The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  Fearing much worse, Olmsted agreed.

  It did not help his mood any that as he battled to protect the island, he learned of another attack on his beloved Central Park. At the instigation of a small group of wealthy New Yorkers, the state legislature had quietly passed a law authorizing the construction of a “speedway” on the west side of the park so that the rich could race their carriages. The public responded with outrage. Olmsted weighed in with a letter describing the proposed road as “unreasonable, unjust and immoral.” The legislature backed off.

  His insomnia and pain, the crushing workload, and his mounting frustration all tore at his spirit until by the end of March he felt himself on the verge of physical and emotional collapse. The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. “When Olmsted is blue,” a friend once wrote, “the logic of his despondency is crushing and terrible.”

  Olmsted, however, believed that all he needed was a good rest. In keeping with the therapeutic mores of the age, he decided to do his convalescing in Europe, where the scenery also would provide an opportunity for him to enrich his visual vocabulary. He planned forays to public gardens and parks and the grounds of the old Paris exposition.

  He put his eldest son, John, in charge of the Brookline office and left Harry Codman in Chicago to guide the work on the world’s fair. At the last minute he decided to bring along two of his children, Marion and Rick, and another young man, Phil Codman, who was Harry’s younger brother. For Marion and the boys, it promised to be a dream journey; for Olmsted it became something rather more dark.

  They sailed on Saturday, April 2, 1892, and arrived in Liverpool under a barrage of hail and snow.

  In Chicago Sol Bloom received a cable from France that startled him. He read it a couple of times to make sure it said what he thought it said. His Algerians, scores of them along with all their animals and material possessions, were already at sea, sailing for America and the fair—one year early.

  “They had picked the right month,” Bloom said, “but the wrong year.”

  Olmsted found the English countryside charming, the weather bleak and morbid. After a brief stay at the home of relatives in Chislehurt, he and the boys left for Paris. Daughter Marion stayed behind.

  In Paris Olmsted went to the old exposition grounds. The gardens were sparse, suppressed by a long winter, and the buildings had not weathered well, but enough of the fair remained to give him “a tolerable idea” of what the exposition once had been. Clearly the site was still popular. During one Sunday visit Olmsted and the boys found four bands playing, refreshment stands open, and a few thousand people roaming the paths. A long line had formed at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

  With the Chicago fair always in mind, Olmsted examined every detail. The lawns were “rather poor,” the gravel walks “not pleasant to the eye nor to the foot.” He found the Paris fair’s extensive use of formal flower beds objectionable. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, in a letter to John in Brookline, “that at the least it must have been extremely disquieting, gaudy & childish, if not savage and an injury to the Exposition, through its disturbance of dignity, and injury to breadth, unity & composure.” He reiterated his insistence that in Chicago “simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.”

  The visit rekindled his concern that in the quest to surpass the Paris exposition Burnham and his architects had lost sight of what a world’s fair ought to be. The Paris buildings, Olmsted wrote, “have much more color and much more ornament in color, but much less in moulding and sculpture than I had supposed. They show I think more fitness for their purposes, seem more designed for the occasion and to be less like grand permanent architectural monuments than ours are to be. I question if ours are not at fault in this respect and if they are not going to look too assuming of architectural stateliness and to be overbonded with sculptural and other efforts for grandeur and grandiloquent pomp.”

  Olmsted liked traveling with his youthful entourage. In a letter to his wife in Brookline he wrote, “I am having a great deal of enjoyment, and I hope laying in a good stock of better health.” Soon after the party returned to Chislehurst, however, Olmsted’s health degraded and insomnia again shattered his nights. He wrote to Harry Codman, who was himself ill with a strange abdominal illness, “I can only conclude now that I am older and more used up than I had supposed.”

  A doctor, Henry Rayner, paid a social visit to Chislehurst to meet Olmsted. He happened to be a specialist in treating nervous disorders and was so appalled by Olmsted’s appearance that he offered to take him to his own house in Hampstead Heath, outside London, and care for him personally. Olmsted accepted.

  Despite Rayner’s close attention, Olmsted’s condition did not improve; his stay at Hampstead Heath became wearisome. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Harry Codman on June 16, 1892. “Every day I look for decided improvement and thus far everyday, I am disappointed.” Dr. Rayner too was perplexed, according to Olmsted. “He says, with confidence, after repeated examinations, of all my anatomy, that I have no organic trouble and that I may reasonably expect under favorable circumstances to keep at work for several years to come. He regards my present trouble as a variation in form of the troubles which led me to come abroad.”

  Most days Olmsted was driven by carriage through the countryside, “every day more or less on a different road,” to view gardens, churchyards, private parks, and the natural landscape. Nearly every ornamental flowerbed offended him. He dismissed them as “childish, vulgar, flaunting, or impertinent, out of place and discordant.” The countryside itself, however, charmed him: “there is nothing in America to be compared with the pastoral or with the picturesque beauty that is common property in England. I cannot go out without being delighted. The view before me as I write, veiled by the rain, is just enchanting.” The loveliest scenes, he found, were comprised of the simplest, most natural juxtapositions of native plants. “The finest combination is one of gorse, sweet briar, brambles, hawthorn, and ivy. Even when there is no bloom this is charming. And these things can be had by the hundred thousand at very low prices.”

