Root, who was four years younger. Born in Lumpkin, Georgia, on January 10, 1850, Root was a musical prodigy who could sing before he could talk. During the Civil War, as Atlanta smoldered, Root’s father had smuggled him to Liverpool, England, aboard a Confederate blockade-runner. Root won acceptance into Oxford, but before he could matriculate, the war ended and his father summoned him back to America, to his new home in New York City, where Root studied civil engineering at New York University and became a draftsman for the architect who later designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Burnham took to Root immediately. He admired Root’s white skin and muscular arms, his stance at the drafting table. They became friends, then partners. They recorded their first income three months before the Panic of 1873 snuffed the nation’s economy. But this time Burnham stuck with it. Something about the partnership with Root bolstered him. It filled an absence and played to both men’s strengths. They struggled for their own commissions and in the meantime hired themselves out to other more established firms.
One day in 1874 a man walked into their office and in a single galvanic moment changed their lives. He wore black and looked ordinary, but in his past there was blood, death, and profit in staggering quantity. He came looking for Root, but Root was out of town. He introduced himself instead to Burnham and gave his name as John B. Sherman.
There was no need to amplify the introduction. As superintendent of the Union Stock Yards, Sherman ruled an empire of blood that employed 25,000 men, women, and children and each year slaughtered fourteen million animals. Directly and indirectly nearly one-fifth of Chicago’s population depended on the yards for its economic survival.
Sherman liked Burnham. He liked his strength, his steady blue gaze, and the confidence with which he conducted the conversation. Sherman commissioned the firm to build him a mansion on Prairie Avenue at Twenty- first Street among homes owned by other Chicago barons and where now and then Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Philip Armour could be seen walking to work together, a titanic threesome in black. Root drew a house of three stories with gables and a peaked roof, in red brick, buff sandstone, blue granite, and black slate; Burnham refined the drawings and guided construction. Burnham happened to be standing in the entrance to the house, considering the work, when a young man with a mildly haughty air and an odd strut—not ego, here, but a congenital fault— walked up to him and introduced himself as Louis Sullivan. The name meant nothing to Burnham. Not yet. Sullivan and Burnham talked. Sullivan was eighteen, Burnham twenty-eight. He told Sullivan, in confidence, that he did not expect to remain satisfied doing just houses. “My idea,” he said, “is to work up a big business, to handle big things, deal with big business men, and to build up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization.”
John Sherman’s daughter, Margaret, also visited the construction site. She was young, pretty, and blond and visited often, using as her excuse the fact that her friend Della Otis lived across the street. Margaret did think the house very fine, but what she admired most was the architect who seemed so at ease among the cairns of sandstone and timber. It took a while, but Burnham got the point. He asked her to marry him. She said yes; the courtship went smoothly. Then scandal broke. Burnham’s older brother had forged checks and wounded their father’s wholesale drug business. Burnham immediately went to Margaret’s father to break the engagement, on grounds the courtship could not continue in the shadow of scandal. Sherman told him he respected Burnham’s sense of honor but rejected his withdrawal. He said quietly, “There is a black sheep in every family.”
Later Sherman, a married man, would run off to Europe with the daughter of a friend.
Burnham and Margaret married on January 20, 1876. Sherman bought them a house at Forty-third Street and Michigan Avenue, near the lake but more importantly near the stockyards. He wanted proximity. He liked Burnham and approved of the marriage, but he did not entirely trust the young architect. He thought Burnham drank too much.
Sherman’s doubts about Burnham’s character did not color his respect for his skill as an architect. He commissioned other structures. In his greatest vote of confidence, he asked Burnham & Root to build an entry portal for the Union Stock Yards that would reflect the yards’ growing importance. The result was the Stone Gate, three arches of Lemont limestone roofed in copper and displaying over the central arch the carved bust—Root’s touch, no doubt—of John Sherman’s favorite bull, Sherman. The gate became a landmark that endured into the twenty-first century, long after the last hog crossed to eternity over the great wooden ramp called the Bridge of Sighs.
