Devil in the White City
(The White City, Chicago, 1893)
There is hope abroad in the land. I saw it in the faces of the people holding blue signs in the median of the highways up north. There is despair, too, in large measure because that change is coming and no one is quite sure what it is going to be, except that it will be big, and it will be profound and it is going to be very expensive.
I was listening to the candidates again after being out of touch for a couple days. The political input I got was street level: an intense woman at a card table in front of an art gallery. Knots of people with the buoyant grins and mechanical wave of the hands.
It is a week away.
I’m back in the land of the sound byte, and I heard the Senator from Illinois telling me that I have to tighten my belt, and prepare for sacrifice. I am not hearing much about taxes, at least by the proper name, since there is a raft of relief legislation that will expire without intervention. The old Congress did that, in its wisdom, and the next President doesn’t have to take responsibility for it.
As things stand, the Federal State and Local folks already take over 40% of what I make. That will go to half, or more. Those of us who pay our bills have to deal simultaneously with the collapse in the value of the real property. Apparently there will be help coming for those who don’t pay their debts, and I have a pretty good idea who will be footing the bills.
I think you do, too. I am not sure how fair this is, but I have lost track of that concept in the cascade of failures and blather about who is responsible.
Still, we are all practical people, even if we have been lead to believe a series of impossible things. The World Series was played in the driving chill rain just long enough to ensure that the score was tied when the game was suspended. Never happened before, they said. I was watching the umpires pace around, dripping, as I participated in a conference call with Honolulu and Seoul.
It is important to snag any business possibility at the moment, on whatever terms we can secure, since there will be a chill wind blowing through the Federal budget soon here in the city of white marble.
These things are cyclical, I know. Sitting on the train over the weekend I had a chance to read for the first time in a long while. I had grabbed a random book from the stack of worthy and neglected new titles on the window ledge in Tunnel Eight. “Devil in the White City” was on top. I have been meaning to get to it for a while.
Erik Larsen completed work on the book in 2004, so it has been sitting there for a while. With a son living in Chicago, I have had resurgence in interest in the teeming city by the lake, and the architecture that makes it unique. The centerpiece of civic development was the great Columbian Exhibition of 1893, intended to honor the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World.
What a difference a century makes! When the Dominican Republic built the massive tomb and lighthouse- the Faro a Colon- e to house the remains of the Great Admiral, they thought it would vault the island nation to special prominence as the First Place in the hemisphere.
Instead, the old Admiral is now a historic pariah of Imperialism and the lighthouse a national oddity.
The Great Columbian Exposition was not about the Admiral, though, and was of course about something else. The pride of the New World was at stake after the sensation of the Paris Exhibition and the erection of Dr. Eiffel’s steel Tower. The Washington Monument had been eclipsed as the tallest structure in the world, an honor it had for only a few minutes. So with both Washington’s prestige on the line, and the burning desire of a stock-yard town to prove itself to the East Coast Establishment, there was a perfect storm of inevitability.
The Ferris Wheel and Alternating Current were just two of the miracles. But the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair became known as the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it, harnessing the best designer of landscapes in America, Fredrick Law Olmstead, and a stable of the most gifted architects of the age. Olmstead’s greatest work is the Central Park in New York, but the White City built on the grounds he laid out was something magical and magnificent.
The thrills and chills of the construction of the Fair, the corruption, nobility, petty spite and soaring ambition are story enough to be riveting. But Larsen weaves the story of Dr. H.H. Holmes through it all. The Doctor, a graduate of the University of Michigan, by the way, was the first modern example of the creature we know as the serial killer.
Perhaps they existed before, but Holmes, the alias of a man born as Herman Webster Mudgett, was something quite special. After graduation, Mudgett changed his name and began his criminal career in insurance fraud. He was a clever man, and quite without shame or conscience. He conned his way into managing a pharmacy in the growing city that was just recovering from the disastrous fire of 1871. He murdered the widow who owned the place, and then went on to kill at least 27 more people, mostly young women, though he happily killed men and children too when it suited him.
He may have killed many more; the Doctor’s World’s Fair Hotel took in many guests who apparently did not check out. The forensic science of the time was not able to sort out all the various bits of people in the basement.
It is queasy stuff even now, even with all the other madmen we have suffered since.
The Great Exposition teetered on failure as bank panics and failures swept the nation, and the international order was changing, Germany challenging the old order, the great railway guns of Krupp were a grim sensation at the fair.
Riding on the train through New York, it was positively eerie to note the similarities of our times. Of course, we know that they eventually caught the Doctor, and it was a sensation at the time. And we all have to learn about what happened to the world that was, and how we lurched through two globe-wrenching conflicts and tens or millions of dead to get where we are now. I wonder what they will think, a hundred years downstream from now?
I still feel a little bad for Architect Daniel Burnham. The triumph of his energy and will should have been a book all his own, but in this one he is conspicuously upstaged by the monster Doctor Holmes.
Back then, the last day of the Fair on was 30th of October. It was supposed to be a day of honor for his contribution to the Nation and to his legacy of making Chicago one of the world’s great cities.
Instead, a deranged lone gunman shot and killed the Mayor, and the celebration of the Burnham was scratched to hold a city-wide funeral.
In the ensuring depression, the buildings of the magnificent White City where torched. It was a sort of quotation, I suppose, a physical manifestation of what had happened after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern and the city went up in smoke.
I am always leery of quotations, and metaphors, for that matter, particularly in an election season. But we are going to have to live through them, just as we always do, wondering what is waiting on the other side of the White City we have constructed of dreams.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com