by Erik Larson
In the fall of 1867, at twenty-one, Burnham returned to Chicago. He sought work in a field where he might be successful and took a job as a draftsman with the architectural firm of Loring & Jenney. He had found his calling, he wrote in 1868, and told his parents he wanted to become the “greatest architect in the city or country.” The next year, however, he bolted for Nevada with friends to try his hand at mining gold. He failed. He ran for the Nevada legislature and failed again. He returned to Chicago broke, in a cattle car, and joined the firm of an architect named L. G. Laurean. Then came October 1871: a cow, a lantern, confusion, and wind. The Great Chicago Fire took nearly eighteen thousand buildings and left more than a hundred thousand people homeless. The destruction promised endless work for the city’s architects. But Burnham quit. He sold plate glass, failed. He became a druggist, quit. “There is,” he wrote, “a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing very long.”
Exasperated and worried, Burnham’s father in 1872 introduced his son to an architect named Peter Wight, who admired the young man’s skill at drawing and hired him as a draftsman. Burnham was twenty-five. He liked Wight and liked the work; he liked especially one of Wight’s other draftsmen, a southerner named John Wellborn Root, who was four years younger. Born in Lumpkin, Georgia, on January 10, 1850, Root was a musical prodigy who could sing before he could talk. During the Civil War, as Atlanta smoldered, Root’s father had smuggled him to Liverpool, England, aboard a Confederate blockade-runner. Root won acceptance into Oxford, but before he could matriculate, the war ended and his father summoned him back to America, to his new home in New York City, where Root studied civil engineering at New York University and became a draftsman for the architect who later designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Burnham took to Root immediately. He admired Root’s white skin and muscular arms, his stance at the drafting table. They became friends, then partners. They recorded their first income three months before the Panic of 1873 snuffed the nation’s economy. But this time Burnham stuck with it. Something about the partnership with Root bolstered him. It filled an absence and played to both men’s strengths. They struggled for their own commissions and in the meantime hired themselves out to other more established firms.
One day in 1874 a man walked into their office and in a single galvanic moment changed their lives. He wore black and looked ordinary, but in his past there was blood, death, and profit in staggering quantity. He came looking for Root, but Root was out of town. He introduced himself instead to Burnham and gave his name as John B. Sherman.
There was no need to amplify the introduction. As superintendent of the Union Stock Yards, Sherman ruled an empire of blood that employed 25,000 men, women, and children and each year slaughtered fourteen million animals. Directly and indirectly nearly one-fifth of Chicago’s population depended on the yards for its economic survival.
Sherman liked Burnham. He liked his strength, his steady blue gaze, and the confidence with which he conducted the conversation. Sherman commissioned the firm to build him a mansion on Prairie Avenue at Twenty-first Street among homes owned by other Chicago barons and where now and then Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Philip Armour could be seen walking to work together, a titanic threesome in black. Root drew a house of three stories with gables and a peaked roof, in red brick, buff sandstone, blue granite, and black slate; Burnham refined the drawings and guided construction. Burnham happened to be standing in the entrance to the house, considering the work, when a young man with a mildly haughty air and an odd strut—not ego, here, but a congenital fault—walked up to him and introduced himself as Louis Sullivan. The name meant nothing to Burnham. Not yet. Sullivan and Burnham talked. Sullivan was eighteen, Burnham twenty-eight. He told Sullivan, in confidence, that he did not expect to remain satisfied doing just houses. “My idea,” he said, “is to work up a big business, to handle big things, deal with big business men, and to build up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization.”
John Sherman’s daughter, Margaret, also visited the construction site. She was young, pretty, and blond and visited often, using as her excuse the fact that her friend Della Otis lived across the street. Margaret did think the house very fine, but what she admired most was the architect who seemed so at ease among the cairns of sandstone and timber. It took a while, but Burnham got the point. He asked her to marry him. She said yes; the courtship went smoothly. Then scandal broke. Burnham’s older brother had forged checks and wounded their father’s wholesale drug business. Burnham immediately went to Margaret’s father to break the engagement, on grounds the courtship could not continue in the shadow of scandal. Sherman told him he respected Burnham’s sense of honor but rejected his withdrawal. He said quietly, “There is a black sheep in every family.”
Later Sherman, a married man, would run off to Europe with the daughter of a friend.
Burnham and Margaret married on January 20, 1876. Sherman bought them a house at Forty-third Street and Michigan Avenue, near the lake but more importantly near the stockyards. He wanted proximity. He liked Burnham and approved of the marriage, but he did not entirely trust the young architect. He thought Burnham drank too much.
Sherman’s doubts about Burnham’s character did not color his respect for his skill as an architect. He commissioned other structures. In his greatest vote of confidence, he asked Burnham & Root to build an entry portal for the Union Stock Yards that would reflect the yards’ growing importance. The result was the Stone Gate, three arches of Lemont limestone roofed in copper and displaying over the central arch the carved bust—Root’s touch, no doubt—of John Sherman’s favorite bull, Sherman. The gate became a landmark that endured into the twenty-first century, long after the last hog crossed to eternity over the great wooden ramp called the Bridge of Sighs.
