The Devil in the White City

Vexed

BURNHAM SAW HIS FAMILY RARELY now. By the spring of 1891 he was living full time in the shanty at Jackson Park; Margaret stayed in Evanston with a few servants who helped her care for their five children. Only a modest train ride separated the Burnhams, but the mounting demands of the fair made that distance as difficult to span as the Isthmus of Panama. Burnham could send telegrams, but they forced a cold and clumsy brevity and afforded little privacy. So Burnham wrote letters, and wrote them often. “You must not think this hurry of my life will last forever,” he wrote in one letter. “I shall stop after the World’s Fair. I have made up my mind to this.” The exposition had become a “hurricane,” he said. “To be done with this flurry is my strongest wish.”

Every dawn he left his quarters and inspected the grounds. Six steam-powered dredges the size of floating barns gnawed at the lakeshore, as five thousand men with shovels and wheelbarrows and horse-drawn graders slowly scraped the landscape raw, many of the men wearing bowlers and suitcoats as if they just happened to be passing by and on impulse chose to pitch in. Despite the presence of so many workers, there was a maddening lack of noise and bustle. The park was too big, the men too spread out, to deliver any immediate sense of work being done. The only reliable signs were the black plumes of smoke from the dredges and the ever-present scent of burning leaves from slash piles set aflame by workers. The brilliant white stakes that marked the perimeters of buildings imparted to the land the look of a Civil War burial ground. Burnham did find beauty in the rawness—“Among the trees of the Wooded Island the long white tents of the contractor’s camp gleamed in the sun, a soft, white note in the dun-colored landscape, and the pure blue line of the lake horizon made a cheerful contrast to the rugged and barren foreground”—but he also found deep frustration.

The work advanced slowly, impeded by the worsening relationship between the fair’s two ruling bodies, the National Commission and the Exposition Company, and by the architects’ failure to get their drawings to Chicago on time. All the drawings were late. Equally aggravating was the fact that there still was no Eiffel challenger. Moreover, the exposition had entered that precarious early phase common to every great construction project when unexpected obstacles suddenly emerge.

Burnham knew how to deal with Chicago’s notoriously flimsy soil, but Jackson Park surprised even him.

Initially the bearing capacity of its ground was “practically an unknown quality,” as one engineer put it. In March 1891 Burnham ordered tests to gauge how well the soil would support the grand palaces then on the architects’ drafting tables. Of special concern was the fact that the buildings would be sited adjacent to newly dug canals and lagoons. As any engineer knew, soil under pressure tended to shift to fill adjacent excavations. The fair’s engineers conducted the first test twelve feet from the lagoon on ground intended to support the northeast corner of the Electricity Building. They laid a platform four feet square and loaded it with iron to a pressure of 2,750 pounds per square foot, twenty-two tons in all. They left it in place for fifteen days and found that it settled only one-quarter of an inch. Next they dug a deep trench four feet from the platform. Over the next two days the platform sank another eighth of an inch but no farther. This was good news. It meant that Burnham could use Root’s floating grillage for foundations without having to worry about catastrophic settlement.

To make sure these properties were constant throughout the park, Burnham had his chief engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, test locations earmarked for other buildings. The tests yielded similar results—until Gottlieb’s men came to the site intended for George Post’s gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. The soil destined to support the northern half of the building showed total settlement of less than one inch, consistent with the rest of the park. At the southern end of the site, however, the men made a disheartening discovery. Even as workers loaded the platform, it sank eight inches. Over the next four days it settled thirty inches more, and would have continued sinking if the engineers had not simply called off the test.

Of course: Nearly all the soil of Jackson Park was competent to support floating foundations except the one portion destined to bear the fair’s biggest and heaviest building. Here, Burnham realized, contractors would have to drive piles at least down to hard-pan, an expensive complication and a source of additional delay.

The problems with this building, however, had only just begun.

In April 1891 Chicago learned the results of the latest mayoral election. In the city’s richest clubs, industrialists gathered to toast the fact that Carter Henry Harrison, whom they viewed as overly sympathetic to organized labor, had lost to Hempstead Washburne, a Republican. Burnham, too, allowed himself a moment of celebration. To him, Harrison represented the old Chicago of filth, smoke, and vice, everything the fair was designed to repudiate.

