The Devil in the White City

Recessional

THE ROARING IN OLMSTED’S EARS, the pain in his mouth, and the sleeplessness never eased, and soon an emptiness began to appear in his gaze. He became forgetful. On May 10, 1895, two weeks after his seventy-third birthday, he wrote to his son John, “It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted.” He was seventy-three years old. That summer, on his last day in the Brookline office, he wrote three letters to George Vanderbilt, each saying pretty much the same thing.

During a period in September 1895 that he described as “the bitterest week of my life,” he confessed to his friend Charles Eliot his terror that his condition soon would require that he be placed in an asylum. “You cannot think how I have been dreading that it would be thought expedient that I should be sent to an ‘institution,’” he wrote on September 26. “Anything but that. My father was a director of an Insane Retreat, and first and last, having been professionally employed and behind the scenes in several, my dread of such places is intense.”

His loss of memory accelerated. He became depressed and paranoid and accused son John of orchestrating a “coup” to remove him from the firm. Olmsted’s wife, Mary, took Olmsted to the family’s island home in Maine, where his depression deepened and he at times became violent. He beat the family horse.

Mary and her sons realized there was little they could do for Olmsted. He had become unmanageable, his dementia profound. With deep sorrow and perhaps a good deal of relief, Rick lodged his father in the McLean Asylum in Waverly, Massachusetts. Olmsted’s memory was not so destroyed that he did not realize he himself had designed McLean’s grounds. This fact gave him no solace, for he saw immediately that the same phenomenon that had diminished nearly every one of his works—Central Park, Biltmore, the world’s fair, and so many others—had occurred yet again. “They didn’t carry out my plan,” he wrote, “confound them!”

Olmsted died at two in the morning on August 28, 1903. His funeral was spare, family only. His wife, who had seen this great man disappear before her eyes, did not attend.

The Ferris Wheel cleared $200,000 at the fair and remained in place until the spring of 1894, when George Ferris dismantled it and reassembled it on Chicago’s North Side. By then, however, it had lost both its novelty and the volume of ridership that the Midway had guaranteed. The wheel began losing money. These losses, added to the $150,000 cost of moving it and the financial damage done to Ferris’s steel-inspection company by the continuing depression, caused Ferris to sell most of his ownership of the wheel.

In the autumn of 1896 Ferris and his wife separated. She went home to her parents; he moved into the Duquesne Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. On November 17, 1896, he was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he died five days later, apparently of typhoid fever. He was thirty-seven years old. One year later his ashes were still in the possession of the undertaker who had received his body. “The request of Mrs. Ferris for the ashes was refused,” the undertaker said, “because the dead man left closer relatives.” In a eulogy two friends said Ferris had “miscalculated his powers of endurance, and he died a martyr to his ambition for fame and prominence.”

In 1903 the Chicago House Wrecking Company bought the wheel at auction for $8,150, then reassembled it at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. There the wheel again became profitable and earned its new owners $215,000. On May 11, 1906, the wrecking company dynamited the wheel, for scrap. The first hundred-pound charge was supposed to cut the wheel loose from its supports and topple it onto its side. Instead the wheel began a slow turn, as if seeking one last roll through the sky. It crumpled under its own weight into a mountain of bent steel.

Sol Bloom, chief of the Midway, emerged from the fair a rich young man. He invested heavily in a company that bought perishable foods and shipped them in the latest refrigerated cars to far-off cities. It was a fine, forward-looking business. But the Pullman strike halted all train traffic through Chicago, and the perishable foods rotted in their train-cars. He was ruined. He was still young, however, and still Bloom. He used his remaining funds to buy two expensive suits, on the theory that whatever he did next, he had to look convincing. “But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.”

Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations.

The fair made Buffalo Bill a million dollars (about $30 million today), which he used to found the town of Cody, Wyoming, build a cemetery and fairground for North Platte, Nebraska, pay the debts of five North Platte churches, acquire a Wisconsin newspaper, and further the theatrical fortunes of a lovely young actress named Katherine Clemmons, thereby deepening the already pronounced alienation of his wife. At one point he accused his wife of trying to poison him.

The Panic of 1907 destroyed his Wild West and forced him to hire himself out to circuses. He was over seventy years old but still rode the ring under his big white hat trimmed in silver. He died in Denver at his sister’s house on January 10, 1917, without the money even to pay for his burial.

Theodore Dreiser married Sara Osborne White. In 1898, two years before publishing Sister Carrie, he wrote to Sara, “I went to Jackson Park and saw what is left of the dear old World’s Fair where I learned to love you.”

He cheated on her repeatedly.

For Dora Root life with John had been like living upon a comet. Their marriage had brought her into a world of art and money where everything seemed energized and alive. Her husband’s wit, his musical talent, those exquisite long fingers so evident in any photograph imparted a gleam to her days that she was never able to recapture after his death. Toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, she wrote a long letter to Burnham. “It means so much to me that you think I have done well all these years,” she wrote. “I have such grave doubts about myself whenever I stop to think about the subject, that a word of encouragement from one who has so wonderfully sounded out his life, gives me a new impetus. If absorbing myself before the coming generation, and humbly passing on the torch, is the whole duty of women, I believe I have earned a word of praise.”

But she knew that with John’s death the doors to a brighter kingdom had softly but firmly closed. “If John had lived,” she told Burnham, “all would have been different. Under the stimulus of his exhilarating life, I would have been his wife as well as the mother of his children. And it would have been interesting!”

Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast stood trial in December 1893. The prosecutor was a criminal attorney hired by the state just for this case.

His name was Alfred S. Trude.

Prendergast’s lawyers tried to prove Prendergast was insane, but a jury of angry, grieving Chicagoans believed otherwise. One important piece of evidence tending to support the prosecution’s case for sanity was the care Prendergast had taken to keep an empty chamber under the hammer of his revolver as he carried it in his pocket. At 2:28 P.M. on December 29, after conferring for an hour and three minutes, the jury found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to death. Throughout his trial and subsequent appeal, he continued to send Trude postcards. He wrote on February 21, 1894, “No one should be put to death no matter who it is, if it can be avoided, it is demoralizing to society to be barbarous.”

Clarence Darrow entered the case and in a novel maneuver won for Prendergast a sanity inquest. This too failed, however, and Prendergast was executed. Darrow called him “a poor demented imbecile.” The execution intensified Darrow’s already deep hatred of the death penalty. “I am sorry for all fathers and all mothers,” he said, years later, during his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, accused of killing a Chicago boy for the thrill of it. “The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe cannot help musing over the end of the child, whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises which her mind can image or whether he may meet death upon the scaffold.”

Leopold and Loeb, as they became known worldwide, had stripped their victim to mask his identity. They dumped some of his clothes in Olmsted’s lagoons at Jackson Park.

In New York at the Waldorf-Astoria a few years into the new century, several dozen young men in evening clothes gathered around a gigantic pie. The whipped-cream topping began to move. A woman emerged. She was stunning, with olive skin and long black hair. Her name was Farida Mazhar. The men were too young to remember, but once, a long while before, she had done the danse du ventre at the greatest fair in history.

What the men noticed now was that she wore nothing at all.