by Erik Larson
What made the incident particularly frightening was Holmes’s manner as he made the offer—“about the same manner one would expect from a friend who was asking you the most trivial question,” Bowman said.
Whether Holmes truly meant for Bowman to kill the man cannot be known. It would have been wholly within character for Holmes to have first persuaded the “brother-in-law” to take out a life insurance policy with Holmes as beneficiary. It was possible, too, that Holmes was merely testing Bowman to determine how useful he might be in the future. If so, it was a test that Bowman failed. “I was so badly scared I didn’t know what to say or do,” Bowman said, “but I didn’t drop the stone and got out of the place soon after.”
Three men did meet Holmes’s standard of trustworthiness. Each worked for him throughout the period of construction and continued to associate with him after the building was completed. One was Charles Chappell, a machinist who lived near Cook County Hospital. He first worked for Holmes as a common laborer but soon proved to possess a talent that Holmes found particularly valuable. Another was Patrick Quinlan, who lived at Forty-seventh and Morgan in Englewood until he moved into Holmes’s building as its caretaker. He was a small, twitchy man in his late thirties, with light curly hair and a sandy mustache.
The third and most important was Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter, who joined Holmes in November 1889. He replaced a worker named Robert Latimer, who had quit to take over as gatekeeper at the rail intersection in front of Holmes’s drugstore. At first, Latimer said, Pitezel took care of the horses involved in the construction of Holmes’s building, but later he became his all-round assistant. Holmes and Pitezel seemed to have a close relationship, close enough at least for Holmes to do Pitezel a costly favor. Pitezel was arrested in Indiana for attempting to pass forged checks. Holmes posted bail and forfeited the amount when Pitezel, as planned, failed to return for trial.
Pitezel had smooth features and a sharp well-defined chin. He might have been handsome if not for a certain hungry gauntness and the way the lids of his eyes cloaked the top of each iris. “In a general way,” Holmes said, “I should describe him a man nearly six feet high (at least five feet ten inches), always thin in flesh and weighing from one hundred and forty-five to one hundred and fifty-five lbs., having very black and somewhat coarse hair, very thick, with no tendency to baldness; his mustache was a much lighter color and I think of a red tinge, though I have seen him have it colored black at times, which gave him quite a different appearance.”
Pitezel was plagued with various maladies: sore knees from the installation of one too many floors, a wart on his neck that kept him from wearing a stiff collar, and teeth so painful that at one point he had to suspend his work for Holmes. Despite being a chronic alcoholic, he was, in the appraisal of one doctor, a man of “fine physique.”
Pitezel was married to Carrie Canning of Galva, Illinois, and the father of a fast-increasing number of children. Photographs of the children show a sweet if sober bunch who seem ready at a moment’s notice to swing into action with brooms and dishcloths. The couple’s first daughter, Dessie, had been born out of wedlock, an event entirely within the realm of what Pitezel’s parents had come to expect of their son. In a last plea for Pitezel to take a more righteous path, his father wrote: “Come with me and I will do the good is the Savior’s command. Will you go? I will take that wicked nature out of you, and I will wash from you all stains, and I will be a father to you and you shall be a son and an heir.” The pain in his father’s words was palpable. “I love you,” he wrote, “although you have gone far astray.”
Alice, the second child, was born soon after the marriage. Another daughter and three sons followed, although one boy died of diphtheria shortly after birth. Three of the children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—would become so well known throughout America that headline writers would refer to them by their first names alone, confident that even the most remote reader understood exactly who they were.
Pitezel too would achieve a certain fame because of Holmes. “Pitezel was his tool,” a district attorney said, “his creature.”
Construction of Holmes’s building occurred in ragged stages and more or less halted each winter at the close of what workers called the “building season,” although Holmes had read how architects in the Loop were using techniques that allowed construction year-round. Eventually, much would be made of the fact that Holmes had erected his building during the same period in which Jack the Ripper, thousands of miles away, began his killings.
The first of Jack’s murders occurred on August 31, 1888, the last on the night of November 9, 1888 when he met a prostitute named Mary Kelly and accompanied her back to her rooms. He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine. Over the next few hours, secure within walls, he carved off her breasts and placed these on a table along with her nose. He slashed her from throat to pubis, skinned her thighs, removed her internal organs, and arranged them in a pile between her feet. He cut off a hand, which he then thrust into her bisected abdomen. Kelly had been three months’ pregnant at the time.
Abruptly the murders stopped, as if that tryst with Mary Kelly had sated the killer’s need at last. Five confirmed victims, only five, and Jack the Ripper became the embodiment, forever, of pure evil.
Every Chicago resident who could read devoured these reports from abroad, but none with quite so much intensity as Dr. H. H. Holmes.
