He was lying. In fact, Mudgett was convinced that the fundamentals of the approach had merit—that by faking the deaths of others, he could indeed fleece life insurance companies. As a physician, he knew no means existed for establishing the identities of burned, dismembered, or otherwise disfigured corpses. And he did not mind handling bodies. They were “material,” no different from firewood, although somewhat more difficult to dispose of.
He was lying too about needing money. The owner of the house in Mooers Forks where he boarded, D. S. Hays, noticed Mudgett often displayed large sums of cash. Hays grew suspicious and watched Mudgett closely—albeit not closely enough.
Mudgett left Mooers Fork at midnight, without paying his lodging bill to Hays. He made his way to Philadelphia, where he hoped to situate himself in a drugstore and eventually to become a partner or owner. He found nothing suitable, however, and instead took a job as a “keeper” at the Norristown Asylum. “This,” he wrote, “was my first experience with insane persons, and so terrible was it that for years afterwards, even now sometimes, I see their faces in my sleep.” Within days he quit.
Eventually he did find a position at one of Philadelphia’s drugstores. Soon afterward a child died after taking medicine acquired at the store. Mudgett immediately left the city.
He caught a train for Chicago but quickly found that he could not work as a druggist in Illinois until he passed a licensing examination in the state capital in Springfield. There, in July 1886, the year Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced his detective to the world, Mudgett registered his name as Holmes.
Holmes understood that powerful new forces were acting upon Chicago, causing a nearly miraculous expansion. The city was growing in all available directions, and where it abutted the lake, it grew skyward, sharply increasing the value of land within the Loop. Everywhere he looked he saw evidence of the city’s prosperity. Even the smoke was proof. The city’s newspapers loved to crow about the startling increase in the number of workers employed by Chicago’s industries, especially meat-packing. Holmes knew—everyone knew—that as skyscrapers soared and the stockyards expanded their butchery, the demand for workers would remain high, and that workers and their supervisors would seek to live in the city’s suburbs, with their promise of smooth macadam, clean water, decent schools, and above all air untainted by the stench of rotting offal from the Union Yards.
As the city’s population swelled, demand for apartments turned into “flat fever.” When people could not find or afford apartments, they sought rooms in private homes and boardinghouses, where typically the rent included meals. Speculators thrived and created eerie landscapes. In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes. Theodore Dreiser reached Chicago about when Holmes did and was struck by this landscape of anticipation. “The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone,” he wrote in
Sister Carrie.
“There were regions, open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas lamps fluttering in the wind.”
One of the fastest-growing suburbs was Englewood. Even a newcomer like Holmes could tell that Englewood was booming. Real estate advertisements were full of testimonials to its location and appreciating values. Englewood in fact had been growing quickly ever since the Great Fire of 1871. One resident recalled how immediately after the fire “there was such a rush for homes in Englewood and the population increased so rapidly that it was impossible to keep up with it.” Old railroad men still called it Chicago Junction or Junction Grove or simply the Junction, for the eight railroad lines that converged within its borders, but after the Civil War residents grew weary of the industrial resonance of the name. In 1868 a Mrs. H. B. Lewis suggested a new one, Englewood, the name of a New Jersey town in which she previously had lived and which had taken its name from a forest in Carlisle, England, legendary for having sheltered two outlaws of Robin Hood stripe. It was here, in what Chicagoans called a “streetcar” suburb, that stockyard supervisors chose to settle, as did officials of companies headquartered in the skyscrapers of the Loop. They acquired big houses on streets named Harvard and Yale that were lined with elm, ash, sycamore, and linden and posted with signs barring all but essential wagon traffic. They sent their children to school and went to church and attended meetings of the Masons and of forty-five other secret societies having lodges, kingdoms, and hives in the village. On Sundays they wandered among the velvet lawns of Washington Park and, if in the mood for solitude, the wind-blasted ridges of Jackson Park at the easternmost end of Sixty-third Street, on the lakeshore.
They took trains and streetcars to work and congratulated themselves on living upwind of the stockyards. The developer of a large Englewood parcel touted this asset in a catalog promoting the auction of two hundred residential lots called the Bates Subdivision: “To the business men of the Union Stock Yards it is particularly convenient and accessible, and free from the odors that are wafted by the prevailing winds to the most fashionable localities of the City.”
Dr. Holton did die. Holmes made his widow an offer: He would buy the store, and she could continue to reside in the second-floor apartment. He couched his offer in prose that made it seem as if he were proposing the purchase not to benefit himself but solely to free the grieving Mrs. Holton from the burden of work. He touched her arm as he spoke. After she signed the deed over to him, he stood and thanked her with tears in his eyes.
He financed the purchase mainly with money he raised by mortgaging the store’s fixtures and stock, agreeing to repay the loan at a rate of one hundred dollars a month (about three thousand dollars in twenty-first-century value). “My trade was good,” he said, “and for the first time in my life I was established in a business that was satisfactory to me.”
He put up a new sign: H
.
H
.
