The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  Peck chose Chicago architect Dankmar Adler. If acoustically flawed, Peck knew, the building would be a failure no matter how imposing the finished structure proved to be. Only Adler had previously demonstrated a clear grasp of the principles of acoustical design. “Burnham was not pleased,” wrote Louis Sullivan, by now Adler’s partner, “nor was John Root precisely entranced.” When Root saw early drawings of the Auditorium, he said it appeared as if Sullivan were about to “smear another façade with ornament.”

  From the start there was tension between the two firms, although no one could have known it would erupt years later in a caustic attack by Sullivan on Burnham’s greatest achievements, this after Sullivan’s own career had dissolved in a mist of alcohol and regret. For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel. It arose from discordant beliefs about the nature and purpose of architecture. Sullivan saw himself as an artist first, an idealist. In his autobiography, in which he always referred to himself in the third person, he described himself as “an innocent with his heart wrapped up in the arts, in the philosophies, in the religions, in the beatitudes of nature’s loveliness, in his search for the reality of man, in his profound faith in the beneficence of power.” He called Burnham a “colossal merchandiser” fixated on building the biggest, tallest, costliest structures. “He was elephantine, tactless, and blurting.”

  Workers began building the Auditorium on June 1, 1887. The result was an opulent structure that, for the moment, was the biggest private building in America. Its theater contained more than four thousand seats, twelve hundred more than New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. And it was air-conditioned, through a system that blew air over ice. The surrounding building had commercial offices, an immense banquet hall, and a hotel with four hundred luxurious rooms. A traveler from Germany recalled that simply by turning an electric dial on the wall by his bed, he could request towels, stationery, ice water, newspapers, whiskey, or a shoe shine. It became the most celebrated building in Chicago. The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.

  Ultimately these setbacks proved to be minor ones for Burnham and Root. Far worse was to occur, and soon, but as of February 14, 1890, the day of the great fair vote, the partners seemed destined for a lifetime of success.

  Outside the Tribune building there was silence. The crowd needed a few moments to process the news. A man in a long beard was one of the first to react. He had sworn not to shave until Chicago got the fair. Now he climbed the steps of the adjacent Union Trust Company Bank. On the top step he let out a shriek that one witness likened to the scream of a skyrocket. Others in the crowd echoed his cry, and soon two thousand men and women and a few children—mostly telegraph boys and hired messengers—cut loose with a cheer that tore through the canyon of brick, stone, and glass like a flash flood. The messenger boys raced off with the news, while throughout the city telegraph boys sprinted from the offices of the Postal Telegraph Company and Western Union or leaped aboard their Pope “safety” bikes, one bound for the Grand Pacific Hotel, another the Palmer House, others to the Richelieu, Auditorium, Wellington, the gorgeous homes on Michigan and Prairie, the clubs—Chicago, Century, Union League—and the expensive brothels, in particular Carrie Watson’s place with its lovely young women and cascades of champagne.

  One telegraph boy made his way through the dark to an unlit alley that smelled of rotted fruit and was silent save for the receding hiss of gaslights on the street he had left behind. He found a door, knocked, and entered a room full of men, some young, some old, all seeming to speak at once, a few quite drunk. A coffin at the center of the room served as a bar. The light was dim and came from gas jets hidden behind skulls mounted on the walls. Other skulls lay scattered about the room. A hangman’s noose dangled from the wall, as did assorted weapons and a blanket caked with blood.

  These artifacts marked the room as headquarters of the Whitechapel Club, named for the London slum in which two years earlier Jack the Ripper had done his killing. The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists, who brought to the club’s meetings stories of murder harvested from the city’s streets. The weapons on the wall had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum; the blanket by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux.

  Upon learning that Chicago had won the fair, the men of the Whitechapel Club composed a telegram to Chauncey Depew, who more than any other man symbolized New York and its campaign to win the fair. Previously Depew had promised the members of the Whitechapel Club that if Chicago prevailed he would present himself at the club’s next meeting, to be hacked apart by the Ripper himself—metaphorically, he presumed, although at the Whitechapel Club could one ever be certain? The club’s coffin, for example, had once been used to transport the body of a member who had committed suicide. After claiming his body, the club had hauled it to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, where members erected an immense pyre. They placed the body on top, then set it alight. Carrying torches and wearing black hooded robes, they circled the fire singing hymns to the dead between sips of whiskey. The club also had a custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.

  The club’s telegram reached Depew in Washington twenty minutes after the final ballot, just as Chicago’s congressional delegation began celebrating at the Willard Hotel near the White House. The telegram asked, “When may we see you at our dissecting table?”

  Depew sent an immediate response: “I am at your service when ordered and quite ready after today’s events to contribute my body to Chicago science.”

