The Devil in the White City (11 page)

The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the
Tribune
offered a six-room house for sale at Forty-first and Ellis, a mile or so north of Jackson Park, and boasted that during the fair the new owner could expect to let four of the six rooms for nearly a thousand dollars a month (about $30,000 in twenty-first-century currency). Holmes’s building and land were valuable to begin with, given Englewood’s continued growth, but now his property seemed the equivalent of a seam of gold ore.

An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.

Pilgrimage

O
N
M
ONDAY EVENING,
D
ECEMBER
15, 1890, a day noteworthy in Chicago for its extraordinary warmth and elsewhere for the gunshot death of Sitting Bull, Daniel Burnham stepped aboard a train bound for New York and what he knew would be the most crucial encounter of the exposition odyssey.

He entered a bright green coach, one of George Pullman’s Palace cars, where the air hung with the stillness of a heavy tapestry. A bell clanged and continued clanging in a swinging rhythm as the train surged at grade level into the heart of the city at twenty miles an hour, despite the presence at arm’s reach of grip-cars, carriages, and pedestrians. Everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leaped past crossing gates waving a raccoon’s tail of white and black smoke. The train clicked by the Union Stock Yards, doubly pungent in the day’s strange warmth, and skirted sierras of black coal capped with grimy melting snow. Burnham treasured beauty but saw none for miles and miles and miles, just coal, rust, and smoke in endless repetition until the train entered the prairie and everything seemed to go quiet. Darkness fell, leaving a false twilight of old snow.

The exposition directors’ decision on where to locate the fair had caused a rapid acceleration of events that was encouraging but also unsettling, because suddenly the whole thing had become more real, its true magnitude more daunting. Immediately the directors had ordered a rough plan of the fair, to be delivered to them within twenty-four hours. John Root, guided by Burnham and Olmsted, had produced a drawing on a sheet of brown paper measuring forty square feet, which the men delivered to the committee with a barbed aside to the effect that the designers of the Paris exposition had been able to spend a whole year thinking, planning, and sketching before reaching the same point. The drawing envisioned a mile-square plain on the lakeshore sculpted by dredges into a wonderland of lagoons and canals. Ultimately, the designers knew, the exposition would have hundreds of buildings, including one for each state of the union and for many countries and industries, but on the drawing they sketched only the most important, among them five immense palaces sited around a central Grand Court. They also made room for a tower to be built at one end of the court, although no one knew exactly who would build this tower or what it would look like, only that it would have to surpass Eiffel’s tower in every way. The directors and their federal overseers, the National Commission, approved the plan with uncharacteristic speed.

For outsiders, it was the sheer size of the exposition that made it seem such an impossible challenge. That the fair’s grounds would be vast and its buildings colossal was something every Chicago resident took for granted; what mystified them was how anyone could expect to build the biggest thing ever constructed on American soil, far bigger than Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, in so little time. Burnham knew, however, that the fair’s size was just one element of the challenge. The gross features of the fair envisioned in the plan concealed a billion smaller obstacles that the public and most of the exposition’s own directors had no idea existed. Burnham would have to build a railroad within the fairgrounds to transport steel, stone, and lumber to each construction site. He would have to manage the delivery of supplies, goods, mail, and all exhibit articles sent to the grounds by transcontinental shipping companies, foremost among them the Adams Express Company. He would need a police force and a fire department, a hospital and an ambulance service. And there would be horses, thousands of them—something would have to be done about the tons of manure generated each day.

Immediately after the brown-paper plan received approval, Burnham requested authority to build “at once cheap wooden quarters in Jackson Park for myself and force,” quarters in which he would live almost continuously for the next three years. This lodging quickly became known as “the shanty,” though it had a large fireplace and an excellent wine cellar stocked by Burnham himself. With a power of perception that far outpaced his era, Burnham recognized that the tiniest details would shape the way people judged the exposition. His vigilance extended even to the design of the fair’s official seal. “It may not occur to you how very important a matter this Seal is,” he wrote in a December 8, 1890, letter to George R. Davis, the fair’s director-general, its chief political officer. “It will be very largely distributed throughout foreign countries, and is one of those trivial things by which these people will judge the artistic standard of the Fair.”

