“Officials will be guilty of criminal neglect if anything occurs. They haven’t a leg to stand on in the way of excuse. This matter was laid before them six months ago and they have done nothing as of yet.”
Not being a member of the fire committee, Alderman Sullivan was free to rant and rail at the shameful lack of responsibility displayed by his colleagues. He assailed the aldermen for their holding out the hope that some of the exhibitors of fire apparatus themselves would provide the steamers free of charge, as had been done at Chicago, or that some unused apparatus might be rigged up for the purpose.
Fingy Conners’ cohort, Alderman Kennedy, defended the committee’s actions.
“They are a private enterprise and have a large amount of money,” Kennedy said. “Why should the city go into debt to provide them with fire protection? It strikes me this question should not be considered too hastily.”
At the same moment that Kennedy was justifying his months of stonewalling, forty-five railroad cars loaded with material for the mammoth Electric Tower, the iconic main feature of the exposition, were chugging slowly on their way into the grounds proper, adding to the consternation and urgency of protecting this major undertaking.
Meanwhile, a scheme was being authorized by the Exposition’s Department of Publicity to throw pictures upward upon heaven’s canopy over Atlantic City, where the legend “Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo 1901” would be seen beckoning from the clouds above throughout the entire summer and autumn of 1900. A contract with the Searchlight Publicity Company was signed to perform this feat as well as to project artists’ renderings of the exposition via lantern slides by means of a huge searchlight onto clouds in the summer resort was readied. Nothing was said of the interruptions sure to be caused by an uncooperative sky.
Throughout Buffalo, scammers were out in full force working their schemes on the unsuspecting public. Two well-dressed young men claiming to be officials of the Pan-American Exposition Company representing the Bureau Of Public Comfort were making the rounds in the appropriate neighborhoods offering, for the trifling sum of $2, to put boarding houses on an official list which will be put in the hands of Pan-American visitors looking for boarding-houses.
Their suspicions aroused, Mrs. Elizabeth Brainerd and Miss Mary McCabe, proprietors of a boarding house at the corner of Hudson Street and Orton Place, summoned the police. Officers stood with the lady proprietors on the rounded front porch beneath a quaint turreted tower as they told the tale.
“These young men were very suave and very smooth in their manner,” Brainerd said. “They informed us that we could not afford to lose the chance of having our house included on the official Pan-American Exposition boarding house list. They promised they would crowd our house for us during the Pan year if we would give up $2 now. They gave references from the Exposition Company as to their integrity. But I do not prove so easy, no. I told them I would look into the matter, and did not give them any money.”
Mrs. Dora Crandall, who keeps a large boarding house at 310 Franklin Street, paid $2 and happened to tell of her investment to one of her boarders, Frank A. Converse, chief of the Pan-American Exposition’s Department of Livestock and Agriculture. Converse informed his landlady that she had probably been fleeced, as the exposition company employed no official canvassers. Mrs. Crandall told the police that one of the men wore duck trousers, a blue serge coat and a straw hat, while the other was fashionably dressed as well in a brown suit and a fedora hat.
Throngs of sightseers descended daily upon the vast Exposition site to monitor the construction progress for themselves. Chief among them were citizen-shareholders keeping an eye on their investment. On the second Sunday in July hundreds of carriages were driven through the grounds on Amherst Street and no fewer than one hundred persons journeyed through the grounds in automobiles. People came on foot by the thousands, on bicycles, and even pushing baby carriages. Chaos was created when the crowds interfered with the movements of rail cars, drays and laborers rushing to make headway on the construction. The logistics thus far involved in digging lakes, lagoons and a canal system for accommodating gondolas on the property were daunting, and coordinating that muddy construction with the transporting of the vast amount of building materials was an arduous and complicated feat.
If as many people were to flock to the Pan-American in one day as visitors to the grounds did during this time of construction, then its success would certainly be assured.
For many weeks there had been a growing call to close the grounds to visitors and curiosity-seekers. What had been for months a vast field of mud had by mid-July dried and hardened in the midsummer sun and heat. Great clouds of dust stirred up from the incessant traffic. Smoking was strictly prohibited but both visitors and workers balked at the idea of not partaking in this particular addiction.
“No Smoking” appeared in gigantic letters at the entrance and throughout the entire grounds at every turn, but one did not have to venture far to see it disregarded by those in carriages as well as those on foot. Visitors squatted along the edges of the massive wooden framework of the largest buildings, some being so bold as to picnic in the interiors, smoking all the while.
The wisdom of the campaign to close the grounds to the uncooperative public having been confirmed with their own eyes, the Board of Public Works rushed in to furnish seventy eight hydrants with direct pressure, and to install a Snow pump in place at the adjoining power house, much to the relief of Captain Riley of the Exposition firehouse. Another firehouse on the opposite end of the grounds was being rushed to completion.
“These problems with careless behavior on the part of hundreds of people on any given day have caused the officials to decide to close the grounds to the public within the next few weeks,” stated Riley in the Commercial.
