The Devil in the White City

Storm and Fire

BURNHAM’S WORK DID NOT CEASE, the pace at his office did not slow. The fair buildings were complete and all exhibits were in place, but just as surely as silver tarnishes, the fair became subject to the inevitable forces of degradation and decline—and tragedy.

On Sunday, July 9, a day of heat and stillness, the Ferris Wheel became one of the most sought-after places to be, as did the basket of the Midway’s captive balloon. The balloon, named Chicago, was filled with 100,000 cubic feet of hydrogen and controlled by a tether connected to a winch. By three o’clock that afternoon it had made thirty-five trips aloft, to an altitude of one thousand feet. As far as the concession’s German aerialist was concerned, the day had been a perfect one for ascensions, so still, he estimated, that a plumb line dropped from the basket would have touched the winch directly below.

At three o’clock, however, the manager of the concession, G. F. Morgan, checked his instruments and noted a sudden decline in barometric pressure, evidence that a storm was forming. He halted the sale of new tickets and ordered his men to reel in the balloon. The operators of the Ferris Wheel, he saw, did not take equivalent precautions. The wheel continued to turn.

Clouds gathered, the sky purpled, and a breeze rose from the northwest. The sky sagged toward the ground and a small funnel cloud appeared, which began wobbling south along the lakeshore, toward the fair.

The Ferris Wheel was full of passengers, who watched with mounting concern as the funnel did its own danse du ventre across Jackson Park directly toward the Midway.

At the base of the captive balloon, Manager Morgan ordered his men to grab mooring ropes and hang on tight.

Within Jackson Park the sudden shift from sunlight to darkness drew Burnham outside. A powerful wind reared from all directions. Lunch wraps took flight and wheeled in the air like gulls. The sky seemed to reach into the exposition, and somewhere glass shattered, not the gentle tinkling of a window extinguished by a stone but the hurt-dog yelp of large sheets falling to the ground.

In the Agriculture Building a giant pane of glass fell from the roof and shattered the table at which, just a few seconds earlier, a young woman had been selling candy. Six roof panes blew from the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Exhibitors raced to cover their displays with duckcloth.

The wind tore a forty-square-foot segment from the dome of the Machinery Building and lifted the roof off the fair’s Hungarian Café. The crew of one of Olmsted’s electric launches made a hasty landing to evacuate all passengers and had just begun motoring toward shelter when a burst of wind caught the boat’s awning and whipped the five-ton craft onto its side. The pilot and conductor swam to safety.

Giant feathers rocked in the air. The twenty-eight ostriches of the Midway ostrich farm bore the loss with their usual aplomb.

In the wheel, riders braced themselves. One woman fainted. A passenger later wrote to Engineering News, “It took the combined effort of two of us to close the doors tight. The wind blew so hard the rain drops appeared to be flowing almost horizontal instead of vertical.” The wheel continued to turn, however, as if no wind were blowing. Passengers felt only a slight vibration. The letter-writer, apparently an engineer, estimated the wind deflected the wheel to one side by only an inch and a half.

The riders watched as the wind gripped the adjacent captive balloon and tore it from the men holding it down and briefly yanked Manager Morgan into the sky. The wind pummeled the balloon as if it were an inverted punching bag, then tore it to pieces and cast shreds of its nine thousand yards of silk as far as half a mile away.

Morgan took the disaster calmly. “I got some pleasure out of watching the storm come up,” he said, “and it was a sight of a lifetime to see the balloon go to pieces, even if it was a costly bit of sightseeing for the people who own stock in the company.”

Whether the storm had anything to do with the events of the next day, Monday, July 10, can’t be known, but the timing was suspicious.

On Monday, shortly after one o’clock, as Burnham supervised repairs and crews removed storm debris from the grounds, smoke began to rise from the cupola of the Cold Storage tower, where the fire of June 17 also had taken light.

The tower was made of wood and housed a large iron smokestack, which vented three boilers located in the main building below. Paradoxically, heat was required to produce cold. The stack rose to a point thirty inches short of the top of the tower, where an additional iron assembly, called a thimble, was to have been placed to extend the stack so that it cleared the top completely. The thimble was a crucial part of architect Frank Burnham’s design, meant to shield the surrounding wooden walls from the superheated gases exiting the stack. For some reason, however, the contractor had not installed it. The building was like a house whose chimney ended not above the roof but inside the attic.

The first alarm reached the fire department at 1:32 P.M. Engines thundered to the building. Twenty firemen led by Captain James Fitzpatrick entered the main structure and climbed to its roof. From there they made their way to the tower and climbed stairs another seventy feet to the tower’s exterior balcony. Using ropes they hauled up a line of hose and a twenty-five-foot ladder. They secured the hose firmly to the tower.