Root also married a daughter of the stockyards, but his experience was darker. He designed a house for John Walker, president of the yards, and met Walker’s daughter, Mary. During their courtship she became ill with tuberculosis. The disease rapidly gained ground, but Root remained committed to the engagement, even though it was clear to everyone he was marrying a dead woman. The ceremony was held in the house Root had designed. A friend, the poet Harriet Monroe, waited with the other guests for the bride to appear on the stairway. Monroe’s sister, Dora, was the sole bridesmaid. “A long wait frightened us,” Harriet Monroe said, “but at last the bride, on her father’s arm, appeared like a white ghost at the halfway landing, and slowly oh, so hesitatingly dragging her heavy satin train, stepped down the wide stairway and across the floor to the bay window which was gay with flowers and vines. The effect was weirdly sad.” Root’s bride was thin and pale and could only whisper her vows. “Her gayety,” Harriet Monroe wrote, “seemed like jewels on a skull.”
Within six weeks Mary Walker Root was dead. Two years later Root married the bridesmaid, Dora Monroe, and very likely broke her poet-sister’s heart. That Harriet Monroe also loved Root seems beyond dispute. She lived nearby and often visited the couple in their Astor Place home. In 1896 she published a biography of Root that would have made an angel blush. Later, in her memoir,
Root and Burnham prospered. A cascade of work flowed to their firm, partly because Root managed to solve a puzzle that had bedeviled Chicago builders ever since the city’s founding. By solving it, he helped the city become the birthplace of skyscrapers despite terrain that could not have been less suited to the role.
In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that propelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within the downtown “Loop,” named for the turn-around loops of streetcar lines. As land values rose, landowners sought ways of improving the return on their investments. The sky beckoned.
The most fundamental obstacle to height was man’s capacity to walk stairs, especially after the kinds of meals men ate in the nineteenth century, but this obstacle had been removed by the advent of the elevator and, equally important, by Elisha Graves Otis’s invention of a safety mechanism for halting an elevator in free-fall. Other barriers remained, however, the most elemental of which was the bedeviling character of Chicago’s soil, which prompted one engineer to describe the challenge of laying foundations in Chicago as “probably not equaled for perverseness anywhere in the world.” Bedrock lay 125 feet below grade, too deep for workers to reach with any degree of economy or safety using the construction methods available in the 1880s. Between this level and the surface was a mixture of sand and clay so saturated with water that engineers called it gumbo. It compressed under the weight of even modest structures and drove architects, as a matter of routine, to design their buildings with sidewalks that intersected the first story four inches above grade, in the hope that when the building settled and dragged the sidewalks down with it, the walks would be level.
There were only two known ways to resolve the soil problem: Build short and avoid the issue, or drive caissons down to bedrock. The latter technique required that workers excavate deep shafts, shore the walls, and pump each so full of air that the resulting high pressure held water at bay, a process that was notorious for causing deadly cases of the bends and used mainly by bridge builders who had no other choice. John Augustus Roebling had used caissons, famously, in building the Brooklyn Bridge, but their first use in the United States had occurred earlier, from 1869 through 1874, when James B. Eads built a bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis. Eads discovered that workers began experiencing the bends at sixty feet below ground, roughly half the depth to which a Chicago caisson would have to descend. Of the 352 men who worked on the bridge’s notorious east caisson, pressure-related illness killed twelve, left two crippled for life, and injured sixty-six others, a casualty rate of over 20 percent.
But Chicago’s landowners wanted profit, and at the city’s center, profit meant height. In 1881 a Massachusetts investor, Peter Chardon Brooks III, commissioned Burnham & Root to build the tallest office building yet constructed in Chicago, which he planned to call the Montauk. Previously he had brought them their first big downtown commission, the seven-story Grannis Block. In that structure, Burnham said, “our originality began to
