The Devil in the White City (13 page)

Soon the street sounds receded, leaving only the rumble of trains and the hollow clip-clop of an occasional horse. Belknap had difficulty sleeping. He stared at the ceiling, which was bathed in the shifting light of the streetlamps below his window. Hours passed. “Presently,” Belknap said, “I heard my door tried and then a key was slipped into the lock.”

Belknap called out, asking who was at the door. The noise stopped. He held his breath and listened and heard the sound of feet moving down the hall. He was certain that initially two men had been outside his door, but now one of them had left. He called again. This time a voice answered. Belknap recognized it as belonging to Patrick Quinlan, the caretaker.

Quinlan wanted to come in.

“I refused to open the door,” Belknap said. “He insisted for a time and then went away.”

Belknap lay awake the rest of the night.

Soon afterward he discovered Holmes’s forgery. Holmes apologized, claiming a dire need for money, and was so persuasive and abject that even Belknap felt mollified, although his distrust of Holmes persisted. Much later Belknap realized why Holmes had wanted so badly to show him the building’s roof. “If I’d gone,” Belknap said, “the forgery probably wouldn’t have been discovered, because I wouldn’t have been around to discover it.

“But I didn’t go,” he said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

As carpenters and plasterers worked on his building, Holmes turned his attention to the creation of an important accessory. He sketched a number of possible designs, relying perhaps on past observations of similar equipment, then settled on a configuration that seemed likely to work: a large rectangular box of fireproof brick about eight feet deep, three feet high, and three feet wide, encased within a second box of the same material, with the space between them heated by flames from an oil burner. The inner box would serve as an elongated kiln. Although he had never built a kiln before, he believed his design would generate temperatures extreme enough to incinerate anything within. That the kiln would also be able to destroy any odors emanating from the interior box was singularly important.

He planned to install the kiln in the basement and hired a bricklayer named Joseph E. Berkler to do the job. He told him he intended to use the kiln to produce and bend plate glass for his Warner Glass Bending Company. At Holmes’s instructions Berkler added a number of components made of iron. He worked quickly, and soon the kiln was ready for its first test.

Holmes ignited the burner. There was a satisfying whoosh. A wave of warmth rolled from the chamber to the far walls of the basement. The scent of partially combusted oil suffused the air.

But the test was disappointing. The box did not generate as much heat as Holmes had hoped. He adjusted the burner and tried again but achieved little improvement.

He used the city directory to locate a furnace company and requested an appointment with an experienced man. He identified himself as the founder of Warner Glass. If for some reason officials of the furnace company felt moved to verify that Warner Glass existed, all they had to do was check the 1890 Englewood directory to find the company’s listing, with Holmes named as proprietor.

The manager of the furnace company—his name was never made public—decided to attend to the matter personally and met Holmes at his building. He found a young good-looking man, almost delicate, who conveyed an air of confidence and prosperity. He had striking blue eyes. His building was on the gloomy side, the construction obviously below the standards of structures rising elsewhere on Sixty-third, but it was well located in a community that clearly was booming. For so young a man to own most of a city block was itself an accomplishment.

The manager followed Holmes to his second-floor office and there in the pleasant cross breeze from the corner windows studied Holmes’s drawings of his kiln. Holmes explained that he could not obtain “the necessary amount of heat.” The manager asked to see the apparatus.

That wasn’t necessary, Holmes said. He did not wish to trouble the manager, only to seek his advice, for which he would pay an appropriate fee.

The furnace man insisted he could do nothing without actually examining the kiln.

Holmes smiled. Of course. If the manager did not mind spending the extra time, he would be glad to show it to him.

Holmes led his visitor down the stairs to the first floor and from there down another, darker flight to the basement.

They entered a large rectangular cavern that ran the entire length of the block, interrupted only by beams and posts. In the shadows stood vats and barrels and mounds of dark matter, possibly soil. A long narrow table with a steel top stood under a series of unlit lamps and two worn leather cases rested nearby. The cellar had the look of a mine, the smell of a surgeon’s suite.

