“We should try to make the boating feature of the exposition a gay and lively one,” he wrote. He loathed the clatter and smoke of steam launches; he wanted electric boats designed specifically for the park, with emphasis on graceful lines and silent operation. It was most important that these boats be constantly but quietly in motion, to provide diversion for the eye, peace for the ear. “What we shall want is a regular service of boats like that of an omnibus line in a city street,” he wrote. He also envisioned a fleet of large birchbark canoes paddled by Indians in deerskin and feathers and recommended that various foreign watercraft be moored in the fair’s harbor. “I mean such as Malay proas, catamarans, Arab dhows, Chinese sanpans, Japanese pilot boats, Turkish caiques, Esquimaux kiacks, Alaskan war canoes, the hooded boats of the Swiss Lakes, and so on.”
A far more important outcome of the Rookery meeting, however, was Olmsted’s recognition that the architects’ noble dreams magnified and complicated the already-daunting challenge that faced him in Jackson Park. When he and Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park in New York, they had planned for visual effects that would not be achieved for decades; here he would have just twenty-six months to reshape the desolation of the park into a prairie Venice and plant its shores, islands, terraces, and walks with whatever it took to produce a landscape rich enough to satisfy his vision. What the architects’ drawings had shown him, however, was that in reality he would have far fewer than twenty-six months. The portion of his work that would most shape how visitors appraised his landscape—the planting and grooming of the grounds immediately surrounding each building—could only be done
after
the major structures were completed and the grounds cleared of construction equipment, temporary tracks and roads, and other aesthetic impedimenta. Yet the palaces unveiled in the Rookery were so immense, so detailed, that their construction was likely to consume nearly all the remaining time, leaving little for him.
Soon after the meeting Olmsted composed a strategy for the transformation of Jackson Park. His ten-page memorandum captured the essence of all he had come to believe about the art of landscape architecture and how it should strive to conjure effects greater than the mere sum of petals and leaves.
He concentrated on the fair’s central lagoon, which his dredges soon would begin carving from the Jackson Park shore. The dredges would leave an island at the center of the lagoon, to be called, simply, the Wooded Island. The fair’s main buildings would rise along the lagoon’s outer banks. Olmsted saw this lagoon district as the most challenging portion of the fair. Just as the Grand Court was to be the architectural heart of the fair, so the central lagoon and Wooded Island were to constitute its landscape centerpiece.
Above all he wanted the exposition landscape to produce an aura of “mysterious poetic effect.” Flowers were not to be used as an ordinary gardener would use them. Rather, every flower, shrub, and tree was to be deployed with an eye to how each would act upon the imagination. This was to be accomplished, Olmsted wrote, “through the mingling intricately together of many forms of foliage, the alternation and complicated crossing of salient leaves and stalks of varying green tints in high lights with other leaves and stalks, behind and under them, and therefore less defined and more shaded, yet partly illumined by light reflected from the water.”
He hoped to provide visitors with a banquet of glimpses—the undersides of leaves sparkling with reflected light; flashes of brilliant color between fronds of tall grass waving in the breeze. Nowhere, he wrote, should there be “a display of flowers demanding attention as such. Rather, the flowers to be used for the purpose should have the effect of flecks and glimmers of bright color imperfectly breaking through the general greenery. Anything approaching a gorgeous, garish or gaudy display of flowers is to be avoided.”
Sedges and ferns and graceful bulrush would be planted on the banks of the Wooded Island to conjure density and intricacy and “to slightly screen, without hiding, flowers otherwise likely to be too obtrusive.” He envisioned large patches of cattails broken by bulrush, iris, and flag and pocketed with blooming plants, such as flame-red cardinal flower and yellow creeping buttercup—planted, if necessary, on slightly raised mounds so as to be just visible among the swaying green spires in the foreground.
On the far shore, below the formal terraces of the buildings, he planned to position fragrant plants such as honeysuckle and summersweet, so that their perfume would rise into the nostrils of visitors pausing on the terraces to view the island and the lagoon.
The overall effect, he wrote, “is thus to be in some degree of the character of a theatrical scene, to occupy the Exposition stage for a single summer.”
It was one thing to visualize all this on paper, another to execute it. Olmsted was nearly seventy, his mouth aflame, his head roaring, each night a desert of wakefulness. Even without the fair he faced an intimidating portfolio of works in progress, chief among them the grounds of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina. If everything went perfectly—
if
his health did not degrade any further,
if
the weather held,
if
Burnham completed the other buildings on time,
if
strikes did not destroy the fair,
if
the many committees and directors, which Olmsted called “that army our hundreds of masters,” learned to leave Burnham alone—Olmsted
might
be able to complete his task on time.
A writer for
Engineering Magazine
asked the question no one had raised at the Rookery: “How is it possible that this vast amount of construction, greatly exceeding that of the Paris Exhibition of 1889, will be ready in two years?”
For Burnham, too, the meeting in the Rookery had produced a heightened awareness of how little time remained. Everything seemed to take longer than it should, and nothing went smoothly. The first real work in Jackson Park began on February 11, when fifty Italian immigrants employed by McArthur Brothers, a Chicago company, began digging a drainage ditch. It was nothing, routine. But word of the work spread, and five hundred union men stormed the park and drove the workers off. Two days later, Friday the thirteenth, six hundred men gathered at the park to protest McArthur’s use of what they alleged were “imported” workers. The next day two thousand men, many armed with sharpened sticks, advanced on McArthur’s workers, seized two, and began beating them. Police arrived. The crowd backed off. McArthur asked Mayor Cregier for protection; Cregier assigned the city’s corporation counsel, a young lawyer named Clarence Darrow, to look into it. Two nights later the city’s unions met with officers of the fair to demand that they limit the workday to eight hours, pay union-scale wages, and hire union workers before all others. After two weeks of deliberation the fair’s directors accepted the eight-hour day but said they’d think about the rest.
