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

by Erik Larson

The architects continued to meet but without Burnham, who stayed beside his partner’s bed except for occasional departures to help resolve issues back in the library or to visit Hunt, whose gout had grown so painful he was confined to his room in the Wellington Hotel. Root joked with his nurses. At its regular Wednesday meeting the Grounds and Buildings Committee passed a resolution wishing Root a speedy recovery. That day Burnham wrote to a Chicago architect named W. W. Boyington: “Mr. Root is quite low, and there is uncertainty about his recovery, but still a chance for him.”

  On Thursday Root seemed to rally. Burnham again wrote to Boyington: “am able this morning to give you a little better report. He has passed a pretty good night and is easier. While the danger is not over, we are hopeful.”

  Enthusiasm among the architects rose. With Hunt still confined to his room, Post stood in as chairman. He and Van Brunt shuttled to and from Hunt’s hotel. The architects approved the original brown-paper plan fashioned by Burnham, Olmsted, and Root with few changes. They decided how big the main buildings should be and how they should be situated on the site. They chose a uniform style, neoclassical, meaning the buildings would have columns and pediments and evoke the glories of ancient Rome. This choice was anathema to Sullivan, who abhorred derivative architecture, but during the meeting he made no objection. The architects also made what would prove to be one of the most important decisions of the fair: They set a uniform height, sixty feet, for the cornice of each of the palaces of the Grand Court. A cornice was merely a horizontal decorative projection. Walls, roofs, domes, and arches could rise far higher, but by establishing this one point of commonality the architects ensured a fundamental harmony among the fair’s most imposing structures.

  At about four o’clock Thursday afternoon Codman and Burnham drove to Root’s house. Codman waited in the carriage as Burnham went inside.

  Burnham found Root struggling for breath. Throughout the day Root had experienced strange dreams, including one that had come to him many times in the past of flying through the air. When Root saw Burnham, he said, “You won’t leave me again, will you?”

  Burnham said no, but he did leave, to check on Root’s wife, who was in a neighboring room. As Burnham talked with her, a relative also entered the room. She told them Root was dead. In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. “Do you hear that?” he whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.”

  The house settled into an eerie postmortem quiet broken only by the hiss of gas lamps and the weary tick of clocks. Burnham paced the floor below. He did not know it, but he was being watched. Harriet Monroe’s Aunt Nettie sat on a step high on the dark upper curve of the stairway that rose from Root’s living room to the second floor. The woman listened as Burnham paced. A fire burned in the hearth behind him and cast large shadows on the opposing wall. “I have worked,” Burnham said, “I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in the world—I have made him see it and kept him at it—and now he dies—damn!—damn!—damn!”

  Root’s death stunned Burnham, stunned Chicago. Burnham and Root had been partners and friends for eighteen years. Each knew the other’s thoughts. Each had come to rely on the other for his skills. Now Root was gone. Outsiders wondered if Root’s death might mean the death of the exposition. The newspapers were full of interviews in which the city’s leading men described Root as the guiding force behind the fair, that without him the city could not hope to realize its dreams. The Tribune said Root was “easily” Chicago’s “most distinguished architect, if indeed he had his superior in the whole country.” Edward Jefferey, chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee, said, “There is no man in the profession of architects who has the genius and ability to take up the Exposition work where Mr. Root left off.”

  Burnham kept silent. He considered quitting the fair. Two forces warred within him: grief, and a desire to cry out that he, Burnham, had been the engine driving the design of the fair; that he was the partner who had propelled the firm of Burnham & Root to greater and greater achievement.

  The eastern architects departed on Saturday, January 17. On Sunday Burnham attended a memorial service for Root at Root’s Astor Place house and his burial in Graceland Cemetery, a charming haven for the well-heeled dead a few miles north of the Loop.

  On Monday he was back at his desk. He wrote twelve letters. Root’s office next to his was silent, draped in bunting. Hothouse flowers perfumed the air.

  The challenge ahead looked more daunting than ever.

  On Tuesday a large bank failed in Kansas City. The following Saturday Lyman Gage announced that he would quit as president of the fair, effective April 1, to tend to his own bank. The fair’s director-general, George Davis, at first refused to believe it. “It’s all nonsense,” he snapped. “Gage has got to stay with us. We can’t do without him.”

  There was labor unrest. Just as Burnham had feared, union leaders began using the future fair as a vehicle for asserting such goals as the adoption of a minimum wage and an eight-hour day. There was the threat of fire and weather and disease: Already foreign editors were asking who would dare attend the exposition given Chicago’s notorious problems with sewage. No one had forgotten how in 1885 fouled water had ignited an outbreak of cholera and typhoid that killed ten percent of the city’s population.

  Darker forces marshaled in the smoke. Somewhere in the heart of the city a young Irish immigrant sank still more deeply into madness, the preamble to an act that would shock the nation and destroy what Burnham dreamed would be the single greatest moment of his life.

  Closer at hand a far stranger creature raised his head in equally intent anticipation. “I was born with the devil in me,” he wrote. “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”

  PART II

  An Awful Fight

  Chicago, 1891–93

  Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, after the storm of June 13, 1892.

