The Devil in the White City

Departures

FRANK MILLET HOPED THE closing ceremony would attract even more people than the fair’s Chicago Day. While Millet did his planning, many of the other men who had helped Burnham construct the fair began the return to ordinary life.

Charles McKim disengaged reluctantly. For him the fair had been a brilliant light that for a time dispelled the shadows that had accumulated around his life. He left Jackson Park abruptly on the morning of October 23 and later that day wrote to Burnham, “You know my dislike for saying ‘Good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that I was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.

“You gave me a beautiful time and the last days of the Fair will always remain in my mind, as were the first, especially identified with yourself. It will be pleasant for the rest of our natural lives to be able to look back to it and talk it over and over and over again, and it goes without saying that you can depend upon me in every way as often hereafter as you may have need of me.”

The next day McKim wrote to a friend in Paris of the deepening consensus among himself, Burnham, and most of Chicago that the fair was too wonderful a thing to be allowed simply to fall into disrepair after its official closure on October 30, just six days thence: “indeed it is the ambition of all concerned to have it swept away in the same magical manner in which it appeared, and with the utmost despatch. For economy, as well as for obvious reasons, it has been proposed that the most glorious way would be to blow up the buildings with dynamite. Another scheme is to destroy them with fire. This last would be the easiest and grandest spectacle except for the danger of flying embers in the event of a change of wind from the lake.”

Neither McKim nor Burnham truly believed the fair should be set aflame. The buildings, in fact, had been designed to maximize the salvage value of their components. Rather, this talk of conflagration was a way of easing the despair of watching the dream come to an end. No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A Cosmopolitan writer said, “Better to have it vanish suddenly, in a blaze of glory, than fall into gradual disrepair and dilapidation. There is no more melancholy spectacle than a festal hall, the morning after the banquet, when the guests have departed and the lights are extinguished.”

Later, these musings about fire would come to seem like prophecy.

Olmsted too severed his connection. Toward the end of summer his busy schedule and the stifling heat caused his health to fail once again and reactivated his insomnia. He had many projects under way, chief among them Biltmore, but he felt himself nearing the end of his career. He was seventy-one years old. On September 6, 1893, he wrote to a friend, Fred Kingsbury, “I can’t come to you and often dream of a ride through our old haunts and meeting you and others but have pretty well surrendered to Fate. I must flounder along my way to the end.” Olmsted did, however, allow himself a rare expression of satisfaction. “I enjoy my children,” he told Kingsbury. “They are one of the centers of my life, the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man.”

Louis Sullivan, engorged with praise and awards for his Transportation Building—especially its Golden Door—again took up his work with Dankmar Adler but under changed circumstances. The deepening depression and missteps by the two partners had left the firm with few projects. For all of 1893 they would complete only two buildings. Sullivan, never easy on his peers, became furious with one of the firm’s junior architects when he discovered the man had been using his free time to design houses for clients of his own. Sullivan fired him.

The junior man was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Ten thousand construction workers also left the fair’s employ and returned to a world without jobs, already crowded with unemployed men. Once the fair closed, many thousands more would join them on Chicago’s streets. The threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn. Mayor Harrison was sympathetic and did what he could. He hired thousands of men to clean streets and ordered police stations opened at night for men seeking a place to sleep. Chicago’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle reported, “Never before has there been such a sudden and striking cessation of industrial activity.” Pig iron production fell by half, and new rail construction shrank almost to nothing. Demand for railcars to carry visitors to the exposition had spared the Pullman Works, but by the end of the fair George Pullman too began cutting wages and workers. He did not, however, reduce the rents in his company town.

The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.

Holmes too sensed it was time to leave Chicago. The pressure from creditors and families was growing too great.

First he set fire to the top floor of his castle. The blaze did minimal damage, but he filed a claim for $6,000 on a policy acquired by his fictional alter ego, Hiram S. Campbell. An investigator for one of the insurance companies, F. G. Cowie, became suspicious and began a detailed investigation. Though he found no concrete evidence of arson, Cowie believed Holmes or an accomplice had started the fire. He advised the insurers to pay the claim, but only to Hiram S. Campbell and only if Campbell presented himself in person.

