Summary
The Angel from Dwight
Benjamin Pitezel is in Dwight, Illinois, trying to deal with his alcoholism. Holmes pays for his treatment, which he says is out of kindness but which is also no doubt due to needing Pitezel to be useful. While in Dwight, Pitezel writes to Holmes of a beautiful young woman named Emeline Cigrand who works in Doctor Keeley’s office. The description appeals to Holmes, who has Pitezel offer her a job. She accepts and comes to Chicago.
Emeline lives nearby in a boardinghouse and works as a personal secretary to Holmes. They spend a lot of time together, riding bikes and visiting the fair site. One day she is at her desk when a man named Ned Connor comes in and says he needs to speak with Holmes about a mortgage. He can tell Emeline has feelings for Holmes and he warns her about him. She does not listen, as she is infatuated with Holmes.
The charming and gregarious Emeline invites two of her second cousins, Dr. and Mrs. B.J. Cigrand, to visit her. Holmes is not around, but Emeline speaks glowingly of him and gives them a tour of the building. They find the building cold and strange and ominous, but say nothing. Not long after, Holmes asks Emeline to marry him.
Dedication Day
Olmsted’s teeth hurt, his ears roar, and he cannot sleep, but he works at a breakneck pace. He has trouble with workers trampling what his men have accomplished, Burnham’s desire for steam engines, and the threats to the island with different people wanting to install things on it. He decides to convalesce in Europe for a while. While in Paris he visits the Exposition’s old grounds, finding much to critique but worrying the Chicago architects want too much ornamentation. He believes the best scenes feature natural juxtapositions and native plants, and his goal is to keep the Wooded Isle as wild as possible. This might be hard with American groundskeepers, but he must try.
As for Sol Bloom, he learns the Algerians he wanted to bring over are already on their way, having gotten the day right but the year wrong. He meets the ships in New York Harbor and sees the chaos beginning. A large black man comes up to him and says he is in charge of getting the men to Chicago. Bloom offers him a cigar and a job as his bodyguard and assistant; the man, Archie, accepts.
Burnham tries to accelerate the buildings because there is only a year and a half to the dedication. He does not know how they will surpass the Eiffel Tower, though, and the weather continues to destroy things that have been completed. He does decide, along with the official director of color, William Pretyman, that the facades should be all white. Pretyman is enraged, but Burnham does not like him anyway and is pleased when he resigns. McKim recommends New York painter Francis Millet, whom Burnham ends up liking immensely. Millet invents what is the first spray paint.
The major issue on Burnham’s agenda is now getting the water pipe completed by opening day, but he does not quite anticipate the opposition from the townspeople of the place where the pipeline would be located. The townspeople refuse to allow the pipeline and the men have to give up, but they decide on another spring in the town of Big Bend, still in the same county.
In June of 1892 workers begin raising the giant iron trusses to support the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building’s roof and “create the widest span of unobstructed interior space ever attempted” (177). They make progress, but a storm destroys it. Francis Agnew, the contractor, admits the walls were inadequately braced but blames Burnham for making them push too fast. Burnham pushes harder and for more power; the Exposition Company and National Commission decide that their overlap is too hard, and appoint Burnham the director of works.
A young steel engineer in Pittsburgh is convinced he has something to rival the Eiffel Tower, and though he has been turned down before because “a chorus of engineers chanted that the thing could not be built, at least not with any margin of safety” (179), he decides to try again. Sol Bloom, the man in charge of the Midway, seems open to anything and now Burnham has limitless power.
Olmsted returns in September of 1862 and takes over while Codman recovers from his own illness. He sees progress, as the Mines Building was finished and the Fisheries is close. Others, including the Manufactures, are well underway. His landscape has been harmed by the building but progress is still made. Thankfully, Burnham had given the boat concession to an electric company, which would not upset Olmsted’s vision.
Dedication Day arrives and the press is generous and polite even though things clearly are not done. There is a grand parade and numerous speeches.
Prendergast
Prendergast, now 24 and working as a delivery contractor even though his mental health is declining, still addresses his postcards. He writes one to Alfred S. Trude, a famous Chicago criminal defense attorney, in companionable, familiar terms. He expresses regret for the man’s recent accident and implores him to remember that his fulfilling of the law depends on following God. Trude, for some reason, keeps the card.
“I Want You at Once”
The young engineer finally gets his approval to build his structure in the Midway. It will be a “vertically revolving wheel 250’ in dimeter” (185); his name is George Washington Gale Ferris.
