The Devil in the White City

“The Cold-Blooded Fact”

AT THE START OF JANUARY 1893 the weather turned cold and stayed cold, the temperature falling to twenty degrees below zero. In his dawn tours, Burnham faced a hard pale world. Cairns of frozen horse manure punctuated the landscape. Along the banks of the Wooded Island ice two feet thick locked Olmsted’s bulrush and sedge in cruel contortions. Burnham saw that Olmsted’s work was far behind. And now Olmsted’s man in Chicago, Harry Codman, upon whom everyone had come to depend, was in the hospital recovering from surgery. His recurring illness had turned out to be appendicitis. The operation, under ether, had gone well and Codman was recuperating, but his recovery would be slow. Only four months remained until Opening Day.

The extreme cold increased the threat of fire. The necessary fires alone—the salamanders and tinner’s pots—had caused dozens of small blazes, easily put out, but the cold increased the likelihood of far worse. It froze water lines and hydrants and drove workers to break Burnham’s ban on smoking and open flame. The men of the Columbian Guard stepped up their vigilance. It was they who suffered most from the cold, standing watch around the clock in far-flung reaches of the park where no shelter existed. “The winter of 1892–3 will always be remembered by those who served on the guard during that period,” wrote Colonel Rice, their commander. Its members most dreaded being assigned to an especially bleak sector at the extreme south end of the park below the Agriculture Building. They called it Siberia. Colonel Rice used their dread to his advantage: “any Guard ordered to the post along the South fence would realize that he had been guilty of some minor breach of discipline, or that his personal appearance rendered him too unsightly for the more public parts of the grounds.”

George Ferris fought the cold with dynamite, the only efficient way to penetrate the three-foot crust of frozen earth that now covered Jackson Park. Once opened, the ground still posed problems. Just beneath the crust lay a twenty-foot stratum of the same quicksand Chicago builders always confronted, only now it was ice cold and a torment to workers. The men used jets of live steam to thaw dirt and prevent newly poured cement from freezing. They drove timber piles to hard-pan thirty-two feet underground. On top of these they laid a grillage of steel, then filled it with cement. To keep the excavated chambers as dry as possible, they ran pumps twenty-four hours a day. They repeated the process for each of the eight 140-foot towers that would support the Ferris Wheel’s giant axle.

At first, Ferris’s main worry was whether he could acquire enough steel to build his machine. He realized, however, that he had an advantage over anyone else trying to place a new order. Through his steel-inspection company he knew most of the nation’s steel executives and the products they made. He was able to pull in favors and spread his orders among many different companies. “No one shop could begin to do all the work, therefore contracts were let to a dozen different firms, each being chosen because of some peculiar fitness for the work entrusted to it,” according to an account by Ferris’s company. Ferris also commanded a legion of inspectors who evaluated the quality of each component as it emerged from each mill. This proved to be a vital benefit since the wheel was a complex assemblage of 100,000 parts that ranged in size from small bolts to the giant axle, which at the time of its manufacture by Bethlehem Steel was the largest one-piece casting ever made. “Absolute precision was necessary, as few of the parts could be put together until they were upon the ground and an error of the smallest fraction of an inch might be fatal.”

The wheel Ferris envisioned actually consisted of two wheels spaced thirty feet apart on the axle. What had frightened Burnham, at first, was the apparent insubstantiality of the design. Each wheel was essentially a gigantic bicycle wheel. Slender iron rods just two and a half inches thick and eighty feet long linked the rim, or felloe, of each wheel to a “spider” affixed to the axle. Struts and diagonal rods ran between the two wheels to stiffen the assembly and give it the strength of a railroad bridge. A chain weighing twenty thousand pounds connected a sprocket on the axle to sprockets driven by twin thousand-horsepower steam engines. For aesthetic reasons the boilers were to be located seven hundred feet outside the Midway, the steam shunted to the engines through ten-inch underground pipes.

This, at least, is how it looked on paper. Just digging and installing the foundation, however, had proven more difficult than Ferris and Rice had expected, and they knew that far greater hurdles lay ahead, foremost among them the challenge of raising that huge axle to its mount atop the eight towers. Together with its fittings, the axle weighed 142,031 pounds. Nothing that heavy had ever been lifted before, let alone to such a height.

Olmsted, in Brookline, got the news by telegram: Harry Codman was dead. Codman, his protégé, whom he loved like a son. He was twenty-nine. “You will have heard of our great calamity,” Olmsted wrote to his friend Gifford Pinchot. “As yet, I am as one standing on a wreck and can hardly see when we shall be afloat again.”

