The Devil in the White City (12 page)

In fact, the evening had ended rather differently. At the Player’s Club, sips of cognac and exhalations of smoke had filled that last difficult pause. The dream was an appealing one, the architects agreed, and no one doubted Chicago’s sincerity in imagining this fantasy precinct of lagoons and palaces, but the reality was something else entirely. The only real certainty was the disruption that would be caused by long-distance travel and the myriad other difficulties inherent in building a complex structure far from home. Peabody did commit to the fair, but Hunt and the others did not: “they said,” as Burnham later revealed, “they would think it over.”

They did, however, agree to come to the January 10 meeting in Chicago to confer again and examine the chosen ground.

None of the architects had been to Jackson Park. In its raw state, Burnham knew, it was not a setting likely to win anyone’s heart. This time Olmsted had to be present. In the meantime Root too would have to become involved in the courtship. The architects respected him but were leery of his powers as supervising architect. It was critical that he go to New York.

Outside the sky was blank, the light pewter. Despite Pullman’s vestibules ice as fine as dust settled between coaches and filled Burnham’s train with the tang of deep winter. Wind-felled trees appeared beside the railbed.

Daniel Burnham arrived in Chicago to find the city’s architects and members of the exposition board outraged that he had gone outside the city—to New York, of all godforsaken places—to court architects for the fair; that he had snubbed the likes of Adler, Sullivan, and Jenney. Sullivan saw it as a sign that Burnham did not truly believe Chicago had the talent to carry the fair by itself. “Burnham had believed that he might best serve his country by placing all of the work exclusively with Eastern architects,” Sullivan wrote; “solely, he averred, on account of their surpassing culture.” The chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee was Edward T. Jefferey. “With exquisite delicacy and tact,” Sullivan said, “Jefferey, at a meeting of the Committee, persuaded Daniel, come to Judgment, to add the Western men to the list of his nominations.”

Hastily, Root and Burnham conferred and chose five Chicago firms to join the effort, among them Adler & Sullivan. Burnham visited each the next day. Four of the five put aside their hurt feelings and accepted immediately. Only Adler & Sullivan resisted. Adler was sulking. “I think he, Adler, had hoped to be in the position I was in,” Burnham said. “He was rather disgruntled and did ‘not know.’ ”

Ultimately, Adler did accept Burnham’s invitation.

Now it was Root’s turn to go to New York. He had to go anyway to attend a meeting of the directors of the American Institute of Architects and planned afterward to take a train to Atlanta to inspect one of the firm’s buildings. Root was in his office at the Rookery on the afternoon of New Year’s Day 1891, shortly before his departure, when an employee stopped by to see him. “He said he was tired,” the man recalled, “and felt inclined to resign the secretaryship of the Institute. This was alarming, as he had never been heard to complain of too much work, and while it only indicated extreme physical exhaustion and before he went home he became cheerful and hopeful again, it has its significance in the light of subsequent events.”

In New York, Root assured the architects again and again that he would do nothing to interfere with their designs. Despite his charm—the
Chicago Inter Ocean
once called him “another Chauncey M. Depew in postprandial wit and humor”—he failed to arouse their enthusiasm and left New York for Atlanta feeling the same degree of disappointment Burnham had felt two weeks earlier. His journey south did little to cheer him up. Harriet Monroe saw him upon his return to Chicago. He was depressed, she said, “by the attitude of the Eastern men, whom he found singularly apathetic, utterly incredulous that any association of Western businessmen would give art a free hand in the manner he set forth. The dream was too extravagant ever to be realized, and they were extremely reluctant to undertake its realization against the hampering and tampering, the interferences petty and great, which they felt were certain to ensue.”

Root was tired and discouraged. He told Monroe he just could not get the men interested. “He felt that this was the greatest opportunity ever offered to his profession in this country, and he could not make them appreciate it,” she said. The architects did plan to come to Chicago for the January meeting, he told her, “but reluctantly; their hearts were not in it.”

On January 5, 1891, the Committee on Grounds and Buildings authorized Burnham to offer formal commissions to all ten architects and pay each $10,000 (equivalent today to about $300,000). It was a rich fee, considering that all Burnham wanted them to do was provide working drawings and make a few visits to Chicago. Burnham and Root would see to the construction of the buildings and manage the niggling details that typically haunted an architect’s life. There would be no artistic interference.

The eastern men gave their tentative acceptance, but their concerns had not diminished.

And they still had not seen Jackson Park.

A Hotel for the Fair

H
OLMES
’
S NEW IDEA WAS TO
turn his building into a hotel for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition—no Palmer House or Richelieu, certainly, but just comfortable enough and cheap enough to lure a certain kind of clientele and convincing enough to justify a large fire insurance policy. After the fair he intended to burn the building to collect the insurance and, as a happy dividend, destroy whatever surplus “material” might remain in its hidden storage chambers, although ideally, given other disposal measures available to him, the building by then would contain nothing of an incriminating nature. The thing was, one never knew. In the most transcendent moment, it was easy to make a mistake and forget some little thing that a clever detective might eventually use to propel him to the gallows. Whether the Chicago police even possessed that kind of talent was open to question. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the more dangerous entity, but its operatives of late seemed to be spending most of their energy battling strikers at coalfields and steel mills around the country.

Again acting as his own architect, Holmes early in 1891 began planning the necessary modifications, and soon carpenters were at work on the second and third floors. Once again Holmes’s method of segregating tasks and firing workers was proving successful. Clearly none of the workers had gone to the police. Patrolmen from the new Chicago police precinct house on Wentworth walked past Holmes’s building each day. Far from being suspicious, the officers had become friendly, even protective. Holmes knew each man by name. A cup of coffee, a free meal in his restaurant, a fine black cigar—policemen valued these gestures of affinity and grace.