Chappell Redux
Emeline goes to a neighbor to give her an early Christmas present and informs her she has decided to go home to Indiana to see her family for Christmas. Later, the Lawrences speculate that Emeline knew something of the real Holmes and wants to get away. Her visits stop and they never see her again. Holmes tells them she went home to get married, which surprises them as they’d never heard of this before. Holmes later shows her a wedding announcement that says she is married to a man named Phelps, but it is not engraved and is very plain. Emeline’s family and friends receive the announcement too, and there is a small newspaper announcement.
Mrs. Lawrence will later say she becomes certain Holmes killed Emeline. She sees him have two men carry a large, heavy trunk downstairs. Holmes’s manner bothers her. Yet, they do not go to the police or move.
Emeline’s trunk arrives at her parents’ house; they have no communication from her ever again. There are a few things her parents do not learn at the time: Phelps was an alias of Pitezel, Chappell articulated a woman’s corpse, a medical college received an articulated skeleton not long after.
Later, when Holmes’s house is investigated, there is a footprint found on the wall of the vault. The assumption is that Emeline had stepped in acid, placed her feet against the door, and etched the print.
“The Cold-Blooded Fact”
It is January 1893 and the weather has turned freezing—20 degrees below zero. This increases the threat of fire, is difficult for the laborers, and slows the work. Ferris is working on his wheel, which is actually two wheels spaced apart thirty feet across the axle. It seems insubstantial, and nothing that heavy has ever been lifted before.
Harry Codman passes away from illness, devastating Olmsted. He asks a former assistant and now one of Boston’s best landscape architects, Charles Eliot, to help. Eliot agrees and comes to Chicago. He joins the firm and tries to help get their work on schedule. Olmsted’s health is precarious, and he has to let his superintendent, Rudolf Elrich, take over for a time. He does not like or trust Ulrich and urges him via letter to remember that they are creating a White City and the landscape needs to be a “counterbalance of dense, broad, luxuriant, green bodies of foliage” (196).
Snow falls heavily, which is problematic as no one thought to design the roofs to resist this weight. Part of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building roof collapses. The fair is to open in two months, but as a reporter notes, it appears that this is impossible.
Acquiring Minnie
Things are going well for Holmes at the moment—Emeline is gone, he owns property and his hotel is almost ready. There is the sense, though, that his time in Chicago will come to an end soon. Creditors are getting more insistent, Mrs. Lawrence will not stop bothering him, and the Cigrand and Connor families are still looking for their daughters. They do not think he has anything to do with it, but they want information.
Holmes also needs a new secretary. There is no shortage of women but he is lucky that a woman he had met in Boston, Minnie Williams, has moved to Chicago. She is rather plain and plump but she was easy to win over in Boston and is easy to win over again now. In Boston he had told her his name was Harry Gordon and he tells her that she will have to call him by an alias now that she is out here—H.H. Holmes. He asks her to marry him and she accepts, but when she tells her sister Anna, Anna is skeptical at the pace of the relationship and the fact that Minnie is no great beauty.
Holmes promises Minnie a trip to Europe and a fine home and children, but he says there are financial affairs to deal with first. She transfers over her deeds and land to what she does not know are aliases of his and Pitezel, and gives her name to one of Holmes’s other fictive businesses. The two marry, but there is no record in the marriage registry of Cook County.
Dreadful Things Done by Girls
Unemployed men come to Chicago in large numbers in 1893, but thankfully Chicago seems immune to the nation’s economic woes. Exhibits arrive daily, such as fantastic artillery pieces from Essen Works, Germany. Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley travel with the Wild West Show and a small army of performers. There are cannibals from Dahomey, Lapps from Lapland, Syrian horsemen. Bloom opens his Algerian village early and starts netting fantastic profits. Sadly, there will be no pygmies because Lieutenant Schufeldt has died of unknown causes.
Advice floods in, much of it from New York. Although Chicagoans scoff at or mock most of it, Burnham knows that the blue bloods might be right about some things, and he has always been slightly aware of his inferior status.
Jacob Riis, the photojournalist, visits Hull House and speaks of the poverty and problems in the city. Chicago decides to tidy things up a bit, repaving alleys and streets, removing garbage, and employing sanitation inspectors.
Carter Henry Harrison has made it clear that he would love to be the “Fair Mayor.” He served four terms before and is not supported by the papers and leading citizens, but the regular people of the city adore him. He is magnetic, strong, and handsome in his late 60s, and has no trouble securing the Democratic nomination.
Patrick Prendergast knows that the political machine pays back people who help advance its interests, and he is convinced that Harrison will honor him with a job when he is elected. Prendergast begins sending out postcards to the men who will be his colleagues and peers when that happens. He writes Trude again, who finds the message very odd and keeps the note.
Harrison wins a fifth term in April 1893.
The Invitation
Holmes suggest Minnie invite her sister Anna to come to the fair with them at his expense. Minnie is delighted and writes to Anna, who accepts.
