The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  He financed the purchase mainly with money he raised by mortgaging the store’s fixtures and stock, agreeing to repay the loan at a rate of one hundred dollars a month (about three thousand dollars in twenty-first-century value). “My trade was good,” he said, “and for the first time in my life I was established in a business that was satisfactory to me.”

  He put up a new sign: H. H. HOLMES PHARMACY. As word spread that a young, handsome, and apparently unmarried young doctor now stood behind the counter, an increasing number of single women in their twenties began to patronize the store. They dressed nicely and bought things they did not need. Longtime customers also liked the new proprietor, although they missed the comforting presence of Mrs. Holton. The Holtons had been there when their children were sick; had comforted them when these illnesses proved mortal. They knew Mrs. Holton had sold the place. But why had they not seen her around town?

  Holmes smiled and explained that she had decided to visit relatives in California, something she had long wanted to do but could never find the time or money to accomplish and certainly could not have done with her husband on his deathbed.

  As time wore on and the inquiries dwindled, Holmes modified the story a bit. Mrs. Holton, he explained, liked California so much she had decided to settle there permanently.

  “Becomingness”

  NOTHING. THERE HAD BEEN SO much energy, so much bravado, but now—nothing. It was July 1890, nearly six months since Congress had voted to give the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago, but the forty-five men on the exposition’s board of directors still had not decided where within the city the fair should be built. At the time of the vote, with the city’s pride at stake, all Chicago had sung with one voice. Its emissaries had boasted to Congress that the city could deliver a grander and more appropriate setting than anything New York, Washington, or any other city could propose. Now, however, each quarter of Chicago was insisting on a location within its own boundaries, and the squabbling had stymied the board.

  The fair’s Committee on Grounds and Buildings had asked Burnham, quietly, to evaluate a number of locations in the city. With equal discretion, the committee assured Burnham and Root that ultimately they would direct the design and construction of the fair. For Burnham, each lost moment was a theft from the already scanty fund of time allotted to build the exposition. The final fair bill signed in April by President Benjamin Harrison established a Dedication Day for October 12, 1892, to honor the moment four hundred years earlier when Columbus had first sighted the New World. The formal opening, however, would not occur until May 1, 1893, to give Chicago more time to prepare. Even so, Burnham knew, much of the fair would have to be ready for the dedication. That left just twenty-six months.

  A friend of Burnham’s, James Ellsworth, was one of the board’s directors; he too was frustrated by the stalemate, so much so that on his own initiative, during a business trip to Maine in mid-July, he visited the Brookline, Massachusetts, office of Frederick Law Olmsted to try and persuade him to come to Chicago and evaluate the sites under consideration and perhaps take on the task of designing the fair’s landscape. Ellsworth hoped that Olmsted’s opinion, backed by his reputation as the wizard of Central Park, would help force a decision.

  That Ellsworth, of all people, should be driven to this step was significant. Initially he had been ambivalent about whether Chicago should even seek the world’s fair. He agreed to serve as a director only out of fear that the exposition was indeed at risk of fulfilling the meager expectations of the East and becoming “simply a fair as the term generally implies.” He believed it imperative that the city protect its civic honor by producing the greatest such event in the world’s history, a goal that seemed to be slipping from Chicago’s grasp with each sweep of the clock’s hands.

  He offered Olmsted a consulting fee of one thousand dollars (equivalent to about thirty thousand today). That the money was his own, and that he lacked official authority to hire Olmsted, were two points Ellsworth failed to disclose.

  Olmsted declined. He did not design fairs, he told Ellsworth. He doubted, moreover, that enough time remained for anyone to do the fair justice. To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future,” he wrote. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”

  Ellsworth insisted that what Chicago had in mind was something far grander than even the Paris exposition. He described for Olmsted a vision of a dream city designed by America’s greatest architects and covering an expanse at least one-third larger than the Paris fair. Ellsworth assured Olmsted that by agreeing to help, he would be joining his name to one of the greatest artistic undertakings of the century.

  Relenting slightly, Olmsted said he would think about it and agreed to meet with Ellsworth two days later, on Ellsworth’s return from Maine.

  Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.” Too often, however, he would “come back in a year and find destruction: why? ‘My wife is so fond of roses;’ ‘I had a present of some large Norway spruces;’ ‘I have a weakness for white birch trees—there was one in my father’s yard when I was a boy.’”

  The same thing happened with large civic clients. He and Calvert Vaux had built and refined Central Park from 1858 through 1876, but forever afterward Olmsted found himself defending the park against attempts to tinker with its grounds in ways he considered tantamount to vandalism. It wasn’t just Central Park, however. Every park seemed subject to such abuse.

