The Devil in the White City

The Landscape of Regret

THE 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.

Root told Dora of his weariness and suggested that in the coming summer they should escape somewhere for a long rest. The last months had been full of frustration and long nights of work and travel. He was exhausted. The trip south had done nothing to ease his stress. He looked forward to the end of the week, January 15, when the architects would conclude their conference and go home.

“After the 15th,” he told his wife, “I shall not be so busy.”

The eastern and Chicago architects reconvened that night at the University Club for a dinner in their honor hosted by the fair’s Grounds and Buildings Committee. Root was too tired to attend. Clearly the dinner was a weapon meant to ignite enthusiasm and show the easterners that Chicago fully intended to follow through on its grand boasts about the exposition. It was the first in a sequence of impossibly rich and voluminous banquets whose menus raised the question of whether any of the city’s leading men could possibly have a functional artery.

As the men arrived, reporters intercepted them. The architects were gracious but closemouthed.

They were to sit at a large T-shaped table, with Lyman Gage, president of the exposition, at the center of the topmost table, Hunt on his right, Olmsted on his left. Bundles of carnations and pink and red roses transformed the tables into cutting beds. A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.

At precisely eight P.M. Gage took Hunt and Olmsted by the arm and led the way from the Club’s reception room to the banquet hall.

Oysters.

A glass or two of Montrachet.

Consommé of Green Turtle.

Amontillado.

Broiled Shad à la Maréchel.

Cucumbers. Potatoes à la Duchesse.

Filet Mignon à la Rossini.

Chateau Lafite and Rinnart Brut.

Fonds d’Artichaut Farcis.

Pommery Sec.

Sorbet au Kirsch.

Cigarettes.

Woodcock on Toast.

Asparagus Sala.

Ices: Canton Ginger.

Cheeses: Pont l’Eveque; Rocquefort. Coffee. Liquers.

Madeira, 1815.

Cigars.

Gage spoke first. He offered a rousing oration on the brilliance of the future exposition and the need now for the great men in the banquet hall to think first of the fair, last of themselves, affirming that only through the subordination of self would the exposition succeed. The applause was warm and enthusiastic.

Burnham spoke next. He described his own vision of the fair and Chicago’s resolve to make that vision real. He too urged teamwork and self-sacrifice. “Gentlemen,” he said, “1893 will be the third great date in our country’s history. On the two others, 1776 and 1861, all true Americans served, and so now I ask you to serve again!”

This time the room erupted. “The men left the banquet hall that night united like soldiers in a campaign,” Burnham said.

It was the Chicagoans, however, who did all the marching. At Root’s house the next day Harriet Monroe met the eastern architects and came away shaken. “In talking with them I was amazed at their listless and hopeless attitude,” she said. “Beautiful effects were scarcely to be expected in buildings so enormous and so cheaply constructed; the level of monotony of ground surfaces in Chicago made effective grouping practically impossible; the time for preparation and construction was too short: these and other criticisms indicated a general feeling of disparagement.”

At tea’s end Root escorted the visitors to their carriages. It was dark and bitterly cold. A sharp wind scythed along Astor Place. Much was made, in retrospect, of the fact that Root, in evening dress, charged into the rock-cold night without first putting on a coat.