The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  He was twenty-two years old, born in Ireland in 1868; his family emigrated to the United States in 1871 and in August that year moved to Chicago, just in time to experience the Great Fire. He was always, as his mother said, “a shy and retiring kind of a boy.” He got his grade-school education at Chicago’s De La Salle Institute. Brother Adjutor, one of his teachers, said, “While in school he was a remarkable boy in this way, that he was very quiet and took no part in the play of the other students at noon time. He would generally stand around. From the appearance of the boy I would be led to think that he was not well; that he was sick.” Prendergast’s father got him a job delivering telegrams for Western Union, which the boy held for a year and a half. When Prendergast was thirteen, his father died, and he lost his only friend. For a time his withdrawal from the world seemed complete. He awakened slowly. He began reading books about law and politics and attending meetings of the Single-Tax Club, which embraced Henry George’s belief that private landowners should pay a tax, essentially rent, to reflect the underlying truth that land belonged to everyone. At these meetings Prendergast insisted on taking part in every conversation and once had to be carried from the room. To his mother, he seemed to be a different man: well read, animated, involved. She said: “He got smart all of a sudden.”

  In fact, his madness had become more profound. When he was not working, he wrote postcards, scores of them, perhaps hundreds, to the most powerful men in the city, in a voice that presumed he was their equal in social stature. He wrote to his beloved Harrison and to assorted other politicians, including the governor of Illinois. It’s possible even that Burnham received a card, given his new prominence.

  That Prendergast was a troubled young man was clear; that he might be dangerous seemed impossible. To anyone who met him, he appeared to be just another poor soul crushed by the din and filth of Chicago. But Prendergast had grand hopes for the future, all of which rested on one man: Carter Henry Harrison.

  He threw himself eagerly into Harrison’s mayoral campaign, albeit without Harrison’s knowledge, sending postcards by the dozens and telling anyone who would listen that Harrison, staunch friend of the Irish and the working man, was the best candidate for the job.

  He believed that when Harrison at last won his fifth two-year term—ideally in the upcoming April 1891 election, but perhaps not until the next, in 1893—he would reward Prendergast with a job. That was how Chicago politics worked. He had no doubt that Harrison would come through and rescue him from the frozen mornings and venomous newsboys that for the moment defined his life.

  Among the most progressive alienists, this kind of unfounded belief was known as a delusion, associated with a newly identified disorder called paranoia. Happily, most delusions were harmless.

  On October 25, 1890, the site for the fair still unchosen, worrisome news arrived from Europe, the first hint of forces gathering that could do infinitely more damage to the fair than the directors’ stalemate. The Chicago Tribune reported that increasing turbulence in global markets had raised concerns in London that a recession, even a full-blown “panic,” could be in the offing. Immediately these concerns began buffeting Wall Street. Railroad stocks tumbled. The value of Western Union’s shares fell by five percent.

  The next Saturday news of a truly stunning failure stuttered through the submarine cable that linked Britain and America.

  In Chicago, before the news arrived, brokers spent a good deal of time discussing the morning’s strange weather. An unusually “murky pall” hung over the city. Brokers joked how the gloom might be the signal that a “day of judgment” was at hand.

  The chuckling faded with the first telegrams from London: Baring Brothers & Co., the powerful London investment house, was on the verge of closure. “The news,” a Tribune writer observed, “was almost incredible.” The Bank of England and a syndicate of financiers were racing to raise a fund to guarantee Baring’s financial obligations. “The wild rush that followed to sell stocks was something terrible. It was a veritable panic for an hour.”

  For Burnham and the exposition directors, this wave of financial damage was troubling. If it indeed marked the start of a true and deep financial panic, the timing was abysmal. In order for Chicago to live up to its boasts about surpassing the Paris exposition in both size and attendance, the city would have to spend far more heavily than the French and capture a lot more visitors—yet the Paris show had drawn more people than any other peaceful event in history. In the best of times winning an audience of that scale would be a challenge; in the worst, impossible, especially since Chicago’s interior location guaranteed that most visitors would have to buy an overnight train ticket. The railroads had made it known early and forcefully that they had no plans to discount their Chicago fares for the exposition.

  Other corporate failures occurred both in Europe and in the United States, but their true meaning remained for the moment unclear—in retrospect, a good thing.

  In the midst of this intensifying financial turbulence, on October 30 the exposition board appointed Burnham chief of construction, with a salary equivalent to $360,000; Burnham in turn made Root the fair’s supervising architect and Olmsted its supervising landscape architect.

  Burnham now possessed formal authority to begin building a fair, but he still had no place to put it.

