The Devil in the White City: Part II

Sullivan took the suggestion but never acknowledged its provenance, even though that one great entrance eventually became the talk of the fair.

The portion of his work that would most shape how visitors appraised his landscape—the planting and grooming of the grounds immediately surrounding each building—could only be done after the major structures were completed and the grounds cleared of construction equipment, temporary tracks and roads, and other aesthetic impedimenta.

This was to be accomplished, Olmsted wrote, “through the mingling intricately together of many forms of foliage, the alternation and complicated crossing of salient leaves and stalks of varying green tints in high lights with other leaves and stalks, behind and under them, and therefore less defined and more shaded, yet partly illumined by light reflected from the water.”

Now, again, their relationship was crumbling. Their daughter, Pearl, became commensurately more difficult to manage, her behavior marked by periods of sullen withdrawal and eruptions of anger.

If he had once been obsequious to Richard Hunt and the eastern men, he was not now. In a June 2, 1891, letter to Hunt, he wrote, “We are at a dead standstill waiting for your scale drawings. Can’t we have them as they are, and finish here?”

Colonel William Cody—Buffalo Bill—sought a concession for his Wild West show, newly returned from a hugely successful tour of Europe, but the fair’s Committee on Ways and Means turned him down on grounds of “incongruity.”

Colonel William Cody—Buffalo Bill—sought a concession for his Wild West show, newly returned from a hugely successful tour of Europe, but the fair’s Committee on Ways and Means turned him down on grounds of “incongruity.”

At Jackson Park aggravation was endemic.

Simple matters, Burnham found, often became imbroglios.

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.

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.

Grave-robbing became an industry, albeit a small one requiring an exceptional degree of sang-froid.

There was talk now among the directors of seeking a $10 million appropriation from Congress, but the only immediate solution was to reduce expenditures.

The institute had a certain cachet, but the village of Dwight was no Chicago. To be able to earn twice her salary and live in that city of legendary glamour and excitement, with the world’s fair set to open in a year, made the offer irresistible.

He was tall, with a clean jaw and modest mustache, and wore a cheap suit; in his thirties; good looking, in a way, but at the same time self-effacing and plain—though at the moment he appeared to be angry.

Given the calumny New York previously had shoveled on Chicago, the postponement was an act of surprising grace.

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.

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 reiterated his insistence that in Chicago “simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.”

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.

In engineering parlance, it embodied little “dead load,” the static weight of immobile masses of brick and steel.

She may have begun to believe the stories she heard in the neighborhood of Holmes’s penchant for acquiring things on credit and then not paying for them—stories she had heard all along, for they were rife, but that she at first had dismissed as the gossip of envious hearts.

He made it clear that this anxiety was due to Ulrich, specifically, Ulrich’s “constitutional propensity” to lose sight of the broad scheme and throw himself into minute tasks better handled by subordinates, a trait that Olmsted feared had left Ulrich vulnerable to demands by other officials, in particular Burnham.

“Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.”

He died in the midst of her three-year program and bequeathed to her an estate valued at between $50,000 and $100,000, (about $1.5 to $3 million in twenty-first-century dollars).

But he imposed a curious stipulation. Minnie was to refer to him in public as Henry Howard Holmes, an alias, he explained, that he had adopted for business reasons. She was never to call him Gordon, nor act surprised when people referred to him as Dr. Holmes.

If Harry Gordon was such a paragon of looks and enterprise, why had he selected her?

She did so on April 18, 1893, with Holmes himself serving as notary. Bond in turn signed the deed over to another man, Benton T. Lyman. Holmes notarized this transfer as well.

Bethlehem Steel brought giant ingots and great slabs of military armor, including a curved plate seventeen inches thick meant for the gun turret of the dreadnought Indiana.

It also carried Phoebe Anne Moses of Tiffin, Ohio, a young woman with a penchant for guns and an excellent sense of distance. Bill called her Annie, the press called her Miss Oakley.

The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society.

Appalled by the vision conjured by Chicago’s Dedication Day, of crème and rabble mixing in such volume and with such indecorous propinquity, McAllister in a column in the New York World advised “it is not quantity but quality that the society people here want. Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable.”

Chicago delighted in such repartee—for the most part. On some level, however, McAllister’s remarks stung.

Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, “interspersed,” as one visitor put it, “with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically.”

Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.

The attempt of the Herald gang to prevent the manifestation of the popular will has been checked—& Carter H. Harrison the popular choice will be our next mayor.

In late March he had been feted at a grand banquet arranged largely by Charles McKim and held in New York at Madison Square Garden—the old Garden, an elegant Moorish structure designed by McKim’s partner, Stanford White.

He reveled in the attention and adored the engraved silver “loving cup” that was filled with wine and held to the lips of every man at the table—despite the prevalence in the city outside of typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia.

Daniel Chester French’s “Statue of the Republic”—nicknamed “Big Mary”—stood in the basin complete and gleaming, its entire surface gilded. Including plinth, the Republic was 111 feet tall.

The fair’s capitulation pumped steam into America’s—and Chicago’s—already-boiling labor movement.

I remonstrate, but it does little good. I can never find him at the work except by special appointment and then he is impatient to get away.

The shore of the Wooded Island was just now beginning to burst forth in a dense profusion of new leaves and blossoms, and the Japanese temple, the Hoo-den, crafted in Japan and assembled by Japanese artisans, detracted little from the sylvan effect.

On Wednesday night a particularly heavy rain came pounding through Jackson Park, and soon a series of two-hundred-foot cataracts began tumbling from the glass ceiling of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building onto the exhibits below.

President Cleveland arrived with his vice president and a retinue of cabinet officials, senators, and military leaders and their wives, children, and friends.

But there was more quotidian work to be done as well.