  “Suppose,” he wrote to architect Henry Van Brunt, “that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house; that after the construction work had been nearly completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so refitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower?” That, he wrote, “is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.”

  What landscape architecture needed, Olmsted believed, was greater visibility, which in turn would bring greater credibility. The exposition could help, he realized, providing it did rise to the heights envisioned by Ellsworth. He had to weigh this benefit, however, against the near-term costs of signing on. His firm already had a full roster of work, so much, he wrote, that “we are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety.” And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears a
t times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache.

  But Ellsworth’s vision was compelling. Olmsted talked it over with his sons and with the newest member of the firm, Henry Sargent Codman—“Harry”—an intensely talented young landscape architect who had quickly become a trusted adviser and confidant.

  When Ellsworth returned, Olmsted told him he had changed his mind. He would join the venture.

  Once back in Chicago, Ellsworth secured formal authority to hire Olmsted and arranged to have him report directly to Burnham.

  In a letter to Olmsted, Ellsworth wrote: “My position is this: The reputation of America is at stake in this matter, and the reputation of Chicago is also at stake. As an American citizen, you have an equal interest in furthering the success of this great and grand undertaking, and I know from talking with you, that on an occasion like this you grasp the whole situation and will be confined to no narrow limits.”

  Certainly that seemed to be the case when, during later contract negotiations, Olmsted at Codman’s urging requested a fee of $22,500 (about $675,000 today) and got it.

  On Wednesday, August 6, 1890, three weeks after Ellsworth’s Brookline visit, the exposition company telegraphed Olmsted: “When can you be here?”

  Olmsted and Codman arrived three days later, on Saturday morning, and found the city ringing from the news that the final census count had confirmed the earlier, preliminary ranking of Chicago as America’s second largest city, even though this final tally also showed that Chicago’s lead over Philadelphia was a skimpy one, only 52,324 souls. The good news was a salve for a difficult summer. Earlier, a heat wave had brutalized the city, killing seventeen people (including a man named Christ) and neatly eviscerating Chicago’s boasts to Congress that the city possessed the charming summer climate—“cool and delicious,” the Tribune had said—of a vacation resort. And just before the heat wave, a rising young British writer had published a scalding essay on Chicago. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”

  To Burnham, Codman seemed amazingly young, late twenties at the most. To be so young and have the trust of America’s greatest landscape architect, Codman must have been very bright indeed. He had obsidian eyes that looked as if they could punch holes in steel. As for Olmsted, Burnham was struck by the slightness of his frame, which seemed structurally insufficient to support so massive a skull. That head: Bald for most of its surface, trimmed at bottom with a tangled white beard, it resembled an ivory Christmas ball resting on a bed of excelsior. Olmsted looked worn from his travels, but his eyes were large, warm, and bright. He wanted to start work immediately. Here at last, Burnham saw, was a man who understood the true cost of each lost minute.

  Burnham of course knew of Olmsted’s achievements: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the grounds of Cornell and Yale, and scores of other projects. He knew also that before launching the field of landscape architecture, Olmsted had been a writer and editor who had journeyed throughout the antebellum South exploring the culture and practice of slavery. Olmsted had a reputation for brilliance and tireless devotion to his work—but also for an acerbic candor that emerged most predictably in the presence of men who failed to understand that what he sought to create were not flower beds and ornamental gardens but expanses of scenery full of mystery, shadow, and sun-stippled ground.

  Olmsted, for his part, knew that Burnham had been a leading force in driving buildings into the clouds. Burnham was said to be the business genius of his firm, Root the artist. It was with Burnham that Olmsted felt the greatest kinship. Burnham was decisive, blunt, and cordial; he spoke under a level blue gaze that Olmsted found reassuring. In private communication Olmsted and Codman agreed that Burnham was a man they could work with.

  The tour began at once, but it was hardly an objective one. Burnham and Root clearly favored one location in particular: Jackson Park, on Chicago’s South Side, due east of Englewood on the lakeshore. As it happened, Olmsted knew this ground. Twenty years earlier, at the request of Chicago’s South Park commissioners, Olmsted had studied both Jackson Park and, to its west, Washington Park, and the broad boulevard that connected them, called Midway. In the plans he had produced for the commissioners, he envisioned transforming Jackson Park from a desert of sand and stagnant pools into a park unlike any other in the nation, focused on water and boating, with canals, lagoons, and shady coves. Olmsted finished those plans shortly before the Great Fire of 1871. In the rush to rebuild, Chicago never got around to realizing his vision. The park became part of Chicago during the 1889 annexations, but otherwise, Olmsted saw, little had changed. He knew its flaws, its many flaws, but believed that with a lot of deft dredging and sculpting, the park could be transformed into a landscape unlike any that had ever seated an exposition.