”The reason is obvious,” added Director of Works Mr. Carllton. “The people are getting in our way and it greatly increases the fire hazard. We are delighted to have the public with us, of course, but must look out for the safety of the buildings as well as our workmen. One shudders to think of what might happen from one lighted stub carelessly tossed aside.”
Concessionaires were brought to fury by this proposal since great sums were being earned by the sale of food and drink as well as souvenirs to the army of looky-loos.
“As to the fire risks,” they attempted to reason, “the exposition might better hire fifty extra policemen than to deprive itself of the cheap but effective advertising it is getting by admitting visitors. Everyone visiting the city makes a point of coming to view the progress on the grounds, and then departs to spread the news far and wide of its coming magnificence wherever they go. Such a policy will prove costly in the long run.”
Fingy Conners’ Buffalo Enquirer wrote, “The general opinion among the Exposition officials is that the Exposition is running too much of a risk in allowing multitudes to wander at will among the half-completed structures with their attendant debris, wherein the omnipresent idiot with his never-failing cigarette stub could start a blaze at the drop of an ash. An admission charge of ten or fifteen cents would exclude most of the young and rough element. People best positioned to do the Exposition good would not be kept out by the charge of a few cents.”
Conners’ other newspaper, the Buffalo Courier, argued that no amount of hired police could harness the 20,000 visitors who had overwhelmed the grounds just the previous Sunday, and too supported the plan to charge admission.
”For the time being, the Exposition grounds must be closed to the public to protect the unprotected structures. Then, after sufficient progress is made on constructing the exposition, admission tickets to tour the exposition grounds will then be sold, as has been the case with all the great expositions.”
The Buffalo exposition’s grand plan varied most significantly from the 1893 “White City” at Chicago by its color scheme of parti-colored effects in harmony with the Spanish-Renaissance style, but presently, 10 months before opening, little of that scheme coul
d be recognized by even the most imaginative of observers. On the other hand much progress indeed had been made as to the ornamentation of the grounds with flowers, shrubs and trees, the landscaping being much further along than the progress on the construction of the buildings.
Steel girders for the Electric Tower littered the ground around its stone base, readied for the Passaic Rolling Mill Company’s assembly.
The tower would rise to an imposing 36 stories, and it was estimated that workers would require 45 days to complete the iron framework. The girders required for the Electric Tower and the various bridges crossing the canals were delivered via the web of temporary railroad tracks laid throughout the grounds.
The frames of the huge Machinery and Transportation Building were already covered in sheathing and stucco. The pumps and boilers were being placed in the power building which had been completed two weeks previous and coating was being applied.
The tons of crushed stone covering the bottoms of the canals and the Court of Fountains was already laid. Visitors poured through the gates virtually unchecked, getting in the way of the workmen, obstructing progress, filing complaints, throwing their trash around, losing their children, stealing souvenirs and building materials, falling into the canals, defecating anywhere they found convenient, vandalizing and pulling pranks, smoking then tossing their lighted stubs in any direction without thought as to the consequence, and endangering themselves and all others daily.
Ground was broken on the Midway for the building serving as the landing dock of the airship Lunette, scheduled to make its initial trip to the moon on the opening day of the exposition. It was destined to be the largest and highest attraction on the Midway at 40,000 square feet. There was no lack of features planned for the Midway. The current 1900 Paris Exposition was proving so poor an investment for concessionaires that many were looking to America and Buffalo to get their money back in 1901. Over 30 Midway features at Paris had already closed shop because of the disappointing numbers of visitors. It proved a great expense to keep them open, especially with no prospect of any returns.
The work of building the Exposition Stadium was already well underway before any serious thought was ever given to exactly what use it might be put, increasingly giving the impression that the Exposition Company had a very costly white elephant on its hands. Time was when it was announced with a blare of trumpets that the Stadium would outdo the Coliseum of Rome in every feature, notably with regard to architecture and seating capacity. It was said that great competitive games in which all of the world’s greatest athletes would participate would be an unrivaled feature of the Pan. A committee on sports was appointed quite some time back, but the most rigid of research on the part of the newspapers had yet failed to unearth anything in the shape of progress accomplished by them. The expense of building the stadium was so large that a daily profit of $2,000 was required in order to pay for it. Even the most optimistic of exposition officials declared there was no hope of getting anything like this sum out of the venue, and kicks were being made to halt its construction. It was then that the plans were amended to reduce its size and glory. All this would have been very well if only someone with the imagination of a Chinese Director of Telegraphs could point out any use for the building once it was completed. It seemed destined to be idly passed by as a monument to some misguided contractor in air castles. The grand plans proposed for an unprecedented international athletic carnival that Stadium boosters called “The Second Coming of the Greek Olympiad” fizzled finally, thanks to the Exposition Athletic Committee’s being hobbled by inertia.
The best idea put forward to salvage the debacle was to bring in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show for the entire run of the exposition. This plan had the Midway concessionaires in a full fury of protestations at the temerity of officials in proposing to allow Col. Cody to encroach upon their territory, which they were paying for at the rate of $25 a foot.