There was conflict, too, among the fair’s overseers. The National Commission, made up of politicians and headed by Director-General George Davis, wanted financial control; the Exposition Company, run by Chicago’s leading businessmen and headed by President Lyman Gage, refused: The company had raised the money, and by God the company would spend it, in whatever way it chose.
Committees ruled everything. In his private practice Burnham was accustomed to having complete control over expenditures needed to build his skyscrapers. Now he needed to seek approval from the Exposition Company’s executive committee at every step, even to buy drafting boards. It was all immensely frustrating. “We must push this now,” Burnham said. “The delays have seemed interminable.”
But he did make progress. For example, he directed a contest to choose a female architect to design the Woman’s Building for the fair. Sophia Hayden of Boston won. She was twenty-one years old. Her fee was the prize money: a thousand dollars. The male architects each got ten thousand. There had been skepticism that a mere woman would be able to conceive such an important building on her own. “Examination of the facts show[s] that this woman had no help whatever in working up the designs,” Burnham wrote. “It was done by herself in her home.”
In March, however, all the architects acknowledged that things were proceeding far too slowly—that if they built their structures as originally planned out of stone, steel, and brick, the buildings could not possibly be finished by Opening Day. They voted instead to clad their buildings in “staff,” a resilient mixture of plaster and jute that could be molded into columns and statuary and spread over wood frames to provide the illusion of stone. “There will not be a brick on the grounds,” Burnham said.
In the midst of all this, as the workload increased, Burnham realized he could put off no longer the hiring of a designer to replace his beloved John Root. He needed someone to manage his firm’s ongoing work while he tended to the exposition. A friend recommended Charles B. Atwood of New York. McKim shook his head. There were stories about Atwood, and questions of dependability. Nonetheless, Burnham arranged to meet Atwood in New York, at the Brunswick Hotel.
Atwood stood him up. Burnham waited an hour, then left to catch his train. As he was crossing the street, a handsome man in a black bowler and cape with black gun-muzzle eyes approached him and asked if he was Mr. Burnham.
“I am,” Burnham said.
“I’m Charles Atwood. Did you want to see me?”
Burnham glared. “I am going back to Chicago; I’ll think it over and let you know.” Burnham caught his train. Once back in Chicago he went directly to his office. A few hours later Atwood walked in. He had followed Burnham from New York.
Burnham gave him the job.
Atwood had a secret, as it happens. He was an opium addict. It explained those eyes and his erratic behavior. But Burnham thought him a genius.
As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word:
RUSH.
Time was so short, the Executive Committee began planning exhibits and appointing world’s fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair “a family of twelve or fourteen of the fierce little midgets.”
The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to complete his mission.
Beyond the fairgrounds’ new fence, turmoil and grief engulfed Chicago. Union leaders threatened to organize unions worldwide to oppose the fair.
The Inland Architect,
a prominent Chicago journal, reported: “That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World’s Fair.” Such behavior, the journal said, “would be called treason in countries less enlightened and more arbitrary than ours.” The nation’s financial condition worsened. Offices in the newest of Chicago’s skyscrapers remained vacant. Just blocks from the Rookery, Burnham & Root’s Temperance Building stood huge and black and largely empty. Twenty-five thousand unemployed workers roamed the city. At night they slept in police stations and in the basement of City Hall. The unions grew stronger.
The old world was passing. P. T. Barnum died; grave-robbers attempted to steal his corpse. William Tecumseh Sherman died, too. Atlanta cheered. Reports from abroad asserted, erroneously, that Jack the Ripper had returned. Closer at hand, a gory killing in New York suggested he might have migrated to America.
In Chicago the former warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, Major R. W. McClaughry, began readying the city for the surge in crime that everyone expected the fair to produce, establishing an office in the Auditorium to receive and distribute Bertillon identifications of known criminals. Devised by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, the system required police to make a precise survey of the dimensions and physical peculiarities of suspects. Bertillon believed that each man’s measurements were unique and thus could be used to penetrate the aliases that criminals deployed in moving from city to city. In theory, a detective in Cincinnati could telegraph a few distinctive numbers to investigators in New York with the expectation that if a match existed, New York would find it.
A reporter asked Major McClaughry whether the fair really would attract the criminal element. He paused a moment, then said, “I think it quite necessary that the authorities here should be prepared to meet and deal with the greatest congregation of criminals that ever yet met in this country.”
Cuckoldry
A
T THE
H
OLMES BUILDING
at Sixty-third and Wallace, now known widely in the neighborhood as “the castle,” the Conner family was in turmoil. Lovely, dark Gertrude—Ned’s sister—one day came to Ned in tears and told him she could not stay in the house another moment. She vowed to catch the first train back to Muscatine, Iowa. Ned begged her to tell him what had occurred, but she refused.
Ned knew that she and a young man had begun courting, and he believed her tears must have resulted from something he had said or done. Possibly the two had been “indiscreet,” although he did not think Gertrude capable of so drastic a moral lapse. The more he pressed her for an explanation, the more troubled and adamant she became. She wished she had never come to Chicago. It was a blighted, hellish place full of noise and dust and smoke and inhuman towers that blocked the sun, and she hated it—hated especially this gloomy building and the ceaseless clamor of construction.
When Holmes came by, she would not look at him. Her color rose. Ned did not notice.
Ned hired an express company to collect her trunk and saw her to the station. Still she would not explain. Through tears, she said good-bye. The train huffed from the station.