But Ellsworth’s vision was compelling. Olmsted talked it over with his sons and with the newest member of the firm, Henry Sargent Codman—“Harry”—an intensely talented young landscape architect who had quickly become a trusted adviser and confidant.
When Ellsworth returned, Olmsted told him he had changed his mind. He would join the venture.
Once back in Chicago, Ellsworth secured formal authority to hire Olmsted and arranged to have him report directly to Burnham.
In a letter to Olmsted, Ellsworth wrote: “My position is this: The reputation of America is at stake in this matter, and the reputation of Chicago is also at stake. As an American citizen, you have an equal interest in furthering the success of this great and grand undertaking, and I know from talking with you, that on an occasion like this you grasp the whole situation and will be confined to no narrow limits.”
Certainly that seemed to be the case when, during later contract negotiations, Olmsted at Codman’s urging requested a fee of $22,500 (about $675,000 today) and got it.
On Wednesday, August 6, 1890, three weeks after Ellsworth’s Brookline visit, the exposition company telegraphed Olmsted: “When can you be here?”
Olmsted and Codman arrived three days later, on Saturday morning, and found the city ringing from the news that the final census count had confirmed the earlier, preliminary ranking of Chicago as America’s second largest city, even though this final tally also showed that Chicago’s lead over Philadelphia was a skimpy one, only 52,324 souls. The good news was a salve for a difficult summer. Earlier, a heat wave had brutalized the city, killing seventeen people (including a man named Christ) and neatly eviscerating Chicago’s boasts to Congress that the city possessed the charming summer climate—“cool and delicious,” the
Tribune
had said—of a vacation resort. And just before the heat wave, a rising young British writer had published a scalding essay on Chicago. “Having seen it,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.”
To Burnham, Codman seemed amazingly young, late twenties at the most. To be so young and have the trust of America’s greatest landscape architect, Codman must have been very bright indeed. He had obsidian eyes that looked as if they could punch holes in steel. As for Olmsted, Burnham was struck by the slightness of his frame, which seemed structurally insufficient to support so massive a skull. That head: Bald for most of its surface, trimmed at bottom with a tangled white beard, it resembled an ivory Christmas ball resting on a bed of excelsior. Olmsted looked worn from his travels, but his eyes were large, warm, and bright. He wanted to start work immediately. Here at last, Burnham saw, was a man who understood the true cost of each lost minute.
Burnham of course knew of Olmsted’s achievements: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the grounds of Cornell and Yale, and scores of other projects. He knew also that before launching the field of landscape architecture, Olmsted had been a writer and editor who had journeyed throughout the antebellum South exploring the culture and practice of slavery. Olmsted had a reputation for brilliance and tireless devotion to his work—but also for an acerbic candor that emerged most predictably in the presence of men who failed to understand that what he sought to create were not flower beds and ornamental gardens but expanses of scenery full of mystery, shadow, and sun-stippled ground.
Olmsted, for his part, knew that Burnham had been a leading force in driving buildings into the clouds. Burnham was said to be the business genius of his firm, Root the artist. It was with Burnham that Olmsted felt the greatest kinship. Burnham was decisive, blunt, and cordial; he spoke under a level blue gaze that Olmsted found reassuring. In private communication Olmsted and Codman agreed that Burnham was a man they could work with.
The tour began at once, but it was hardly an objective one. Burnham and Root clearly favored one location in particular: Jackson Park, on Chicago’s South Side, due east of Englewood on the lakeshore. As it happened, Olmsted knew this ground. Twenty years earlier, at the request of Chicago’s South Park commissioners, Olmsted had studied both Jackson Park and, to its west, Washington Park, and the broad boulevard that connected them, called Midway. In the plans he had produced for the commissioners, he envisioned transforming Jackson Park from a desert of sand and stagnant pools into a park unlike any other in the nation, focused on water and boating, with canals, lagoons, and shady coves. Olmsted finished those plans shortly before the Great Fire of 1871. In the rush to rebuild, Chicago never got around to realizing his vision. The park became part of Chicago during the 1889 annexations, but otherwise, Olmsted saw, little had changed. He knew its flaws, its
many
flaws, but believed that with a lot of deft dredging and sculpting, the park could be transformed into a landscape unlike any that had ever seated an exposition.
For he recognized that Jackson Park had something no other city in the world could equal: the spreading blue plain of Lake Michigan, as comely a backdrop for a fair as anyone could hope for.
On Tuesday, August 12, just four days after he and Codman arrived in Chicago, Olmsted filed a report with the exposition directors, who then to his chagrin made the report public. Olmsted had intended the report for a professional audience, one that would take for granted Jackson Park’s fundamental acceptability and value the report as an unflinching guide to the challenges ahead. He was surprised to find the report put to use by opposing cliques as evidence that the fair could not possibly be placed in Jackson Park.
The directors asked for a second report. Olmsted delivered it on Monday, August 18, six days after the first. Burnham saw to his delight that Olmsted had given the directors somewhat more than they perhaps had wished to receive.
Olmsted was no literary stylist. Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence. But his prose revealed the depth and subtlety of his thinking about how landscape could be modified to produce an effect in the mind.
First he had set down a few principles and done a little chiding.
Rather than squabbling over sites, he lectured, the different factions needed to recognize that for the exposition to succeed, everyone had to work together, no matter which location the directors selected. “It is to be desired, let us say, that it should be better understood than it yet seems to be by some of your fellow citizens, that the Fair is not to be a Chicago Fair. It is a World’s Fair, and Chicago is to stand before the world as the chosen standard bearer for the occasion of the United States of America. All Chicago can afford to take nothing less than the very best site that can be found for the fair, regardless of the special local interests of one quarter of the city or another.”
Every landscape element of the fair, he argued, had to have one “supreme object, viz., the becomingness: the
becomingness
of everything that may be seen as a modestly contributive part of a grand whole; the major elements of which whole will be in the towering series of the main exhibition structures. In other words, the ground, with all it carries, before, between, and behind the buildings, however dressed with turf, or bedecked with flowers, shrubs or trees, fountains, statues, bric-a-brac, and objects of art, should be one
in unity of design
with the buildings; should set off the buildings and should be set off, in matters of light and shadow and tone, by the buildings.”
Clearly certain sites were endowed more richly than others. More would be gained by associating the exposition with some feature of striking natural beauty “than by the most elaborate and costly artificial decorations in the form of gardening features, terraces, fountains and statues, than it is possible for the mind of man to devise or the hand of man to carry out.” What the many factions in the battle for the fair seemed to ignore was that Chicago had “but one natural object at all distinctively local, which can be regarded as an object of much grandeur, beauty or interest. This is the Lake.”
The lake was beautiful and always changing in hue and texture, but it was also, Olmsted argued, a novelty capable of amplifying the drawing power of the exposition. Many visitors from the heart of the country “will, until they arrive here, never have seen a broad body of water extending to the horizon; will never have seen a vessel under sail, nor a steamboat of half the tonnage of those to be seen hourly passing in and out of Chicago harbor; and will never have seen such effects of reflected light or of clouds piling up from the horizon, as are to be enjoyed almost every summer’s day on the lake margin of the city.”
Olmsted next considered four specific candidates: a site on the lakeshore above the Loop; two inland sites, one of which was Garfield Park on the western perimeter of the city; and of course Jackson Park.
Although Olmsted himself preferred the northernmost site, he insisted Jackson Park could work and “produce results of a pleasingly becoming character, such as have not hitherto been aimed at in World’s Fairs.”
Olmsted dismissed the inland sites out of hand as being flat and monotonous and too far from the lake. In critiquing Garfield Park, he again took a moment to express his annoyance at Chicago’s inability to select a site, a failure he found all the more exasperating given the elaborate boasts issued by the city’s leading men back when they were lobbying Congress for the fair:
“But considering what has been so strenuously urged upon the attention of the country in regard to the number and excellence of sites which Chicago has to offer; considering what advantages the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia possessed in the neighboring scenery; considering what advantages of the same order would have been possessed by the Fair if it had been given a site in the beautiful Rock Creek Valley at Washington, of which the Nation is just taking possession for a Park; considering what superb views were presented of the Palisades and up the valley of the Hudson on the one hand, and the waters and varied shores of Long Island Sound on the other, from the site offered for the Fair by New York; considering all this, we cannot but fear that the choice of a site in the rear of the city, utterly without natural landscape attraction, would be found a disappointment to the country, and that it would give occasion for not a little ironical reference to the claims of an endless extent of
perfect
sites made last winter before Congress.”