  Although he was gracious in acknowledging defeat, Depew doubted that Chicago really understood the challenge that lay ahead. “The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris,” he told the Tribune. “Whatever you do is to be compared with that. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph. If you fall below it you will be held responsible by the whole American people for having assumed what you are not equal to.

  “Beware,” he warned. “Take care!”

  Chicago promptly established a formal corporation, the World’s Columbian Exposition Company, to finance and build the fair. Quietly officials made it clear that Burnham and Root would be the lead designers. The burden of restoring the nation’s pride and prominence in the wake of the Paris exposition had fallen upon Chicago, and Chicago in turn had lodged it firmly, if for now discreetly, on the top floor of the Rookery.

  Failure was unthinkable. If the fair failed, Burnham knew, the nation’s honor would be tarnished, Chicago humiliated, and his own firm dealt a crushing blow. Everywhere Burnham turned there was someone—a friend, an editor, a fellow club member—telling him that the nation expected something tremendous out of this fair. And expected it in record time. The Auditorium alone had taken nearly three years to build and driven Louis Sullivan to the brink of physical collapse. Now Burnham and Root were being called upon to build what amounted to an entire city in about the same amount of time—not just any city, but one that would surpass the brilliance of the Paris exposition. The fair also would have to make a profit. Among Chicago’s leading men, profitability was a matter of personal and civic honor.

  By traditional architectural standards the challenge seemed an impossible one. Alone neither architect could have done it, but together, Burnham believed, he and Root had the will and the interlocking powers of organization and design to succeed. Together they had defeated gravity and conquered the soft gumbo of Chicago soil, to change forever the character of urban life; now, together, they would build the fair and change history. It could be done, because it had to be done, but the challenge was monstrous. Depew’s oratory on the fair quickly grew tiresome, but the man had a
way of capturing with wit and brevity the true character of a situation. “Chicago is like the man who marries a woman with a ready-made family of twelve,” he said. “The trouble is just begun.”

  Even Depew, however, did not foresee the true magnitude of the forces that were converging on Burnham and Root. At this moment he and they saw the challenge in its two most fundamental dimensions, time and money, and these were stark enough.

  Only Poe could have dreamed the rest.

  The Necessary Supply

  ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child’s fever, a man calling himself H. H. Holmes walked into one of Chicago’s train stations. The air was stale and still, suffused with the scent of rotten peaches, horse excrement, and partially combusted Illinois anthracite. Half a dozen locomotives stood in the trainyard exhaling steam into the already-yellow sky.

  Holmes acquired a ticket to a village called Englewood in the town of Lake, a municipality of 200,000 people that abutted Chicago’s southernmost boundary. The township encompassed the Union Stock Yards and two large parks: Washington Park, with lawns, gardens, and a popular racetrack, and Jackson Park, a desolate, undeveloped waste on the lakeshore.

  Despite the heat Holmes looked fresh and crisp. As he moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals.

  He walked with confidence and dressed well, conjuring an impression of wealth and achievement. He was twenty-six years old. His height was five feet, eight inches; he weighed only 155 pounds. He had dark hair and striking blue eyes, once likened to the eyes of a Mesmerist. “The eyes are very big and wide open,” a physician named John L. Capen later observed. “They are blue. Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.” Capen also noted thin lips, tented by a full dark mustache. What he found most striking, however, were Holmes’s ears. “It is a marvelously small ear, and at the top it is shaped and carved after the fashion in which old sculptors indicated deviltry and vice in their statues of satyrs.” Overall, Capen noted, “he is made on a very delicate mold.”

  To women as yet unaware of his private obsessions, it was an appealing delicacy. He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.

  He stepped from the train into the heart of Englewood and took a moment to survey his surroundings. He stood at the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace. A telegraph pole at the corner held Fire Alarm Box No. 2475. In the distance rose the frames of several three-story homes under construction. He heard the concussion of hammers. Newly planted trees stood in soldierly ranks, but in the heat and haze they looked like desert troops gone too long without water. The air was still, moist, and suffused with the burned-licorice scent of freshly rolled macadam. On the corner stood a shop with a sign identifying it as E. S. Holton Drugs.

  He walked. He came to Wentworth Street, which ran north and south and clearly served as Englewood’s main commercial street, its pavement clotted with horses, drays, and phaetons. Near the corner of Sixty-third and Wentworth, he passed a fire station that housed Engine Company no. 51. Next door was a police station. Years later a villager with a blind spot for the macabre would write, “While at times there was considerable need of a police force in the Stock Yards district, Englewood pursued the even tenor of its way with very little necessity for their appearance other than to ornament the landscape and see that the cows were not disturbed in their peaceful pastures.”

  Holmes returned to Wallace Street, where he had seen the sign for Holton Drugs. Tracks crossed the intersection. A guard sat squinting against the sun watching for trains and every few minutes lowered a crossing gate as yet another locomotive huffed past. The drugstore was on the northwest corner of Wallace and Sixty-third. Across Wallace was a large vacant lot.

  Holmes entered the store and there found an elderly woman named Mrs. Holton. He sensed vulnerability, sensed it the way another man might capture the trace of a woman’s perfume. He identified himself as a doctor and licensed pharmacist and asked the woman if she needed assistance in her store. He spoke softly, smiled often, and held her in his frank blue gaze.

  He was good with conversation, and soon she revealed to him her deepest sorrow. Her husband, upstairs in their apartment, was dying of cancer. She confessed that managing the store while caring for him had become a great burden.

  Holmes listened with moist eyes. He touched her arm. He could ease her burden, he said. Not only that, he could turn the drugstore into a thriving establishment and conquer the competition up the block.

  His gaze was so clear and blue. She told him she would have to talk to her husband.

  She walked upstairs. The day was hot. Flies rested on the window sill. Outside yet another train rumbled through the intersection. Cinder and smoke drifted like soiled gauze past the window. She would talk to her husband, yes, but he was dying, and she was the one who now managed the store and bore its responsibilities, and she had come to a decision.

  Just thinking about the young doctor gave her a feeling of contentment she had not experienced in a long while.

  Holmes had been to Chicago before, but only for brief visits. The city impressed him, he said later, which was surprising because as a rule nothing impressed him, nothing moved him. Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or remain motionless. When he resolved at last to move to Chicago, he was still using his given name, Herman Webster Mudgett.

  As for most people, his initial sensory contact with Chicago had been the fantastic stink that lingered always in the vicinity of the Union Stock Yards, a Chinook of putrefaction and incinerated hair, “an elemental odor,” wrote Upton Sinclair, “raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual and strong.” Most people found it repulsive. The few who found it invigorating tended to be men who had waded in its “river of death,” Sinclair’s phrase, and panned from it great fortunes. It is tempting to imagine that all that death and blood made Mudgett feel welcome but more realistic to suppose it conveyed a sense that here at last was a city that allowed a broader range of behavior than was tolerated in Gilmanton Academy, New Hampshire, the town in which he was born and where he drifted through childhood as a small, odd, and exceptionally bright boy—and where, as a consequence, in the cruel imaginations of his peers, he became prey.

  The memory of one episode stayed with him throughout his life. He was five, wearing his first boy’s suit, when his parents sent him off to begin his education at the village schoolhouse. “I had daily to pass the office of one village doctor, the door of which was seldom if ever barred,” he wrote in a later memoir. “Partly from its being associated in my mind as the source of all the nauseous mixtures that had been my childish terror (for this was before the day of children’s medicines), and partly because of vague rumors I had heard regarding its contents, this place was one of peculiar abhorrence to me.”

  In those days a doctor’s office could indeed be a fearsome place. All doctors were in a sense amateurs. The best of them bought cadavers for study. They paid cash, no questions asked, and preserved particularly interesting bits of diseased viscera in large clear bottles. Skeletons hung in offices for easy anatomical reference; some transcended function to become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated—every bleached bone hitched to its neighbor with brass, under a skull grinning with slap-shoulder bonhomie—that they appeared ready to race chattering down the street to catch the next grip-car.

  Two older children discovered Mudgett’s fear and one day captured him and dragged him “struggling and shrieking” into the doctor’s office. “Nor did they desist,” Mudgett wrote, “until I had been brought face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize me.

  “It was a wicked and dangerou
s thing to do to a child of tender years and health,” he wrote, “but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession.”

  The incident probably did occur, but with a different choreography. More likely the two older boys discovered that their five-year-old victim did not mind the excursion; that far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.

  When his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled.

  Gilmanton was a small farming village in New Hampshire’s lake country, sufficiently remote that its residents did not have access to a daily newspaper and rarely heard the shriek of train whistles. Mudgett had two siblings, a brother and sister. His father, Levi, was a farmer, as was Levi’s own father. Mudgett’s parents were devout Methodists whose response to even routine misbehavior relied heavily on the rod and prayer, followed by banishment to the attic and a day with neither speech nor food. His mother often insisted he pray with her in her room, then filled the air around him with trembly passion.

  By his own assessment, he was a “mother’s boy.” He spent a good deal of time alone in his room reading Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe and inventing things. He built a wind-powered mechanism that generated noise to scare birds from the family fields and set out to create a perpetual motion machine. He hid his most favored treasures in small boxes, among them his first extracted tooth and a photograph of his “twelve-year-old sweetheart,” although later observers speculated these boxes also contained treasures of a more macabre sort, such as the skulls of small animals that he disabled and then dissected, alive, in the woods around Gilmanton. They based this speculation on the hard lessons learned during the twentieth century about the behavior of children of similar character. Mudgett’s only close friend was an older child named Tom, who was killed in a fall while the boys were playing in an abandoned house.