Jerked buffalo, a la Indian Village.
Stuffed ostrich, a la Ostrich Farm.
Boiled camel humps, a la Cairo street.
Monkey stew, a la Hagenbeck.
ENTREES.
Fricassee of reindeer, a la Lapland.
Fried snowballs, a la Ice Railway.
Crystallized frappe, from Libby glass exhibit.
PASTRY.
Wind doughnuts, a la Captive Balloon.
Sandwiches (assorted), especially prepared by the
Leather Exhibit.
And for dessert, the program said, “Twenty-five percent of gross receipts.”
The ball ended at four-thirty A.M. The exotics walked slowly back to the Midway. The guests climbed into their carriages and slept or softly sang “After the Ball”—the hit song of the day—as their liverymen drove them home over empty streets that echoed with the plosive rhythm of hooves on granite.
The ball and Frank Millet’s other inventions imparted to the exposition a wilder, happier air. The exposition by day might wear a chaste gown of white staff, but at night it danced barefoot and guzzled champagne.
Attendance rose. The daily average of paid admissions for August was 113,403—at last topping the vital 100,000 threshold. The margin was slim, however. And the nation’s economic depression was growing steadily worse, its labor situation more volatile.
On August 3 a big Chicago bank, Lazarus Silverman, failed. Burnham’s firm had long been a client. On the night of August 10 Charles J. Eddy, a former top official of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, one of the first casualties of the panic, walked into Washington Park just north of the Midway and shot himself. Of course he had been staying at the Metro-pole. He was the hotel’s third suicide that summer. Mayor Harrison warned that the ranks of the unemployed had swollen to an alarming degree. “If Congress does not give us money we will have riots that will shake this country,” he said. Two weeks later workers scuffled with police outside City Hall. It was a minor confrontation, but the
For the city’s industrialists and merchant princes who learned of Gompers’s speech in their Sunday morning newspapers, this was a particularly unsettling question, for it seemed to embody a demand for much more than simply work. Gompers was calling for fundamental change in the relationship between workers and their overseers.
This was dangerous talk, to be suppressed at all costs.
Prendergast
IT WAS EXCITING, THIS PROSPECT of becoming one of the city’s most important officials. At last Prendergast could leave behind the cold mornings and filthy streets and the angry newsboys who disobeyed and taunted him. He was growing impatient, however. His appointment as corporation counsel should have occurred by now.
One afternoon in the first week of October Prendergast took a grip-car to City Hall to see his future office. He found a clerk and introduced himself.
Incredibly, the clerk did not recognize his name. When Prendergast explained that Mayor Harrison planned to make him the city’s new corporation counsel, the clerk laughed.
Prendergast insisted on seeing the current counsel, a man named Kraus. Certainly Kraus would recognize his name.
The clerk went to get him.
Kraus emerged from his office and extended his hand. He introduced Prendergast to the other men on his staff as his “successor.” Suddenly everyone was smiling.
At first Prendergast thought the smiling was an acknowledgment that soon he would be in charge, but now he saw it as something else.
Kraus asked if he’d like the position immediately.
“No,” Prendergast said. “I am in no hurry about it.”
Which was not true, but the question had thrown Prendergast. He did not like the way Kraus asked it. Not at all.
Toward Triumph
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING on Monday, October 9, 1893, the day Frank Millet had designated as Chicago Day, ticket-takers at the fair’s Sixty-fourth Street gate made an informal count of the morning’s sales thus far and found that this one gate had recorded 60,000 paid admissions. The men knew from experience that on any ordinary day sales at this gate accounted for about one-fifth of the total admissions to the fair for any given time, and so came up with an estimate that some 300,000 paid visitors already had entered Jackson Park—more than any other full day’s total and close to the world’s record of 397,000 held by the Paris exposition. Yet the morning had barely begun. The ticket-takers sensed that something odd was happening. The pace of admissions seemed to be multiplying by the hour. In some ticket booths the volume grew so great, so quickly, that silver coins began piling on the floors and burying the ticket-takers’ shoes.
Millet and other fair officials had expected high attendance. Chicago was proud of its fair, and everyone knew that only three weeks remained before it would close forever. To assure maximum attendance, Mayor Harrison had signed an official proclamation that urged every business to suspend operation for the day. The courts closed, as did the Board of Trade. The weather helped, too. Monday was an apple-crisp day with temperatures that never exceeded sixty-two degrees, under vivid cerulean skies. Every hotel had filled to capacity, even beyond capacity, with some managers finding themselves compelled to install cots in lobbies and halls. The Wellington Catering Company, which operated eight restaurants and forty lunch counters in Jackson Park, had braced for the day by shipping in two traincar loads of potatoes, 4,000 half-barrels of beer, 15,000 gallons of ice cream, and 40,000 pounds of meat. Its cooks built 200,000 ham sandwiches and brewed 400,000 cups of coffee.
No one, however, expected the sheer crush of visitors that actually did arrive. By noon the chief of admissions, Horace Tucker, wired a message to fair headquarters, “The Paris record is broken to smithereens, and the people are still coming.” A single ticket-seller, L. E. Decker, a nephew of Buffalo Bill who had sold tickets for Bill’s Wild West for eight years, sold 17,843 tickets during his shift, the most by any one man, and won Horace Tucker’s prize of a box of cigars. Lost children filled every chair at the headquarters of the Columbian Guard; nineteen spent the night and were claimed by their parents the next day. Five people were killed in or near the fair, including a worker obliterated while helping prepare the night’s fireworks and a visitor who stepped from one grip- car into the path of another. A woman lost her foot when a surging crowd knocked her from a train platform. George Ferris, riding his wheel that day, looked down and gasped, “There must be a million people down