At the end of July a deputation from Buffalo interviewed the Ontario government at Toronto and strongly urged the Canadians to at least send over to the exposition an agricultural, mining and timber exhibit, but the committee received little encouragement. The Canadians had no interest in participating, they said, but gave no reason. With virtually every country in the Western Hemisphere exhibiting at the Exposition—many erecting their own stand-alone buildings—it was a mystery how the largest country on this half of the planet had declined to even mount an exhibit in one of the theme buildings.
In an interview with a newsman from the Enquirer, Alderman Sullivan said, “If a country as poor as Chile can construct its own building to boast of its grand history, its unique wares, the exotic produce of its agriculture and all other accomplishments, how is it then that Canada fails to see the great potential of this Exposition?”
Mea Culpa
Mary Jordan Conners sat on the pearlescent pale blue and cream fleur-de-lys silk damask that covered her 18th Century French settee paging through the latest issue of Vogue. She was in her bedroom, the private boudoir that she did not share with her husband. It overlooked the large carriage house that their two remaining horses shared with the new automobiles. The corner bedroom overlooking West Ferry Street was larger and brighter, and had a beautiful semi-circular balcony, but the noise from the trolleys and the legions of Exposition people who were forever coming and going for meetings with Milburn in his mansion across the street had driven her to distraction. Peace and quiet in which to forge her schemes were more precious to her than square footage.
When Fingy needed to occasionally satisfy himself with her they did so in his room, on the sturdy oak four poster bed that he insisted be covered with his woolen blankets collected from western Indian tribes and the Pendleton Mills in Oregon.
The Indian blankets smelled of goat.
It was bad enough to have the man on top of her drilling away, but to have her naked hindquarters rubbed raw by Indian blankets during the height of Fingy’s impressive passions was the very height of barbarism, taking place as it did by means of such a primitive act, she told herself. She didn’t ever want him to know that at times, once in a while, during the height of her passion, she adored it.
It was a fine French dress fabric that she insisted be used to upholster the settee. The interior decorator told her point-blank that for a piece of furniture there were more durable options, other choices just as beautiful that would better stand up to the challenge imposed by her big well-fed rear end.
She laughed.
No one she’d ever known since her own father, especially these days, ever spoke so crudely and familiarly without regard for who she was or what she or anyone else thought about them. The fancy Monsieur Jean-Marie Lorrain was handsome, crude and wicked, and she loved that about him almost as much as she did his unerring eye for beauty and style.
Lorrain had apprenticed with Monsieur St. Ody, who in the 1860s up until his death had decorated all the best mansions of Buffalo’s wealthy families. M. St. Ody was best remembered and widely praised for so well and quickly conjuring a beautifully serene resting place for the body of the beloved President Lincoln when his corpse arrived in Buffalo for his funeral. Now it was Monsieur Lorrain who was intimately familiar with the interiors of all the finest society households, as well as other delicious secrets hidden from view behind ponderous velvet drapes and massive oak armoires.
The sun was shining even though it was freezing out, so sitting in its rays as they poured though the double-paned glass in her boudoir allowed Mary Conners to close her eyes and imagine that it was summer. That precious season was still so very far off yet. This was a city where the sun’s rays might not emerge from behind the clouds for an entire month or longer in winter, and when it did venture out, fully half of its beneficial countenance would be stolen away before it ever reached the ground by the thick cloud of coal soot that hung perpetually over the city.
The maid balanced the tray unsteadily as she knocked.
“Entrez-vous,” allowed
Mary Conners, as lunch was brought in and carefully set up for her expected visitor.
Hannah Sullivan was extremely suspicious upon receipt of a solicitation from Mary Jordan Conners, inviting her to the Delaware Ave. mansion for luncheon. Hannah had initially demurred, immediately leery of the woman’s motives. Despite their speaking together over a telephone, Mary had picked up on Hannah’s hesitation.
“I need to apologize to you, Mrs. Sullivan, face to face, and I feel that the only fitting and respectful way for me to go about this properly is if you’ll agree to grace me with your presence for tea at our beautiful home.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Conners. But that won’t be at all necessary. My Jim told me that he stood right there in your doorway as Fingy ordered you to apologize to me—or else. So we can just do away with the window-dressing and consider this telephone conversation to be such as it is.”
Hannah Sullivan’s intellect was not always an effective counter to such predatory, persistent and manipulative machinations as those so sharply practiced by the likes of Mary Jordan Conners.
There was silence on her part over the telephone for a moment. The surprised Mary Conners had assumed that the First Ward trash she routinely referred to as “that shanty-Irish old washerwoman” behind her back would jump at such a rare social opportunity.
She viewed Hannah Sullivan as being a woman defeated by life. Mary Conners was not introspective enough to understand that this opinion was simply her own invention. How could someone endure so much, yet keep going on? she had thought. How else could a plain woman, the wife of an oft-absent policeman and the failed mother to four poor dead children possibly feel anything other than perpetually defeated and inferior?
Fingy Conners & The New Century Page 17