by Erik Larson
Although such interior exhibits were compelling, the earliest visitors to Jackson Park saw immediately that the fair’s greatest power lay in the strange gravity of the buildings themselves. The Court of Honor produced an effect of majesty and beauty that was far greater than even the dream conjured in the Rookery library. Some visitors found themselves so moved by the Court of Honor that immediately upon entering they began to weep.
No single element accounted for this phenomenon. Each building was huge to begin with, but the impression of mass was amplified by the fact that all the buildings were neoclassical in design, all had cornices set at the same height, all had been painted the same soft white, and all were so shockingly, beautifully unlike anything the majority of visitors ever had seen in their own dusty hometowns. “No other scene of man’s creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honor,” wrote James Fullerton Muirhead, an author and guidebook editor. The court, he wrote, “was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.” Edgar Lee Masters, Chicago attorney and emerging poet, called the Court “an inexhaustible dream of beauty.”
The shared color, or more accurately the shared absence of color, produced an especially alluring range of effects as the sun traveled the sky. In the early morning, when Burnham conducted his inspections, the buildings were a pale blue and seemed to float on a ghostly cushion of ground mist. Each evening the sun colored the buildings ochre and lit the motes of dust raised by the breeze until the air itself became a soft orange veil.
One such evening Burnham led a tour of the fair aboard an electric launch for a group that included John Root’s widow, Dora, and a number of foreign emissaries. Burnham loved escorting friends and dignitaries through the grounds but sought always to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, with the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order, as if he were still back in his library showing drawings instead of real structures. He had tried to impose his aesthetic will on all the fair’s visitors by insisting during the first year of planning that the number of entrances to Jackson Park be limited to a few and that these be situated so that people had to enter first through the Court of Honor, either through a large portal at the rail station on the west side of the park or an entry on the east from the exposition wharf. His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within. He did not get his way. The directors insisted on many gates, and the railroads refused to channel their exposition traffic through a single depot. Burnham never quite surrendered. Throughout the fair, he said, “we insisted on sending our own guests whose opinions we specially valued into the Grand Court first.”
The electric launch carrying Burnham, Dora Root, and the foreign dignitaries cut silently through the lagoon, scattering the white city reflected upon its surface. The setting sun gilded the terraces on the east bank but cast the west bank into dark blue shadow. Women in dresses of crimson and aquamarine walked slowly along the embankments. Voices drifted across the water, laced now and then with laughter that rang like crystal touched in a toast.
The next day, after what surely had been a difficult night, Dora Root wrote to Burnham to thank him for the tour and to attempt to convey the complexity of her feelings.
“Our hour on the lagoon last evening proved the crown of a charming day,” she wrote. “Indeed I fear we would have lingered on indefinitely had not our foreign friends prepared a more highly spiced entertainment. I think I should never willingly cease drifting in that dreamland.” The scenes elicited conflicting emotions. “I find it all infinitely sad,” she wrote, “but at the same time so entrancing, that I often feel as if it would be the part of wisdom to fly at once to the woods or mountains where one can always find peace. There is much I long to say to you about your work of the past two years—which has brought about this superb realization of John’s vision of beauty—but I cannot trust myself. It means too much to me and I think, I hope, you understand. For years his hopes and ambitions were mine, and in spite of my efforts the old interests still go on. It is a relief to me to write this. I trust you will not mind.”
If evenings at the fair were seductive, the nights were ravishing. The lamps that laced every building and walkway produced the most elaborate demonstration of electric illumination ever attempted and the first large-scale test of alternating current. The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago. These were important engineering milestones, but what visitors adored was the sheer beauty of seeing so many lights ignited in one place, at one time. Every building, including the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, was outlined in white bulbs. Giant searchlights—the largest ever made and said to be visible sixty miles away—had been mounted on the Manufactures’ roof and swept the grounds and surrounding neighborhoods. Large colored bulbs lit the hundred-foot plumes of water that burst from the MacMonnies Fountain.
For many visitors these nightly illuminations were their first encounter with electricity. Hilda Satt, a girl newly arrived from Poland, went to the fair with her father. “As the light was fading in the sky, millions of lights were suddenly flashed on, all at one time,” she recalled, years later. “Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven.”
Her father told her the lights were activated by electric switches.
“Without matches?” she asked.
Between the lights and the ever-present blue ghosts of the Columbian Guard, the fair achieved another milestone: For the first time Chicagoans could stroll at night in perfect safety. This alone began to draw an increased number of visitors, especially young couples locked in the rictus of Victorian courtship and needful of quiet dark places.
At night the lights and the infilling darkness served to mask the exposition’s many flaws—among them, wrote John Ingalls in Cosmopolitan, the “unspeakable debris of innumerable luncheons”—and to create for a few hours the perfect city of Daniel Burnham’s dreams.
“Night,” Ingalls wrote, “is the magician of the fair.”