On June 29, 1889, when Holmes’s building was half completed, Chicago annexed Englewood and soon afterward established a new police precinct, the Tenth, Second Division, at Sixty-third and Wentworth, seven blocks from Holmes’s pharmacy. Soon patrolmen under the command of Captain Horace Elliott began making regular walks past the store, where in accord with custom they stopped to chat with the young and personable owner. Periodically the officers ambled across the street to watch construction of the new building. Englewood already had a number of substantial structures, including the YMCA, the Cook County Normal School, which trained teachers, and the lavish Timmerman Opera House, now nearing completion at Sixty-third and Stewart, but the village still had a lot of open terrain, and any building destined to occupy an entire block was a topic of conversation.
Construction took another year, with the usual hiatus for winter. By May 1890 the building was largely finished. The second floor had six corridors, thirty-five rooms, and fifty-one doors, the third another three dozen rooms. The building’s first floor had space for five retail stores, the best of which was a large and inviting corner shop on the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace.
One month after moving into his building, Holmes sold the former Holton drugstore and assured the buyer that he would face little competition.
To the buyer’s chagrin, Holmes promptly opened a new drugstore just across the street, in his own corner shop.
Holmes installed a variety of other businesses in his remaining first-floor stores, including a barbershop and restaurant. City directories also listed at Holmes’s address the office of a doctor named Henry D. Mann, possibly a Holmes alias, and the headquarters of the Warner Glass Bending Company, which Holmes formed ostensibly to enter the booming new business of making and shaping the large sheets of plate glass suddenly in so much demand.
Holmes equipped his shops with furniture and fixtures that he bought on credit. He had no intention of paying his debts and was confident he could evade prosecution through guile and charm. When creditors came by demanding to see the owner of the building, Holmes referred them happily to the fictive H. S. Campbell.
“He was the smoothest man I ever saw,” said C. E. Davis, whom Holmes had hired to manage the drugstore’s jewelry counter. Creditors, Davis said, would “come here raging and calling him all the names imaginable, and he would smile and talk to them and set up the cigars and drinks and send them away seemingly his friends for life. I never saw him angry. You couldn’t have trouble with him if you tried.”
Davis gestured toward the sto
re. “If all the writs of mechanic’s lien that have been levied on this structure were pasted on these three walls, the block would look like a mammoth circus billboard. But I never heard of a lien being collected. Holmes used to tell me he had a lawyer paid to keep him out of trouble, but it always seemed to me that it was the courteous, audacious rascality of the fellow that pulled him through. One day he bought some furniture for his restaurant and moved it in, and that very evening the dealer came around to collect his bill or remove his goods. Holmes set up the drinks, took him to supper, bought him a cigar and sent the man off laughing at a joke, with a promise to call the next week for his money. In thirty minutes after he took his car Holmes had wagons in front loading up that furniture and the dealer never got a cent. Holmes didn’t go to jail, either. He was the only man in the United States that could do what he did.”
Holmes had the money to pay his debts. Davis estimated that Holmes made $200,000 through his drugstore and other business ventures, most of which were fraudulent. Holmes attempted, for example, to sell investors a machine that turned water into natural gas. He secretly connected his prototype to city gas lines.
He was always charming and cordial, but there were times when even these traits failed to put his business associates at ease. A druggist named Erickson recalled how Holmes used to come into his store to buy chloroform, a potent but unpredictable anesthetic in use since the Civil War. “I sometimes sold him the drug nine or ten times a week and each time it was in large quantities. I asked him what he used it for on several occasions, but he gave me very unsatisfactory answers. At last I refused to let him have any more unless he told me, as I pretended that I was afraid that he was not using it for any proper purpose.”
Holmes told Erickson he was using the chloroform for scientific experiments. Later, when Holmes returned for more chloroform, Erickson asked him how his experiments were coming.
Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments.
“I could never make him out,” Erickson said.
A woman named Strowers occasionally did Holmes’s laundry. One day he offered to pay her $6,000 if she would acquire a $10,000 life insurance policy and name him beneficiary. When she asked why he would do such a thing, he explained that upon her death he’d make a profit of $4,000, but in the meantime she’d be able to spend her $6,000 in whatever manner she chose.
To Mrs. Strowers, this was a fortune, and all she had to do was sign a few documents. Holmes assured her it was all perfectly legal.
She was healthy and expected to live a good long while. She was on the verge of accepting the offer when Holmes said to her, softly, “Don’t be afraid of me.”
Which terrified her.
In November 1890 Holmes learned along with the rest of Chicago that the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition had at last reached a decision as to where to build the fair. To his delight, he read that the main site was to be Jackson Park, due east of his building at the lake end of Sixty-third, with exhibits also in downtown Chicago and Washington Park and along the full length of Midway Boulevard.
Holmes knew the parks from his bicycle journeys. Like most Americans, he had become caught up in the bicycle craze that was ignited by the advent of the “safety” bicycle, with its same-sized wheels and chain-and-sprocket drive. Unlike most Americans, however, Holmes sought also to capitalize on the craze by buying bicycles on credit, then reselling them without ever paying off the initial purchase. He himself rode a Pope.