The celebrations were tempered, however, by the fact that Harrison had lost by the narrowest of margins, fewer than four thousand votes. What’s more, he had achieved this near-victory without the support of a major party. Shunned by the Democrats, he had run as an independent.

Elsewhere in the city, Patrick Prendergast grieved. Harrison was his hero, his hope. The margin was so narrow, however, that he believed that if Harrison ran again, he would win. Prendergast resolved to double his own efforts to help Harrison succeed.

In Jackson Park Burnham faced repeated interruptions stemming from his de facto role as ambassador to the outside world, charged with cultivating goodwill and future attendance. Mostly these banquets, talks, and tours were time-squandering annoyances, as in June 1891 when, at the request of Director-General Davis, Burnham hosted a visit to Jackson Park by a battalion of foreign dignitaries that consumed two full days. Others were purely a pleasure. A few weeks earlier Thomas Edison, known widely as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” had paid a visit to Burnham’s shanty. Burnham showed him around. Edison suggested the exposition use incandescent bulbs rather than arc lights, because the incandescent variety produced a softer light. Where arc lights could not be avoided, he said, they should be covered with white globes. And of course Edison urged the fair to use direct current, DC, the prevailing standard.

The civility of this encounter belied a caustic battle being waged outside Jackson Park for the rights to illuminate the exposition. On one side was General Electric Company, which had been created when J. P. Morgan took over Edison’s company and merged it with several others and which now proposed to install a direct current system to light the fair. On the other side was Westinghouse Electric Company, with a bid to wire Jackson Park for alternating current, using patents that its founder, George Westinghouse, had acquired a few years earlier from Nikola Tesla.

General Electric offered to do the job for $1.8 million, insisting the deal would not earn a penny’s profit. A number of exposition directors held General Electric stock and urged William Baker, president of the fair since Lyman Gage’s April retirement, to accept the bid. Baker refused, calling it “extortionate.” General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

The source of Burnham’s greatest dismay was the failure of the architects to finish their drawings on schedule.

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?”

Four days later he again prodded Hunt: “The delay you are causing us by not forwarding scale drawings is embarrassing in the extreme.”

That same month a serious if unavoidable interruption hobbled the Landscape Department. Olmsted became ill—severely so. He attributed his condition to poisoning from an arsenic-based pigment called Turkey Red in the wallpaper of his Brookline home. It may, however, simply have been another bout of deep blue melancholia, the kind that had assailed him off and on for years.

During his recuperation Olmsted ordered bulbs and plants for cultivation in two large nurseries established on the fairgrounds. He ordered Dusty Miller, Carpet Bugle, President Garfield heliotrope, Speedwell, Pennyroyal, English and Algerian ivies, verbena, vinca, and a rich palette of geraniums, among them Black Prince, Christopher Columbus, Mrs. Turner, Crystal Palace, Happy Thought, and Jeanne d’Arc. He dispatched an army of collectors to the shores of Lake Calumet, where they gathered twenty-seven traincar loads of iris, sedge, bulrush, and other semiaquatic plants and grasses. They collected an additional four thousand crates of pond lily roots, which Olmsted’s men quickly planted, only to watch most of the roots succumb to the ever-changing levels of the lake.

In contrast to the lush growth within the nurseries, the grounds of the park had been scraped free of all vegetation. Workers enriched the soil with one thousand carloads of manure shipped from the Union Stock Yards and another two thousand collected from the horses working in Jackson Park. The presence of so much exposed earth and manure became a problem. “It was bad enough during the hot weather, when a south wind could blind the eyes of man and beast,” wrote Rudolf Ulrich, Olmsted’s landscape superintendent at the park, “but still worse during wet weather, the newly filled ground, which was still undrained, becoming soaked with water.”

Horses sank to their bellies.