  At times the scenes he saw challenged his vision of Jackson Park, at other times they affirmed it. “Everywhere the best ornamental grounds that we see are those in which vines and creepers are outwitting the gardener. We can’t have little vines and weeds enough.” He knew there was too little time to let nature alone produce such effects. “Let us as much as possible, train out creepers, and branches of trees, upon bridges, pulling down and nailing the branches, aiming to obtain shade and reflection of foliage and broken obscuration of water.”

  Above all, his sorties reinforced his belief that the Wooded Island, despite the Japanese temple, should be made as wild as possible. “I think more than ever of the value of the island,” he wrote to Harry Codman, “and of the importance of using all possible, original means of securing impervious screening, dense massive piles of foliage on its borders; with abundant variety of small detail in abject subordination to general effect. . . . There cannot be enough of bulrush, adlumia, Madeira vine, catbriar, virgin’s bower, brambles, sweet peas, Jimson weed, milkweed, the smaller western sunflowers and morning glories.”

  But he also recognized that the wildness he sought would have to be tempered with excellent groundskeeping. He worried that Chicago would not be up to the task. “The standard of an English laborer, hack driver or cad in respect to neatness, smugness and elegance of gardens and grounds and paths and ways is infinitely higher than that of a Chicago merchant prince or virtuoso,” he wrote to Codman, “and we shall be disgraced if we fail to work up to a far higher level than our masters will be prepared to think suitable.”

  Overall Olmsted remained confident that his exposition landscape would succeed. A new worry troubled him, however. “The only cloud I see over the Exposition now is the Cholera,” he wrote in a letter to his Brookline office. “The acco
unts from Russia and from Paris this morning are alarming.”

  As Sol Bloom’s Algerians neared New York Harbor, workers assigned to the Midway erected temporary buildings to house them. Bloom went to New York to meet the ship and reserved two traincars to bring the villagers and their cargo back to Chicago.

  As the Algerians left the ship, they began moving in all directions at once. “I could see them getting lost, being run over, and landing in jail,” Bloom said. No one seemed to be in charge. Bloom raced up to them, shouting commands in French and English. A giant black-complected man walked up to Bloom and in perfect House of Lords English said, “I suggest you be more civil. Otherwise I may lose my temper and throw you into the water.”

  The man identified himself as Archie, and as the two settled into a more peaceful conversation, he revealed to Bloom that he had spent a decade in London serving as a rich man’s bodyguard. “At present,” he said, “I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”

  Bloom handed him a cigar and proposed that he become his bodyguard and assistant.

  “Your offer,” Archie said, “is quite satisfactory.”

  Both men lit up and puffed smoke into the fragrant murk above New York Harbor.

  Burnham fought to boost the rate of construction, especially of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which had to be completed by Dedication Day. In March, with just half a year remaining until the dedication, he invoked the “czar” clause of his construction contracts. He ordered the builder of the Electricity Building to double his workforce and to put the men to work at night under electric lights. He threatened the Manufactures contractor with the same fate if he did not increase the pace of his work.

  Burnham had all but given up hope of surpassing the Eiffel Tower. Most recently he had turned down another outlandish idea, this from an earnest young Pittsburgh engineer who had attended his lecture to the Saturday Afternoon Club. The man was credible enough—his company held the contract for inspecting all the steel used in the fair’s structures—but the thing he proposed to build just did not seem feasible. “Too fragile,” Burnham told him. The public, he said, would be afraid.

  A hostile spring further hampered the fair’s progress. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, at 6:50 A.M., a sudden windstorm demolished the fair’s just-finished pumping station and tore down sixty-five feet of the Illinois State Building. Three weeks later another storm destroyed eight hundred feet of the south wall of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. “The wind,” the Tribune observed, “seems to have a grudge against the World’s Fair grounds.”

  To find ways to accelerate the work, Burnham called the eastern architects to Chicago. One looming problem was how to color the exteriors of the main buildings, especially the staff-coated palisades of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. During the meeting an idea arose that in the short run promised a dramatic acceleration of the work, but that eventually served to fix the fair in the world’s imagination as a thing of otherworldly beauty.

  By all rights, the arena of exterior decoration belonged to William Pretyman, the fair’s official director of color. Burnham admitted later that he had hired Pretyman for the job “largely on account of his great friendship for John Root.” Pretyman was ill suited to the job. Harriet Monroe, who knew him and his wife, wrote, “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”

  The day of the meeting Pretyman was on the East Coast. The architects proceeded without him. “I was urging everyone on, knowing I had an awful fight against time,” Burnham said. “We talked about the colors, and finally the thought came, ‘let us make it all perfectly white.’ I do not remember who made that suggestion. It might have been one of those things that reached all minds at once. At any rate, I decided it.”