Holmes could not claim the money himself, for by now Cowie knew him. Ordinarily he simply would have recruited someone else to masquerade as Campbell and claim the money, but of late he had become increasingly wary. The guardians of Minnie Williams had dispatched an attorney, William Capp, to look for Minnie and to protect the assets of her estate. Anna’s guardian, the Reverend Dr. Black, had hired a private detective who had come to Holmes’s building. And letters continued to arrive from the Cigrands and Smythes and other parents. No one yet had accused Holmes of foul play, but the intensity of this new wave of inquiry was greater, more obliquely accusatory, than anything he previously had experienced. Hiram S. Campbell never claimed the money.

But Holmes found that Cowie’s investigation had a secondary, more damaging effect. In the course of digging up information about Holmes, he had succeeded in stirring up and uniting Holmes’s creditors, the furniture dealers and iron suppliers and bicycle manufacturers and contractors whom Holmes had cheated over the previous five years. The creditors now hired an attorney named George B. Chamberlin, counsel for Chicago’s Lafayette Collection Agency, who had been pestering Holmes ever since he failed to pay the furnace company for improving his kiln. Later Chamberlin would claim to be the first man in Chicago to suspect Holmes of being a criminal.

In the fall of 1893 Chamberlin contacted Holmes and requested he come to a meeting at his office. Holmes believed he and Chamberlin would be meeting alone, one on one, but when Holmes arrived at the office, he found it occupied by two dozen creditors and their attorneys and one police detective.

This surprised Holmes but did not faze him. He shook hands and met the angry gazes of his creditors head on. Tempers immediately cooled a few degrees. He had that effect.

Chamberlin had planned the meeting as a trap to try to shatter Holmes’s imperturbable façade, and was impressed with Holmes’s ability to maintain his insouciance despite the rancor in the room. Chamberlin told Holmes that all together he owed the creditors at least $50,000.

Holmes adopted his most sober expression. He understood their concerns. He explained his lapses. His ambition had gotten ahead of his ability to pay his debts. Things would have been fine, all the debts resolved, if not for the Panic of 1893, which had ruined him and destroyed his hopes, just as it had for countless others in Chicago and the nation at large.

Incredibly, Chamberlin saw, some of the creditors nodded in sympathy.

Tears filled Holmes’s eyes. He offered his deepest, most heartfelt apologies. And he suggested a solution. He proposed to settle his debts by giving the group a mortgage secured by his various properties.

This nearly made Chamberlin laugh, yet one of the attorneys present in the room actually advised the group to accept Holmes’s offer. Chamberlin was startled to see that Holmes’s false warmth seemed to be mollifying the creditors. A few moments earlier the group had wanted the detective to arrest Holmes the moment he entered the room. Now they wanted to talk about what to do next.

Chamberlin told Holmes to wait in an adjacent room.

Holmes did so. He waited peacefully.

As the meeting progressed—and grew heated—the attorney who previously had wanted to accept Holmes’s mortgage stepped out of Chamberlin’s office and entered the room where Holmes waited, ostensibly for a drink of water. He and Holmes talked. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Chamberlin claimed later that this attorney had been so angry at having his recommendation rebuffed that he tipped Holmes to the fact the creditors were again leaning toward arrest. It is possible, too, that Holmes simply offered the attorney cash for the information, or deployed his false warmth and teary regret to seduce the attorney into revealing the group’s mounting consensus.

The attorney returned to the meeting.

Holmes fled.

Soon afterward Holmes set out for Fort Worth, Texas, to take better advantage of Minnie Williams’s land. He had plans for the property. He would sell some of it and on the rest build a three-story structure exactly like the one in Englewood. Meanwhile he would use the land to secure loans and to float notes. He expected to lead a very prosperous and satisfying life, at least until the time came to move on to the next city. He brought along his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and his new fiancée, the small and pretty Miss Georgiana Yoke. Just before leaving Chicago Holmes acquired a life insurance policy, from the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia, to insure Pitezel’s life for $10,000.