It was midsummer 1891 by the time the last of the architects’ drawings were completed. As each set came in, Burnham advertised for bids. Recognizing that the architects’ delays had put everything behind schedule, he inserted into the construction contracts clauses that made him a “czar,” as the Chicago Tribune put it. Each contract contained a tight deadline for completion, with a financial penalty for every day beyond. Burnham had advertised the first contract on May 14, this for the Mines Building. He wanted it finished by the end of the year. That left at best about seven months for construction (roughly the amount of time a twenty-first-century homeowner would need to build a new garage). “He is the arbiter of all disputes and no provision is made for an appeal from his decision,” the Tribune reported. “If in the opinion of Mr. Burnham the builder is not employing a sufficient force of men to complete the work on time, Mr. Burnham is authorized to engage men himself and charge the cost to the builder.” The Mines Building was the first of the main exposition buildings to begin construction, but the work did not start until July 3, 1891, with less than sixteen months remaining until Dedication Day.

As construction of the buildings at last got under way, anticipation outside the park began to increase. 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.” Undeterred, Cody secured rights to a large parcel of land adjacent to the park. In San Francisco a twenty-one-year-old entrepreneur named Sol Bloom realized that the Chicago fair would let him at last take advantage of an asset he had acquired in Paris two years earlier. Entranced by the Algerian Village at the Paris exposition, he had bought the rights to display the village and its inhabitants at future events. The Ways and Means Committee rejected him, too. He returned to San Francisco intent on trying a different, more oblique means of winning a concession—one that ultimately would get him a lot more than he had bargained for. Meanwhile young Lieutenant Schufeldt had reached Zanzibar. On July 20 he telegraphed Exposition President William Baker that he was confident he could acquire as many Pygmies from the Congo as he wished, provided the king of Belgium consented. “President Baker wants these pygmies,” the Tribune said, “and so does everybody else around headquarters.”

On the drafting board the fair did look spectacular. The centerpiece was the Grand Court, which everyone had begun calling the Court of Honor. With its immense palaces by Hunt, Post, Peabody, and the rest, the court by itself would be a marvel, but now nearly every state in the nation was planning a building, as were some two hundred companies and foreign governments. The exposition promised to surpass the Paris exposition on every level—every level that is, except one, and that persistent deficit troubled Burnham: The fair still had nothing planned that would equal, let alone eclipse, the Eiffel Tower. At nearly one thousand feet in height, the tower remained the tallest structure in the world and an insufferable reminder of the triumph of the Paris exposition. “To out-Eiffel Eiffel” had become a battle cry among the directors.

A competition held by the Tribune brought a wave of implausible proposals. C. F. Ritchel of Bridgeport, Connecticut, suggested a tower with a base one hundred feet high by five hundred feet wide, within which Ritchel proposed to nest a second tower and, in this one, a third. At intervals a complicated system of hydraulic tubes and pumps would cause the towers to telescope slowly upward, a journey of several hours, then allow them to sink slowly back to their original configuration. The top of the tower would house a restaurant, although possibly a bordello would have been more apt.

Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.”

A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.”

Everyone was thinking in terms of towers, but Burnham, for one, did not think a tower was the best approach. Eiffel had done it first and best. More than merely tall, his tower was grace frozen in iron, as much an evocation of the spirit of the age as Chartres had been in its time. To build a tower would be to follow Eiffel into territory he already had conquered for France.

In August 1891 Eiffel himself telegraphed the directors to ask if he might submit a proposal for a tower. This was a surprise and at first a welcome one. Exposition President Baker immediately cabled Eiffel that the directors would be delighted to see whatever he proposed. If the fair was to have a tower, Baker said in an interview, “M. Eiffel is the man to build it. It would not be so much of an experiment if he should be in charge of its construction. He might be able to improve on his design for the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and I think it fair to assume that he would not construct one in any way inferior to that famous structure.” To the engineers of America, however, this embrace of Eiffel was a slap in the face. Over the next week and a half telegrams shot from city to city, engineer to engineer, until the story became somewhat distorted. Suddenly it seemed as if an Eiffel Tower in Chicago was a certainty—that Eiffel himself was to do the out-Eiffeling. The engineers were outraged. A long letter of protest arrived at Burnham’s office, signed by some of the nation’s leading engineers.