  The Mines Building, designed by Chicago’s Solon S. Beman, was nearly finished. It became the test building. Burnham ordered it painted a creamy white. Pretyman returned and “was outraged,” Burnham recalled.

  Pretyman insisted that any decision on color was his alone.

  “I don’t see it that way,” Burnham told him. “The decision is mine.”

  “All right,” Pretyman said. “I will get out.”

  Burnham did not miss him. “He was a brooding sort of man and very cranky,” Burnham said. “I let him go, then told Charles McKim that I would have to have a man who could actually take charge of it, and that I would not decide from the point of friendship.”

  McKim recommended the New York painter Francis Millet, who had sat in on the color meeting. Burnham hired him.

  Millet quickly proved his worth. After some experimentation he settled on “ordinary white lead and oil” as the best paint for staff, then developed a means of applying the paint not by brush but through a hose with a special nozzle fashioned from a length of gas pipe—the first spray paint. Burnham nicknamed Millet and his paint crews “the Whitewash Gang.”

  In the first week of May a powerful storm dropped an ocean of rain on Chicago and again caused the Chicago River to reverse flow. Again the sewage threatened the city’s water supply. The decaying carcass of a horse was spotted bobbing near one of the intake cribs.

  This new surge underscored for Burnham the urgency of completing his plan to pipe Waukesha spring water to the fair by Opening Day. Earlier, in July 1891, the exposition had granted a contract for the work to the Hygeia Mineral Springs Company, headed by an entrepreneur named J. E. McElroy, but the company had accomplished little. In March Burnham ordered Dion Geraldine, his chief construction superintendent, to press the matter “with the utmost vigor and see that no delay occurs.”

  Hygeia secured rights to lay its pipe from its springhouse in Waukesha through the village itself but failed to anticipate the intensity of opposition from citizens who feared the pipeline would disfigure their landscape and drain their famous springs. Hygeia’s McElroy, under mounting pressure from Burnham, turned to desperate measures.

  On Saturday evening, May 7, 1892, McElroy loaded a special train with pipes, picks, shovels, and three hundred men and set off for Waukesha to dig his pipeline under cover of darkness.

  Word of the expedition beat the train to Waukesha. As it pulled into the station, someone rang the village firebell, and soon a large force of men armed with clubs, pistols, and shotguns converged on the train. Two fire engines arrived hissing steam, their crews ready to blast the pipelayers with water. One village leader told McElroy that if he went ahead with his plan, he would not leave town alive.

  Soon another thousand or so townspeople joined the small army at the station. One group of men dragged a cannon from the town hall and trained it on Hygeia’s bottling plant.

  After a brief standoff, McElroy and the pipelayers went back to Chicago.

  Burnham still wanted that water. Workers had already laid pipes in Jackson Park for two hundred springwater booths.

  McElroy gave up trying to run pipes directly into the village of Waukesha. Instead he bought a spring in the town of Big Bend, twelve miles south of Waukesha, just inside the Waukesha County line. Fair visitors would be able to drink Waukesha springwater after all.

  That the water came from the county and not the famous village was a subtlety upon which Burnham and McElroy did not dwell.

  In Jackson Park everyone became caught up in the accelerating pace of construction. As the buildings rose, the architects spotted flaws in their designs but found the forward crush of work so overwhelming, it threatened to leave the flaws locked in stone, or at least staff. Frank Millet unofficially kept watch over the buildings of the eastern architects during their lengthy absences from the park, lest some ad hoc decision cause irreparable aesthetic damage. On June 6, 1892, he wrote to Charles McKim, designer of the Agriculture Building, “You had better write a letter embodying all the ideas of changes you have, because before you know it they’ll ha
ve you by the umbilicus. I staved them off from a cement floor in the Rotunda to-day and insisted that you must have brick. . . . It takes no end of time and worry to get a thing settled right but only a second to have orders given out for a wrong thing to be done. All these remarks are in strict confidence, and I write in this way to urge you to be explicit and flat-footed in your wishes.”

  At the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building workers employed by contractor Francis Agnew began the dangerous process of raising the giant iron trusses that would support the building’s roof and create the widest span of unobstructed interior space ever attempted.

  The workers installed three sets of parallel railroad tracks along the length of the building. Atop these, on railcar wheels or “trucks,” they erected a “traveler,” a giant derrick consisting of three tall towers spanned at the top by a platform. Workers using the traveler could lift and position two trusses at a time. George Post’s design called for twenty-two trusses, each weighing two hundred tons. Just getting the components to the park had required six hundred railcars.

  On Wednesday, June 1, exposition photographer Charles Arnold took a photograph of the building to record its progress. Anyone looking at that photograph would have had to conclude that the building could not possibly be finished in the four and a half months that remained until Dedication Day. The trusses were in place but no roof. The walls were just beginning to rise. When Arnold took the photograph, hundreds of men were at work on the building, but its scale was so great that none of the men was immediately visible. The ladders that rose from one level of scaffold to the next had all the substance of matchsticks and imparted to the structure an aura of fragility. In the foreground stood mountains of debris.