All these, however, were mere distractions compared to the single most important task on Burnham’s roster: the selection of architects to design the fair’s major buildings.

He and John Root had considered designing the whole exposition themselves, and indeed their peers jealously expected they would do so. Harriet Monroe, Root’s sister-in-law, recalled how one evening Root came home “cut to the quick” because an architect whom he had considered a friend “had apparently refused to recognize Mr. Burnham when they met at a club.” Root grumbled, “I suppose he thinks we are going to hog it all!” He resolved that to preserve his credibility as supervising architect, a role in which he would be compelled to oversee the work of other exposition architects, he would not himself design any of the buildings.

Burnham knew exactly whom he wanted to hire but was less aware of how incendiary his selections would prove. He wanted the best architects America had to offer, not just for their talent but also for how their affiliation instantly would shatter the persistent eastern belief that Chicago would produce only a country fair.

In December, though he lacked an official mandate to do so, Burnham secretly mailed inquiries to five men, “feeling confident that I would carry my point.” And indeed soon afterward the fair’s Grounds and Buildings Committee authorized him to invite the men to join the exposition. Unquestionably they were five of the greatest architects America had produced, but of the five, three were from the land of “unclean beasts” itself: George B. Post, Charles McKim, and Richard M. Hunt, the nation’s most venerable architect. The others were Robert Peabody of Boston and Henry Van Brunt, Kansas City.

None was from Chicago, even though the city took great pride in its architectural pioneers, in Sullivan, Adler, Jenney, Beman, Cobb, and the others. Somehow, despite his powers of anticipation, Burnham failed to realize that Chicago might see his choices as betrayal.

What troubled Burnham at the moment, as he rode in his Pullman compartment, was the fact that only one of his candidates, Van Brunt of Kansas City, had replied with any enthusiasm. The others had expressed only a tepid willingness to meet once Burnham arrived in New York.

Burnham had asked Olmsted to join him for the meeting, aware that in New York the landscape architect’s reputation exerted a force like gravity, but Olmsted could not get away. Now Burnham faced the prospect of having to go alone to meet these legendary architects—one of them, Hunt, a man also of legendary irascibility.

Why were they so unenthusiastic? How would they react to his attempts at persuasion? And if they declined and word of their refusal became public, what then?

The landscape outside his windows gave him little solace. As his train roared across Indiana, it overtook a cold front. Temperatures plunged. Strong gusts of wind buffeted the train, and ghostly virga of ice followed it through the night.

There was something Burnham did not know. Soon after receiving his letter the eastern architects, Hunt, Post, Peabody, and McKim, had held a meeting of their own in the offices of McKim, Mead and White in New York to discuss whether the fair would be anything more than a display of overfed cattle. During the meeting Hunt—the architect Burnham most hoped to recruit—announced that he would not participate. George Post persuaded him at least to hear what Burnham had to say, arguing that if Hunt stood down, the others would feel pressed to do likewise, for such was Hunt’s influence.

McKim had opened this meeting with a wandering talk about the fair and its prospects. Hunt cut him off: “McKim, damn your preambles. Get down to facts!”

In New York the wind blew hard and harsh all week. On the Hudson ice produced the earliest halt to navigation since 1880. Over breakfast at his hotel on Thursday morning, Burnham read with uneasiness about the failure of S. A. Kean & Co., a private bank in Chicago. It was one more sign of a gathering panic.