Olmsted recognized that now he himself would have to take over direct supervision of the exposition work, but he felt less up to the duty than ever. He and Phil, Harry’s brother, arrived in Chicago at the beginning of February to find the city locked in brutal cold, the temperature eight degrees below zero. On February 4 he sat down at Codman’s desk for the first time and found it awash with stacks of invoices and memoranda. Olmsted’s head raged with noise and pain. He had a sore throat. He was deeply sad. The task of sorting through Codman’s accumulated papers and of taking over the exposition work now seemed beyond him. He asked a former assistant, Charles Eliot, now one of Boston’s best landscape architects, if he would come to help. After some hesitation Eliot agreed. On arrival Eliot saw immediately that Olmsted was ill. By the evening of February 17, 1893, as a blizzard bore down on Chicago, Olmsted was under a doctor’s care, confined to his hotel.

The same night Olmsted wrote to John in Brookline. Weariness and sorrow freighted each page of his letter. “It looks as if the time has come when it is necessary for you to count me out,” he wrote. The work in Chicago had begun to look hopeless. “It is very plain that as things are, we are not going to be able to do our duty here.”

By early March Olmsted and Eliot were back in Brookline, Eliot now a full-fledged partner, the firm newly renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. The exposition work was still far behind schedule and a major source of worry, but Olmsted’s health and the pressure of other work had forced him from Chicago. With deep misgivings Olmsted had left the work in the care of his superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, whom he had come to distrust. On March 11 Olmsted dispatched a long letter to Ulrich full of instructions.

“I have never before, in all the numerous works for which I have been broadly responsible, trusted as much to the discretion of an assistant or co-operator,” Olmsted wrote. “And the results have been such that in the straights in which we are placed by the death of Mr. Codman and my ill health, and the consequent excessive pressure of other duties, I am more than ever disposed to pursue this policy, and to carry it further. But I must confess that I can not do so without much anxiety.”

He made it clear that this anxiety was due to Ulrich, specifically, Ulrich’s “constitutional propensity” to lose sight of the broad scheme and throw himself into minute tasks better handled by subordinates, a trait that Olmsted feared had left Ulrich vulnerable to demands by other officials, in particular Burnham. “Never lose sight of the fact that our special responsibility as landscape artists applies primarily to the broad, comprehensive scenery of the Exposition,” Olmsted wrote. (The emphases were his.) “This duty is not to make a garden, or to produce garden effects, but relates to the scenery of the Exposition as a whole; first of all and most essentially the scenery, in a broad and comprehensive way…. If, for lack of time and means, or of good weather, we come short in matters of detailed decoration, our failure will be excusable. If we fall short in matters affecting broad landscape effects we shall fail in our primary and essential duty.”

He went on to identify for Ulrich the things that most worried him about the fair, among them the color scheme chosen by Burnham and the architects. “Let me remind you that the whole field of the Exposition has already come to be popularly called ‘THE WHITE CITY’. … I fear that against the clear blue sky and the blue lake, great towering masses of white, glistening in the clear, hot, Summer sunlight of Chicago, with the glare of the water that we are to have both within and without the Exposition grounds, will be overpowering.” This, he wrote, made it more important than ever to provide a counterbalance of “dense, broad, luxuriant green bodies of foliage.”

Clearly the possibility of failure at the exposition had occurred to Olmsted and troubled him. Time was short, the weather terrible. The spring planting season would be brief. Olmsted had begun to think in terms of fallback arrangements. He warned Ulrich, “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of plain, undecorated, smooth surfaces.”

It was far better, Olmsted lectured, to underdecorate than to over-decorate. “Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.”

Snow fell, bales of it. It fell day after day until hundreds of tons of it lay upon the rooftops at Jackson Park. The exposition was to be a warm-weather affair, set to run from May through October. No one had thought to design the roofs to resist such extreme loading from snow.

Men working at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building heard the shriek of failed steel and ran for cover. In a great blur of snow and silvery glass the building’s roof—that marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris, enclosing the greatest volume of unobstructed space in history—collapsed to the floor below.

Soon afterward, a reporter from San Francisco made his way to Jackson Park. He had come prepared to admire the grand achievement of Burnham’s army of workers but instead found himself troubled by what he saw in the stark frozen landscape.

“This seems to be an impossibility,” he wrote. “To be sure, those in charge claim that they will be ready on time. Still the cold-blooded fact stares one in the face that only the Woman’s Building is anywhere near completion inside and out.”

Yet the fair was to open in little more than two months.