Fitzpatrick and his men didn’t realize it, but the fire at the top of the tower had set a lethal trap. Fragments of burning debris had fallen into the space between the iron stack and the inner walls of the tower, made of smooth white pine. These flaming brands ignited a fire that, in those narrow confines, soon depleted the available air and extinguished its own flames, leaving in their place a superheated plasma that needed only a fresh supply of oxygen to become explosive.

As the firemen on the tower balcony concentrated on the fire above them, a small plume of white smoke appeared at their feet.

The Fire Department rang a second alarm at 1:41 P.M. and activated the big siren at the exposition’s Machinery Building. Thousands of visitors now moved toward the smoke and packed the lawns and paths surrounding the building. Some brought lunch. Burnham came, as did Davis. The Columbian Guard arrived in force to clear the way for additional engines and ladder wagons. Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.

“Never,” the Fire Department reported, “was so terrible a tragedy witnessed by such a sea of agonized faces.”

Suddenly flames erupted from the tower at a point about fifty feet below Fitzpatrick and his men. Fresh air rushed into the tower. An explosion followed. To the firemen, according to the department’s official report, it appeared “as though the gaseous contents of the air-shaft surrounding the smokestack had become ignited, and the entire interior of the tower at once became a seething furnace.”

Fireman John Davis was standing on the balcony with Captain Fitzpatrick and the other men. “I saw there was only one chance, and I made up my mind to take it,” Davis said. “I made a leap for the hose and had the good luck to catch it. The rest of the boys seemed transfixed with horror and unable to move.”

Davis and one other man rode the hose to the ground. The firemen still on the balcony knew their situation was deadly and began to tell each other good-bye. Witnesses watched them hug and shake hands. Captain Fitzpatrick grabbed a rope and swung down through the fire to the main roof below, where he lay with a fractured leg and internal injuries, half his huge mustache burned away. Other men jumped to their deaths, in some cases penetrating the main roof.

Fire Marshal Murphy and two other firemen on the ground climbed a ladder to retrieve Fitzpatrick. They lowered him by rope to colleagues waiting below. He was alive but fading.

In all, the blaze killed twelve firemen and three workers. Fitzpatrick died at nine o’clock that night.

The next day attendance exceeded 100,000. The still-smoking rubble of the Cold Storage Building had proved irresistible.

The coroner immediately convened an inquest, during which a jury heard testimony from Daniel Burnham; Frank Burnham; officials of Hercules Iron Works; and various firemen. Daniel Burnham testified he had not known of the previous fire or the omitted thimble and claimed that since the building was a private concession he had no authority over its construction beyond approving its design. On Tuesday, July 18, the jury charged him, Fire Marshal Murphy, and two Hercules officers with criminal negligence and referred the charges to a grand jury.

Burnham was stunned but kept his silence. “The attempt to hold you in any degree responsible or censurable for the loss of life is an outrage,” wrote Dion Geraldine, his construction superintendent at the fair. “The men who gave this verdict must have been very stupid, or sadly misinformed.”

Under customary procedures, Burnham and the others would have been placed under arrest pending bail, but in this instance even the coroner’s office seemed taken aback. The sheriff made no move to arrest the director of works. Burnham posted bond the next morning.

With the stink of charred wood still heavy in the air, Burnham closed the roof walks of the Transportation and Manufactures and Liberal Arts buildings and the balconies and upper galleries of the Administration Building, fearing that a fire in the buildings or among their exhibits could start a panic and cause a tragedy of even greater magnitude. Hundreds of people had crowded the roof walk of the Manufactures Building each day, but their only way down was by elevator. Burnham imagined terrified men, women, and children trying to slide down the glass flanks of the roof and breaking through, then falling two hundred feet to the exhibit floor.

As if things could not get any blacker, on the same day that the coroner’s jury ordered Burnham’s arrest, July 18, the directors of the exposition bowed to bank pressure and voted to establish a Retrenchment Committee with nearly unrestricted powers to cut costs throughout the fair, and appointed three cold-eyed men to staff it. A subsequent resolution approved by the Exposition Company’s directors stated that as of August 1, “no expenditures whatever connected with the construction, maintenance or conduct of the Exposition shall be incurred unless authorized by said committee.” It was clear from the start that the committee’s primary target was Burnham’s Department of Works.

Equally clear, at least to Burnham, was that the last thing the fair needed right now, as he and Millet continued their fight to boost the rate of paid admissions—a campaign with its own necessary costs—was a troika of penny-pinchers sitting in judgment on every new expense. Millet had some extraordinary ideas for events in August, including an elaborate Midway ball during which fair officials, including Burnham, would dance with Dahoman women and Algerian belly dancers. That the committee would view the expense of this ball and other Millet events as frivolous seemed certain. Yet Burnham knew that such expenditures, as well as continued spending on police, garbage removal, and maintenance of roads and lawns, was vital.

He feared that the Retrenchment Committee would cripple the fair for once and for all.