  Convocation

  ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1891, Burnham, Olmsted, Hunt, and the other architects gathered in the library on the top floor of the Rookery to present drawings of the fair’s main structures to the Grounds and Buildings Committee. The architects met by themselves throughout the morning, with Hunt serving as chairman. His gout forced him to keep one leg on the table. Olmsted looked worn and gray, except for his eyes, which gleamed beneath his bald skull like marbles of lapis. A new man had joined the group, Augustus St. Gaudens, one of America’s best-known sculptors, whom Charles McKim had invited to help evaluate the designs. The members of the Grounds and Buildings Committee arrived at two o’clock and filled the library with the scent of cigars and frosted wool.

  The light in the room was sallow, the sun already well into its descent. Wind thumped the windows. In the hearth at the north wall a large fire cracked and lisped, flushing the room with a dry sirocco that caused frozen skin to tingle.

  At Hunt’s brusque prodding the architects got to work.

  One by one they walked to the front of the room, unrolled their drawings, and displayed them upon the wall. Something had happened among the architects, and it became evident immediately, as though a new force had entered the room. They spoke, Burnham said, “almost in whispers.”

  Each building was more lovely, more elaborate than the last, and all were immense—fantastic things on a scale never before attempted.

  Hunt hobbled to the front and displayed his Administration Building, intended to be the most important at the fair and the portal through which most visitors would enter. Its center was an octagon topped by a dome that rose 275 feet from floor to peak, higher than the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

  The next structure presented was even bigger. If successfully erected, George B. Post’s Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building would be the largest building ever constructed and consume enough steel to build two Brooklyn Bridges. All that space, moreover, was to be lit inside and
out with electric lamps. Twelve electric elevators would carry visitors to the building’s upper reaches. Four would rise through a central tower to an interior bridge 220 feet above the floor, which in turn would lead to an exterior promenade offering foot-tingling views of the distant Michigan shore, “a panorama,” as one guidebook later put it, “such as never before has been accorded to mortals.”

  Post proposed to top his building with a dome 450 feet high, which would have made the building not only the biggest in the world but also the tallest. As Post looked around the room, he saw in the eyes of his peers great admiration but also something else. A murmur passed among them. Such was this new level of cohesion among the architects that Post understood at once. The dome was too much—not too tall to be built, simply too proud for its context. It would diminish Hunt’s building and in so doing diminish Hunt and disrupt the harmony of the other structures on the Grand Court. Without prodding, Post said quietly, “I don’t think I shall advocate that dome; probably I shall modify the building.” There was unspoken but unanimous approval.

  Sullivan had already modified his own building, at Burnham’s suggestion. Originally Burnham wanted Adler & Sullivan to design the fair’s Music Hall, but partly out of a continued sense of having been wronged by Burnham, the partners had turned the project down. Burnham later offered them the Transportation Building, which they accepted. Two weeks before the meeting Burnham wrote to Sullivan and urged him to modify his design to create “one grand entrance toward the east and make this much richer than either of the others you had proposed…. Am sure that the effect of your building will be much finer than by the old method of two entrances on this side, neither of which could be so fine and effective as the one central feature.” Sullivan took the suggestion but never acknowledged its provenance, even though that one great entrance eventually became the talk of the fair.

  All the architects, including Sullivan, seemed to have been captured by the same spell, although Sullivan later would disavow the moment. As each architect unrolled his drawings, “the tension of feeling was almost painful,” Burnham said. St. Gaudens, tall and lean and wearing a goatee, sat in a corner very still, like a figure sculpted from wax. On every face Burnham saw a “quiet intentness.” It was clear to him that now, finally, the architects understood that Chicago had been serious about its elaborate plans for the fair. “Drawing after drawing was unrolled,” Burnham said, “and as the day passed it was apparent that a picture had been forming in the minds of those present—a vision far more grand and beautiful than hitherto presented by the richest imagination.”

  As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library’s gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats. From the street below, the top floor of the Rookery seemed aflame with the shifting light of the jets and the fire in the great hearth. “The room was still as death,” Burnham said, “save for the low voice of the speaker commenting on his design. It seemed as if a great magnet held everyone in its grasp.”

  The last drawing went up. For a few moments afterward the silence continued.

  Lyman Gage, still president of the exposition, was first to move. He was a banker, tall, straight-backed, conservative in demeanor and dress, but he rose suddenly and walked to a window, trembling with emotion. “You are dreaming, gentlemen, dreaming,” he whispered. “I only hope that half the vision may be realized.”

  Now St. Gaudens rose. He had been quiet all day. He rushed to Burnham and took his hands in his own. “I never expected to see such a moment,” he said. “Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?”