Holmes was, however, beginning to feel mounting pressure from creditors, in particular from several furniture and bicycle dealers. He could still charm them and commiserate over their inability to locate the elusive deedholder, H. S. Campbell, but Holmes knew they soon would lose patience and in fact was a bit surprised they had not pursued him more forcefully than had been the case thus far. His techniques were too new, his skills too great, the men around him too naïve, as if they had never before experienced a falsehood. For every business that now refused to sell him goods, there were a dozen more that fawned over him and accepted his notes endorsed by H. S. Campbell or secured by the assets of the Warner Glass Bending Company. When pressed, sensing that a particular creditor was on the verge of legal action, even violence, Holmes paid his bills in cash using money harvested from his own ventures, such as lease income from his apartments and stores, sales from his pharmacy, and the proceeds from his newest venture, a mail-order medicine company. In a parody of Aaron Montgomery Ward’s fast-growing empire in central Chicago, Holmes had begun selling sham drugs that he guaranteed would cure alcoholism and baldness.

He was always open to new financial opportunities but was especially so now, since he knew that no matter how deftly he kept labor costs down, he still would have to pay for at least some of the transformation of his building. When Myrta’s great-uncle, Jonathan Belknap of Big Foot Prairie, Illinois, came to Wilmette for a visit, that challenge suddenly seemed likely to resolve itself. Belknap was not a rich man, but he was well off.

Holmes began appearing more frequently at the Wilmette house. He brought toys for Lucy, jewelry for Myrta and her mother. He filled the house with love.

Belknap had never met Holmes but knew all about his troubled marriage to Myrta and was prepared to dislike the young doctor. On first meeting he found Holmes far too smooth and self-assured for a man of so few years. He was struck, however, by how enthralled Myrta seemed to be whenever Holmes was around and by how even Myrta’s mother—Belknap’s niece by marriage—appeared to glow in Holmes’s presence. After several more encounters Belknap began to appreciate why Myrta had fallen so thoroughly for the man. He was handsome and clean and dressed well and spoke in fine sentences. His gaze was blue and forthright. In conversation he listened with an intensity that was almost alarming, as if Belknap were the most fascinating man in the world, not just an elderly uncle visiting from Big Foot Prairie.

Belknap still did not like Holmes, but he found his candor sufficiently disarming that when Holmes asked him to endorse a note for $2,500 to help cover the cost of a new house in Wilmette for himself and Myrta, Belknap agreed. Holmes thanked him warmly. A new house, away from Myrta’s parents, might be all the couple needed to end their growing estrangement. Holmes promised to pay the money back as soon as his business affairs allowed.

Holmes returned to Englewood and promptly forged Belknap’s signature to a second note for the same amount, intending to use the proceeds for his hotel.

On Holmes’s next visit to Wilmette, he invited Belknap to visit Englewood for a tour of his building and of the newly chosen site for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Although Belknap had read much about the world’s fair and did want to see its future home, he did not relish the idea of spending a full day with Holmes. Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as “moral insanity” and those who exhibited the disorder as “moral imbeciles.” They later adopted the term “psychopath,” used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead’s
Pall Mall Gazette,
which described it as a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.” Half a century later, in his path-breaking book
The Mask of Sanity,
Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. . . . So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as “Cleckley” psychopaths.

When Belknap refused Holmes’s offer, Holmes seemed to crumble with hurt and disappointment. A tour was necessary, Holmes pleaded, if only to bolster his own sense of honor and to demonstrate to Belknap that he really was a man of means and that Belknap’s note was as secure an investment as any man could make. Myrta too looked crestfallen.

Belknap gave in. During the train journey to Englewood, Holmes pointed out landmarks: the skyscrapers of the city, the Chicago River, the stockyards. Belknap found the stench overpowering, but Holmes seemed not to notice it. The men exited the train at Englewood station.

The town was alive with movement. Trains rumbled past every few minutes. Horse-drawn streetcars moved east and west along Sixty-third, amid a dense traffic of carriages and drays. Everywhere Belknap looked some building was under construction. Soon the level of construction would increase even more, as entrepreneurs prepared to cash in on the expected crush of exposition visitors. Holmes described his own plans. He took Belknap on a tour of his pharmacy, with its marble countertops and glass containers filled with wildly colored solutions, then took him up to the second floor, where he introduced him to the building’s caretaker, Patrick Quinlan. Holmes walked Belknap through the building’s many corridors and described how the place would look as a hotel. Belknap found it bleak and strange, with passages that struck off in unexpected directions.

Holmes asked Belknap if he would like to see the roof and the construction already under way. Belknap declined, claiming falsely that he was too old a man to climb that many steps.

Holmes promised stirring views of Englewood, perhaps even a glimpse of Jackson Park off to the east, where the buildings of the fair soon would begin to rise. Again Belknap resisted, this time with more force.

Holmes tried a different approach. He invited Belknap to spend the night in his building. At first Belknap declined this offer as well, but feeling perhaps that he had been overly rude in avoiding the roof, he relented.

After nightfall Holmes led Belknap to a room on the second floor. Gas lamps had been installed at haphazard intervals along the corridor, leaving pockets of gloom whose borders shivered as Belknap and Holmes moved past. The room was furnished and comfortable enough and overlooked the street, which was still reassuringly busy. As far as Belknap could tell, he and Holmes were by now the only occupants of the building. “When I went to bed,” Belknap said, “I carefully locked the door.”