The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the Tribune offered a six-room house for sale at Forty-first and Ellis, a mile or so north of Jackson Park, and boasted that during the fair the new owner could expect to let four of the six rooms for nearly a thousand dollars a month (about $30,000 in twenty-first-century currency). Holmes’s building and land were valuable to begin with, given Englewood’s continued growth, but now his property seemed the equivalent of a seam of gold ore.
An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.
Pilgrimage
ON MONDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 15, 1890, a day noteworthy in Chicago for its extraordinary warmth and elsewhere for the gunshot death of Sitting Bull, Daniel Burnham stepped aboard a train bound for New York and what he knew would be the most crucial encounter of the exposition odyssey.
He entered a bright green coach, one of George Pullman’s Palace cars, where the air hung with the stillness of a heavy tapestry. A bell clanged and continued clanging in a swinging rhythm as the train surged at grade level into the heart of the city at twenty miles an hour, despite the presence at arm’s reach of grip-cars, carriages, and pedestrians. Everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leaped past crossing gates waving a raccoon’s tail of white and black smoke. The train clicked by the Union Stock Yards, doubly pungent in the day’s strange warmth, and skirted sierras of black coal capped with grimy melting snow. Burnham treasured beauty but saw none for miles and miles and miles, just coal, rust, and smoke in endless repetition until the train entered the prairie and everything seemed to go quiet. Darkness fell, leaving a false twilight of old snow.
The exposition directors’ decision on where to locate the fair had caused a rapid acceleration of events that was encouraging but also unsettling, because suddenly the whole thing had become more real, its true magnitude more daunting. Immediately the directors had ordered a rough plan of the fair, to be delivered to them within twenty-four hours. John Root, guided by Burnham and Olmsted, had produced a drawing on a sheet of brown paper measuring forty square feet, which the men delivered to the committee with a barbed aside to the effect that the designers of the Paris exposition had been able to spend a whole year thinking, planning, and sketching before reaching the same point. The drawing envisioned a mile-square plain on the lakeshore sculpted by dredges into a wonderland of lagoons and canals. Ultimately, the designers knew, the exposition would have hundreds of buildings, including one for each state of the union and for many countries and industries, but on the drawing they sketched only the most important, among them five immense palaces sited around a central Grand Court. They also made room for a tower to be built at one end of the court, although no one knew exactly who would build this tower or what it would look like, only that it would have to surpass Eiffel’s tower in every way. The directors and their federal overseers, the National Commission, approved the plan with uncharacteristic speed.
For outsiders, it was the sheer size of the exposition that made it seem such an impossible challenge. That the fair’s grounds would be vast and its buildings colossal was something every Chicago resident took for granted; what mystified them was how anyone could expect to build the biggest thing ever constructed on American soil, far bigger than Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, in so little time. Burnham knew, however, that the fair’s size was just one element of the challenge. The gross features of the fair envisioned in the plan concealed a billion smaller obstacles that the public and most of the exposition’s own directors had no idea existed. Burnham would have to build a railroad within the fairgrounds to transport steel, stone, and lumber to each construction site. He would have to manage the delivery of supplies, goods, mail, and all exhibit articles sent to the grounds by transcontinental shipping companies, foremost among them the Adams Express Company. He would need a police force and a fire department, a hospital and an ambulance service. And there would be horses, thousands of them—something would have to be done about the tons of manure generated each day.
Immediately after the brown-paper plan received approval, Burnham requested authority to build “at once cheap wooden quarters in Jackson Park for myself and force,” quarters in which he would live almost continuously for the next three years. This lodging quickly became known as “the sha
nty,” though it had a large fireplace and an excellent wine cellar stocked by Burnham himself. With a power of perception that far outpaced his era, Burnham recognized that the tiniest details would shape the way people judged the exposition. His vigilance extended even to the design of the fair’s official seal. “It may not occur to you how very important a matter this Seal is,” he wrote in a December 8, 1890, letter to George R. Davis, the fair’s director-general, its chief political officer. “It will be very largely distributed throughout foreign countries, and is one of those trivial things by which these people will judge the artistic standard of the Fair.”
All these, however, were mere distractions compared to the single most important task on Burnham’s roster: the selection of architects to design the fair’s major buildings.
He and John Root had considered designing the whole exposition themselves, and indeed their peers jealously expected they would do so. Harriet Monroe, Root’s sister-in-law, recalled how one evening Root came home “cut to the quick” because an architect whom he had considered a friend “had apparently refused to recognize Mr. Burnham when they met at a club.” Root grumbled, “I suppose he thinks we are going to hog it all!” He resolved that to preserve his credibility as supervising architect, a role in which he would be compelled to oversee the work of other exposition architects, he would not himself design any of the buildings.
Burnham knew exactly whom he wanted to hire but was less aware of how incendiary his selections would prove. He wanted the best architects America had to offer, not just for their talent but also for how their affiliation instantly would shatter the persistent eastern belief that Chicago would produce only a country fair.