Acceptance of “the distinguished gentleman’s offer,” they wrote, would be “equivalent to a statement that the great body of civil engineers in this country, whose noble works attest their skill abroad as well as throughout the length and breadth of the land, lack the ability to cope with such a problem, and such action could have a tendency to rob them of their just claim to professional excellence.”

Burnham read this letter with approval. It pleased him to see America’s civil engineers at last expressing passion for the fair, although in fact the directors had promised nothing to Eiffel. His formal proposal arrived a week later, envisioning a tower that was essentially a taller version of what he had built in Paris. The directors sent his proposal out for translation, reviewed it, then graciously turned it down. If there was to be a tower at the fair, it would be an American tower.

But the drafting boards of America’s engineers remained dishearteningly barren.

Sol Bloom, back in California, took his quest for a concession for his Algerian Village to an influential San Franciscan, Mike De Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the exposition’s national commissioners. Bloom told him about the rights he had acquired in Paris and how the exposition had rebuffed his petition.

De Young knew Bloom. As a teenager Bloom had worked in De Young’s Alcazar Theater and worked his way up to become its treasurer at age nineteen. In his spare time Bloom had organized the ushers, checkers, and refreshment sellers into a more efficient, cohesive structure that greatly increased the theater’s profits and his own salary. Next he organized these functions at other theaters and received regular commissions from each. At the Alcazar he inserted into scripts the names of popular products, bars, and restaurants, including the Cliff House, and for this received another stream of income. He also organized a cadre of professional applauders, known as a “claque,” to provide enthusiastic ovations, demand encores, and cry “Brava!” for any performer willing to pay. Most performers did pay, even the most famous diva of the time, Adelina Patti. One day Bloom saw an item in a theatrical publication about a novel Mexican band that he believed Americans would adore, and he convinced the band’s manager to let him bring the musicians north for a tour. Bloom’s profit was $40,000. At the time he was only eighteen.

De Young told Bloom he would investigate the situation. One week later he summoned Bloom back to his office.

“How soon could you be ready to go to Chicago?” he asked.

Bloom, startled, said, “In a couple of days, I guess.” He assumed De Young had arranged a second opportunity for him to petition the fair’s Ways and Means Committee. He was hesitant and told De Young he saw no value in making the journey until the exposition’s directors had a better idea of the kinds of attractions they wanted.

“The situation has advanced since our talk,” De Young said. “All we need now is somebody to take charge.” He gave Bloom a cable from the Exposition Company that empowered De Young to hire someone to select the concessions for the Midway Plaisance and guide their construction and promotion. “You’ve been elected,” he said.

“I can’t do it,” Bloom said. He did not want to leave San Francisco. “Even if I did, I’ve got too much at stake here to consider it.”

De Young watched him. “I don’t want to hear another word from you till tomorrow,” he said.

In the meantime De Young wanted Bloom to think about how much money he would have to be paid to overcome his reluctance. “When you come back you can name your salary,” he said. “I will either accept or reject it. There will be no argument. Is that agreeable?”

Bloom did agree, but only because De Young’s request gave him a graceful way of refusing the job. All he had to do, he figured, was name such an outrageous sum that De Young could not possibly accept it, “and as I walked down the street I decided what it would be.”

Burnham tried to anticipate every conceivable threat to the fair. Aware of Chicago’s reputation for vice and violence, Burnham insisted on the creation of a large police force, the Columbian Guard, and placed it under the command of Colonel Edmund Rice, a man of great valor who had faced Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Unlike conventional police departments, the Guard’s mandate explicitly emphasized the novel idea of preventing crime rather than merely arresting wrongdoers after the fact.

Disease, too, posed dangers to the fair, Burnham knew. An outbreak of smallpox or cholera or any of the other lethal infections that roamed the city could irreparably taint the exposition and destroy any hopes the directors had of achieving the record attendance necessary to generate a profit.