  “Don’t Be Afraid”

  AS ENGLEWOOD GAINED POPULATION, Holmes’s sales of tonics and lotions increased. By the end of 1886 the pharmacy was running smoothly and profitably. His thoughts turned now to a woman he had met earlier in the year during his brief stay in Minneapolis, Myrta Z. Belknap. She was young and blond, with blue eyes and a lush figure, but what elevated her above mere beauty was the aura of vulnerability and need that surrounded her. She became an immediate obsession, her image and need locked in his brain. He traveled to Minneapolis, ostensibly on business. He had no doubt he would succeed. It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.

  The city toughened them quickly, however. Best to catch them at the start of their ascent toward freedom, in transit from small places, when they were anonymous, lost, their presence recorded nowhere. Every day he saw them stepping from trains and grip-cars and hansom cabs, inevitably frowning at some piece of paper that was supposed to tell them where they belonged. The city’s madams understood this and were known to meet inbound trains with promises of warmth and friendship, saving the important news for later. Holmes adored Chicago, adored in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she ever had existed, save perhaps a blade-thin track of perfume amid the stench of dung, anthracite, and putrefaction.

  To Myrta, Holmes seemed to have stepped from a world far more exciting than her own. She lived with her parents and clerked in a music store. Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

  When his first letter arrived, asking sweetly if he might court her, she felt as if a coarse blanket had been lifted from her life. Every few weeks he returned to Minneapolis. He told her about Chicago. He described its skyscrapers and explained how each year the buildings grew taller and taller. He told her pleasantly shocking stories of the stockyards, how the hogs climbed the Bridge of Sighs to an elevated platform where chains were attached to their hind legs and they were swept away, shrieking, along an overhead track down into the bloody core of the slaughterhouse. And romantic stories: how Potter Palmer had been
so in love with his wife, Bertha, that he had given her a luxurious hotel, the Palmer House, as a wedding present.

  There were rules about courtship. Although no one set them down on paper, every young woman knew them and knew instantly when they were being broken. Holmes broke them all—and with such forthright lack of shame that it became clear to Myrta that the rules must be different in Chicago. At first it frightened her, but she found quickly that she liked the heat and risk. When Holmes asked her to be his wife, she accepted immediately. They married on January 28, 1887.

  Holmes neglected to tell Myrta that he already had a wife, Clara Lovering, the original Mrs. Herman Webster Mudgett. Two weeks after marrying Myrta, he filed a petition in the Supreme Court of Cook County, Illinois, to divorce Lovering. This was no fine-spirited gesture to clear the record: He charged Lovering with infidelity, a ruinous accusation. He allowed the petition to lapse, however, and eventually the court dismissed it for “failure to prosecute.”

  In Chicago Myrta saw at once that the stories Holmes had told of the city had only barely captured its glamour and dangerous energy. It was like a cauldron of steaming iron, trains everywhere—jarring, but also a reminder that life had opened to her at last. In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That Holmes lived in Englewood, not the heart of Chicago, was at first a disappointment, but here too there was a vibrancy far beyond what she had experienced at home. She and Holmes settled into the second-floor apartment previously occupied by Mrs. Holton. By the spring of 1888 Myrta was pregnant.

  At first she helped run the drugstore. She liked working with her husband and often watched him when he was engaged with a customer. She savored his looks and blue calm and craved the moments when, in the course of routine tasks, their bodies would touch. She admired, too, the charm with which he managed each transaction and how he won the business even of elderly customers loyal to the absent Mrs. Holton. And she smiled, at least initially, as a seemingly endless train of young women entered the store, each insisting that only direct consultation with Dr. Holmes himself would suffice.

  Myrta came to see that underneath her husband’s warm and charming exterior there flowed a deep current of ambition. He seemed a druggist in name only; he more closely fit the prevailing ideal of the self-made man who through hard work and invention pulled himself rung by rung into the upper strata of society. “Ambition has been the curse of my husband’s life,” Myrta said later. “He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth.”

  She insisted, however, that his ambition never impaired his character and never distracted him from his role as husband and eventually father. Holmes, she swore, had a gentle heart. He adored children and animals. “He was a lover of pets and always had a dog or cat and usually a horse, and he would play with them by the hour, teaching them little tricks or romping with them.” He neither drank nor smoked and did not gamble. He was affectionate and impossible to ruffle. “In his home life I do not think there was ever a better man than my husband,” Myrta said. “He never spoke an unkind word to me or our little girl, or my mother. He was never vexed or irritable but was always happy and free from care.”

  Yet from the start tension suffused their marriage. Holmes expressed no hostility; the heat came from Myrta, who quickly tired of all those young female customers and the way Holmes would smile at them and touch them and channel his blue gaze into their eyes. At first she had found it appealing; then it made her uneasy; finally it made her jealous and watchful.

