Book review

Vision, villainy in 1890s Chicago

A bold architect and a serial killer both realize their ambitions and seal their legacies through the World's Columbian Exposition.

By TOM VALEO
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 27, 2003

In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson chronicles the manic ambition that enabled Chicago to rise from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 and host the breathtaking spectacle known as the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Larson's book, subtitled Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, revolves around two of the most fascinating personalities in Chicago's history, one a bold visionary, the other a villain.

The former is Daniel Burnham, an architect and urban planner whose personality and legacy are well-represented by his most famous quote: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood."

The latter is H.H. Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, America's first celebrity serial killer.

A mediocre student rejected by Harvard and Yale, Burnham, with his partner, John Root, figured out how to float skyscrapers on Chicago's swampy soil, creating mountains of office space in the center of the city. When Congress voted in 1890 to make Chicago the host of a world's fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival, the city asked Burnham, 43, and Root, 40, to build a site that would at least match the glamor and significance of the Paris Exposition of 1889. There, Gustave Eiffel had dazzled visitors with his 1,000-foot tower, the tallest structure in the world.

Burnham persuaded leading New York architects to design some of the buildings, despite their disdain for the upstart prairie town that had wrestled the fair away from their great city. He took up residence in a cabin at the fair site on the far South Side of Chicago, far from his wife and children in Evanston, north of the city. Burnham pushed construction through paralyzing cold snaps, pounding rain and windstorms that toppled fragile walls. He negotiated with workers threatening to strike. In his quest for a structure that would surpass the Eiffel Tower, he proclaimed, "Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing." Eventually he agreed to an outlandish but elegant contraption known forever after as the Ferris wheel.

Meanwhile, a young doctor who called himself H.H. Holmes had acquired a vacant lot at 63rd and Wentworth. He designed a building with storefronts at street level and two floors of apartments above. Known locally as "the castle," the building was full of peculiar details: a wooden chute that descended from the second floor to the basement, an airtight vault next to Holmes' office with a seemingly pointless gas jet protruding from the wall, a kiln in the basement just large enough for a body.

Holmes designed every detail himself to avoid involving an architect, and he allayed the suspicions of carpenters and other laborers by finding some pretext to fire them before they started asking questions. When construction began on the Columbian Exposition, Holmes recognized that he could transform the castle into a lucrative hotel where he could persuade beautiful young women to stay.

Like John Wayne Gacy, who worked the Chicago area three-quarters of a century later, Holmes used his own residence to dispose of his victims' bodies. Some he dissolved in acid or quicklime, some he cremated, and some, incredibly enough, he sold as skeletons to medical colleges, no questions asked. Before his execution, he confessed to 28 murders, but investigators removing body parts from the castle suspect that he killed 200 or more.

Larson tells the tales of Burnham and Holmes in vivid detail, some of it seemingly too good to be true. As an old woman about to be defrauded by Holmes walks up the stairs to her apartment, "flies rested on the windowsill," Larson tells us. As Burnham leaves the city in one of George Pullman's Palace cars, "everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leapt past crossing gates waving a raccoon's tail of white and black smoke." How does the author know this? I called him up and asked, and Larson reiterated what he writes in his opening note: "This is NOT a work of fiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir or other written document."

Larson admits to fabricating two scenes, one involving Holmes' use of chloroform on one of his victims, and the other describing a trip to the fair that Holmes probably took with his new wife and sister-in-law. Both scenes are based on well-documented sources, as Larson explains in his source notes, and both add color to a story that seems, at times, to unfold in black and white.

"I make no claim to being a professional historian," he says. "I'm an animator of history."

Larson gleaned many of the book's details from primary sources at the Chicago Historical Society and other libraries. He discovered, for example, that unused nuts and bolts rained to the ground during the first revolution of the Ferris wheel. Larson also displays a solid sense of chronology that keeps his tale on course. The Devil in the White City makes historical events feel like they're happening right now, to people much like ourselves.

"I'm just a writer trying to retrieve lost stories from the past," Larson says. "That doesn't mean I'm making it up. I'm just putting it together and making it walk."

-- The Devil in the White City is published by Crown, $25.95, 304 pages. Tom Valeo is a journalist and critic who has covered Chicago for 25 years.

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