The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

The first time I visited Chicago, I indulged my inner engineer by ending my trip with a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry. It's a science museum with a technology, rather than a natural history, focus, housed in a massive building on the south side. It has a German U-boat in a corner of the basement, a Boeing-727 attached to the balcony, and exhibits including a simulated tour of an entire Carrier Battle Group, a three-story sculptural interpretation of the periodic table, a technically sophisticated presentation of environmental science and technology, and, rather incongruously, a doll house.

The building itself is the last standing remnant of one of the most spectacular events of Chicago's past, the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition - the World's Fair - an event designed to assert America's place in the world, and Chicago's place in America.

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City builds his story of "the fair that changed America," on the thesis that only Gilded-Age Chicago had the combination of gumption, civic pride and business acumen to create the glittering, six-month-long festival which would attract Americans from east to west and European royalty alike, introduce the world to everything from the Ferris wheel to the incandescent light bulb to shredded wheat, and inspire lands of fantasy from Baum's Oz to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom.

Larson's story centers on Daniel Burnham, the fair's director. Burnham's influence as an architect is evident in Chicago's distinctive aesthetic to the present day, but in 1893 and preceding years, his life consisted of the near-impossible task of imagining, designing, and constructing, and overseeing the fair. The stakes were high - unless the fair easily outshone the 1878 Paris Expo, it would be considered a failure, and an embarrassment to the city and the country. Among Burnham's challenges: the bureaucracies of Chicago's business and political communities; a years-too-short construction schedule; budget constraints, exacerbated by a national recession; brutal Chicago winters; the burgeoning labor movement; and the egos of more than a dozen of America's greatest architects and designers, each with a hand in the fair's execution.

Burnham's fair covered 600 acres on the shore of Lake Michigan with an idealized city - the White City of Larson's title - of promenades, lagoons, gardens, fountains, and 200 Beaux arts buildings housing exhibits of culture and technology from around the world. Larson's talents of description are considerable, as the reader's most lasting impressions by far are of the opulence and immensity of the display. It's sometimes surprising how evocative prose of such precision can be. This passage imagines one visitor's first steps inside the massive Manufacturers and Liberal Arts building, the fair's main exhibit space:

A blue haze of human breath and dust blurred the intricate bracing of the ceiling 246 feet above. Halfway to the ceiling, seemingly in midair, were five gigantic electric chandeliers, the largest ever built, each seventy-five feet in diameter and generating 828,000 candlepower. Below the chandeliers spread an indoor city of "gilded domes and glittering minarets, mosques, palaces, kiosks, and brilliant pavilions," according to the popular Rand, McNally & Co. Handbook to the World's Columbian Exposition. At the center stood a clock tower, the tallest of the interior structures, rising to a height of 120 feet. Its self-winding clock told the time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds, from a face seven feet in diameter. As tall as the tower was, the ceiling was yet another 126 feet above. (p. 266)

Yet, Larson is sensible to the fact that the glories of the White City stood in contrast to the desperation of the "black city," the oppressive, industrial gloom that was the factories, stockyards, and tenements of surrounding Chicago. Interlaced with the story of Burnham's quest and triumph is the story of H. H. Holmes (the "Devil"), a psychopathic serial killer for whom industrial-era Chicago, with its constant influx of friendless farm girls seeking work, provided an endless supply of victims who would never be missed.

The pleasure of this book lies in its intricate detail and deliberate pacing, both direct testimonies to Larson's impressive and extensive research, and his talent for reconstructing a story. I was truly fascinated.

Much more information about the book, the Fair, Burnham, Holmes and Larson is available on the publisher's website. Additional information and images are available from the Illinois Institute of Technology Digital History Collection. Definitely check out the photos of the Fair - there's nothing like it.