The emphasis was Olmsted’s.
Burnham hoped this second report would at last compel a decision. The delay was maddening, absurd, the hourglass long ago upended. The board seemed unaware that Chicago now risked becoming a national, even global, embarrassment.
Weeks passed.
At the end of October 1890 the site question remained unresolved. Burnham and Root tended to their fast-growing practice. Contractors had begun erecting two of the firm’s newest, tallest Chicago skyscrapers, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Temple and the Masonic Fraternity Temple, at twenty-one stories the tallest building in the world. The foundations of both were nearly finished and awaited the installation of cornerstones. With architecture and construction such a fascination in Chicago, cornerstone ceremonies became extravagant affairs.
The Temperance celebration took place at the corner of La Salle and Monroe, beside a ten-ton boulder of dark New Hampshire granite seven feet square by three feet thick. Here Burnham and Root joined other dignitaries, including Mrs. Frances E. Willard, president of the Union, and Carter Henry Harrison, a former mayor who, with four terms already under his belt, was again running for the office. When Harrison appeared, wearing his usual black slouch hat, his pocket quilled with cigars, the crowd roared a welcome, especially the Irish and union men who saw Harrison as a friend of the city’s lower classes. The presence of Burnham, Root, and Harrison beside the Temperance stone was more than a bit ironic. As mayor, Harrison had kept a couple of cases of fine bourbon in his office at city hall. The city’s stern Protestant upper class saw him as a civic satyr whose tolerance of prostitution, gambling and alcohol had allowed the city’s vice districts, most notably the Levee—home of the infamous bartender and robber Mickey Finn—to swell to new heights of depravity. Root was a notorious bon vivant, whom Louis Sullivan once described as “a man of the world, of the flesh, and considerably of the devil.” And Burnham, in addition to monitoring the global passage of his Madeira, each year bottled four hundred quarts of lesser stuff sent to him by a friend and personally selected the wines for the cellar of the Union League Club.
With great ceremony Burnham handed a silver-plated trowel to Mrs. T. B. Carse, president of the Temple Building Association, whose smile suggested she knew nothing of these monstrous habits or at least was willing for the moment to ignore them. She scooped up a mound of mortar previously laid for purposes of the ceremony, then reapplied it and tapped it back into place, prompting a witness to observe, “she patted the mortar as a man sometimes pats the head of a curly-haired boy.” She passed the trowel to the fearsome Mrs. Willard, “who stopped the mortar more heartily, and got some of it on her gown.”
Root, according to a witness, leaned toward friends and suggested sotto voce that they all cut away for cocktails.
Nearby, at the distribution warehouse of the
Chicago Inter Ocean,
a widely read and respected newspaper, a young Irish immigrant—and staunch supporter of Carter Harrison—completed his workday. His name was Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast. He ran a squad of obstreperous newsboys, whom he loathed, and who loathed him in return, as was clear by their taunts and practical jokes. That Prendergast might one day shape the destiny of the World’s Columbian Exposition would have seemed ridiculous to these boys, for Prendergast to them was about as hapless and sorry a human being as they could imagine.
He was twenty-two years old, born in Ireland in 1868; his family emigrated to the United States in 1871 and in August that year moved to Chicago, just in time to experience the Great Fire. He was always, as his mother said, “a shy and retiring kind of a boy.” He got his grade-school education at Chicago’s De La Salle Institute. Brother Adjutor, one of his teachers, said, “While in school he was a remarkable boy in this way, that he was very quiet and took no part in the play of the other students at noon time. He would generally stand around. From the appearance of the boy I would be led to think that he was not well; that he was sick.” Prendergast’s father got him a job delivering telegrams for Western Union, which the boy held for a year and a half. When Prendergast was thirteen, his father died, and he lost his only friend. For a time his withdrawal from the world seemed complete. He awakened slowly. He began reading books about law and politics and attending meetings of the Single-Tax Club, which embraced Henry George’s belief that private landowners should pay a tax, essentially rent, to reflect the underlying truth that land belonged to everyone. At these meetings Prendergast insisted on taking part in every conversation and once had to be carried from the room. To his mother, he seemed to be a different man: well read, animated, involved. She said: “He got smart all of a sudden.”