Final Preparations
April arrives with gorgeous weather but issues abound: there is a strike, a few workers lose their lives, buildings are not finished. Burnham is lauded for his hard work and loves the attention, knowing he has done tremendous things in a short time. Six of the grandest buildings tower over the central court with Daniel Chester French’s “Statue of the Republic” gleaming in the basin.
On the fairgrounds next to the fair Buffalo Bill sets up his “Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” He opens on April 3. The show features gunfights and an Indian attack on a settler’s cabin and then a rendition of the Battle of Littler Big Horn.
Burnham sees that the labor strike might become worse so he negotiates with the carpenters and ironworkers to get them a minimum wage and time and a half or double time for weekends and holidays.
Back in Chicago, Olmsted realizes his work will have to go on at night after the fair closes. He is frustrated with Ulrich and the fear that Ulrich has transferred his loyalty to Burnham, with the plans that have not arrived, and the lack of rain and unfinished waterworks.
Rain does begin to fall, which the fair organizers welcome at first. However, it does not cease and grows heavier. Buildings leak, dust turns to mud, and the unfinished parts of the fair loom larger. It is hard for Olmsted’s landscape work in particular, but he keeps up the pace of work (in the closing weeks there are over 20,000 workers present each day). Burnham pushes him to get the Court of Honor into presentable shape. Olmsted does not like shortcuts but does what he can for Opening Day.
The opening is Monday and trains bearing men from all over the country and the world are arriving. President Grover Cleveland is among them. A British reporter writes that he is shocked at the heartbreaking and perplexing unfinished nature of the scene.
At the same time, Holmes opens the World’s Fair Hotel.
Analysis
Larsen continues weaving together his stories of Holmes, Prendergast and Harrison, and Burnham and the architects. As he does so he further contrasts the Black City, or Chicago itself, with the White City, the World’s Fair. Outside the fair, unemployed men begin pouring into the city, and those men without jobs, “Burnham knew, faced homelessness and poverty; their families confronted the real prospect of starvation” (155). Journalist and photographer Jacob Riis of How the Other Half Lives (1890) “toured Chicago’s foulest districts and pronounced them worse than anything he had seen in New York” (212). Banks continued to fail, strikes loomed, and industrial production slowed down dramatically.
The contrast is striking: whereas the Black City “lay steeped in smoke and garbage . . . here in the White City of the fair visitors found clean public bathrooms, pure water, an ambulance service, electric streetlights, and a sewage-processing system that yielded acres of manure for farmers”; the fair thus “revealed to its visitors a vision of what a city could and ought to be” (247).
It will not just be the clean facilities and utilities that strike visitors to the fair, however; the buildings with their stunning shade of pure white, their neoclassical style, and their surrounding of a sparkling pool of water beguile visitors (more on visitors’ reactions and experiences in the next analysis). One of the fascinating elements of these buildings is that they look permanent but are actually temporary; they are gilded, illusory, superficial intimations of opulence. Historian Rebecca Graff looks at this element of the World’s Fair and connects it to its larger context of the Gilded Age, an era rife with “increasingly developed systems of ‘-izations’ and ‘-ations’: industrialization, transportation, urbanization, education, communication, bureaucratization, corporatization.” There was an abiding desire to get rich and to “demonstrate it materially.” This era featured even more cheap, mass-produced consumer goods than ever before, as well as new forms of leisure and entertainment, and the middle class reveled in their ability to buy goods that looked more expensive than they were due to new practices of replicating costly items with cheaper materials.
Graff discusses the origins of modern world’s fairs, such as London’s Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851. These are fairs which display, in encyclopedic fashion, raw materials, new inventions, manufactured goods, art, food, entertainment, “native” peoples, and more, all held within temporary cities and meant to glorify the nation that hosted the fair. They come from “the phenomenon of industrial capitalism, where a customer base of millions might be reached to consume the goods on display at the fair.” The architecture’s ephemerality is a main theme because these fairs needed to be constructed in record time yet impress the visitors. Thus, cheap materials and cost-effective solutions were key; staff, essentially a counterfeit marble, is a perfect example of this, for “it could be carved and sculpted into any architectural fantasy, resulting paradoxically in sculptures that looked ancient though were built to last for only six months.”
The paradox for visitors was that the buildings and other structures of the fair looked permanent but they were only intended to last for six months. Indeed, arson wiped out most of the buildings not long after the close, leaving very little left in Jackson Park to remind people of their collective dream. The illusion can be considered problematic in that it was showing a reality that didn’t exist and couldn’t endure, but it was also a respite from the troubles the nation faced in 1893. In addition, it offers a fascinating example of Gilded Age America’s deepening obsession with material culture, the commodification of everyday life, spectacle, and image and illusion.
