used up than I had supposed.”
A doctor, Henry Rayner, paid a social visit to Chislehurst to meet Olmsted. He happened to be a specialist in treating nervous disorders and was so appalled by Olmsted’s appearance that he offered to take him to his own house in Hampstead Heath, outside London, and care for him personally. Olmsted accepted.
Despite Rayner’s close attention, Olmsted’s condition did not improve; his stay at Hampstead Heath became wearisome. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Harry Codman on June 16, 1892. “Every day I look for decided improvement and thus far everyday, I am disappointed.” Dr. Rayner too was perplexed, according to Olmsted. “He says, with confidence, after repeated examinations, of all my anatomy, that I have no organic trouble and that I may reasonably expect under favorable circumstances to keep at work for several years to come. He regards my present trouble as a variation in form of the troubles which led me to come abroad.”
Most days Olmsted was driven by carriage through the countryside, “every day more or less on a different road,” to view gardens, churchyards, private parks, and the natural landscape. Nearly every ornamental flowerbed offended him. He dismissed them as “childish, vulgar, flaunting, or impertinent, out of place and discordant.” The countryside itself, however, charmed him: “there is nothing in America to be compared with the pastoral or with the picturesque beauty that is common property in England. I cannot go out without being delighted. The view before me as I write, veiled by the rain, is just enchanting.” The loveliest scenes, he found, were comprised of the simplest, most natural juxtapositions of native plants. “The finest combination is one of gorse, sweet briar, brambles, hawthorn, and ivy. Even when there is no bloom this is charming. And these things can be had by the hundred thousand at very low prices.”
At times the scenes he saw challenged his vision of Jackson Park, at other times they affirmed it. “Everywhere the best ornamental grounds that we see are those in which vines and creepers are outwitting the gardener. We can’t have little vines and weeds enough.” He knew there was too little time to let nature alone produce such effects. “Let us as much as possible, train out creepers, and branches of trees, upon bridges, pulling down and nailing the branches, aiming to obtain shade and reflection of foliage and broken obscuration of water.”
Above all, his sorties reinforced his belief that the Wooded Island, despite the Japanese temple, should be made as wild as possible. “I think more than ever of the value of the island,” he wrote to Harry Codman, “and of the importance of using all possible, original means of securing impervious screening, dense massive piles of foliage on its borders; with abundant variety of small detail in abject subordination to general effect…. There cannot be enough of bulrush, adlumia, Madeira vine, catbriar, virgin’s bower, brambles, sweet peas, Jimson weed, milkweed, the smaller western sunflowers and morning glories.”
But he also recognized that the wildness he sought would have to be tempered with excellent groundskeeping. He worried that Chicago would not be up to the task. “The standard of an English laborer, hack driver or cad in respect to neatness, smugness and elegance of gardens and grounds and paths and ways is infinitely higher than that of a Chicago merchant prince or virtuoso,” he wrote to Codman, “and we shall be disgraced if we fail to work up to a far higher level than our masters will be prepared to think suitable.”
Overall Olmsted remained confident that his exposition landscape would succeed. A new worry troubled him, however. “The only cloud I see over the Exposition now is the Cholera,” he wrote in a letter to his Brookline office. “The accounts from Russia and from Paris this morning are alarming.”
As Sol Bloom’s Algerians neared New York Harbor, workers assigned to the Midway erected temporary buildings to house them. Bloom went to New York to meet the ship and reserved two traincars to bring the villagers and their cargo back to Chicago.
As the Algerians left the ship, they began moving in all directions at once. “I could see them getting lost, being run over, and landing in jail,” Bloom said. No one seemed to be in charge. Bloom raced up to them, shouting commands in French and English. A giant black-complected man walked up to Bloom and in perfect House of Lords English said, “I suggest you be more civil. Otherwise I may lose my temper and throw you into the water.”
The man identified himself as Archie, and as the two settled into a more peaceful conversation, he revealed to Bloom that he had spent a decade in London serving as a rich man’s bodyguard. “At present,” he said, “I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”
Bloom handed him a cigar and proposed that he become his bodyguard and assistant.
“Your offer,” Archie said, “is quite satisfactory.”
Both men lit up and puffed smoke into the fragrant murk above New York Harbor.
Burnham fought to boost the rate of construction, especially of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which had to be completed by Dedication Day. In March, with just half a year remaining until the dedication, he invoked the “czar” clause of his construction contracts. He ordered the builder of the Electricity Building to double his workforce and to put the men to work at night under electric lights. He threatened the Manufactures contractor with the same fate if he did not increase the pace of his work.
Burnham had all but given up hope of surpassing the Eiffel Tower. Most recently he had turned down another outlandish idea, this from an earnest young Pittsburgh engineer who had attended his lecture to the Saturday Afternoon Club. The man was credible enough—his company held the contract for inspecting all the steel used in the fair’s structures—but the thing he proposed to build just did not seem feasible. “Too fragile,” Burnham told him. The public, he said, would be afraid.
A hostile spring further hampered the fair’s progress. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, at 6:50 A.M., a sudden windstorm demolished the fair’s just-finished pumping station and tore down sixty-five feet of the Illinois State Building. Three weeks later another storm destroyed eight hundred feet of the south wall of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. “The wind,” the
To find ways to accelerate the work, Burnham called the eastern architects to Chicago. One looming problem was how to color the exteriors of the main buildings, especially the staff-coated palisades of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. During the meeting an idea arose that in the short run promised a dramatic acceleration of the work, but that eventually served to fix the fair in the world’s imagination as a thing of otherworldly beauty.
By all rights, the arena of exterior decoration belonged to William Pretyman, the fair’s official director of color. Burnham admitted later that he had hired Pretyman for the job “largely on account of his great friendship for John Root.” Pretyman was ill suited to the job. Harriet Monroe, who knew him and his wife, wrote, “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”
The day of the meeting Pretyman was on the East Coast. The architects proceeded without him. “I was urging everyone on, knowing I had an awful fight against time,” Burnham said. “We talked about the colors, and finally the thought came, ‘let us make it all perfectly white.’ I do not remember who made that suggestion. It might have been one of those things that reached all minds at once. At any rate, I decided it.”
The Mines Building, designed by Chicago’s Solon S. Beman, was nearly finished. It became the test building. Burnham ordered it painted a creamy white. Pretyman returned and “was outraged,” Burnham recalled.
Pretyman insisted that any decision on color was his alone.
“I don’t see it that way,” Burnham told him. “The decision is mine.”
“All right,” Pretyman said. “I will get out.”
Burnham did not miss him. “He was a brooding sort of man and very cranky,” Burnham said. “I let him go, then told Charles McKim that I would have to have a man who could actually take charge of it, and that I would not decide from the point of friendship.”
McKim recommended the New York painter Francis Millet, who had sat in on the color meeting. Burnham hired him.
Millet quickly proved his worth. After some experimentation he settled on “ordinary white lead and oil” as the best paint for staff, then developed a means of applying the paint not by brush but through a hose with a special nozzle fashioned from a length of gas pipe—the first spray paint. Burnham nicknamed Millet and his paint crews “the Whitewash Gang.”
