Devil in White City: Burnham and Jackson Park
U.S. author Erik Larson offers a offers a dramatic account of the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer/fall of 1893
The exhilarating and informative experience of reading Erik Larson’s “The Splendid and the Vile” (reviewed on Oct. 10) led me to take up an earlier Larson book, “The Devil in the White City.” Could it be as good?
The answer is yes. Written nearly 20 years ago, it offers a dramatic account of the Chicago World’s Fair in the summer/ fall of 1893. Officially the Fair was called The World’s Columbian Exhibition in honour of Columbus’s landing in the new world in 1492.
As someone interested in America’s “Gilded Age,” the most notable period of urban growth and individual wealth in American history ( loosely, 1870-1895), I found Larson’s book remarkable. His subtitle promises much — “Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.”
In essence, the book provides an extended account of the preparations for the Fair, its architectural ambitions and challenges, and its sad aftermath. Along the way it offers many glimpses into aspects of American ambition, identity-seeking, corporatism, engineering achievement, national productivity, and the value of cheap and ready labour. It then laments the Fair’s swift demise soon after its completion.
Few periods in American history have been so eventful, so flamboyant, so extraordinary. Vast individual fortunes were made and often flaunted in the years before there were labour laws and an income tax on individuals. Legendary icons of wealth (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pullman and Armour to name a few) ruled the country as American cities teemed with hopeful immigrants, many living in ghettoes and squalid poverty.
In “How the Other Half Lives” Jacob Riis documented such awful conditions in New York City. Chicago with its infamous stockyards and burgeoning population (over a million in the 1880s) was second only in growth to New York City; moreover, according to Riis, who visited the city during the Fair, its “foulest districts” were “worse than anything he had seen in New York.” Clamour, smoke, stench and steam characterized a city still rebuilding after the devastating Great Fire of 1871.
But Larson is much too astute a popular historian to focus solely on slums and poverty. His narrative provides darkness enough in the way he parallels the story of the Fair with the nefarious doings of Dr. H.H. Holmes, a mild-mannered, handsome serial killer who lived close to Jackson Park, the site chosen for the Fair.
Larson’s major emphasis is the creation of the Fair under the architectural direction and financial control of Daniel Hudson Burnham. He was one of Chicago’ s most prominent architects and a man with a grand vision for his adopted city.
When in 1890 the American Congress decided that Chicago would host the Fair instead of New York City or St. Louis, it was a huge boost to the city’s civic pride and self-esteem. Too often it was known more for vice, violence and its stockyards than cultural achievement. But how could the city put such a major international event together from scratch in three years? And how could they match what Paris had achieved four years earlier?
In 1889, the Exposition Universelle at Paris had “startled everyone” by putting on a “fair so big and glamorous and so exotic that visitors came away believing no exposition could surpass it.” Its major attraction was the Eiffel Tower which, at over 1000 feet in height, surpassed any previous man-made structure in the world. What could Chicago do by way of response? Much indeed, as it turned out, because it was the era of architectural invention and railway travel. Failure was unacceptable. America would not continence it.
It fell to Daniel Burnham to meet that challenge. Assembling a team of architects, many from the rival East coast, he laid out his plan for ‘a white city’ and its “grand court,” featuring huge buildings of classical design and a “Midway Plaisance” featuring exotic peoples and buildings from around the world, including Pygmies, belly dancers, Algerian villagers, and a Moorish Palace.
Buffalo Bill brought his famous Wild West show; they arrived in railway cars peopled by retired Cavalry officers and ”ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee and Sioux Indians,” along with the famous Phoebe Anne Moses (a.k.a. Annie Oakley). As the midway’s organizer, Sol Bloom, put it succinctly, “the more novel and startling the better.” And the more fun for visitors to the fair.
Work began quickly in Jackson Park, an unpromising property described by Larson as “one square mile of (mostly treeless) desolation.” But it had a view of Lake Michigan and
included a pond and an island. John Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect of Central Park in NYC, deemed it “the least parklike ground within miles of the city,” but he took on the project and did his usual fine work, carving out pleasing lagoons and fetching vistas, though his health was poor and he was overworked with other projects.
Others took on ambitious buildings like “the giant Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building.” As the city sought to clean itself up for visitors (no small task, that), the various structures, soon to be painted white, blossomed in Jackson Park.
As plans bubbled along and concerns grew about the vast amount of work that had to be completed before the opening, Burnham desperately sought to find someone with the vision and knowledge to create an American structure to contend with Eiffel’s extraordinary tower. Belatedly, a plan emerged.
A steel engineer from Pittsburgh, George W.G. Ferris, offered to build a huge rotating wheel that would tower over the fair itself and carry spectators to heights they could scarcely imagine. But, as Larson writes, “A chorus of engineers chanted that the thing could not be built, at least not with any margin of safety.”
Ferris, however, persisted; with only a few setbacks, his wheel rose up over the Fair. Held up by eight 140 foot towers, its assemblage included
100,000 parts ranging from small bolts to the gigantic axle. Twenty thousand people a day rode the Ferris Wheel helping to make the Fair a big success commercially and dramatically.
It may have come late to the party but the Wheel became a star, making plenty of money for Ferris’s company. However, he dismantled it in 1894, and died an early death from typhoid fever two years later, “a martyr to his ambition for fame and prominence.” By then the Fair itself had died its own sad death, the victim of fire, neglect and lack of interest.
Erik Larson’s book brings the “black city” of Chicago and its 1893 Fair to life once again. But not satisfied with that story alone, he provides two other narratives. The story of Dr. H.H. Holmes who built a hotel near the Fair’s site and equipped it with a basement kiln and a soundproof room is transfixing.
In lock step with the Fair, Larson uses Holmes’s later confession to trace his murderous actions in Chicago and places like Toronto, often by gassing and cremating his female friends, who seldom suspected their gentlemanly acquaintance of such evil. The other story is of the inept Patrick Prendergast who eventually murders the mayor of Chicago for ignoring his personal hopes for a civic position.
“The Devil in the White City” is a terrific read — well-paced and rich in vivid detail. It is a powerful reminder of what we can miss when we overlook certain historical events.