  For he recognized that Jackson Park had something no other city in the world could equal: the spreading blue plain of Lake Michigan, as comely a backdrop for a fair as anyone could hope for.

  On Tuesday, August 12, just four days after he and Codman arrived in Chicago, Olmsted filed a report with the exposition directors, who then to his chagrin made the report public. Olmsted had intended the report for a professional audience, one that would take for granted Jackson Park’s fundamental acceptability and value the report as an unflinching guide to the challenges ahead. He was surprised to find the report put to use by opposing cliques as evidence that the fair could not possibly be placed in Jackson Park.

  The directors asked for a second report. Olmsted delivered it on Monday, August 18, six days after the first. Burnham saw to his delight that Olmsted had given the directors somewhat more than they perhaps had wished to receive.

  Olmsted was no literary stylist. Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence. But his prose revealed the depth and subtlety of his thinking about how landscape could be modified to produce an effect in the mind.

  First he had set down a few principles and done a little chiding.

  Rather than squabbling over sites, he lectured, the different factions needed to recognize that for the exposition to succeed, everyone had to work together, no matter which location the directors selected. “It is to be desired, let us say, that it should be better understood than it yet seems to be by some of your fellow citizens, that the Fair is not to be a Chicago Fair. It is a World’s Fair, and Chicago is to stand before the world as the chosen standard bearer for the occasion of the United States of America. All Chicago can afford to take nothing less than the very best site that can be found for the fair, regardless of the special local interests of one quarter of the city or another.”

  Every landscape element of the fair, he argued, had to have one “supreme object, viz., the becomingness: the becomingness of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole; the major elements of which whole will be in the towering series of the main exhibition structures. In other words, the ground, with all it carries, before, between, and behind the buildings, however dressed with turf, or bedecked with flowers, shrubs or trees, fountains, statues, bric-a-brac, and objects of art, should be one in unity of design with the buildings; should set off the buildings and should be set off, in matters of light and shadow and tone, by the buildings.”

  Clearly certain sites were endowed more richly than others. More would be gained by associating the exposition with some feature of striking natural beauty “than by the most elaborate and costly artificial decorations in the form of gardening features, terraces, fountains and statues, than it is possible for the mind of man to devise or the hand of man to carry out.” What the many factions in the battle for the fair seemed to ignore was that Chicago had “but one natural object at all distinctively local, which can be regarded as an obje
ct of much grandeur, beauty or interest. This is the Lake.”

  The lake was beautiful and always changing in hue and texture, but it was also, Olmsted argued, a novelty capable of amplifying the drawing power of the exposition. Many visitors from the heart of the country “will, until they arrive here, never have seen a broad body of water extending to the horizon; will never have seen a vessel under sail, nor a steamboat of half the tonnage of those to be seen hourly passing in and out of Chicago harbor; and will never have seen such effects of reflected light or of clouds piling up from the horizon, as are to be enjoyed almost every summer’s day on the lake margin of the city.”

  Olmsted next considered four specific candidates: a site on the lakeshore above the Loop; two inland sites, one of which was Garfield Park on the western perimeter of the city; and of course Jackson Park.

  Although Olmsted himself preferred the northernmost site, he insisted Jackson Park could work and “produce results of a pleasingly becoming character, such as have not hitherto been aimed at in World’s Fairs.”

  Olmsted dismissed the inland sites out of hand as being flat and monotonous and too far from the lake. In critiquing Garfield Park, he again took a moment to express his annoyance at Chicago’s inability to select a site, a failure he found all the more exasperating given the elaborate boasts issued by the city’s leading men back when they were lobbying Congress for the fair:

  “But considering what has been so strenuously urged upon the attention of the country in regard to the number and excellence of sites which Chicago has to offer; considering what advantages the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia possessed in the neighboring scenery; considering what advantages of the same order would have been possessed by the Fair if it had been given a site in the beautiful Rock Creek Valley at Washington, of which the Nation is just taking possession for a Park; considering what superb views were presented of the Palisades and up the valley of the Hudson on the one hand, and the waters and varied shores of Long Island Sound on the other, from the site offered for the Fair by New York; considering all this, we cannot but fear that the choice of a site in the rear of the city, utterly without natural landscape attraction, would be found a disappointment to the country, and that it would give occasion for not a little ironical reference to the claims of an endless extent of perfect sites made last winter before Congress.”