Sullivan built only twenty-five new structures, roughly one a year. From time to time he came to Burnham for money, although whether he sought outright loans or sold Burnham artwork from his personal collection is unclear. An entry in Burnham’s diary for 1911 states, “Louis Sullivan called to get more money of DHB.” That same year Sullivan inscribed a set of drawings, “To Daniel H. Burnham, with the best wishes of his friend Louis H. Sullivan.”
But Sullivan laced his 1924 autobiography with hyperbolic attacks on Burnham and the fair’s impact on the masses who came through its gates. The classical architecture of the White City made such a profound impression, Sullivan claimed, that it doomed America to another half-century of imitation. The fair was a “contagion,” a “virus,” a form of “progressive cerebral meningitis.” In his view it had fatal consequences. “Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave—in a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress.”
Sullivan’s low opinion of Burnham and the fair was counterbalanced only by his own exalted view of himself and what he saw as his role in attempting to bring to architecture something fresh and distinctly American. Frank Lloyd Wright took up Sullivan’s banner. Sullivan had fired him in 1893, but later Wright and Sullivan became friends. As Wright’s academic star rose, so too did Sullivan’s. Burnham’s fell from the sky. It became de rigueur among architecture critics and historians to argue that Burnham in his insecurity and slavish devotion to the classical yearnings of the eastern architects had indeed killed American architecture.
But that view was too simplistic, as some architecture historians and critics have more recently acknowledged. The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by all but his closest friends: Both Harvard and Yale granted him honorary master’s degrees in recognition of his achievement in building the fair. The ceremonies occurred on the same day. He attended Harvard’s. For him the awards were a form of redemption. His past failure to gain admission to both universities—the denial of his “right beginning”—had haunted him throughout his life. Even years after receiving the awards, as he lobbied Harvard to grant provisional admission to his son Daniel, whose own performance on the entry exams was far from stellar, Burnham wrote, “He needs to know that he is a winner, and, as soon as he does, he will show his real quality, as I have been able to do. It is the keenest regret of my life that someone did not follow me up at Cambridge … and let the authorities know what I could do.”
Burnham had shown them himself, in Chicago, through the hardest sort of work. He bristled at the persistent belief that John Root deserved most of the credit for the beauty of the fair. “What was done up to the time of his death was the faintest suggestion of a plan,” he said. “The impression concerning his part has been gradually built up by a few people, close friends of his and mostly women, who naturally after the Fair proved beautiful desired to more broadly identify his memory with it.”
Root’s death had crushed Burnham, but it also freed him to become a broader, better architect. “It was questioned by many if the loss of Mr. Root was not irreparable,” wrote James Ellsworth in a letter to Burnham’s biographer, Charles Moore. Ellsworth concluded that Root’s death “brought out qualities in Mr. Burnham which might not have developed, as early anyway, had Mr. Root lived.” The common perception had always been that Burnham managed the business side of the firm, while Root did all the designs. Burnham did seem to “lean more or less” on Root’s artistic abilities, Ellsworth said, but added that after Root’s death “one would never realize anything of this kind … or ever know from his actions that he ever possessed a partner or did not always command in
In 1901 Burnham built the Fuller Building at the triangular intersection of Twenty-third and Broadway in New York, but neighborhood residents found an uncanny resemblance to a common domestic tool and called it the Flatiron Building. Burnham and his firm went on to build scores of other structures, among them the Gimbel’s department store in New York, Filene’s in Boston, and the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Of the twenty-seven buildings he and John Root built in Chicago’s Loop, only three remain today, among them the Rookery, its top-floor library much as it was during that magical meeting in February 1891, and the Reliance Building, beautifully transformed into the Hotel Burnham. Its restaurant is called the Atwood, after Charles Atwood, who replaced Root as Burnham’s chief designer.
Burnham became an early environmentalist. “Up to our time,” he said, “strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in which our children are to live.” He had great, if misplaced, faith in the automobile. The passing of the horse would “end a plague of barbarism,” he said. “When this change comes, a real step in civilization will have been taken. With no smoke, no gases, no litter of horses, your air and streets will be clean and pure. This means, does it not, that the health and spirits of men will be better?”
On winter nights in Evanston he and his wife went sleigh-riding with Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham became an avid player of bridge, though he was known widely for being utterly inept at the game. He had promised his wife that after the exposition the pace of his work would ease. But this did not happen. He told Margaret, “I thought the fair was an intense life, but I find the pressing forward of all these important interests gives me quite as full a day, week or year.”
Burnham’s health began to decline early in the twentieth century, when he was in his fifties. He developed colitis and in 1909 learned he had diabetes. Both conditions forced him to adopt a more healthful diet. His diabetes damaged his circulatory system and fostered a foot infection that bedeviled him for the rest of his life. As the years passed, he revealed an interest in the supernatural. One night in San Francisco, in a bungalow he had built at the fog-licked summit of Twin Peaks, his planning shanty, he told a friend, “If I were able to take the time, I believe that I could prove the continuation of life beyond the grave, reasoning from the necessity, philosophically speaking, of a belief in an absolute and universal power.”
He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, “You’ll see it lovely. I never will. But it
Recessional
THE ROARING IN OLMSTED’S EARS, the pain in his mouth, and the sleeplessness never eased, and soon an emptiness began to appear in his gaze. He became forgetful. On May 10, 1895, two weeks after his seventy-third birthday, he wrote to his son John, “It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted.” He was seventy-three years old. That summer, on his last day in the Brookline office, he wrote three letters to George Vanderbilt, each saying pretty much the same thing.
During a period in September 1895 that he described as “the bitterest week of my life,” he confessed to his friend Charles Eliot his terror that his condition soon would require that he be placed in an asylum. “You cannot think how I have been dreading that it would be thought expedient that I should be sent to an ‘institution,’” he wrote on September 26. “Anything but that. My father was a director of an Insane Retreat, and first and last, having been professionally employed and behind the scenes in several, my dread of such places is intense.”
His loss of memory accelerated. He became depressed and paranoid and accused son John of orchestrating a “coup” to remove him from the firm. Olmsted’s wife, Mary, took Olmsted to the family’s island home in Maine, where his depression deepened and he at times became violent. He beat the family horse.
Mary and her sons realized there was little they could do for Olmsted. He had become unmanageable, his dementia profound. With deep sorrow and perhaps a good deal of relief, Rick lodged his father in the McLean Asylum in Waverly, Massachusetts. Olmsted’s memory was not so destroyed that he did not realize he himself had designed McLean’s grounds. This fact gave him no solace, for he saw immediately that the same phenomenon that had diminished nearly every one of his works—Central Park, Biltmore, the world’s fair, and so many others—had occurred yet again. “They didn’t carry out my plan,” he wrote, “confound them!”
Olmsted died at two in the morning on August 28, 1903. His funeral was spare, family only. His wife, who had seen this great man disappear before her eyes, did not attend.