The furnace man examined the kiln. He saw that it contained an inner chamber of firebrick constructed in a manner that kept flames from reaching the interior, and he noted the clever addition of two openings in the top of the inner box that would allow gases from the box to flow into the surrounding flames, where they would then be consumed. It was an interesting design and seemed likely to work, although he did observe to himself that the shape of the kiln seemed unsuited to the task of bending glass. The inner box was too small to admit the broad panes now appearing in storefronts throughout the city. Otherwise, he noticed nothing unusual and foresaw no difficulty in improving the kiln’s operation.

He returned with a work crew. The men installed a more powerful burner that, once ignited, heated the kiln to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Holmes seemed pleased.

Only later did the furnace man recognize that the kiln’s peculiar shape and extreme heat made it ideal for another, very different application. “In fact,” he said, “the general plan of the furnace was not unlike that of a crematory for dead bodies, and with the provision already described there would be absolutely no odor from the furnace.”

But again, that was later.

Holmes’s absences from Wilmette lengthened once again, although at regular intervals he sent Myrta and his daughter enough money to keep them comfortable. He even insured the girl’s life, since children after all were such fragile things and could be taken from the world in a heartbeat.

His businesses were doing well. His mail-order company brought in a surprising amount of cash, and he began trying to find a way to capitalize on the latest medical rage, a cure for alcoholism invented by a physician named Keeley in Dwight, Illinois. The corner drugstore ran smoothly and profitably, although one woman in the neighborhood observed that he seemed to have difficulty retaining the young and typically attractive women he often hired as clerks. These clerks, as far as she could tell, had an unfortunate habit of departing without warning, sometimes even leaving their personal belongings in their rooms on the second floor. She saw such behavior as a troubling sign of the rising shiftlessness of the age.

The work of turning Holmes’s building into a hotel proceeded slowly, with the usual bouts of rancor and delay. Holmes left the task of finding replacement workers to his three helpers, Quinlan, Chappell, and Pitezel. They seemed to have little difficulty finding new men for each new opening. Thousands of workers laid off elsewhere had come to Chicago hoping for jobs building the fair, only to find that too many workers had gotten the same idea, thus leaving a large pool of men available for work—any work, at any price.

Holmes turned his attention to other, more pleasant distractions. Sheer fate had brought two new women into his life, one of them nearly six feet tall and possessed of a rapturous body, the other, her sister-in-law, a lovely young woman with black hair and exquisite dark eyes.

That the tall one came equipped with a husband and daughter made the situation infinitely more appealing.

The Landscape of Regret

T
HE EASTERN ARCHITECTS LEFT
New Jersey at 4:50
P.M.
, January 8, 1891, in car 5, section 6, of the North Shore Limited, which Hunt had reserved so that they all could travel together. Olmsted had come down from Boston the night before in order to join them.

It was a bewitching moment: a gorgeous train rocketing through the winter landscape carrying five of history’s greatest architects, all in the same car, gossiping, joking, drinking, smoking. Olmsted used the opportunity to describe in detail Jackson Park and the trials of dealing with the exposition’s many layers of committees that for the moment seemed to have so much power. He respected Burnham for his candor, his directness, and the air of leadership he exuded, and no doubt he told the architects as much. That he spent a good deal of time asserting his own vision of the exposition’s landscape is also beyond doubt, especially his belief that the Wooded Island should remain entirely free of conspicuous man-made structures.

Two hours before the train reached Chicago, during a brief stop, McKim received a cable notifying him that his mother, Sarah McKim, had died unexpectedly in her home, at seventy-eight. The two had been very close. He left the group and caught a return train.

The architects arrived in Chicago late Friday night, January 9, and took carriages to the Wellington Hotel, where Burnham had arranged rooms for all. Van Brunt, arriving from Kansas City, joined them there. The next morning they boarded carriages for the journey south to Jackson Park. Root, absent, was to return that day from Atlanta.

