The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  “I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate—”

  “You said that a minute ago,” De Young said. “Now tell me how much money you want.”

  This was not going quite the way Bloom had expected. With some trepidation, Bloom told him the number: “A thousand dollars a week.”

  De Young smiled. “Well, that’s pretty good pay for a fellow of twenty-one, but I have no doubt you’ll earn it.”

  In August, Burnham’s chief structural engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, made a startling disclosure: He had failed to calculate wind loads for the fair’s main buildings. Burnham ordered his key contractors—including Agnew & Co., erecting the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—to stop work immediately. For months Burnham had been combating rumors that he had forced his men to work at too fast a pace and that as a result some buildings were unsafe; in Europe, press reports held that certain structures had been “condemned.” Now here was Gottlieb, conceding a potentially catastrophic error.

  Gottlieb protested that even without an explicit calculation of wind loads, the buildings were strong enough.

  “I could not, however, take this view,” Burnham wrote in a letter to James Dredge, editor of the influential British magazine Engineering. Burnham ordered all designs strengthened to withstand the highest winds recorded over the previous ten years. “This may be going to extremes,” he told Dredge, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.”

  Gottlieb resigned. Burnham replaced him with Edward Shankland, an engineer from his own firm who possessed a national reputation as a designer of bridges.

  On November 24, 1891, Burnham wrote to James Dredge to report that once again he was under fire over the issue of structural integrity. “The criticism now,” he wrote, “is that the structures are unnecessarily strong.”

  Bloom arrived in Chicago and quickly discovered why so little had been accomplished at the Midway Plaisance, known officially as Department M. Until now it had been under the control of Frederick Putnam, a Harvard professor of ethnology. He was a distinguished anthropologist, but putting him in charge of the Midway, Bloom said years later, “was about as intelligent a decision as it would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” Putnam would not have disagreed. He told a Harvard colleague he was “anxious to get this whole Indian circus off my hands.”

  Bloom took his concerns to Exposition President Baker, who turned him over to Burnham.

  “You are a very young man, a very young man indeed, to be in charge of the work entrusted to you,” Burnham said.

  But Burnham himself had been young when John B. Sherman walked into his office and changed his life.

  “I want you to know that you have my full confidence,” he said. “You are in complete charge of the Midway. Go ahead with the work. You are responsible only to me. I will write orders to that effect. Good luck.”

  By December 1891 the two buildings farthest along were the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. Construction of the Mines Building had gone smoothly, thanks to a winter that by Chicago standards had been mercifully benign. Construction of the Woman’s Building, however, had become an ordeal, both for Burnham and its young architect, Sophia Hayden, mainly because of modifications demanded by Bertha Honore Palmer, head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers, which governed all things at the fair having to do with women. As the wife of Potter Palmer, she was accustomed by wealth and absolute social dominance to having her own way, as she had made clear earlier in the year when she suppressed a revolt led by the board’s executive secretary that had caused open warfare between factions of elegantly coiffed and dressed women. In the thick of it one horrified lady manager had written to Mrs. Palmer, “I do hope that Congress will not become disgusted with our sex.”

  Hayden came to Chicago to produce final drawings, then returned home, leaving their execution to Burnham. Construction began July 9; workers began applying the final coat of staff in October. Hayden returned in December to direct the decoration of the building’s exterior, believing this to be her responsibility. She discovered that Bertha Palmer had other ideas.

  In September, without Hayden’s knowledge, Palmer had invited women everywhere to donate architectural ornaments for the building and in response had received a museum’s worth of columns, panels, sculpted figures, window grills, doors, and other objects. Palmer believed the building could accommodate all the contributions, especially those sent by prominent women. Hayden, on the other hand, knew that such a hodgepodge of materials would result in an aesthetic abomination. When an influential Wisconsin woman named Flora Ginty sent an elaborately carved wooden door, Hayden turned it down. Ginty was hurt and angry. “When I think of the days I worked and the miles I traveled to achieve these things for the Woman’s building, my ire rises a little yet.” Mrs. Palmer was in Europe at the time, but her private secretary, Laura Hayes, a gossip of virtuosic scope, made sure her employer learned all the details. Hayes also relayed to Palmer a few words of advice that she herself had given the architect: “‘I think it would be better to have the building look like a patchwork quilt, than to refuse these things which the Lady Managers have been to such pains in soliciting.’ ”

  A patchwork quilt was not what Hayden had in mind. Despite Mrs. Palmer’s blinding social glare, Hayden continued to decline donations. A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy. Mrs. Palmer pecked and pestered and catapulted icy smiles into Hayden’s deepening gloom. Finally Palmer assigned the decoration of the Woman’s Building to someone else, a designer named Candace Wheeler.

  Hayden fought the arrangement in her quiet, stubborn way until she could take it no longer. She walked into Burnham’s office, began to tell him her story, and promptly, literally, went mad: tears, heaving sobs, cries of anguish, all of it. “A severe breakdown,” an acquaintance called it, “with a violent attack of high nervous excitement of the brain.”