H
OLMES
P
HARMACY.
As word spread that a young, handsome, and apparently unmarried young doctor now stood behind the counter, an increasing number of single women in their twenties began to patronize the store. They dressed nicely and bought things they did not need. Longtime customers also liked the new proprietor, although they missed the comforting presence of Mrs. Holton. The Holtons had been there when their children were sick; had comforted them when these illnesses proved mortal. They knew Mrs. Holton had sold the place. But why had they not seen her around town?
Holmes smiled and explained that she had decided to visit relatives in California, something she had long wanted to do but could never find the time or money to accomplish and certainly could not have done with her husband on his deathbed.
As time wore on and the inquiries dwindled, Holmes modified the story a bit. Mrs. Holton, he explained, liked California so much she had decided to settle there permanently.
“Becomingness”
N
OTHING.
T
HERE HAD BEEN SO
much energy, so much bravado, but now—nothing. It was July 1890, nearly six months since Congress had voted to give the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago, but the forty-five men on the exposition’s board of directors still had not decided where within the city the fair should be built. At the time of the vote, with the city’s pride at stake, all Chicago had sung with one voice. Its emissaries had boasted to Congress that the city could deliver a grander and more appropriate setting than anything New York, Washington, or any other city could propose. Now, however, each quarter of Chicago was insisting on a location within its own boundaries, and the squabbling had stymied the board.
The fair’s Committee on Grounds and Buildings had asked Burnham, quietly, to evaluate a number of locations in the city. With equal discretion, the committee assured Burnham and Root that ultimately they would direct the design and construction of the fair. For Burnham, each lost moment was a theft from the already scanty fund of time allotted to build the exposition. The final fair bill signed in April by President Benjamin Harrison established a Dedication Day for October 12, 1892, to honor the moment four hundred years earlier when Columbus had first sighted the New World. The formal opening, however, would not occur until May 1, 1893, to give Chicago more time to prepare. Even so, Burnham knew, much of the fair would have to be ready for the dedication. That left just twenty-six months.
A friend of Burnham’s, James Ellsworth, was one of the board’s directors; he too was frustrated by the stalemate, so much so that on his own initiative, during a business trip to Maine in mid-July, he visited the Brookline, Massachusetts, office of Frederick Law Olmsted to try and persuade him to come to Chicago and evaluate the sites under consideration and perhaps take on the task of designing the fair’s landscape. Ellsworth hoped that Olmsted’s opinion, backed by his reputation as the wizard of Central Park, would help force a decision.
That Ellsworth, of all people, should be driven to this step was significant. Initially he had been ambivalent about whether Chicago should even seek the world’s fair. He agreed to serve as a director only out of fear that the exposition was indeed at risk of fulfilling the meager expectations of the East and becoming “simply a fair as the term generally implies.” He believed it imperative that the city protect its civic honor by producing the greatest such event in the world’s history, a goal that seemed to be slipping from Chicago’s grasp with each sweep of the clock’s hands.
He offered Olmsted a consulting fee of one thousand dollars (equivalent to about thirty thousand today). That the money was his own, and that he lacked official authority to hire Olmsted, were two points Ellsworth failed to disclose.
Olmsted declined. He did not design fairs, he told Ellsworth. He doubted, moreover, that enough time remained for anyone to do the fair justice. To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future,” he wrote. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”
Ellsworth insisted that what Chicago had in mind was something far grander than even the Paris exposition. He described for Olmsted a vision of a dream city designed by America’s greatest architects and covering an expanse at least one-third larger than the Paris fair. Ellsworth assured Olmsted that by agreeing to help, he would be joining his name to one of the greatest artistic undertakings of the century.
Relenting slightly, Olmsted said he would think about it and agreed to meet with Ellsworth two days later, on Ellsworth’s return from Maine.
Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.” Too often, however, he would “come back in a year and find destruction: why? ‘My wife is so fond of roses;’ ‘I had a present of some large Norway spruces;’ ‘I have a weakness for white birch trees—there was one in my father’s yard when I was a boy.’ ”
The same thing happened with large civic clients. He and Calvert Vaux had built and refined Central Park from 1858 through 1876, but forever afterward Olmsted found himself defending the park against attempts to tinker with its grounds in ways he considered tantamount to vandalism. It wasn’t just Central Park, however. Every park seemed subject to such abuse.
“Suppose,” he wrote to architect Henry Van Brunt, “that you had been commissioned to build a really grand opera house; that after the construction work had been nearly completed and your scheme of decoration fully designed you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that suitable place must be made for a huge organ, a pulpit and a dipping pool. Then at intervals afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so refitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical cliniques, for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station and shot tower?” That, he wrote, “is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.”
What landscape architecture needed, Olmsted believed, was greater visibility, which in turn would bring greater credibility. The exposition could help, he realized, providing it did rise to the heights envisioned by Ellsworth. He had to weigh this benefit, however, against the near-term costs of signing on. His firm already had a full roster of work, so much, he wrote, that “we are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety.” And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache.