by Erik Larson
“I am,” Burnham said.
“I’m Charles Atwood. Did you want to see me?”
Burnham glared. “I am going back to Chicago; I’ll think it over and let you know.” Burnham caught his train. Once back in Chicago he went directly to his office. A few hours later Atwood walked in. He had followed Burnham from New York.
Burnham gave him the job.
Atwood had a secret, as it happens. He was an opium addict. It explained those eyes and his erratic behavior. But Burnham thought him a genius.
As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.
Time was so short, the Executive Committee began planning exhibits and appointing world’s fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair “a family of twelve or fourteen of the fierce little midgets.”
The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to complete his mission.
Beyond the fairgrounds’ new fence, turmoil and grief engulfed Chicago. Union leaders threatened to organize unions worldwide to oppose the fair. The Inland Architect, a prominent Chicago journal, reported: “That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World’s Fair.” Such behavior, the journal said, “would be called treason in countries less enlightened and more arbitrary than ours.” The nation’s financial condition worsened. Offices in the newest of Chicago’s skyscrapers remained vacant. Just blocks from the Rookery, Burnham & Root’s Temperance Building stood huge and black and largely empty. Twenty-five thousand unemployed workers roamed the city. At night they slept in police stations and in the basement of City Hall. The unions grew stronger.
The old world was passing. P. T. Barnum died; grave-robbers attempted to steal his corpse. William Tecumseh Sherman died, too. Atlanta cheered. Reports from abroad asserted, erroneously, that Jack the Ripper had returned. Closer at hand, a gory killing in New York suggested he might have migrated to America.
In Chicago the former warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, Major R. W. McClaughry, began readying the city for the surge in crime that everyone expected the fair to produce, establishing an office in the Auditorium to receive and distribute Bertillon identifications of known criminals. Devised by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, the system required police to make a precise survey of the dimensions and physical peculiarities of suspects. Bertillon believed that each man’s measurements were unique and thus could be used to penetrate the aliases that criminals deployed in moving from city to city. In theory, a detective in Cincinnati could telegraph a few distinctive numbers to investigators in New York with the expectation that if a match existed, New York would find it.
A reporter asked Major McClaughry whether the fair really would attract the criminal element. He paused a moment, then said, “I think it quite necessary that the authorities here should be prepared to meet and deal with the greatest congregation of criminals that ever yet met in this country.”
Cuckoldry
AT THE HOLMES BUILDING at Sixty-third and Wallace, now known widely in the neighborhood as “the castle,” the Conner family was in turmoil. Lovely, dark Gertrude—Ned’s sister—one day came to Ned in tears and told him she could not stay in the house another moment. She vowed to catch the first train back to Muscatine, Iowa. Ned begged her to tell him what had occurred, but she refused.
Ned knew that she and a young man had begun courting, and he believed her tears must have resulted from something he had said or done. Possibly the two had been “indiscreet,” although he did not think Gertrude capable of so drastic a moral lapse. The more he pressed her for an explanation, the more troubled and adamant she became. She wished she had never come to Chicago. It was a blighted, hellish place full of noise and dust and smoke and inhuman towers that blocked the sun, and she hated it—hated especially this gloomy building and the ceaseless clamor of construction.
When Holmes came by, she would not look at him. Her color rose. Ned did not notice.
Ned hired an express company to collect her trunk and saw her to the station. Still she would not explain. Through tears, she said good-bye. The train huffed from the station.
In Iowa—in safe, bland Muscatine—Gertrude fell ill, an accident of nature. The disease proved fatal. Holmes told Ned how sorry he was to hear of her passing, but in his eyes there was only a flat blue calm, like the lake on a still August morning.
With Gertrude gone, the tension between Ned and Julia increased. Their marriage never had been tranquil. Back in Iowa they had come close to separating. Now, again, their relationship was crumbling. Their daughter, Pearl, became commensurately more difficult to manage, her behavior marked by periods of sullen withdrawal and eruptions of anger. Ned understood none of it. He was “of an easy-going innocent nature,” a reporter later observed, “he mistrusted nothing.” He did not see what even his friends and regular customers saw. “Some of my friends told me there was something between Holmes and my wife,” he said later. “At first I did not believe it.”
Despite the warnings and his own mounting uneasiness, Ned admired Holmes. While he, Ned, was but a jeweler in someone else’s store, Holmes controlled a small empire—and had yet to turn thirty years old. Holmes’s energy and success made Ned feel even smaller than he already was inclined to feel, especially now that Julia had begun looking at him as if he had just emerged from a rendering vat at the stockyards.
Thus Ned was particularly susceptible to an offer from Holmes that seemed likely to increase his own stature in Julia’s eyes. Holmes proposed to sell Ned the entire pharmacy, under terms that Ned—naïve Ned—found generous beyond all expectation. Holmes would increase his salary from twelve to eighteen dollars a week, so that Ned could pay Holmes six dollars a week to cover the purchase. Ned wouldn’t even have to worry about handling the six dollars—Holmes would deduct it from the new eighteen-dollar salary each week, automatically. Holmes promised also to take care of all the legal details and to record the transfer with city officials. Ned would get his twelve dollars a week just as always, but now he would be the owner of a fine store in a prosperous neighborhood destined to become even wealthier once the world’s fair began operation.
Ned accepted, giving no thought to why Holmes would wish to shed such a healthy business. The offer eased his concerns about Holmes and Julia. If Holmes and she were involved in an indiscreet liaison, would he offer Ned the jewel of his Englewood empire?
To Ned’s sorrow, he soon found that his new status did nothing to ease the tension between himself and Julia. The ferocity of their arguments only increased, as did the length of the cold silences that filled whatever other time they spent together. Holmes was sympathetic. He bought Ned lunch at the first-floor restaurant and told Ned how certain he was that the marriage would be salvaged. Julia was an ambitious woman and clearly a very beautiful one, but she would come to her senses in short order.
Holmes’s sympathy was disarming. The idea that Holmes might be the cause of Julia’s discontent seemed more and more improbable. Holmes even wanted Ned to buy life insurance, for surely once his marital strife subsided, he would want to protect Julia and Pearl from destitution in the event of his death. He recommended that Ned also consider insuring Pearl’s life and offered to pay the initial premiums. He brought an insurance man, C. W. Arnold, to meet with Ned.
Arnold explained that he was building a new agency and wanted to sell as many policies as possible in order to attract the attention of the biggest insurance companies. To secure a policy, all Ned had to pay was a dollar, Arnold said—just one dollar to begin protecting his family forever.
But Ned did not want a policy. Arnold tried to change his mind. Ned refused and refused and finally told Arnold that if he really needed a dollar, Ned would simply give him one.
Arnold and Holmes looked at each other, their eyes empty of all expression.
Soon creditors began appearing at the pharmacy demanding repayment of mortgages secured by the store’s furnishings and its stock of salves and ointments and other goods. Ned was unaware of the existence of these debts and believed the creditors were trying to defraud him—until they presented documents signed by the previous owner, H. H. Holmes. Convinced now that these were bona-fide debts, Ned promised to pay them as soon as he was able.
Here too Holmes was sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do. Any thriving venture accumulated debts. He had assumed that Ned understood at least that much about business. At any rate it was something to which Ned would now have to become accustomed. The sale, he reminded Ned, was final.
This latest disappointment rekindled Ned’s uneasiness about Holmes and Julia. He began to suspect that his friends might indeed be correct in believing that Holmes and Julia were engaged in an illicit affair. It would explain the change in Julia, certainly, and might even explain Holmes’s sale of the pharmacy—an unstated trade: the store in exchange for Julia.
Ned did not yet confront Julia with his suspicions. He told her simply that if her behavior toward him did not change, if her coldness and hostility continued, he and she would have to separate.
She snapped, “Separation couldn’t come too soon to suit me.”
But they remained together a short while longer. Their battles became more frequent. Finally Ned shouted that he was done, the marriage was over. He spent the night in the barbershop on the first floor, directly below their apartment. He heard her footsteps as she moved about on the floor above.
The next morning he told Holmes he was leaving and would abandon his interest in the store. When Holmes urged him to reconsider, Ned merely laughed. He moved out and took a new job with a jewelry store in downtown Chicago, H. Purdy & Co. Pearl remained with Julia and Holmes.
Ned made one more attempt to win back his wife. “I told her after I left the building that if she would return to me and stop her quarreling we would live together again, but she refused to come back.”
Ned vowed that one day he would return for Pearl. Soon he left Chicago and moved to Gilman, Illinois, where he met a young woman and began a formal courtship, which compelled him to visit Holmes’s building one more time, to seek a divorce decree. He got it but failed to gain custody of Pearl.
With Ned gone and the divorce final, Holmes’s interest in Julia began to dissipate. He had promised her repeatedly that he would marry her once the decree was confirmed, but now he found the prospect repulsive. Pearl’s sullen, accusing presence had become especially unappealing.
At night, after the first-floor stores had closed and Julia and Pearl and the building’s other tenants were asleep, he sometimes would descend to the basement, careful to lock the door behind him, and there ignite the flames of his kiln and marvel at its extraordinary heat.
Vexed
BURNHAM SAW HIS FAMILY RARELY now. By the spring of 1891 he was living full time in the shanty at Jackson Park; Margaret stayed in Evanston with a few servants who helped her care for their five children. Only a modest train ride separated the Burnhams, but the mounting demands of the fair made that distance as difficult to span as the Isthmus of Panama. Burnham could send telegrams, but they forced a cold and clumsy brevity and afforded little privacy. So Burnham wrote letters, and wrote them often. “You must not think this hurry of my life will last forever,” he wrote in one letter. “I shall stop after the World’s Fair. I have made up my mind to this.” The exposition had become a “hurricane,” he said. “To be done with this flurry is my strongest wish.”
