there.”
The fireworks began at eight o’clock sharp. Millet had planned an elaborate series of explosive “set pieces,” fireworks affixed to large metal frames shaped to depict various portraits and tableaus. The first featured the Great Fire of 1871, including an image of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. The night boomed and hissed. For the finale the fair’s pyrotechnicians launched five thousand rockets all at once into the black sky over the lake.
The true climax occurred after the grounds closed, however. In the silence, with the air still scented with exploded powder, collectors accompanied by armed guards went to each ticket booth and collected the accumulated silver, three tons of it. They counted the money under heavy guard. By one forty-five A.M., they had an exact total.
Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059—four percent—were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringing the total admission for the day to 751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history. The
When the news reached Burnham’s shanty, there were cheers and champagne and stories through the night. But the best news came the next day, when officials of the World’s Columbian Exposition Company, whose boasts had been ridiculed far and wide, presented a check for $1.5 million to the Illinois Trust and Savings Company and thereby extinguished the last of the exposition’s debts.
The Windy City had prevailed.
Now Burnham and Millet made final arrangements for Burnham’s own great day, the grand closing ceremony of October 30 that would recognize once and for all that Burnham really had done it and that his work was now complete—that for once there was nothing left to do. At this point, Burnham believed, nothing could tarnish the fair’s triumph or his own place in architectural history.
Departures
FRANK MILLET HOPED THE closing ceremony would attract even more people than the fair’s Chicago Day. While Millet did his planning, many of the other men who had helped Burnham construct the fair began the return to ordinary life.
Charles McKim disengaged reluctantly. For him the fair had been a brilliant light that for a time dispelled the shadows that had accumulated around his life. He left Jackson Park abruptly on the morning of October 23 and later that day wrote to Burnham, “You know my dislike for saying ‘Good-bye’ and were prepared to find that I had skipped this morning. To say that I was sorry to leave you all is to put it only one half as strongly as I feel.
“You gave me a beautiful time and the last days of the Fair will always remain in my mind, as were the first, especially identified with yourself. It will be pleasant for the rest of our natural lives to be able to look back to it and talk it over and over and over again, and it goes without saying that you can depend upon me in every way as often hereafter as you may have need of me.”
The next day McKim wrote to a friend in Paris of the deepening consensus among himself, Burnham, and most of Chicago that the fair was too wonderful a thing to be allowed simply to fall into disrepair after its official closure on October 30, just six days thence: “indeed it is the ambition of all concerned to have it swept away in the same magical manner in which it appeared, and with the utmost despatch. For economy, as well as for obvious reasons, it has been proposed that the most glorious way would be to blow up the buildings with dynamite. Another scheme is to destroy them with fire. This last would be the easiest and grandest spectacle except for the danger of flying embers in the event of a change of wind from the lake.”
Neither McKim nor Burnham truly believed the fair should be set aflame. The buildings, in fact, had been designed to maximize the salvage value of their components. Rather, this talk of conflagration was a way of easing the despair of watching the dream come to an end. No one could bear the idea of the White City lying empty and desolate. A
Later, these musings about fire would come to seem like prophecy.
Olmsted too severed his connection. Toward the end of summer his busy schedule and the stifling heat caused his health to fail once again and reactivated his insomnia. He had many projects under way, chief among them Biltmore, but he felt himself nearing the end of his career. He was seventy-one years old. On September 6, 1893, he wrote to a friend, Fred Kingsbury, “I can’t come to you and often dream of a ride through our old haunts and meeting you and others but have pretty well surrendered to Fate. I must flounder along my way to the end.” Olmsted did, however, allow himself a rare expression of satisfaction. “I enjoy my children,” he told Kingsbury. “They are one of the centers of my life, the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man.”
Louis Sullivan, engorged with praise and awards for his Transportation Building—especially its Golden Door —again took up his work with Dankmar Adler but under changed circumstances. The deepening depression and missteps by the two partners had left the firm with few projects. For all of 1893 they would complete only two buildings. Sullivan, never easy on his peers, became furious with one of the firm’s junior architects when he discovered the man had been using his free time to design houses for clients of his own. Sullivan fired him.
The junior man was Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ten thousand construction workers also left the fair’s employ and returned to a world without jobs, already crowded with unemployed men. Once the fair closed, many thousands more would join them on Chicago’s streets. The threat of violence was as palpable as the deepening cold of autumn. Mayor Harrison was sympathetic and did what he could. He hired thousands of men to clean streets and ordered police stations opened at night for men seeking a place to sleep. Chicago’s
The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.
Holmes too sensed it was time to leave Chicago. The pressure from creditors and families was growing too great.
First he set fire to the top floor of his castle. The blaze did minimal damage, but he filed a claim for $6,000 on a policy acquired by his fictional alter ego, Hiram S. Campbell. An investigator for one of the insurance companies, F. G. Cowie, became suspicious and began a detailed investigation. Though he found no concrete evidence of arson, Cowie believed Holmes or an accomplice had started the fire. He advised the insurers to pay the claim, but only to Hiram S. Campbell and only if Campbell presented himself in person.
Holmes could not claim the money himself, for by now Cowie knew him. Ordinarily he simply would have recruited someone else to masquerade as Campbell and claim the money, but of late he had become increasingly wary. The guardians of Minnie Williams had dispatched an attorney, William Capp, to look for Minnie and to protect the assets of her estate. Anna’s guardian, the Reverend Dr. Black, had hired a private detective who had come to Holmes’s building. And letters continued to arrive from the Cigrands and Smythes and other parents. No one yet had accused Holmes of foul play, but the intensity of this new wave of inquiry was greater, more obliquely accusatory, than anything he previously had experienced. Hiram S. Campbell never claimed the money.
But Holmes found that Cowie’s investigation had a secondary, more damaging effect. In the course of digging up information about Holmes, he had succeeded in stirring up and uniting Holmes’s creditors, the furniture dealers and iron suppliers and bicycle manufacturers and contractors whom Holmes had cheated over the previous five