Burnham met the eastern architects Monday evening, December 22, at the Players Club, for dinner. Their cheeks were red from the cold. They shook hands: Hunt, McKim, Post, and Peabody—Peabody, down from Boston for the meeting. Here they were, gathered at one table, the nation’s foremost practitioners of what Goethe and Schelling called “frozen music.” All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones. They wore dark suits and crisp white collars. All had mustaches, some dark, some gray. Post was huge, the largest man in the room. Hunt was fierce, a frown in a suit, with a client list that included most of America’s richest families. Every other mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and along Fifth Avenue in New York seemed to have been designed by him, but he also had built the base for the Statue of Liberty and was a founder of the American Institute of Architects. All the men had one or more elements of shared background. Hunt, McKim, and Peabody had all studied at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris; Van Brunt and Post had studied under Hunt; Van Brunt had been Peabody’s mentor. For Burnham, with his failed attempts at getting into Harvard and Yale and his lack of formal architectural training, sitting down to dinner with these men was like being a stranger at someone else’s Thanksgiving.

The men were cordial. Burnham described his vision of a fair larger and grander than the Paris exposition. He played up the fact of Olmsted’s participation. Both Olmsted and Hunt were hard at work on George Washington Vanderbilt’s manor, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, and together had built the Vanderbilt family’s mausoleum. But Hunt was skeptical and not shy about expressing his doubts. Why should he and the others interrupt their already full schedules to build temporary structures in a far-off city where they would have little control over the final product?

Their skepticism shook Burnham. He was accustomed to the headlong civic energy of Chicago. He wished Olmsted and Root were beside him: Olmsted, to counter Hunt; Root because of his wit, and because the other architects all knew him from his role as secretary of the American Institute of Architects. Ordinarily it was in situations like this that Burnham could be most effective. “To himself, and indeed to most of the world in general, he was always right,” wrote Harriet Monroe, “and by knowing this so securely he built up the sheer power of personality which accomplished big things.” But this night he felt ill at ease, a choirboy among cardinals.

He argued that Chicago’s fair, unlike any other before it, would be primarily a monument to architecture. It would awaken the nation to the power of architecture to conjure beauty from stone and steel. Olmsted’s plans alone would make the exposition unique, with lagoons, canals, and great lawns all set against the cobalt-blue steppe of Lake Michigan. In exhibit space, he told them, the fair would be at least one-third larger than what the French had allotted in Paris. This was no mere dream, he said. Chicago had the resolve to make this exposition a reality, the same resolve that had made the city the second largest in America. And, he added, Chicago had the money.

The architects’ questions became slightly less challenging, more practical. What kind of structures did he envision, and in what style? The issue of the Eiffel Tower arose: What could Chicago do to equal that? On this score Burnham had no plan other than somehow to surpass Eiffel. Secretly, he was disappointed that the engineers of America had not yet stepped forward with some novel but feasible scheme to eclipse Eiffel’s achievement.

The architects worried that anyone who joined the fair would find himself in the grip of innumerable committees. Burnham guaranteed complete artistic independence. They wanted to know in detail how Olmsted felt about the sites selected for the fair, in particular about a central feature called the Wooded Island. Their insistence prompted Burnham to telegraph Olmsted immediately and urge him once again to come. Again Olmsted demurred.

One question came up repeatedly throughout the evening: Was there enough time?

Burnham assured them that ample time remained but that he had no illusions. The work had to start at once.

He believed he had won them. As the evening ended, he asked, would they join?

There was a pause.

Burnham left New York the next morning on the North Shore Limited. Throughout the day his train pushed through a landscape scoured by snow as a blizzard whitened the nation in a swath from the Atlantic to Minnesota. The storm destroyed buildings, broke trees, and killed a man in Baberton, Ohio, but it did not stop the Limited.

While aboard the train, Burnham wrote a letter to Olmsted that contained a less-than-candid description of the meeting with the architects. “They all approved the proposition to have them take hold of the artistic part of the main buildings. . . . The general layout seemed to meet the hearty approval, first of Mr. Hunt then of the others, but they were desirous of knowing your views of the landscape on and about the island. Therefore I telegraphed you urgently to come. They were very much disappointed, as was I, when it was found impossible to get you. The gentlemen are all to be here on the 10th of next month and at that time they urgently request, as do I, that you will be here personally. I find that Mr. Hunt especially lays large stress upon your opinions in the entire matter.”