The early visitors returned to their homes and reported to friends and family that the fair, though incomplete, was far grander and more powerful than they had been led to expect. Montgomery Schuyler, the leading architectural critic of Burnham’s day, wrote, “It was a common remark among visitors who saw the Fair for the first time that nothing they had read or seen pictured had given them an idea of it, or prepared them for what they saw.” Reporters from far-flung cities wired the same observation back to their editors, and stories of delight and awe began to percolate through the most remote towns. In fields, dells, and hollows, families terrified by what they read in the papers each day about the collapsing national economy nonetheless now began to think about Chicago. The trip would be expensive, but it was starting to look more and more worthwhile. Even necessary.
If only Mr. Ferris would get busy and finish that big wheel.
Modus Operandi
AND SO IT BEGAN. A waitress disappeared from Holmes’s restaurant, where his guests ate their meals. One day she was at work, the next gone, with no clear explanation for her abrupt departure. Holmes seemed as stumped as anyone. A stenographer named Jennie Thompson disappeared, as did a woman named Evelyn Stewart, who either worked for Holmes or merely stayed in his hotel as a guest. A male physician who for a time had rented an office in the castle and who had befriended Holmes—they were seen together often—also had decamped, with no word to anyone.
Within the hotel chemical odors ebbed and flowed like an atmospheric tide. Some days the halls were suffused with a caustic scent, as of a cleanser applied too liberally, other days with a silvery medicinal odor, as if a dentist were at work some
where in the building easing a customer into a deep sleep. There seemed to be a problem with the gas lines that fed the building, for periodically the scent of uncombusted gas permeated the halls.
There were inquiries from family and friends. As always Holmes was sympathetic and helpful. The police still did not become involved. Apparently there was too much else for them to do, as wealthy visitors and foreign dignitaries began arriving in ever-greater numbers, shadowed by a swarm of pickpockets, thugs, and petty swindlers.
Holmes did not kill face to face, as Jack the Ripper had done, gorging himself on warmth and viscera, but he did like proximity. He liked being near enough to hear the approach of death in the rising panic of his victims. This was when his quest for possession entered its most satisfying phase. The vault deadened most of the cries and pounding but not all. When the hotel was full of guests, he settled for more silent means. He filled a room with gas and let the guest expire in her sleep, or he crept in with his passkey and pressed a chloroform-soaked rag to her face. The choice was his, a measure of his power.
No matter what the approach, the act always left him in possession of a fresh supply of material, which he could then explore at will.
The subsequent articulation by his very talented friend Chappell constituted the final phase of acquisition, the triumphal phase, though he used Chappell’s services only sparingly. He disposed of other spent material in his kiln or in pits filled with quicklime. He dared not keep Chappell’s frames for too long a time. Early on he had made it a rule not to retain trophies. The possession he craved was a transient thing, like the scent of a fresh-cut hyacinth. Once it was gone, only another acquisition could restore it.
One Good Turn
IN THE FIRST WEEK of June 1893 Ferris’s men began prying the last timbers and planks from the falsework that had encased and supported the big wheel during its assembly. The rim arced through the sky at a height of 264 feet, as high as the topmost occupied floor in Burnham’s Masonic Temple, the city’s tallest skyscraper. None of the thirty-six cars had been hung—they stood on the ground like the coaches of a derailed train—but the wheel itself was ready for its first rotation. Standing by itself, unbraced, Ferris’s wheel looked dangerously fragile. “It is impossible for the non-mechanical mind to understand how such a Brobdingnag continues to keep itself erect,” wrote Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel; “it has no visible means of support—none that appear adequate. The spokes look like cobwebs; they are after the fashion of those on the newest make of bicycles.”
On Thursday, June 8, Luther Rice signaled the firemen at the big steam boilers seven hundred feet away on Lexington Avenue, outside the Midway, to build steam and fill the ten-inch underground mains. Once the boilers reached suitable pressure, Rice nodded to an engineer in the pit under the wheel, and steam whooshed into the pistons of its twin thousand-horsepower engines. The drive sprockets turned smoothly and quietly. Rice ordered the engine stopped. Next workers attached the ten-ton chain to the sprockets and to a receiving sprocket at the wheel. Rice sent a telegram to Ferris at his office in the Hamilton Building in Pittsburgh: “Engines have steam on and are working satisfactorily. Sprocket chain connected up and are ready to turn wheel.”
Ferris was unable to go to Chicago himself but sent his partner W. F. Gronau to supervise the first turn. In the early morning of Friday, June 9, as his train passed through the South Side, Gronau saw how the great wheel towered over everything in its vicinity, just as Eiffel’s creation did in Paris. The exclamations of fellow passengers as to the wheel’s size and apparent fragility filled him with a mixture of pride and anxiety. Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham’s pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower.
Last-minute adjustments and inspections took up most of Friday, but just before dusk Rice told Gronau that everything appeared to be ready.