  Olmsted too sensed that something extraordinary had occurred, but the meeting also troubled him. First, it confirmed his growing concern that the architects were losing sight of the nature of the thing they were proposing to build. The shared vision expressed in their drawings struck him as being too sober and monumental. After all, this was a world’s fair, and fairs should be fun. Aware of the architects’ increasing emphasis on size, Olmsted shortly before the meeting had written to Burnham suggesting ways to enliven the grounds. He wanted the lagoons and canals strewn with waterfowl of all kinds and colors and traversed continually by small boats. Not just any boats, however: becoming boats. The subject became an obsession for him. His broad view of what constituted landscape architecture included anything that grew, flew, floated, or otherwise entered the scenery he created. Roses produced dabs of red; boats added intricacy and life. But it was crucial to choose the right kind of boat. He dreaded what would happen if the decision were left to one of the fair’s many committees. He wanted Burnham to know his views from the start.

  “We should try to make the boating feature of the exposition a gay and lively one,” he wrote. He loathed the clatter and smoke of steam launches; he wanted electric boats designed specifically for the park, with emphasis on graceful lines and silent operation. It was most important that these boats be constantly but quietly in motion, to provide diversion for the eye, peace for the ear. “What we shall want is a regular service of boats like that of an omnibus line in a city street,” he wrote. He also envisioned a fleet of large birchbark canoes paddled by Indians in deerskin and feathers and recommended that various foreign watercraft be moored in the fair’s harbor. “I mean such as Malay proas, catamarans, Arab dhows, Chinese sanpans, Japanese pilot boats, Turkish caiques, Esquimaux kiacks, Alaskan war canoes, the hooded boats of the Swiss Lakes, and so on.”

  A far more important outcome of the Rookery meeting, however, was Olmsted’s recognition that the architects’ noble dreams magnified and complicated the already-daunting challenge that faced him in Jackson Park. When he and Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park in New York, they had planned for visual effects that would not be achieved for decades; here he would have just twenty-six months to reshape the desolation of the park into a prairie Venice and plant its shores, islands, terraces, and walks with whatever it took to produce a landscape rich enough to satisfy his vision. What the architects’ drawings had shown him, however, was that in reality he would have far fewer than twenty-six months. The portion of his work that would most shape how visitors appraised his landscape—the planting and grooming of the grounds immediately surrounding each building—could only be done after the major structures were completed and the grounds cleared of construction equipment, temporary tracks and roads, and other aesthetic impedimenta. Yet the palaces unveiled in the Rookery were so immense, so detailed, that their construction was likely to consume nearly all the remaining time, leaving little for him.

  Soon after the meeting Olmsted composed a strategy for the transformation of Jackson Park. His ten-page memorandum captured the essence of all he had come to believe about the art of landscape architecture and how it should strive to conjure effects greater than the mere sum of petals and leaves.

  He concentrated on the fair’s central lagoon, which his dredges soon would begin carving from the Jackson Park shore. The dredges would leave an island at the center of the lagoon, to be called, simply, the Wooded Island. The fair’s main buildings would rise along the lagoon’s outer banks. Olmsted saw this lagoon district as the most challenging portion of the fair. Just as the Grand Court was to be the architectural heart of the fair, so the central lagoon and Wooded Island were to constitute its landscape centerpiece.

  Above all he wanted the exposition landscape to produce an aura of “mysterious poetic effect.” Flowers were not to be used as an ordinary gardener would use them. Rather, every flower, shrub, and tree was to be deployed with an eye to how each would act upon the imagination. This was to be accomplished, Olmsted wrote, “through the mingling intricately together of many forms of foliage, the alternation and complicated crossing of salient leaves and stalks of varying green tints in high lights with other leaves and stalks, behind and under them, and therefore less defined and more shaded, yet partly illumined by light reflected from the water.”

  He hoped to provide vis
itors with a banquet of glimpses—the undersides of leaves sparkling with reflected light; flashes of brilliant color between fronds of tall grass waving in the breeze. Nowhere, he wrote, should there be “a display of flowers demanding attention as such. Rather, the flowers to be used for the purpose should have the effect of flecks and glimmers of bright color imperfectly breaking through the general greenery. Anything approaching a gorgeous, garish or gaudy display of flowers is to be avoided.”

  Sedges and ferns and graceful bulrush would be planted on the banks of the Wooded Island to conjure density and intricacy and “to slightly screen, without hiding, flowers otherwise likely to be too obtrusive.” He envisioned large patches of cattails broken by bulrush, iris, and flag and pocketed with blooming plants, such as flame-red cardinal flower and yellow creeping buttercup—planted, if necessary, on slightly raised mounds so as to be just visible among the swaying green spires in the foreground.

  On the far shore, below the formal terraces of the buildings, he planned to position fragrant plants such as honeysuckle and summersweet, so that their perfume would rise into the nostrils of visitors pausing on the terraces to view the island and the lagoon.

  The overall effect, he wrote, “is thus to be in some degree of the character of a theatrical scene, to occupy the Exposition stage for a single summer.”

  It was one thing to visualize all this on paper, another to execute it. Olmsted was nearly seventy, his mouth aflame, his head roaring, each night a desert of wakefulness. Even without the fair he faced an intimidating portfolio of works in progress, chief among them the grounds of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina. If everything went perfectly—if his health did not degrade any further, if the weather held, if Burnham completed the other buildings on time, if strikes did not destroy the fair, if the many committees and directors, which Olmsted called “that army our hundreds of masters,” learned to leave Burnham alone—Olmsted might be able to complete his task on time.