and give it the strength of a railroad bridge. A chain weighing twenty thousand pounds connected a sprocket on the axle to sprockets driven by twin thousand-horsepower steam engines. For aesthetic reasons the boilers were to be located seven hundred feet outside the Midway, the steam shunted to the engines through ten-inch underground pipes.
This, at least, is how it looked on paper. Just digging and installing the foundation, however, had proven more difficult than Ferris and Rice had expected, and they knew that far greater hurdles lay ahead, foremost among them the challenge of raising that huge axle to its mount atop the eight towers. Together with its fittings, the axle weighed 142,031 pounds. Nothing that heavy had ever been lifted before, let alone to such a height.
Olmsted, in Brookline, got the news by telegram: Harry Codman was dead. Codman, his protege, whom he loved like a son. He was twenty-nine. “You will have heard of our great calamity,” Olmsted wrote to his friend Gifford Pinchot. “As yet, I am as one standing on a wreck and can hardly see when we shall be afloat again.”
Olmsted recognized that now he himself would have to take over direct supervision of the exposition work, but he felt less up to the duty than ever. He and Phil, Harry’s brother, arrived in Chicago at the beginning of February to find the city locked in brutal cold, the temperature eight degrees below zero. On February 4 he sat down at Codman’s desk for the first time and found it awash with stacks of invoices and memoranda. Olmsted’s head raged with noise and pain. He had a sore throat. He was deeply sad. The task of sorting through Codman’s accumulated papers and of taking over the exposition work now seemed beyond him. He asked a former assistant, Charles Eliot, now one of Boston’s best landscape architects, if he would come to help. After some hesitation Eliot agreed. On arrival Eliot saw immediately that Olmsted was ill. By the evening of February 17, 1893, as a blizzard bore down on Chicago, Olmsted was under a doctor’s care, confined to his hotel.
The same night Olmsted wrote to John in Brookline. Weariness and sorrow freighted each page of his letter. “It looks as if the time has come when it is necessary for you to count me out,” he wrote. The work in Chicago had begun to look hopeless. “It is very plain that as things are, we are not going to be able to do our duty here.”
By early March Olmsted and Eliot were back in Brookline, Eliot now a full-fledged partner, the firm newly renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. The exposition work was still far behind schedule and a major source of worry, but Olmsted’s health and the pressure of other work had forced him from Chicago. With deep misgivings Olmsted had left the work in the care of his superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, whom he had come to distrust. On March 11 Olmsted dispatched a long letter to Ulrich full of instructions.
“I have never before, in all the numerous works for which I have been broadly responsible, trusted as much to the discretion of an assistant or co-operator,” Olmsted wrote. “And the results have been such that in the straights in which we are placed by the death of Mr. Codman and my ill health, and the consequent excessive pressure of other duties, I am more than ever disposed to pursue this policy, and to carry it further. But I must confess that I can not do so without much anxiety.”
He made it clear that this anxiety was due to Ulrich, specifically, Ulrich’s “constitutional propensity” to lose sight of the broad scheme and throw himself into minute tasks better handled by subordinates, a trait that Olmsted feared had left Ulrich vulnerable to demands by other officials, in particular Burnham. “Never lose sight of the fact that our special responsibility as
He went on to identify for Ulrich the things that most worried him about the fair, among them the color scheme chosen by Burnham and the architects. “Let me remind you that the whole field of the Exposition has already come to be popularly called ‘THE WHITE CITY’. … I fear that against the clear blue sky and the blue lake, great towering masses of white, glistening in the clear, hot, Summer sunlight of Chicago, with the glare of the water that we are to have both within and without the Exposition grounds, will be overpowering.” This, he wrote, made it more important than ever to provide a counterbalance of “dense, broad, luxuriant green bodies of foliage.”
Clearly the possibility of failure at the exposition had occurred to Olmsted and troubled him. Time was short, the weather terrible. The spring planting season would be brief. Olmsted had begun to think in terms of fallback arrangements. He warned Ulrich, “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of plain, undecorated, smooth surfaces.”
It was far better, Olmsted lectured, to underdecorate than to over-decorate. “Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.”
Snow fell, bales of it. It fell day after day until hundreds of tons of it lay upon the rooftops at Jackson Park. The exposition was to be a warm-weather affair, set to run from May through October. No one had thought to design the roofs to resist such extreme loading from snow.
Men working at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building heard the shriek of failed steel and ran for cover. In a great blur of snow and silvery glass the building’s roof—that marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris, enclosing the greatest volume of unobstructed space in history—collapsed to the floor below.
Soon afterward, a reporter from San Francisco made his way to Jackson Park. He had come prepared to admire the grand achievement of Burnham’s army of workers but instead found himself troubled by what he saw in the stark frozen landscape.
“This seems to be an impossibility,” he wrote. “To be sure, those in charge claim that they will be ready on time. Still the cold-blooded fact stares one in the face that only the Woman’s Building is anywhere near completion inside and out.”
Yet the fair was to open in little more than two months.
Acquiring Minnie
FOR HOLMES, DESPITE THE PERSISTENT deep cold of the first two months of 1893, things never looked better. With Emeline gone and neatly disposed of, he now was able to concentrate on his growing web of enterprises. He savored its scope: He owned a portion of a legitimate company that produced a machine for duplicating documents; he sold mail-order ointments and elixirs and by now had established his own alcohol- treatment company, the Silver Ash Institute, his answer to Keeley’s gold cure; he collected rents from the Lawrences and his other tenants and owned two houses, one on Honore Street, the other the new house in Wilmette now occupied by his wife Myrta and daughter Lucy, which he himself had designed and then built with the help of as many as seventy-five largely unpaid workers. And soon he would begin receiving his first world’s fair guests.
He spent much of his time outfitting his hotel. He acquired high-grade furnishings from the Tobey Furniture Company, and crystal and ceramics from the French, Potter Crockery Company, and did so without paying a dime, though he recognized that soon the companies would attempt to collect on the promissory notes he had given them. This did not worry him. He had learned through experience that delay and heartfelt remorse were powerful tools with which he could fend off creditors for months and years, sometimes forever. Such prolonged standoffs would not be necessary, however, for he sensed that his time in Chicago was nearing an end. Mrs. Lawrence’s questioning had become more pointed, almost accusing. And lately some of his creditors had begun exhibiting an extraordinary hardening of resolve. One firm, Merchant & Co., which had supplied the iron for his kiln and vault, had gone so far as to secure a writ of replevin to take the iron back. In an inspection of the building, however, its agents had been unable to find anything they could identify conclusively as a Merchant product.
Far more annoying were the letters from parents of missing daughters and the private detectives who had