The ride to the park took about an hour. “It was one of those cold winter days,” Burnham recalled. “The sky was overcast with clouds and the lake covered with foam.”

At the park the architects eased from the carriages puffing blasts of steam into the frigid air. The wind picked up motes of sand that stung their cheeks and forced them to shield their eyes. They stumbled over the frozen ground, Hunt wincing from gout, cursing, disbelieving; Olmsted, his teeth inflamed, his night an ordeal of wakefulness, limping from his long-ago carriage accident.

The lake was gray, darkening to a band of black at the horizon. The only color in the vicinity was the frost rouge on the men’s cheeks and the blue of Burnham’s and Olmsted’s eyes.

Olmsted watched for the architects’ reactions. Now and then he and Burnham caught each other’s glances.

The architects were stunned: “they gazed,” Burnham said, “with a feeling almost of despair.”

Jackson Park was one square mile of desolation, mostly treeless, save for pockets of various kinds of oak—burr, pin, black, and scarlet—rising from a tangled undergrowth of elder, wild plum, and willow. In the most exposed portions there was only sand tufted with marine and prairie grasses. One writer called the park “remote and repulsive”; another, a “sandy waste of unredeemed and desert land.” It was ugly, a landscape of last resort. Olmsted himself had said of Jackson Park: “If a search had been made for the least parklike ground within miles of the city, nothing better meeting the requirement could have been found.”

In fact, the site was even worse than it appeared. Many of the oaks were dead. Given the season, the dead were hard to distinguish from the living. The root systems of others were badly damaged. Test borings showed that the earth within the park consisted of a top layer of black soil about one foot thick, followed by two feet of sand, then eleven feet of sand so saturated with water, Burnham wrote, “it became almost like quicksand and was often given this name.” The Chicago men understood the challenge that this soil presented; the New York men, accustomed to bedrock, did not.

The park’s gravest flaw, at least from Olmsted’s perspective, was that its shoreline was subject to dramatic annual changes in the level of the lake, sometimes as much as four feet. Such fluctuations, Olmsted recognized, would greatly increase the difficulty of planting the banks and shores. If the water level fell, visitors to the fair would be treated to an offensive band of bare earth at the waterline. If it rose too high, the water would submerge and kill shore plantings.

The architects climbed back into their carriages. They drove toward the lake over the park’s rough roads at the pace of a funeral cortege and with equal gloom. Burnham wrote: “a feeling of discouragement allied to hopelessness came over those who then first realized the extent and magnitude of the proposed undertaking, and appreciated the inexorable conditions of a time-limitation to the work. . . . Twenty-one months later was the day fixed by Act of Congress for the dedication of the buildings, and in the short space of twenty-seven and one-half months, or on May 1, 1893, the entire work of construction must be finished, the landscape perfected, and the exhibits installed.”

At the lake they again left their carriages. Peabody of Boston climbed atop a pier. He turned to Burnham. “Do you mean to say that you really propose opening a Fair here by Ninety-three?”

“Yes,” Burnham said. “We intend to.”

Peabody said, “It can’t be done.”

Burnham looked at him. “That point is settled,” he said.

But even he did not, and could not, grasp what truly lay ahead.

Root returned to Chicago while the architects were in Jackson Park. It was his forty-first birthday. He went directly from the train station to the Rookery. “He went down to the office in a gay humor,” Harriet Monroe said, “and that very day received a commission for a large commercial building.”

But that afternoon draftsman Paul Starrett encountered Root in one of the Rookery’s elevators “looking ill.” His good spirits had fled. He complained again of being tired.

The architects returned from their tour discouraged and full of regret. They gathered again in the firm’s library, where Root, suddenly revitalized, now joined them. He was gracious, funny, warm. If anyone could sway these men and ignite their passion, Burnham knew, Root was the one. Root invited the outside men to come to his house on Astor Place the next day, Sunday, for high tea, then went home at last to greet his children and his wife, Dora, who according to Harriet Monroe was in bed “ill almost unto death” from a recent miscarriage.