By now the new science of bacteriology, pioneered by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, had convinced most public health officials that contaminated drinking water caused the spread of cholera and other bacterial diseases. Chicago’s water teemed with bacteria, thanks mainly to the Chicago River. In a monumental spasm of civic engineering the city in 1871 reversed the river’s direction so that it no longer flowed into Lake Michigan, but ran instead into the Des Plaines River and ultimately into the Mississippi, the theory being that the immense flows of both rivers would dilute the sewage to harmless levels—a concept downriver towns like Joliet did not wholeheartedly embrace. To the engineers’ surprise, however, prolonged rains routinely caused the Chicago River to regress and again pour dead cats and fecal matter into the lake, and in such volume that tendrils of black water reached all the way to the intake cribs of the city water system.

Most Chicago residents had no choice but to drink the water. Burnham, however, believed from the start that the fair’s workers and visitors needed a better, safer supply. In this too he was ahead of the age. On his orders his sanitary engineer, William S. MacHarg, built a water-sterilization plant on the fairgrounds that pumped lake water through a succession of large tanks in which the water was aerated and boiled. MacHarg’s men set big casks of this sterilized water throughout the park and replenished them every day.

Burnham planned to close the purification plant by Opening Day and give visitors a choice between two other supplies of safe water: lake water purified with Pasteur filters and offered free of charge, or naturally pure water for a penny a cup, piped one hundred miles from the coveted springs of Waukesha, Wisconsin. In November 1891 Burnham ordered MacHarg to investigate five of Waukesha’s springs to gauge their capacity and purity, but to do so “quietly,” suggesting he was aware that running a pipeline through the village’s comely landscape might prove a sensitive issue. No one, however, could have imagined that in a few months MacHarg’s efforts to secure a supply of Waukesha’s best would lead to an armed encounter in the middle of a fine Wisconsin night.

What most worried Burnham was fire. The loss of the Grannis Block, with his and Root’s headquarters, remained a vivid, humiliating memory. A catastrophic fire in Jackson Park could destroy the fair. Yet within the park fire was central to the construction process. Plasterers used small furnaces called salamanders to speed drying and curing. Tinners and electricians used fire pots for melting, bending, and fusing. Even the fire department used fire: Steam engines powered the pumps on the department’s horse-drawn fire trucks.

Burnham established defenses that by prevailing standards seemed elaborate, even excessive. He formed an exposition fire department and ordered the installation of hundreds of fire hydrants and telegraphic alarm boxes. He commissioned the construction of a fire boat, the Fire Queen, built specifically to negotiate the park’s shallow canals and to pass under its many low bridges. Design specifications required that every building be surrounded by an underwater main and be plumbed with interior standpipes. He also banned all smoking on the grounds, although here he made at least two exceptions: one for a contractor who pleaded that his crew of European artisans would quit if denied their cigars, the other for the big hearth in his own shanty, around which he and his engineers, draftsmen, and visiting architects gathered each night for wine, talk, and cigars.

With the onset of winter Burnham ordered all hydrants packed in horse manure to prevent freezing.

On the coldest days the manure steamed, as if the hydrants themselves were on fire.

When Sol Bloom returned to the office of Mike De Young, he was confident De Young could not possibly accept his salary request, for he had decided to ask for the same salary as the president of the United States: $50,000. “The more I thought about it,” Bloom recalled, “the more I enjoyed the prospect of telling Mike De Young that no less a sum could compensate me for my sacrifice in leaving San Francisco.”

De Young offered Bloom a seat. His expression was sober and expectant.

Bloom said: “Much as I appreciate the compliment, I find that my interests lie right here in this city. As I look ahead I can see myself—”

De Young cut him off. Softly he said, “Now, Sol, I thought you were going to tell me how much you wanted us to pay you.”

“I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate—”

“You said that a minute ago,” De Young said. “Now tell me how much money you want.”

This was not going quite the way Bloom had expected. With some trepidation, Bloom told him the number: “A thousand dollars a week.”

De Young smiled. “Well, that’s pretty good pay for a fellow of twenty-one, but I have no doubt you’ll earn it.”

