The Devil in the White City Read Online Free PDF Page B

midnight and made the open-window nights of summer unbearable. In poor neighborhoods garbage mounded in alleys and overflowed giant trash boxes that became banquet halls for rats and bluebottle flies. Billions of flies. The corpses of dogs, cats, and horses often remained where they fell. In January they froze into disheartening poses; in August they ballooned and ruptured. Many ended up in the Chicago River, the city’s main commercial artery. During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city’s drinking water. In rain any street not paved with macadam oozed a fragrant muck of horse manure, mud, and garbage that swelled between granite blocks like pus from a wound. Chicago awed visitors and terrified them. French editor Octave Uzanne called it “that Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic.” Paul Lindau, an author and publisher, described it as “a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point.”
    Burnham loved Chicago for the opportunity it afforded, but he grew wary of the city itself. By 1886 he and Margaret were the parents of five children: two daughters and three sons, the last, a boy named Daniel, born in February. That year Burnham bought an old farmhouse on the lake in the quiet village of Evanston, called by some “the Athens of suburbs.” The house had sixteen rooms on two floors, was surrounded by “superb old trees,” and occupied a long rectangle of land that stretched to the lake. He bought it despite initial opposition from his wife and her father, and did not tell his own mother of his planned move until the purchase was complete. Later he wrote her an apology. “I did it,” he explained, “because I can no longer bear to have my children in the streets of Chicago. . . .”
    Success came easily to Burnham and Root, but the partners did have their trials. In 1885 a fire destroyed the Grannis Block, their flagship structure. At least one of them was in the office at the time and made his escape down a burning stairway. They moved next to the top floor of the Rookery. Three years later a hotel they had designed in Kansas City collapsed during construction, injuring several men and killing one. Burnham was heartbroken. The city convened a coroner’s inquest, which focused its attention on the building’s design. For the first time in his career Burnham found himself facing public attack. He wrote to his wife, “You must not worry over the affair, no matter what the papers say. There will no doubt be censure, and much trouble before we get through, all of which we will shoulder in a simple, straightforward, manly way; so much as in us lies.”
    The experience cut him deeply, in particular the fact his competence lay exposed to the review of a bureaucrat over whom he had no influence. “The coroner,” he wrote Margaret three days after the collapse, “is a disagreeable little doctor, a political hack, without brains, who distresses me.” Burnham was sad and lonesome and wanted to go home. “I do so long to be there, and be at peace again, with you.”
    A third blow came in this period, but of a different character. Although Chicago was rapidly achieving recognition as an industrial and mercantile dynamo, its leading men felt keenly the slander from New York that their city had few cultural assets. To help address this lack, one prominent Chicagoan, Ferdinand W. Peck, proposed to build an auditorium so big, so acoustically perfect, as to silence all the carping from the East and to make a profit to boot. Peck envisioned enclosing this gigantic theater within a still larger shell that would contain a hotel, banquet room, and offices. The many architects who dined at Kinsley’s Restaurant, which had a stature in Chicago equal to that of Delmonico’s in New York, agreed this would be the single most important architectural assignment in the city’s history and that most likely it