“I did not trust myself to speak,” Gronau said, “so merely nodded to start.” He was anxious to see if the wheel worked, but at the same time “would gladly have assented to postpone the trial.”
Nothing remained but to admit steam and see what happened. Never had anyone built such a gigantic wheel. That it would turn without crushing its bearings and rotate smoothly and true were engineering hopes supported only by calculations that reflected known qualities of iron and steel. No structure ever had been subjected to the unique stresses that would come to bear upon and within the wheel once in motion.
Ferris’s pretty wife, Margaret, stood nearby, flushed with excitement. Gronau believed she was experiencing the same magnitude of mental strain as he.
“Suddenly I was aroused from these thoughts by a most horrible noise,” he said. A growl tore through the sky and caused everyone in the vicinity—the Algerians of Bloom’s village, the Egyptians and Persians and every visitor within one hundred yards—to halt and stare at the wheel.
“Looking up,” Gronau said, “I saw the wheel move slowly. What can be the matter! What is this horrible noise!”
Gronau ran to Rice, who stood in the engine pit monitoring pressures and the play of shafts and shunts. Gronau expected to see Rice hurriedly trying to shut down the engine, but Rice looked unconcerned.
Rice explained that he had merely tested the wheel’s braking system, which consisted of a band of steel wrapped around the axle. The test alone had caused the wheel to move one eighth of its circumference. The noise, Rice said, was only the sound of rust being scraped off the band.
The engineer in the pit released the brake and engaged the drive gears. The sprockets began to turn, the chain to advance.
By now many of the Algerians, Egyptians, and Persians—possibly even a few belly dancers—had gathered on the wheel’s loading platforms, which were staged like steps so that once the wheel opened six cars could be loaded at a time. Everyone was silent.
As the wheel began to turn, loose nuts and bolts and a couple of wrenches rained from its hub and spokes. The wheel had consumed 28,416 pounds of bolts in its assembly; someone was bound to forget something.
Unmindful of this steel downpour, the villagers cheered and began dancing on the platforms. Some played instruments. The workmen who had risked their lives building the wheel now risked them again and climbed aboard the moving frame. “No carriages were as yet placed in position,” Gronau said, “but this did not deter the men, for they clambered among the spokes and sat upon the crown of the wheel as easy as I am sitting in this chair.”
The wheel needed twenty minutes for a single revolution. Only when it had completed its first full turn did Gronau feel the test had been successful, at which point he said, “I could have yelled out loud for joy.”
Mrs. Ferris shook his hand. The crowd cheered. Rice telegraphed Ferris, who had been waiting all day for word of the test, his anxiety rising with each hour. The Pittsburgh office of Western Union received the cable at 9:10 P.M., and a blue-suited messenger raced through the cool spring night to bring it to Ferris. Rice had written: “The last coupling and final adjustment was made and steam turned on at six o’clock this evening one complete revolution of the big wheel was made everything working satisfactory twenty minutes time was taken for the revolution—I congratulate you upon it complete success midway is wildly enthusiastic.”
The next day, Saturday, June 10, Ferris cabled Rice, “Your telegram stating that first revolution of wheel had been made last night at six o’clock and that same was successful in every way has caused great joy in this entire camp. I wish to congratulate you in all respects in this matter and ask that you rush the putting in of cars working day and night—if you can’t put the cars in at night, babbitt the car bearings at night so as to keep ahead.” By “babbitt” he no doubt meant that Rice should install the metal casings in which the bearings were to sit.
The wheel had worked, but Ferris, Gronau, and Rice all knew that far more important tests lay ahead. Beginning that Saturday workers would begin hanging cars, thus placing upon the wheel its first serious st
resses. Each of the thirty-six cars weighed thirteen tons, for a total of just under one million pounds. And that did not include the 200,000 pounds of additional live load that would be added as passengers filled the cars.
On Saturday, soon after receiving Ferris’s congratulatory telegram, Rice cabled back that in fact the first car already had been hung.
Beyond Jackson Park the first turn of Ferris’s wheel drew surprisingly little attention. The city, especially its frappé set, had focused its interest on another event unfolding in Jackson Park—the first visit by Spain’s official emissary to the fair, the Infanta Eulalia, the youngest sister of Spain’s dead King Alfonso XII and daughter of exiled Queen Isabel II.
The visit wasn’t going very well.
The infanta was twenty-nine and, in the words of a State Department official, “rather handsome, graceful and bright.” She had arrived two days earlier by train from New York, been transported immediately to the Palmer House, and lodged there in its most lavish suite. Chicago’s boosters saw her visit as the first real opportunity to demonstrate the city’s new refinement and to prove to the world, or at least to New York, that Chicago was as adept at receiving royalty as it was at turning pig bristles into paintbrushes. The first warning that things might not go as planned should perhaps have been evident in a wire-service report cabled from New York alerting the nation to the scandalous news that the young woman smoked cigarettes.