Every dawn he left his quarters and inspected the grounds. Six steam-powered dredges the size of floating barns gnawed at the lakeshore, as five thousand men with shovels and wheelbarrows and horse-drawn graders slowly scraped the landscape raw, many of the men wearing bowlers and suitcoats as if they just happened to be passing by and on impulse chose to pitch in. Despite the presence of so many workers, there was a maddening lack of noise and bustle. The park was too big, the men too spread out, to deliver any immediate sense of work being done. The only reliable signs were the black plumes of smoke from the dredges and the ever-present scent of burning leaves from slash piles set aflame by workers. The brilliant white stakes that marked the perimeters of buildings imparted to the land the look of a Civil War burial ground. Burnham did find beauty in the rawness—“Among the trees of the Wooded Island the long white tents of the contractor’s camp gleamed in the sun, a soft, white note in the dun-colored landscape, and the pure blue line of the lake horizon made a cheerful contrast to the rugged and barren foreground”—but he also found deep frustration.
The work advanced slowly, impeded by the worsening relationship between the fair’s two ruling bodies, the National Commission and the Exposition Company, and by the architects’ failure to get their drawings to Chicago on time. All the drawings were late. Equally aggravating was the fact that there still was no Eiffel challenger. Moreover, the exposition had entered that precarious early phase common to every great construction project when unexpected obstacles suddenly emerge.
Burnham knew how to deal with Chicago’s notoriously flimsy soil, but Jackson Park surprised even him.
Initially the bearing capacity of its ground was “practically an unknown quality,” as one engineer put it. In March 1891 Burnham ordered tests to gauge how well the soil would support the grand palaces then on the architects’ drafting tables. Of special concern was the fact that the buildings would be sited adjacent to newly dug canals and lagoons. As any engineer knew, soil under pressure tended to shift to fill adjacent excavations. The fair’s engineers conducted the first test twelve feet from the lagoon on ground intended to support the northeast corner of the Electricity Building. They laid a platform four feet square and loaded it with iron to a pressure of 2,750 pounds per square foot, twenty-two tons in all. They left it in place for fifteen days and found that it settled only one-quarter of an inch. Next they dug a deep trench four feet from the platform. Over the next two days the platform sank another eighth of an inch but no farther. This was good news. It meant that Burnham could use Root’s floating grillage for foundations without having to worry about catastrophic settlement.
To make sure these properties were constant throughout the park, Burnham had his chief engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, test locations earmarked for other buildings. The tests yielded similar results—until Gottlieb’s men came to the site intended for George Post’s gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. The soil destined to support the northern half of the building showed total settlement of less than one inch, consistent with the rest of the park. At the southern end of the site, however, the men made a disheartening discovery. Even as workers loaded the platform, it sank eight inches. Over the next four days it settled thirty inches more, and would have continued sinking if the engineers had not simply called off the test.
Of course: Nearly all the soil of Jackson Park was competent to support floating foundations except the one portion destined to bear the fair’s biggest and heaviest building. Here, Burnham realized, contractors would have to drive piles at least down to hard-pan, an expensive complication and a source of additional delay.
The problems with this building, however, had only just begun.
In April 1891 Chicago learned the results of the latest mayoral election. In the city’s richest clubs, industrialists gathered to toast the fact that Carter Henry Harrison, whom they viewed as overly sympathetic to organized labor, had lost to Hempstead Washburne, a Republican. Burnham, too, allowed himself a moment of celebration. To him, Harrison represented the old Chicago of filth, smoke, and vice, everything the fair was designed to repudiate.
The celebrations were tempered, h
owever, by the fact that Harrison had lost by the narrowest of margins, fewer than four thousand votes. What’s more, he had achieved this near-victory without the support of a major party. Shunned by the Democrats, he had run as an independent.
Elsewhere in the city, Patrick Prendergast grieved. Harrison was his hero, his hope. The margin was so narrow, however, that he believed that if Harrison ran again, he would win. Prendergast resolved to double his own efforts to help Harrison succeed.
In Jackson Park Burnham faced repeated interruptions stemming from his de facto role as ambassador to the outside world, charged with cultivating goodwill and future attendance. Mostly these banquets, talks, and tours were time-squandering annoyances, as in June 1891 when, at the request of Director-General Davis, Burnham hosted a visit to Jackson Park by a battalion of foreign dignitaries that consumed two full days. Others were purely a pleasure. A few weeks earlier Thomas Edison, known widely as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” had paid a visit to Burnham’s shanty. Burnham showed him around. Edison suggested the exposition use incandescent bulbs rather than arc lights, because the incandescent variety produced a softer light. Where arc lights could not be avoided, he said, they should be covered with white globes. And of course Edison urged the fair to use direct current, DC, the prevailing standard.
The civility of this encounter belied a caustic battle being waged outside Jackson Park for the rights to illuminate the exposition. On one side was General Electric Company, which had been created when J. P. Morgan took over Edison’s company and merged it with several others and which now proposed to install a direct current system to light the fair. On the other side was Westinghouse Electric Company, with a bid to wire Jackson Park for alternating current, using patents that its founder, George Westinghouse, had acquired a few years earlier from Nikola Tesla.