It was nearly dark when Harrison left Jackson Park and drove north through the cold smoky evening toward his mansion on Ashland Avenue. Temperatures had fallen sharply over the week, down to the thirties at night, and the sky seemed perpetually overcast. Harrison reached his home by seven o’clock. He tinkered with a first-floor window, then sat down to supper with two of his children, Sophie and Preston. He had other children, but they were grown and gone. The meal, of course, included watermelon.
In the midst of supper, at approximately seven-thirty, someone rang the bell at the front door. Mary Hanson, the parlor maid, answered and found a gaunt young man with a smooth-shaven face and close-cut black hair. He looked ill. He asked to see the mayor.
By itself, there was nothing peculiar about the request. Evening visits by strangers were a regular occurrence at the Ashland house, for Harrison prided himself on being available to any citizen of Chicago, regardless of social stature. Tonight’s visitor seemed seedier than most, however, and behaved oddly. Nonetheless, Mary Hanson told him to come back in half an hour.
The day had been an exciting one for the mayor but also exhausting. He fell asleep at the table. Shortly before eight o’clock his son left the dining room to go up to his room and dress for an engagement in the city later that night. Sophie also went upstairs, to write a letter. The house was cozy and well lit. Mary Hanson and the other servants gathered in the kitchen for their own supper.
At precisely eight o’clock the front bell again rang, and again Hanson answered it.
The same young man stood at the threshold. Hanson asked him to wait in the hall and went to get the mayor.
“It must have been about eight o’clock when I heard a noise,” Harrison’s son Preston said. “I was startled; it sounded like a picture falling.” Sophie heard it, too, and heard her father cry out. “I thought nothing of it,” she said, “because I thought it was some screens falling on the floor near the back hall. Father’s voice I took to be a yawn. He had a way of yawning very loud.”
Preston left his room and saw smoke drifting up from the entry hall. As he came down the steps, he heard two more reports. “The last shot was clear and penetrating,” he said. “I knew it to be a revolver shot.” It sounded “like a manhole explosion.”
He ran to the hall and found Harrison lying on his back surrounded by servants, the air silvered with gunsmoke. There was very little blood. Preston shouted, “Father is not hurt, is he?”
The mayor himself answered. “Yes,” he said. “I am shot. I will die.”
Three more shots sounded from the street. The coachman had fired his own revolver once in the air to alert police, once at Prendergast, and Prendergast had returned the shot.
The commotion brought a neighbor, William J. Chalmers, who folded his coat under Harrison’s head. Harrison told him he had been shot over the heart, but Chalmers did not believe it. There was too little blood.
They argued.
Chalmers told Harrison he had
Harrison snapped, “I tell you I am; this is death.”
A few moments later his heart stopped.
“He died angry,” Chalmers said, “because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.”
Prendergast walked to the nearby Desplaines Street police station and calmly told desk sergeant O. Z. Barber, “Lock me up; I am the man who shot the mayor.” The sergeant was incredulous, until Prendergast gave him the revolver, which smelled strongly of blown powder. Barber found that its cylinder contained four spent cartridges and a single live one. The sixth chamber was empty.
Barber asked Prendergast why he had shot the mayor.
“Because he betrayed my confidence. I supported him through his campaign and he promised to appoint me corporation counsel. He didn’t live up to his word.”
The Exposition Company canceled the closing ceremony. There would be no Jubilee March, no landing by Columbus, no address by Harlow Higinbotham, George Davis, or Bertha Palmer; no presentation of awards, no praise for Burnham and Olmsted; no “Hail Columbia;” no mass rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” The closing became instead a memorial assembly in the fair’s Festival Hall. As the audience entered, an organist played Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the hall’s giant pipe organ. The hall was so cold, the presiding officer announced that men could keep their hats on.
Reverend Dr. J. H. Barrows read a blessing and benediction and then, at the request of exposition officials, read a speech that Higinbotham had prepared for the originally planned ceremony. The remarks still seemed appropriate, especially one passage. “We are turning our backs upon the fairest dream of civilization and are about to consign it to the dust,” Barrows read. “It is like the death of a dear friend.”
The audience exited slowly into the cold gray afternoon.
At exactly four forty-five, sunset, the warship
The fair was over.
The six hundred carriages in Carter Harrison’s cortege stretched for miles. The procession moved slowly and quietly through a black sea of men and women dressed for mourning. A catafalque carrying Harrison’s black casket led the cortege and was followed immediately by Harrison’s beloved Kentucky mare, stirrups crossed on its empty saddle. Everywhere the white flags that had symbolized the White City hung at half mast. Thousands of men and women wore buttons that said “Our Carter” and watched in silence as, carriage by carriage, the city’s greatest men drove past. Armour, Pullman, Schwab, Field, McCormick, Ward.
And Burnham.
It was a difficult ride for him. He had passed this way before, to bury John Root. The fair had begun with death, and now it had ended with death.
So grand was the procession, it needed two hours to pass any one point. By the time it reached Graceland Cemetery, north of the city, darkness had fallen and a soft mist hugged the ground. Long lines of policemen flanked the path to the cemetery’s brownstone chapel. Off to the side stood fifty members of the United German Singing Societies.
Harrison had heard them sing at a picnic and, joking, had asked them to sing at his funeral.
Harrison’s murder fell upon the city like a heavy curtain. There was the time before, there was the time after. Where once the city’s newspapers would have run an endless series of stories about the aftereffects of the fair, now there was mostly silence. The fair remained open, informally, on October 31, and many men and women came to the grounds for one last visit, as if paying their respects to a lost relative. A tearful woman told columnist Teresa Dean, “The good-by is as sad as any I have known in all the years that I have lived.” William Stead, the British editor whose brother Herbert had covered the fair’s opening, arrived in Chicago from New York on the night of its official close but made his first visit to the grounds the next day. He claimed that nothing he had seen in Paris, Rome, or London was as perfect as the Court of Honor.
That night the exposition illuminated the fairgrounds one last time. “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre,” Stead wrote, “but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.”
The Black City
