By traditional architectural standards the challenge seemed an impossible one. Alone neither architect could have done it, but together, Burnham believed, he and Root had the will and the interlocking powers of organization and design to succeed. Together they had defeated gravity and conquered the soft gumbo of Chicago soil, to change forever the character of urban life; now, together, they would build the fair and change history. It could be done, because it had to be done, but the challenge was monstrous. Depew’s oratory on the fair quickly grew tiresome, but the man had a way of capturing with wit and brevity the true character of a situation. “Chicago is like the man who marries a woman with a ready-made family of twelve,” he said. “The trouble is just begun.”
Even Depew, however, did not foresee the true magnitude of the forces that were converging on Burnham and Root. At this moment he and they saw the challenge in its two most fundamental dimensions, time and money, and these were stark enough.
Only Poe could have dreamed the rest.
The Necessary Supply
ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1886, as heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child’s fever, a man calling himself H. H. Holmes walked into one of Chicago’s train stations. The air was stale and still, suffused with the scent of rotten peaches, horse excrement, and partially combusted Illinois anthracite. Half a dozen locomotives stood in the trainyard exhaling steam into the already-yellow sky.
Holmes acquired a ticket to a village called Englewood in the town of Lake, a municipality of 200,000 people that abutted Chicago’s southernmost boundary. The township encompassed the Union Stock Yards and two large parks: Washington Park, with lawns, gardens, and a popular racetrack, and Jackson Park, a desolate, undeveloped waste on the lakeshore.
Despite the heat Holmes looked fresh and crisp. As he moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals.
He walked with confidence and dressed well, conjuring an impression of wealth and achievement. He was twenty-six years old. His height was five feet, eight inches; he weighed only 155 pounds. He had dark hair and striking blue eyes, once likened to the eyes of a Mesmerist. “The eyes are very big and wide open,” a physician named John L. Capen later observed. “They are blue. Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.” Capen also noted thin lips, tented by a full dark mustache. What he found most striking, however, were Holmes’s ears. “It is a marvelously small ear, and at the top it is shaped and carved after the fashion in which old sculptors indicated deviltry and vice in their statues of satyrs.” Overall, Capen noted, “he is made on a very delicate mold.”
To women as yet unaware of his private obsessions, it was an appealing delicacy. He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.
He stepped from the train into the heart of Englewood and took a moment to survey his surroundings. He stood at the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace. A telegraph pole at the corner held Fire Alarm Box No. 2475. In the distance rose the frames of several three-story homes under construction. He heard the concussion of hammers. Newly planted trees stood in soldierly ranks, but in the heat and haze they looked like desert troops gone too long without water. The air was still, moist, and suffused with the burned-licorice scent of freshly rolled macadam. On the corner stood a shop with a sign identifying it as E. S. Holton Drugs.
He walked. He came to Wentworth Street, which ran north and south and clearly served as Englewood’s main commercial street, its pavement clotted with horses, drays, and phaetons. Near the corner of Sixty-third and Wentworth, he passed a fire station that housed Engine Company no. 51. Next door was a police station. Years later a villager with a blind spot for the macabre would write, “While at times there was considerable need of a police force in the Stock Yards district, Englewood pursued the even tenor of its way with very little necessity for their appearance other than to ornament the landscape and see that the cows were not disturbed in their peaceful pastures.”
Holmes returned to Wallace Street, where he had seen the sign for Holton Drugs. Tracks crossed the intersection. A guard sat squinting against the sun watching for trains and every few minutes lowered a crossing gate as yet another locomotive huffed past. The drugstore was on the northwest corner of Wallace and Sixty-third. Across Wallace was a large vacant lot.
Holmes entered the store and there found an elderly woman named Mrs. Holton. He sensed vulnerability, sensed it the way another man might capture the trace of a woman’s perfume. He identified himself as a doctor and licensed pharmacist and asked the woman if she needed assistance in her store. He spoke softly, smiled often, and held her in his frank blue gaze.
He was good with conversation, and soon she revealed to him her deepest sorrow. Her husband, upstairs in their apartment, was dying of cancer. She confessed that managing the store while caring for him had become a great burden.
Holmes listened with moist eyes. He touched her arm. He could ease her burden, he said. Not only that, he could turn the drugstore into a thriving establishment and conquer the competition up the block.
His gaze was so clear and blue. She told him she would have to talk to her husband.
She walked upstairs. The day was hot. Flies rested on the window sill. Outside yet another train rumbled through the intersection. Cinder and smoke drifted like soiled gauze past the window. She would talk to her husband, yes, but he was dying, and she was the one who now managed the store and bore its responsibilities, and she had come to a decision.
Just thinking about the young doctor gave her a feeling of contentment she had not experienced in a long while.
Holmes had been to Chicago before, but only for brief visits. The city impressed him, he said later, which was surprising because as a rule nothing impressed him, nothing moved him. Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or remain motionless. When he resolved at last to move to Chicago, he was still using his given name, Herman Webster Mudgett.
As for most people, his initial sensory contact with Chicago had been the fantastic stink that lingered always in the vicinity of the Union Stock Yards, a Chinook of putrefaction and incinerated hair, “an elemental odor,” wrote Upton Sinclair, “raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual and strong.” Most people found it repulsive. The few who found it invigorating tended to be men who had waded in its “river of death,” Sinclair’s phrase, and panned from it great fortunes. It is tempting to imagine that all that death and blood made Mudgett feel welcome but more realistic to suppose it conveyed a sense that here at last was a city that allowed a broader range of behavior than was tolerated in Gilmanton Academy, New Hampshire, the town in which he was born and where he drifted through childhood as a small, odd, and exceptionally bright boy—and where, as a consequence, in the cruel imaginations of his peers, he became prey.
The memory of one episode stayed with him throughout his life. He was five, wearing his first boy’s suit, when his parents sent him off to begin his education at the village schoolhouse. “I had daily to pass the office of one village doctor, the door of which was seldom if ever barred,” he wrote in a later memoir. “Partly from its being associated in my mind as the source of all the nauseous mixtures that had been my childish terror (for this was before the day of children’s medicines), and partly because of vague rumors I had heard regarding its contents, this place was one of peculiar abhorrence to me.”
In those days a doctor’s office could indeed be a fearsome place. All doctors were in a sense amateurs. The best of them bought cadavers for study. They paid cash, no questions asked, and preserved particularly interesting bits of diseased viscera in large clear bottles. Skeletons hung in offices for easy anatomical reference; some transcended function to become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated—every bleached bone hitched to its neighbor with brass, under a skull grinning with slap-shoulder bonhomie—that they appeared ready to race chattering down the street to catch the next grip-car.
Two older children discovered Mudgett’s fear and one day captured him and dragged him “struggling and