Root also married a daughter of the stockyards, but his experience was darker. He designed a house for John Walker, president of the yards, and met Walker’s daughter, Mary. During their courtship she became ill with tuberculosis. The disease rapidly gained ground, but Root remained committed to the engagement, even though it was clear to everyone he was marrying a dead woman. The ceremony was held in the house Root had designed. A friend, the poet Harriet Monroe, waited with the other guests for the bride to appear on the stairway. Monroe’s sister, Dora, was the sole bridesmaid. “A long wait frightened us,” Harriet Monroe said, “but at last the bride, on her father’s arm, appeared like a white ghost at the halfway landing, and slowly oh, so hesitatingly dragging her heavy satin train, stepped down the wide stairway and across the floor to the bay window which was gay with flowers and vines. The effect was weirdly sad.” Root’s bride was thin and pale and could only whisper her vows. “Her gayety,” Harriet Monroe wrote, “seemed like jewels on a skull.”
Within six weeks Mary Walker Root was dead. Two years later Root married the bridesmaid, Dora Monroe, and very likely broke her poet-sister’s heart. That Harriet Monroe also loved Root seems beyond dispute. She lived nearby and often visited the couple in their Astor Place home. In 1896 she published a biography of Root that would have made an angel blush. Later, in her memoir, A Poet’s Life, she described Root’s marriage to her sister as being “so completely happy that my own dreams of happiness, confirmed by that example, demanded as fortunate a fulfillment, and could accept nothing less.” But Harriet never found its equal and devoted her life instead to poetry, eventually founding Poetry magazine, where she helped launch Ezra Pound toward national prominence.
Root and Burnham prospered. A cascade of work flowed to their firm, partly because Root managed to solve a puzzle that had bedeviled Chicago builders ever since the city’s founding. By solving it, he helped the city become the birthplace of skyscrapers despite terrain that could not have been less suited to the role.
In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that propelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within the downtown “Loop,” named f
or the turn-around loops of streetcar lines. As land values rose, landowners sought ways of improving the return on their investments. The sky beckoned.
The most fundamental obstacle to height was man’s capacity to walk stairs, especially after the kinds of meals men ate in the nineteenth century, but this obstacle had been removed by the advent of the elevator and, equally important, by Elisha Graves Otis’s invention of a safety mechanism for halting an elevator in free-fall. Other barriers remained, however, the most elemental of which was the bedeviling character of Chicago’s soil, which prompted one engineer to describe the challenge of laying foundations in Chicago as “probably not equaled for perverseness anywhere in the world.” Bedrock lay 125 feet below grade, too deep for workers to reach with any degree of economy or safety using the construction methods available in the 1880s. Between this level and the surface was a mixture of sand and clay so saturated with water that engineers called it gumbo. It compressed under the weight of even modest structures and drove architects, as a matter of routine, to design their buildings with sidewalks that intersected the first story four inches above grade, in the hope that when the building settled and dragged the sidewalks down with it, the walks would be level.
There were only two known ways to resolve the soil problem: Build short and avoid the issue, or drive caissons down to bedrock. The latter technique required that workers excavate deep shafts, shore the walls, and pump each so full of air that the resulting high pressure held water at bay, a process that was notorious for causing deadly cases of the bends and used mainly by bridge builders who had no other choice. John Augustus Roebling had used caissons, famously, in building the Brooklyn Bridge, but their first use in the United States had occurred earlier, from 1869 through 1874, when James B. Eads built a bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis. Eads discovered that workers began experiencing the bends at sixty feet below ground, roughly half the depth to which a Chicago caisson would have to descend. Of the 352 men who worked on the bridge’s notorious east caisson, pressure-related illness killed twelve, left two crippled for life, and injured sixty-six others, a casualty rate of over 20 percent.
But Chicago’s landowners wanted profit, and at the city’s center, profit meant height. In 1881 a Massachusetts investor, Peter Chardon Brooks III, commissioned Burnham & Root to build the tallest office building yet constructed in Chicago, which he planned to call the Montauk. Previously he had brought them their first big downtown commission, the seven-story Grannis Block. In that structure, Burnham said, “our originality began to show. … It was a wonder. Everybody went to see it, and the town was proud of it.” They moved their offices into its top floor (a potentially fatal move, as it happens, but no one knew it at the time). Brooks wanted the new building to be 50 percent taller “if,” he said, “the earth can support it.”
The partners quickly grew frustrated with Brooks. He was picky and frugal and seemed not to care how the building looked as long as it was functional. He issued instructions that anticipated by many years Louis Sullivan’s famous admonition that form must follow function. “The building throughout is to be for use and not for ornament,” Brooks wrote. “Its beauty will be in its all-adaptation to its use.” Nothing was to project from its face, no gargoyles, no pedimenta, for projections collected dirt. He wanted all pipes left in the open. “This covering up of pipes is all a mistake, they should be exposed everywhere, if necessary painted well and handsomely.” His frugal glare extended to the building’s bathrooms. Root’s design called for cabinets under sinks. Brooks objected: A cabinet made “a good receptacle for dirt, mice too.”