  Burnham, stunned, summoned one of the exposition surgeons. Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest. She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.

  At Jackson Park aggravation was endemic. Simple matters, Burnham found, often became imbroglios. Even Olmsted had become an irritant. He was brilliant and charming, but once fixed on a thing, he was as unyielding as a slab of Joliet limestone. By the end of 1891 the question of what kind of boats to allow on the fair’s waterways had come to obsess him, as if boats alone would determine the success of his quest for “poetic mystery.”

  In December 1891 Burnham received a proposal from a tugboat manufacturer arguing the case for steam launches at the exposition. Olmsted got wind of it from Harry Codman, who in addition to being his chief operating man in Chicago served as a kind of spy, keeping Olmsted abreast of all threats to Olmsted’s vision. Codman sent Olmsted a copy of the letter, adding his own note that the tugboat maker seemed to enjoy Burnham’s confidence.

  On December 23 Olmsted wrote to Burnham: “I suspect that even Codman is inclined to think that I make too much of a hobby of this boat question and give an amount of worry, if not thought, to it that would be better expended on other and more critical matters, and I fear that you may think me a crank upon it.”

  He proceeded, however, to vent his obsession yet again. The tugmaker’s letter, he complained, framed the boat question solely in terms of moving the greatest number of passengers between different points at the exposition as cheaply and quickly as possible. “You perfectly well know that the main object to be accomplished was nothing of this sort. I need not try to make a statement of what it was. You are as alive to it as I am. You know that it was a poetic object, and you know that if boats are to be introduced on these waters, it would be perfect nonsense to have them of a kind that would antagonize this poetic object.”

 
Mere transportation was never the goal, he fumed. The whole point of having boats was to enhance the landscape. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition. I say destroy deliberately. A thousand times better [to] have no boats.”

  Despite increasing committee interference and intensified conflict between Burnham and Director-General Davis, and with the threat of labor strikes ever present, the main buildings rose. Workers laid foundations of immense timbers in crisscrossed layers in accord with Root’s grillage principle, then used steam-powered derricks to raise the tall posts of iron and steel that formed each building’s frame. They cocooned the frames in scaffolds of wood and faced each frame with hundreds of thousands of wooden planks to create walls capable of accepting two thick layers of staff. As workers piled mountains of fresh lumber beside each building, jagged foothills of sawdust and scrap rose nearby. The air smelled of cut wood and Christmas.

  In December the exposition experienced its first death: a man named Mueller at the Mines Building, dead of a fractured skull. Three other deaths followed in short order:

  Jansen, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

  Allard, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

  Algeer, stunned to oblivion by a new phenomenon, electric shock, at the Mines Building.

  Dozens of lesser accidents occurred as well. Publicly Burnham struck a pose of confidence and optimism. In a December 28, 1891, letter to the editor of the Chicago Herald, he wrote, “A few questions of design and plan are still undetermined, but there is nothing which is not well in hand, and I see no reason why we will not be able to complete our work in time for the ceremonies in October, 1892”—Dedication Day—“and for the opening of the Exposition, May 1st, 1893.”

  In reality, the fair was far behind schedule, with worse delay forestalled only by the winter’s mildness. The October dedication was to take place inside the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, yet as of January only the foundation of the building had been laid. For the fair to be even barely presentable in time for the ceremony, everything would have to go perfectly. The weather especially would have to cooperate.

  Meanwhile, banks and companies were failing across America, strikes threatened everywhere, and cholera had begun a slow white trek across Europe, raising fears that the first plague ships would soon arrive in New York Harbor.

  As if anyone needed extra pressure, the New York Times warned: “the failure of the fair or anything short of a positive and pronounced success would be a discredit to the whole country, and not to Chicago alone.”

  Remains of the Day

  IN NOVEMBER 1891 JULIA CONNER announced to Holmes she was pregnant; now, she told him, he had no choice but to marry her. Holmes reacted to her news with calm and warmth. He held her, stroked her hair, and with moist eyes assured her that she had nothing to worry about, certainly he would marry her, as he long had promised. There was, however, a condition that he now felt obligated to impose. A child was out of the question. He would marry her only if she agreed to allow him to execute a simple abortion. He was a physician, he had done it before. He would use chloroform, and she would feel nothing and awaken to the prospect of a new life as Mrs. H. H. Holmes. Children would come later. Right now there was far too much to do, especially given all the work that lay ahead to complete the hotel and furnish each of its rooms in time for the world’s fair.

  Holmes knew he possessed great power over Julia. First there was the power that accrued to him naturally through his ability to bewitch men and women alike with false candor and warmth; second, the power of social approbation that he now focused upon her. Though sexual liaisons were common, society tolerated them only as long as their details remained secret. Packinghouse princes ran off with parlormaids and bank presidents seduced typewriters; when necessary, their attorneys arranged quiet solo voyages to Europe to the surgical suites of discreet but capable doctors. A public pregnancy without marriage meant disgrace and destitution. Holmes possessed Julia now as fully as if she were an antebellum slave, and he reveled in his possession. The operation, he told Julia, would take place on Christmas Eve.

  Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions on Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the tall, gloomy guardian at the tomb of Dexter Graves, Eternal Silence, a hooded figure that from a distance seems to have only darkness where the face should have been. To look into this emptiness, legend held, was to receive a glimpse into the underworld.

  At 701 Sixty-third Street in Englewood Julia Conner put her daughter to bed and did her best to smile and indulge the child’s delighted anticipation of Christmas. Yes, Saint Nicholas would come, and he would bring wonderful things. Holmes had promised a bounty of toys and sweets for Pearl, and for Julia something truly grand, beyond anything she could have received from her poor bland Ned.

  Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.

  Julia walked down the hall to an apartment occupied by Mr. and Mrs. John Crowe. Julia and Mrs. Crowe had become friends, and now Julia helped Mrs. Crowe decorate a Christmas tree in the Crowes’ apartment, meant for Pearl as a Christmas-morning surprise. Julia talked of all that she and Pearl would do the next day, and told Mrs. Crowe that soon she would be going to Davenport, Iowa, to attend the wedding of an older sister, “an old maid,” Mrs. Crowe said, who to everyone’s surprise was about to marry a railroad man. Julia was awaiting the rail pass that the groom was supposed to have put in the mail.

  Julia left the apartment late that night, in good spirits, Mrs. Crowe later recalled: “there was nothing about her conversation that would lead any of us to think she intended going away that night.”

  Holmes offered Julia a cheerful “Merry Christmas” and gave her a hug, then took her hand and led her to a room on the second floor that he had readied for the operation. A table lay draped in white linen. His surgical kits stood open and gleaming, his instruments laid out in a sunflower of polished steel. Fearful things: bonesaws, abdomen retractor, trocar and trepan. More instruments, certainly, than he really needed and all positioned so that Julia could not help but see them and be sickened by their hard, eager gleam.

  He wore a white apron and had rolled back his cuffs. Possibly he wore his hat, a bowler. He had not washed his hands, nor did he wear a mask. There was no need.

  She reached for his hand. There would be no pain, he assured her. She would awaken as healthy as she was now but without the encumbrance she bore within. He pulled the stopper from a dark amber bottle of liquid and immediately felt its silvery exhalation in his own nostrils. He poured the chloroform into a bunched cloth. She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly arousing. He held the cloth over her nose and mouth. Her eyes fluttered and rolled upward. Then came the inevitable, reflexive disturbance of muscles, like a dream of running. She released his hand and cast it away with splayed fingers. Her feet trembled as if tapping to a wildly beating drum. His own excitement rose. She tried to pull his hand away, but he was prepared for this sudden surge of muscle stimulation that always preceded stupor, and with great force clamped the cloth to her face. She beat at his arms. Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.

  He kept one hand on the cloth and with the other dribbled more of the liquid between his fingers into its folds, delighting in the sensation of frost where the chloroform coated his fingers. One of her wrists sagged to the table, followed shortly by the other. Her eyelids stuttered, then closed. Holmes did not think her so clever as to feign coma, but he held tight just the same. After
a few moments he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.

  He removed the apron and rolled down his sleeves. The chloroform and his own intense arousal made him feel light-headed. The sensation, as always, was pleasant and induced in him a warm languor, like the feeling he got after sitting too long in front of a hot stove. He stoppered the chloroform, found a fresh cloth, and walked down the hall to Pearl’s room.

  It took only a moment to bunch the fresh cloth and douse it with chloroform. In the hall, afterward, he examined his watch and saw that it was Christmas.

  The day meant nothing to Holmes. The Christmas mornings of his youth had been suffocated under an excess of piety, prayer, and silence, as if a giant wool blanket had settled over the house.

  On Christmas morning the Crowes waited for Julia and Pearl in glad anticipation of watching the girl’s eyes ignite upon spotting the lovely tree and the presents arrayed under its boughs. The apartment was warm, the air rouged with cinnamon and fir. An hour passed. The Crowes waited as long as they could, but at ten o’clock they set out to catch a train for central Chicago, where they planned to visit friends. They left the apartment unlocked, with a cheerful note of welcome.

  The Crowes returned at eleven o’clock that night and found everything as they had left it, with no evidence that Julia and her daughter had come. The next morning they tried Julia’s apartment, but no one answered. They asked neighbors inside and outside the building if any had seen Julia or Pearl, but none had.

  When Holmes next appeared, Mrs. Crowe asked him where Julia might be. He explained that she and Pearl had gone to Davenport earlier than expected.

  Mrs. Crowe heard nothing more from Julia. She and her neighbors thought the whole thing very odd. They all agreed that the last time anyone had seen Julia or Pearl was Christmas Eve.