convened a coroner’s inquest, which focused its attention on the building’s design. For the first time in his career Burnham found himself facing public attack. He wrote to his wife, “You must not worry over the affair, no matter what the papers say. There will no doubt be censure, and much trouble before we get through, all of which we will shoulder in a simple, straightforward, manly way; so much as in us lies.”
The experience cut him deeply, in particular the fact his competence lay exposed to the review of a bureaucrat over whom he had no influence. “The coroner,” he wrote Margaret three days after the collapse, “is a disagreeable little doctor, a political hack, without brains, who distresses me.” Burnham was sad and lonesome and wanted to go home. “I do so long to be there, and be at peace again, with you.”
A third blow came in this period, but of a different character. Although Chicago was rapidly achieving recognition as an industrial and mercantile dynamo, its leading men felt keenly the slander from New York that their city had few cultural assets. To help address this lack, one prominent Chicagoan, Ferdinand W. Peck, proposed to build an auditorium so big, so acoustically perfect, as to silence all the carping from the East and to make a profit to boot. Peck envisioned enclosing this gigantic theater within a still larger shell that would contain a hotel, banquet room, and offices. The many architects who dined at Kinsley’s Restaurant, which had a stature in Chicago equal to that of Delmonico’s in New York, agreed this would be the single most important architectural assignment in the city’s history and that most likely it would go to Burnham & Root. Burnham believed likewise.
Peck chose Chicago architect Dankmar Adler. If acoustically flawed, Peck knew, the building would be a failure no matter how imposing the finished structure proved to be. Only Adler had previously demonstrated a clear grasp of the principles of acoustical design. “Burnham was not pleased,” wrote Louis Sullivan, by now Adler’s partner, “nor was John Root precisely entranced.” When Root saw early drawings of the Auditorium, he said it appeared as if Sullivan were about to “smear another facade with ornament.”
From the start there was tension between the two firms, although no one could have known it would erupt years later in a caustic attack by Sullivan on Burnham’s greatest achievements, this after Sullivan’s own career had dissolved in a mist of alcohol and regret. For now, the tension was subtle, a vibration, like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel. It arose from discordant beliefs about the nature and purpose of architecture. Sullivan saw himself as an artist first, an idealist. In his autobiography, in which he always referred to himself in the third person, he described himself as “an innocent with his heart wrapped up in the arts, in the philosophies, in the religions, in the beatitudes of nature’s loveliness, in his search for the reality of man, in his profound faith in the beneficence of power.” He called Burnham a “colossal merchandiser” fixated on building the biggest, tallest, costliest structures. “He was elephantine, tactless, and blurting.”
Workers began building the Auditorium on June 1, 1887. The result was an opulent structure that, for the moment, was the biggest private building in America. Its theater contained more than four thousand seats, twelve hundred more than New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. And it was air-conditioned, through a system that blew air over ice. The surrounding building had commercial offices, an immense banquet hall, and a hotel with four hundred luxurious rooms. A traveler from Germany recalled that simply by turning an electric dial on the wall by his bed, he could request towels, stationery, ice water, newspapers, whiskey, or a shoe shine. It became the most celebrated building in Chicago. The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.
Ultimately these setbacks proved to be minor ones for Burnham and Root. Far worse was to occur, and soon, but as of February 14, 1890, the day of the great fair vote, the partners seemed destined for a lifetime of success.
Outside the
One telegraph boy made his way through the dark to an unlit alley that smelled of rotted fruit and was silent save for the receding hiss of gaslights on the street he had left behind. He found a door, knocked, and entered a room full of men, some young, some old, all seeming to speak at once, a few quite drunk. A coffin at the center of the room served as a bar. The light was dim and came from gas jets hidden behind skulls mounted on the walls. Other skulls lay scattered about the room. A hangman’s noose dangled from the wall, as did assorted weapons and a blanket caked with blood.
These artifacts marked the room as headquarters of the Whitechapel Club, named for the London slum in which two years earlier Jack the Ripper had done his killing. The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists, who brought to the club’s meetings stories of murder harvested from the city’s streets. The weapons on the wall had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum; the blanket by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux.
Upon learning that Chicago had won the fair, the men of the Whitechapel Club composed a telegram to Chauncey Depew, who more than any other man symbolized New York and its campaign to win the fair. Previously Depew had promised the members of the Whitechapel Club that if Chicago prevailed he would present himself at the club’s next meeting, to be hacked apart by the Ripper himself—metaphorically, he presumed, although at the Whitechapel Club could one ever be certain? The club’s coffin, for example, had once been used to transport the body of a member who had committed suicide. After claiming his body, the club had hauled it to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, where members erected an immense pyre. They placed the body on top, then set it alight. Carrying torches and wearing black hooded robes, they circled the fire singing hymns to the dead between sips of whiskey. The club also had a custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.
The club’s telegram reached Depew in Washington twenty minutes after the final ballot, just as Chicago’s congressional delegation began celebrating at the Willard Hotel near the White House. The telegram asked, “When may we see you at our dissecting table?”
Depew sent an immediate response: “I am at your service when ordered and quite ready after today’s events to contribute my body to Chicago science.”
Although he was gracious in acknowledging defeat, Depew doubted that Chicago really understood the challenge that lay ahead. “The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris,” he told the
“Beware,” he warned. “Take care!”
Chicago promptly established a formal corporation, the World’s Columbian Exposition Company, to finance and build the fair. Quietly officials made it clear that Burnham and Root would be the lead designers. The burden of restoring the nation’s pride and prominence in the wake of the Paris exposition had fallen upon Chicago, and Chicago in turn had lodged it firmly, if for now discreetly, on the top floor of the Rookery.
Failure was unthinkable. If the fair failed, Burnham knew, the nation’s honor would be tarnished, Chicago humiliated, and his own firm dealt a crushing blow. Everywhere Burnham turned there was someone—a friend, an editor, a fellow club member—telling him that the nation expected something tremendous out of this fair. And expected it in record time. The Auditorium alone had taken nearly three years to build and driven Louis Sullivan to the brink of physical collapse. Now Burnham and Root were being called upon to build what amounted to an entire city in about the same amount of time—not just any city, but one that would surpass the brilliance of the Paris exposition. The fair also would have to make a profit. Among Chicago’s leading men, profitability was a matter of personal and civic honor.