In August, Burnham’s chief structural engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, made a startling disclosure: He had failed to calculate wind loads for the fair’s main buildings. Burnham ordered his key contractors—including Agnew & Co., erecting the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—to stop work immediately. For months Burnham had been combating rumors that he had forced his men to work at too fast a pace and that as a result some buildings were unsafe; in Europe, press reports held that certain structures had been “condemned.” Now here was Gottlieb, conceding a potentially catastrophic error.

Gottlieb protested that even without an explicit calculation of wind loads, the buildings were strong enough.

“I could not, however, take this view,” Burnham wrote in a letter to James Dredge, editor of the influential British magazine Engineering. Burnham ordered all designs strengthened to withstand the highest winds recorded over the previous ten years. “This may be going to extremes,” he told Dredge, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.”

Gottlieb resigned. Burnham replaced him with Edward Shankland, an engineer from his own firm who possessed a national reputation as a designer of bridges.

On November 24, 1891, Burnham wrote to James Dredge to report that once again he was under fire over the issue of structural integrity. “The criticism now,” he wrote, “is that the structures are unnecessarily strong.”

Bloom arrived in Chicago and quickly discovered why so little had been accomplished at the Midway Plaisance, known officially as Department M. Until now it had been under the control of Frederick Putnam, a Harvard professor of ethnology. He was a distinguished anthropologist, but putting him in charge of the Midway, Bloom said years later, “was about as intelligent a decision as it would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” Putnam would not have disagreed. He told a Harvard colleague he was “anxious to get this whole Indian circus off my hands.”

Bloom took his concerns to Exposition President Baker, who turned him over to Burnham.

“You are a very young man, a very young man indeed, to be in charge of the work entrusted to you,” Burnham said.

But Burnham himself had been young when John B. Sherman walked into his office and changed his life.

“I want you to know that you have my full confidence,” he said. “You are in complete charge of the Midway. Go ahead with the work. You are responsible only to me. I will write orders to that effect. Good luck.”

By December 1891 the two buildings farthest along were the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. Construction of the Mines Building had gone smoothly, thanks to a winter that by Chicago standards had been mercifully benign. Construction of the Woman’s Building, however, had become an ordeal, both for Burnham and its young architect, Sophia Hayden, mainly because of modifications demanded by Bertha Honore Palmer, head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers, which governed all things at the fair having to do with women. As the wife of Potter Palmer, she was accustomed by wealth and absolute social dominance to having her own way, as she had made clear earlier in the year when she suppressed a revolt led by the board’s executive secretary that had caused open warfare between factions of elegantly coiffed and dressed women. In the thick of it one horrified lady manager had written to Mrs. Palmer, “I do hope that Congress will not become disgusted with our sex.”

Hayden came to Chicago to produce final drawings, then returned home, leaving their execution to Burnham. Construction began July 9; workers began applying the final coat of staff in October. Hayden returned in December to direct the decoration of the building’s exterior, believing this to be her responsibility. She discovered that Bertha Palmer had other ideas.

In September, without Hayden’s knowledge, Palmer had invited women everywhere to donate architectural ornaments for the building and in response had received a museum’s worth of columns, panels, sculpted figures, window grills, doors, and other objects. Palmer believed the building could accommodate all the contributions, especially those sent by prominent women. Hayden, on the other hand, knew that such a hodgepodge of materials would result in an aesthetic abomination. When an influential Wisconsin woman named Flora Ginty sent an elaborately carved wooden door, Hayden turned it down. Ginty was hurt and angry. “When I think of the days I worked and the miles I traveled to achieve these things for the Woman’s building, my ire rises a little yet.” Mrs. Palmer was in Europe at the time, but her private secretary, Laura Hayes, a gossip of virtuosic scope, made sure her employer learned all the details. Hayes also relayed to Palmer a few words of advice that she herself had given the architect: “‘I think it would be better to have the building look like a patchwork quilt, than to refuse these things which the Lady Managers have been to such pains in soliciting.’”

