shop on the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace.
One month after moving into his building, Holmes sold the former Holton drugstore and assured the buyer that he would face little competition.
To the buyer’s chagrin, Holmes promptly opened a new drugstore just across the street, in his own corner shop.
Holmes installed a variety of other businesses in his remaining first-floor stores, including a barbershop and restaurant. City directories also listed at Holmes’s address the office of a doctor named Henry D. Mann, possibly a Holmes alias, and the headquarters of the Warner Glass Bending Company, which Holmes formed ostensibly to enter the booming new business of making and shaping the large sheets of plate glass suddenly in so much demand.
Holmes equipped his shops with furniture and fixtures that he bought on credit. He had no intention of paying his debts and was confident he could evade prosecution through guile and charm. When creditors came by demanding to see the owner of the building, Holmes referred them happily to the fictive H. S. Campbell.
“He was the smoothest man I ever saw,” said C. E. Davis, whom Holmes had hired to manage the drugstore’s jewelry counter. Creditors, Davis said, would “come here raging and calling him all the names imaginable, and he would smile and talk to them and set up the cigars and drinks and send them away seemingly his friends for life. I never saw him angry. You couldn’t have trouble with him if you tried.”
Davis gestured toward the store. “If all the writs of mechanic’s lien that have been levied on this structure were pasted on these three walls, the block would look like a mammoth circus billboard. But I never heard of a lien being collected. Holmes used to tell me he had a lawyer paid to keep him out of trouble, but it always seemed to me that it was the courteous, audacious rascality of the fellow that pulled him through. One day he bought some furniture for his restaurant and moved it in, and that very evening the dealer came around to collect his bill or remove his goods. Holmes set up the drinks, took him to supper, bought him a cigar and sent the man off laughing at a joke, with a promise to call the next week for his money. In thirty minutes after he took his car Holmes had wagons in front loading up that furniture and the dealer never got a cent. Holmes didn’t go to jail, either. He was the only man in the United States that could do what he did.”
Holmes had the money to pay his debts. Davis estimated that Holmes made $200,000 through his drugstore and other business ventures, most of which were fraudulent. Holmes attempted, for example, to sell investors a machine that turned water into natural gas. He secretly connected his prototype to city gas lines.
He was always charming and cordial, but there were times when even these traits failed to put his business associates at ease. A druggist named Erickson recalled how Holmes used to come into his store to buy chloroform, a potent but unpredictable anesthetic in use since the Civil War. “I sometimes sold him the drug nine or ten times a week and each time it was in large quantities. I asked him what he used it for on several occasions, but he gave me very unsatisfactory answers. At last I refused to let him have any more unless he told me, as I pretended that I was afraid that he was not using it for any proper purpose.”
Holmes told Erickson he was using the chloroform for scientific experiments. Later, when Holmes returned for more chloroform, Erickson asked him how his experiments were coming.
Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments.
“I could never make him out,” Erickson said.
A woman named Strowers occasionally did Holmes’s laundry. One day he offered to pay her $6,000 if she would acquire a $10,000 life insurance policy and name him beneficiary. When she asked why he would do such a thing, he explained that upon her death he’d make a profit of $4,000, but in the meantime she’d be able to spend her $6,000 in whatever manner she chose.
To Mrs. Strowers, this was a fortune, and all she had to do was sign a few documents. Holmes assured her it was all perfectly legal.
She was healthy and expected to live a good long while. She was on the verge of accepting the offer when Holmes said to her, softly, “Don’t be afraid of me.”
Which terrified her.
In November 1890 Holmes learned along with the rest of Chicago that the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition had at last reached a decision as to where to build the fair. To his delight, he read that the main site was to be Jackson Park, due east of his building at the lake end of Sixty-third, with exhibits also in downtown Chicago and Washington Park and along the full length of Midway Boulevard.
Holmes knew the parks from his bicycle journeys. Like most Americans, he had become caught up in the bicycle craze that was ignited by the advent of the “safety” bicycle, with its same-sized wheels and chain-and- sprocket drive. Unlike most Americans, however, Holmes sought also to capitalize on the craze by buying bicycles on credit, then reselling them without ever paying off the initial purchase. He himself rode a Pope.
The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the
An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.
Pilgrimage
ON MONDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 15, 1890, a day noteworthy in Chicago for its extraordinary warmth and elsewhere for the gunshot death of Sitting Bull, Daniel Burnham stepped aboard a train bound for New York and what he knew would be the most crucial encounter of the exposition odyssey.
He entered a bright green coach, one of George Pullman’s Palace cars, where the air hung with the stillness of a heavy tapestry. A bell clanged and continued clanging in a swinging rhythm as the train surged at grade level into the heart of the city at twenty miles an hour, despite the presence at arm’s reach of grip-cars, carriages, and pedestrians. Everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leaped past crossing gates waving a raccoon’s tail of white and black smoke. The train clicked by the Union Stock Yards, doubly pungent in the day’s strange warmth, and skirted sierras of black coal capped with grimy melting snow. Burnham treasured beauty but saw none for miles and miles and miles, just coal, rust, and smoke in endless repetition until the train entered the prairie and everything seemed to go quiet. Darkness fell, leaving a false twilight of old snow.
The exposition directors’ decision on where to locate the fair had caused a rapid acceleration of events that was encouraging but also unsettling, because suddenly the whole thing had become more real, its true magnitude more daunting. Immediately the directors had ordered a rough plan of the fair, to be delivered to them within twenty-four hours. John Root, guided by Burnham and Olmsted, had produced a drawing on a sheet of brown paper measuring forty square feet, which the men delivered to the committee with a barbed aside to the effect that the designers of the Paris exposition had been able to spend a whole year thinking, planning, and sketching before reaching the same point. The drawing envisioned a mile-square plain on the lakeshore sculpted by dredges into a wonderland of lagoons and canals. Ultimately, the designers knew, the exposition would have hundreds of buildings, including one for each state of the union and for many countries and industries, but on the drawing they sketched only the most important, among them five immense palaces sited around a central Grand Court. They also made room for a tower to be built at one end of the court, although no one knew exactly who would build this tower or what it would look like, only that it would have to surpass Eiffel’s tower in every way. The directors and their federal overseers, the National Commission, approved the plan with uncharacteristic speed.
For outsiders, it was the sheer size of the exposition that made it seem such an impossible challenge. That the fair’s grounds would be vast and its buildings colossal was something every Chicago resident took for granted; what mystified them was how anyone could expect to build the biggest thing ever constructed on American soil, far
