The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

a grand tour that was to continue through the summer. Burnham had chosen this ship, the R.M.S. Olympic of the White Star Line, because it was new and glamorous and big. At the time he booked passage the Olympic was the largest vessel in regular service, but just three days before his departure a sister ship—a slightly longer twin—had stolen that rank when it set off on its maiden voyage. The twin, Burnham knew, was at that moment carrying one of his closest friends, the painter Francis Millet, over the same ocean but in the opposite direction.

As the last sunlight of the day entered Burnham’s suite, he and Margaret set off for the first-class dining room on the deck below. They took the elevator to spare his foot the torment of the grand stairway, but he did so with reluctance, for he admired the artistry in the iron scrollwork of its balustrades and the immense dome of iron and glass that flushed the ship’s core with natural light. His sore foot had placed increasing limitations on his mobility. Only a week earlier he had found himself in the humiliating position of having to ride in a wheelchair through Union Station in Washington, D.C., the station he had designed.

The Burnhams dined by themselves in the Olympic’s first-class salon, then retired to their suite and there, for no particular reason, Burnham’s thoughts returned to Frank Millet. On impulse, he resolved to send Millet a midsea greeting via the Olympic’s powerful Marconi wireless.

Burnham signaled for a steward. A middle-aged man in knife-edge whites took his message up three decks to the Marconi room adjacent to the officer’s promenade. He returned a few moments later, the message still in his hand, and told Burnham the operator had refused to accept it.

Footsore and irritable, Burnham demanded that the steward return to the wireless room for an explanation.

Millet was never far from Burnham’s mind, nor was the event that had brought the two of them together: the great Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Millet had been one of Burnham’s closest allies in the long, bittersweet struggle to build the fair. Its official name was the World’s Columbian Exposition, its official purpose to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, but under Burnham, its chief builder, it had become something enchanting, known throughout the world as the White City.

It had lasted just six months, yet during that time its gatekeepers recorded 27.5 million visits, this when the country’s total population was 65 million. On its best day the fair drew more than 700,000 visitors. That the fair had occurred at all, however, was something of a miracle. To build it Burnham had confronted a legion of obstacles, any one of which could have—should have—killed it long before Opening Day. Together he and his architects had conjured a dream city whose grandeur and beauty exceeded anything each singly could have imagined. Visitors wore their best clothes and most somber expressions, as if entering a great cathedral. Some wept at its beauty. They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat. Whole villages had been imported from Egypt, Algeria, Dahomey, and other far-flung locales, along with their inhabitants. The Street in Cairo exhibit alone employed nearly two hundred Egyptians and contained twenty-five distinct buildings, including a fifteen-hundred-seat theater that introduced America to a new and scandalous form of entertainment. Everything about the fair was exotic and, above all, immense. The fair occupied over one square mile and filled more than two hundred buildings. A single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, all at the same time. One structure, rejected at first as a “monstrosity,” became the fair’s emblem, a machine so huge and terrifying that it instantly eclipsed the tower of Alexandre Eiffel that had so wounded America’s pride. Never before had so many of history’s brightest lights, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Henry Adams, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Nikola Tesla, Ignace Paderewski, Philip Armour, and Marshall Field, gathered in one place at one time. Richard Harding Davis called the exposition “the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War.”

That something magical had occurred in that summer of the world’s fair was beyond doubt, but darkness too had touched the fair. Scores of workers had been hurt or killed in building the dream, their families consigned to poverty. Fire had killed fifteen more, and an assassin had transformed the closing ceremony from what was to have been the century’s greatest celebration into a vast funeral. Worse had occurred too, although these revelations emerged only slowly. A murderer had moved among the beautiful things Burnham had created. Young women drawn to Chicago by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared, last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything architects held dear. Only after the exposition had Burnham and his colleagues learned of the anguished letters describing daughters who had come to the city and then fallen silent. The press speculated that scores of fairgoers must have disappeared within the building. Even the street-hardened members of the city’s Whitechapel Club, named for the London stalking grounds of Jack the Ripper, were startled by what detectives eventually found inside and by the fact that such grisly events could have gone undiscovered for so long. The rational explanation laid blame on the forces of change that during this time had convulsed Chicago. Amid so much turmoil it was understandable that the work of a young and handsome doctor would go unnoticed. As time passed, however, even sober men and women began to think of him in less-than-rational terms. He described himself as the Devil and contended that his physical shape had begun to alter. Enough strange things began happening to the men who brought him to justice to make his claim seem almost plausible.

For the supernaturally inclined, the death of the jury foreman alone offered sufficient proof.

Burnham’s foot ached. The deck thrummed. No matter where you were on the ship, you felt the power of the Olympic’s twenty-nine boilers transmitted upward through the strakes of the hull. It was the one constant that told you—even in the staterooms and dining chambers and smoking lounge, despite the lavish efforts to make these rooms look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion —that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest reaches of the ocean.

Burnham and Millet were among the few builders of the fair still alive. So many others had gone. Olmsted and Codman. McKim. Hunt. Atwood—mysteriously. And that initial loss, which Burnham still found difficult to comprehend. Soon no one would remain, and the fair would cease to exist as a living memory in anyone’s brain.

Of the key men, who besides Millet was left? Only Louis Sullivan: embittered, perfumed with alcohol, resenting who knew what, but not above coming by Burnham’s office for a loan or to sell some painting or sketch.

At least Frank Millet still seemed strong and healthy and full of the earthy good humor that had so enlivened the long nights during the fair’s construction.

The steward came back. The expression in his eyes had changed. He apologized. He still could not send the message, he said, but at least now he had an explanation. An accident had occurred involving Millet’s ship. In fact, he said, the Olympic was at that moment speeding north at maximum velocity to come to her aid, with instructions to receive and care for injured passengers. He knew nothing more.

Burnham shifted his leg, winced, and waited for more news. He hoped that when the Olympic at last reached the site of the accident, he would find Millet and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage. In the peace of his stateroom, Burnham opened his diary.

That night the fair came back to him with extra clarity.

PART I Frozen Music Chicago, 1890–91

Chicago, circa 1889.

The Black City

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