The trickiest part of the Montauk was its foundation. Initially Root planned to employ a technique that Chicago architects had used since 1873 to support buildings of ordinary stature. Workers would erect pyramids of stone on the basement slab. The broad bottom of each pyramid spread the load and reduced settlement; the narrow top supported load-bearing columns. To hold up ten stories of stone and brick, however, the pyramids would have to be immense, the basement transformed into a Giza of stone. Brooks objected. He wanted the basement free for the boilers and dynamo.
The solution, when Root first struck it, must have seemed too simple to be real. He envisioned digging down to the first reasonably firm layer of clay, known as hard-pan, and there spreading a pad of concrete nearly two feet thick. On top of this workers would set down a layer of steel rails stretching from one end of the pad to the other, and over this a second layer at right angles. Succeeding layers would be arranged the same way. Once complete, this grillage of steel would be filled and covered with Portland cement to produce a broad, rigid raft that Root called a floating foundation. What he was proposing, in effect, was a stratum of artificial bedrock that would also serve as the floor of the basement. Brooks liked it.
Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper. “What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral,” wrote Thomas Talmadge, a Chicago architect and critic, “the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building.”
This was the heyday of architectural invention. Elevators got faster and safer. Glassmakers became adept at turning out ever larger sheets of plate glass. William Jenney, of the firm Loring & Jenney, where Burnham started his architectural career, designed the first building to have a load-bearing metal frame, in which the burden of supporting the structure was shifted from the exterior walls to a skeleton of iron and steel. Burnham and Root realized that Jenney’s innovation freed builders from the last physical constraints on altitude. They employed it to build taller and taller buildings, cities in the sky inhabited by a new race of businessmen, whom some called “cliff-dwellers.” These were men, wrote Lincoln Steffens, “who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of business.”
Burnham and Root became rich men. Not Pullman rich, not rich enough to be counted among the first rank of society alongside Potter Palmer and Philip Armour, or to have their wives’ gowns described in the city’s newspapers, but rich beyond anything either man had expected, enough so that each year Burnham bought a barrel of fine Madeira and aged it by shipping it twice around the world on slow freighters.
As their firm prospered, the character of each partner began to emerge and clarify. Burnham was a talented artist and architect in his own right, but his greatest strength lay in his ability to win clients and execute Root’s elegant designs. Burnham was handsome, tall, and strong, with vivid blue eyes, all of which drew clients and friends to him the way a lens gathers light. “Daniel Hudson Burnham was one of the handsomest men I ever saw,” said Paul Starrett, later to lead construction of the Empire State Building; he joined Burnham & Root in 1888 as an all-purpose helper. “It was easy to see how he got commissions. His very bearing and looks were half the battle. He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.” Starrett recalled being moved by Burnham’s frequent admonition: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Burnham understood that Root was the firm’s artistic engine. He believed Root possessed a genius for envisioning a structure quickly, in its entirety. “I’ve never seen anyone like him in this respect,” Burnham said. “He would grow abstracted and silent, and a faraway look would come into his eyes, and the building was there before him—every stone.” At the same time he knew Root had little interest in the business side of architecture and in sowing the relationships at the Chicago Club and Union League that eventually led to commissions.
Root played the organ every Sunday morning at the First Presbyterian Church. He wrote opera critiques for the Chicago Tribune. He read broadly in philosophy, science, art, and religion and was known throughout Chicago’s upper echelon for his ability to converse on almost any subject and to do so with great wit. “His con
versational powers were extraordinary,” a friend said. “There seemed to be no subject which he had not investigated and in which he was not profoundly learned.” He had a sly sense of humor. One Sunday morning he played the organ with particular gravity. It was a while before anyone noticed he was playing “Shoo, Fly.” When Burnham and Root were together, one woman said, “I used always to think of some big strong tree with lightning playing around it.”
Each man recognized and respected the other’s skills. The resultant harmony was reflected in the operation of their office, which, according to one historian, functioned with the mechanical precision of a “slaughterhouse,” an apt allusion, given Burnham’s close professional and personal association with the stockyards. But Burnham also created an office culture that anticipated that of businesses that would not appear for another century. He installed a gym. During lunch hour employees played handball. Burnham gave fencing lessons. Root played impromptu recitals on a rented piano. “The office was full of a rush of work,” Starrett said, “but the spirit of the place was delightfully free and easy and human in comparison with other offices I had worked in.”
Burnham knew that together he and Root had reached a level of success that neither could have achieved on his own. The synchrony with which they worked allowed them to take on ever more challenging and daring projects, at a time when so much that an architect did was new and when dramatic increases in the height and weight of buildings amplified the risk of catastrophic failure. Harriet Monroe wrote, “The work of each man became constantly more necessary to the other.”
