The architects worried that anyone who joined the fair would find himself in the grip of innumerable committees. Burnham guaranteed complete artistic independence. They wanted to know in detail how Olmsted felt about the sites selected for the fair, in particular about a central feature called the Wooded Island. Their insistence prompted Burnham to telegraph Olmsted immediately and urge him once again to come. Again Olmsted demurred.
One question came up repeatedly throughout the evening: Was there enough time?
Burnham assured them that ample time remained but that he had no illusions. The work had to start at once.
He believed he had won them. As the evening ended, he asked, would they join?
There was a pause.
Burnham left New York the next morning on the North Shore Limited. Throughout the day his train pushed through a landscape scoured by snow as a blizzard whitened the nation in a swath from the Atlantic to Minnesota. The storm destroyed buildings, broke trees, and killed a man in Barberton, Ohio, but it did not stop the Limited.
While aboard the train, Burnham wrote a letter to Olmsted that contained a less-than-candid description of the meeting with the architects. “They all approved the proposition to have them take hold of the artistic part of the main buildings…. The general layout seemed to meet the hearty approval, first of Mr. Hunt then of the others, but they were desirous of knowing your views of the landscape on and about the island. Therefore I telegraphed you urgently to come. They were very much disappointed, as was I, when it was found impossible to get you. The gentlemen are all to be here on the 10th of next month and at that time they urgently request, as do I, that you will be here personally. I find that Mr. Hunt especially lays large stress upon your opinions in the entire matter.”
In fact, the evening had ended rather differently. At the Player’s Club, sips of cognac and exhalations of smoke had filled that last difficult pause. The dream was an appealing one, the architects agreed, and no one doubted Chicago’s sincerity in imagining this fantasy precinct of lagoons and palaces, but the reality was something else entirely. The only real certainty was the disruption that would be caused by long-distance travel and the myriad other difficulties inherent in building a complex structure far from home. Peabody did commit to the fair, but Hunt and the others did not: “they said,” as Burnham later revealed, “they would think it over.”
They did, however, agree to come to the January 10 meeting in Chicago to confer again and examine the chosen ground.
None of the architects had been to Jackson Park. In its raw state, Burnham knew, it was not a setting likely to win anyone’s heart. This time Olmsted had to be present. In the meantime Root too would have to become involved in the courtship. The architects respected him but were leery of his powers as supervising architect. It was critical that he go to New York.
Outside the sky was blank, the light pewter. Despite Pullman’s vestibules ice as fine as dust settled between coaches and filled Burnham’s train with the tang of deep winter. Wind-felled trees appeared beside the railbed.
Daniel Burnham arrived in Chicago to find the city’s architects and members of the exposition board outraged that he had gone outside the city—to New York, of all godforsaken places—to court architects for the fair; that he had snubbed the likes of Adler, Sullivan, and Jenney. Sullivan saw it as a sign that Burnham did not truly believe Chicago had the talent to carry the fair by itself. “Burnham had believed that he might best serve his country by placing all of the work exclusively with Eastern architects,” Sullivan wrote; “solely, he averred, on account of their surpassing culture.” The chairman of the Grounds and Buildings Committee was Edward T. Jefferey. “With exquisite delicacy and tact,” Sullivan said, “Jefferey, at a meeting of the Committee, persuaded Daniel, come to Judgment, to add the Western men to the list of his nominations.”
Hastily, Root and Burnham conferred and chose five Chicago firms to join the effort, among them Adler & Sullivan. Burnham visited each the next day. Four of the five put aside their hurt feelings and accepted immediately. Only Adler & Sullivan resisted. Adler was sulking. “I think he, Adler, had hoped to be in the position I was in,” Burnham said. “He was rather disgruntled and did ‘not know.’”
Ultimately, Adler did accept Burnham’s invitation.
Now it was Root’s turn to go to New York. He had to go anyway to attend a meeting of the directors of the American Institute of Architects and planned afterward to take a train to Atlanta to inspect one of the firm’s buildings. Root was in his office at the Rookery on the afternoon of New Year’s Day 1891, shortly before his departure, when an employee stopped by to see him. “He said he was tired,” the man recalled, “and felt inclined to resign the secretaryship of the Institute. This was alarming, as he had never been heard to complain of too much work, and while it only indicated extreme physical exhaustion and before he went home he became cheerful and hopeful again, it has its significance in the light of subsequent events.”
In New York, Root assured the architects again and again that he would do nothing to interfere with their designs. Despite his charm—the
Root was tired and discouraged. He told Monroe he just could not get the men interested. “He felt that this was the greatest opportunity ever offered to his profession in this country, and he could not make them appreciate it,” she said. The architects did plan to come to Chicago for the January meeting, he told her, “but reluctantly; their hearts were not in it.”
On January 5, 1891, the Committee on Grounds and Buildings authorized Burnham to offer formal commissions to all ten architects and pay each $10,000 (equivalent today to about $300,000). It was a rich fee, considering that all Burnham wanted them to do was provide working drawings and make a few visits to Chicago. Burnham and Root would see to the construction of the buildings and manage the niggling details that typically haunted an architect’s life. There would be no artistic interference.
The eastern men gave their tentative acceptance, but their concerns had not diminished.
And they still had not seen Jackson Park.
A Hotel for the Fair
HOLMES’S NEW IDEA WAS TO turn his building into a hotel for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition —no Palmer House or Richelieu, certainly, but just comfortable enough and cheap enough to lure a certain kind of clientele and convincing enough to justify a large fire insurance policy. After the fair he intended to burn the building to collect the insurance and, as a happy dividend, destroy whatever surplus “material” might remain in its hidden storage chambers, although ideally, given other disposal measures available to him, the building by then would contain nothing of an incriminating nature. The thing was, one never knew. In the most transcendent moment, it was easy to make a mistake and forget some little thing that a clever detective might eventually use to propel him to the gallows. Whether the Chicago police even possessed that kind of talent was open to question. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the more dangerous entity, but its operatives of late seemed to be spending most of their energy battling strikers at coalfields and steel mills around the country.
Again acting as his own architect, Holmes early in 1891 began planning the necessary modifications, and soon carpenters were at work on the second and third floors. Once again Holmes’s method of segregating tasks and firing workers was proving successful. Clearly none of the workers had gone to the police. Patrolmen from the new Chicago police precinct house on Wentworth walked past Holmes’s building each day. Far from being suspicious, the