  Her increasing possessiveness did not anger Holmes. Rather he came to see her as an obstacle, just as a sea captain might view an iceberg—something to monitor and avoid. Business was so good, he told Myrta, that he needed her help managing the store’s books. She found herself spending more and more time in an office upstairs, writing correspondence and preparing invoices for the drugstore. She wrote to her parents of her sorrow. In the summer of 1888 her parents moved to Wilmette, Illinois, where they occupied a pretty two-story house on John Street, opposite a church. Lonely, sad, and pregnant, Myrta joined them at the house and there bore a daughter, Lucy.

  Suddenly Holmes began acting like a dutiful husband. Myrta’s parents were cool at first, but he courted their approval with moist-eyed declarations of regret and displays of adoration for his wife and child. He succeeded. “His presence,” Myrta said, “was like oil on troubled waters, as mother often said to him. He was so kind, so gentle and thoughtful that we forgot our cares and worries.”

  He begged their forbearance for his lengthy absences from the Wilmette house. There was so much to do in Chicago. From the way he dressed and the money he gave Myrta, he certainly seemed like a man on the rise, and this perception went a long way to ease the concerns of Myrta’s parents. They and Myrta settled into a life marked by increasingly sparse visits from Dr. Holmes, but when he did appear, he brought warmth and gifts and entombed little Lucy in his arms.

  “It is said that babies are better judges of people than grown-up persons,” Myrta said, “and I never saw a baby that would not go to Mr. Holmes and stay with him contentedly. They would go to him when they wouldn’t come to me. He was remarkably fond of children. Often when we were traveling and there happened to be a baby in the car he would say, ‘Go and see if they won’t lend you that baby a little while,’ and when I brought it to him he would play with it, forgetting everything else, until its mother called for it or I could see that she wanted it. He has often taken babies that were crying from their mothers, and it would hardly be any time until he had them sound asleep or playing as happily as little ones can.”

  With Englewood booming, Holmes saw an opportunity. Ever since acquiring Holton’s drugstore, he had been interested in the undeveloped land across the street. After a few inquiries he learned that it was owned by a woman in New York. In the summer of 1888 he bought the land and, thinking ahead, registered the deed under a false name, H. S. Campbell. Soon afterward he began jotting notes and sketching features for a building he planned to erect on the lot. He did not consult an architect, although a fine one, a Scotsman named A. A. Frazier, had an office in the building that housed Holton’s store. To hire an architect would have meant revealing the true character of the structure that suddenly had lodged itself in his imagination.

  The building’s broad design and its function had come to him all at once, like a blueprint pulled from a drawer. He wanted retail shops on the first floor, to generate income and allow him to employ as many women as possible; apartments would fill the second and third. His personal flat and a large office would occupy the second-floor corner overlooking the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace. These were the basics. It was the details of the building that gave him the most pleasure. He sketched a wooden chute that would descend from a secret location on the second floor all the way to the basement. He planned to coat the chute with axle grease. He envisioned a room next to his office fitted with a large walk-in vault, with airtight seams and asbestos-coated iron walls. A gas jet embedded in one wall would be controlled from his closet, as would other gas jets installed in apartments throughout the building. There would be a large basement with hidden chambers and a subbasement for the permanent storage of sensitive material.

  As Holmes dreamed and sketched, the features of his building became more elaborate and satisfying. But this was only the dream phase. He could hardly imagine the pleasure that would fill his days when the building was finished and flesh-and-blood women moved among its features. As always, the thought aroused him.

  Constructing the building, he knew, would be no small challenge. He devised a strategy that he believed would not only allay suspicions but also reduce the costs of construction.

  He placed newspaper advertisements for carpenters and laborers, and soon workers with teams of horses began excavating the land. The resulting hole evoked a giant grave and exuded the same
musty chill, but this was not unwelcome for it provided workers with relief from the intensifying summer heat. The men had difficulty with the soil. The top few feet were easy to manage, but lower down the earth became sandy and wet. The sides of the pit had to be shored with timber. The walls bled water. A later report by a Chicago building inspector noted, “There is an uneven settlement of foundations, in some places as much as four inches in a span of 20 feet.” Bricklayers set the foundation and laid the exterior walls, while carpenters erected the interior frame. The street resonated with the wheeze of handsaws.

  Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost. The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building’s secrets. A worker might be ordered to perform a certain task—for example, to install the gas nozzle inside the big walk-in vault—but in the narrow context within which the worker functioned, the assignment could seem reasonable or at worst merely eccentric.

  Even so, a bricklayer named George Bowman found the experience of working for Holmes somewhat chilling. “I don’t know what to make of Holmes,” Bowman said. “I hadn’t been working for him but two days before he came around and asked me if I didn’t think it pretty hard work, this bricklaying. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to make money easier than that, and of course I told him yes. A few days after, he came over to me and, pointing down to the basement, said, ‘You see that man down there? Well, that’s my brother-in-law, and he has got no love for me, neither have I for him. Now, it would be the easiest matter for you to drop a stone on that fellow’s head while you’re at work and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you do.’ ”