A patchwork quilt was not what Hayden had in mind. Despite Mrs. Palmer’s blinding social glare, Hayden continued to decline donations. A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy. Mrs. Palmer pecked and pestered and catapulted icy smiles into Hayden’s deepening gloom. Finally Palmer assigned the decoration of the Woman’s Building to someone else, a designer named Candace Wheeler.

Hayden fought the arrangement in her quiet, stubborn way until she could take it no longer. She walked into Burnham’s office, began to tell him her story, and promptly, literally, went mad: tears, heaving sobs, cries of anguish, all of it. “A severe breakdown,” an acquaintance called it, “with a violent attack of high nervous excitement of the brain.”

Burnham, stunned, summoned one of the exposition surgeons. Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest. She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.

At Jackson Park aggravation was endemic. Simple matters, Burnham found, often became imbroglios. Even Olmsted had become an irritant. He was brilliant and charming, but once fixed on a thing, he was as unyielding as a slab of Joliet limestone. By the end of 1891 the question of what kind of boats to allow on the fair’s waterways had come to obsess him, as if boats alone would determine the success of his quest for “poetic mystery.”

In December 1891 Burnham received a proposal from a tugboat manufacturer arguing the case for steam launches at the exposition. Olmsted got wind of it from Harry Codman, who in addition to being his chief operating man in Chicago served as a kind of spy, keeping Olmsted abreast of all threats to Olmsted’s vision. Codman sent Olmsted a copy of the letter, adding his own note that the tugboat maker seemed to enjoy Burnham’s confidence.

On December 23 Olmsted wrote to Burnham: “I suspect that even Codman is inclined to think that I make too much of a hobby of this boat question and give an amount of worry, if not thought, to it that would be better expended on other and more critical matters, and I fear that you may think me a crank upon it.”

He proceeded, however, to vent his obsession yet again. The tug-maker’s letter, he complained, framed the boat question solely in terms of moving the greatest number of passengers between different points at the exposition as cheaply and quickly as possible. “You perfectly well know that the main object to be accomplished was nothing of this sort. I need not try to make a statement of what it was. You are as alive to it as I am. You know that it was a poetic object, and you know that if boats are to be introduced on these waters, it would be perfect nonsense to have them of a kind that would antagonize this poetic object.”

Mere transportation was never the goal, he fumed. The whole point of having boats was to enhance the landscape. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition. I say destroy deliberately. A thousand times better [to] have no boats.”

Despite increasing committee interference and intensified conflict between Burnham and Director-General Davis, and with the threat of labor strikes ever present, the main buildings rose. 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. They cocooned the frames in scaffolds of wood and faced each frame with hundreds of thousands of wooden planks to create walls capable of accepting two thick layers of staff. As workers piled mountains of fresh lumber beside each building, jagged foothills of sawdust and scrap rose nearby. The air smelled of cut wood and Christmas.

In December the exposition experienced its first death: a man named Mueller at the Mines Building, dead of a fractured skull. Three other deaths followed in short order:

Jansen, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

Allard, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

Algeer, stunned to oblivion by a new phenomenon, electric shock, at the Mines Building.

Dozens of lesser accidents occurred as well. Publicly Burnham struck a pose of confidence and optimism. In a December 28, 1891, letter to the editor of the Chicago Herald, he wrote, “A few questions of design and plan are still undetermined, but there is nothing which is not well in hand, and I see no reason why we will not be able to complete our work in time for the ceremonies in October, 1892”—Dedication Day—“and for the opening of the Exposition, May 1st, 1893.”

In reality, the fair was far behind schedule, with worse delay forestalled only by the winter’s mildness. The October dedication was to take place inside the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, yet as of January only the foundation of the building had been laid. For the fair to be even barely presentable in time for the ceremony, everything would have to go perfectly. The weather especially would have to cooperate.

Meanwhile, banks and companies were failing across America, strikes threatened everywhere, and cholera had begun a slow white trek across Europe, raising fears that the first plague ships would soon arrive in New York Harbor.

As if anyone needed extra pressure, the New York Times warned: “the failure of the fair or anything short of a positive and pronounced success would be a discredit to the whole country, and not to Chicago alone.”