
Algeer, stunned to oblivion by a new phenomenon, electric shock, at the Mines Building.
Dozens of lesser accidents occurred as well. Publicly Burnham struck a pose of confidence and optimism. In a December 28, 1891, letter to the editor of the Chicago Herald, he wrote, “A few questions of design and plan are still undetermined, but there is nothing which is not well in hand, and I see no reason why we will not be able to complete our work in time for the ceremonies in October, 1892”—Dedication Day—“and for the opening of the Exposition, May 1st, 1893.”
In reality, the fair was far behind schedule, with worse delay forestalled only by the winter’s mildness. The October dedication was to take place inside the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, yet as of January only the foundation of the building had been laid. For the fair to be even barely presentable in time for the ceremony, everything would have to go perfectly. The weather especially would have to cooperate.
Meanwhile, banks and companies were failing across America, strikes threatened everywhere, and cholera had begun a slow white trek across Europe, raising fears that the first plague ships would soon arrive in New York Harbor.
As if anyone needed extra pressure, the New York Times warned: “the failure of the fair or anything short of a positive and pronounced success would be a discredit to the whole country, and not to Chicago alone.”
Remains of the Day
IN NOVEMBER 1891 JULIA CONNER announced to Holmes she was pregnant; now, she told him, he had no choice but to marry her. Holmes reacted to her news with calm and warmth. He held her, stroked her hair, and with moist eyes assured her that she had nothing to worry about, certainly he would marry her, as he long had promised. There was, however, a condition that he now felt obligated to impose. A child was out of the question. He would marry her only if she agreed to allow him to execute a simple abortion. He was a physician, he had done it before. He would use chloroform, and she would feel nothing and awaken to the prospect of a new life as Mrs. H. H. Holmes. Children would come later. Right now there was far too much to do, especially given all the work that lay ahead to complete the hotel and furnish each of its rooms in time for the world’s fair. Holmes knew he possessed great power over Julia. First there was the power that accrued to him naturally through his ability to bewitch men and women alike with false candor and warmth; second, the power of social approbation that he now focused upon her. Though sexual liaisons were common, society tolerated them only as long as their details remained secret. Packinghouse princes ran off with parlormaids and bank presidents seduced typewriters; when necessary, their attorneys arranged quiet solo voyages to Europe to the surgical suites of discreet but capable doctors. A public pregnancy without marriage meant disgrace and destitution. Holmes possessed Julia now as fully as if she were an antebellum slave, and he reveled in his possession. The operation, he told Julia, would take place on Christmas Eve.
Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions on Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago’s richest and most
powerful men, the tombs’ bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow.
At 701 Sixty-third Street in Englewood Julia Conner put her daughter to bed and did her best to smile and indulge the child’s delighted anticipation of Christmas. Yes, Saint Nicholas would come, and he would bring wonderful things. Holmes had promised a bounty of toys and sweets for Pearl, and for Julia something truly grand, beyond anything she could have received from her poor bland Ned.
Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.
Julia walked down the hall to an apartment occupied by Mr. and Mrs. John Crowe. Julia and Mrs. Crowe had become friends, and now Julia helped Mrs. Crowe decorate a Christmas tree in the Crowes’ apartment, meant for Pearl as a Christmas-morning surprise. Julia talked of all that she and Pearl would do the next day, and told Mrs. Crowe that soon she would be going to Davenport, Iowa, to attend the wedding of an older sister, “an old maid,” Mrs. Crowe said, who to everyone’s surprise was about to marry a railroad man. Julia was awaiting the rail pass that the groom was supposed to have put in the mail.
Julia left the apartment late that night, in good spirits, Mrs. Crowe later recalled: “there was nothing about her conversation that would lead any of us to think she intended going away that night.”