The Devil in the White City Read online

  Crown Publishers • New York

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Quotes

  Illustration Credits

  Map

  Evils Imminent (A Note)

  PROLOGUE:

  Aboard the Olympic

  Aboard the Olympic

  PART I:

  Frozen Music

  The Black City

  “The Trouble Is Just Begun”

  The Necessary Supply

  “Becomingness”

  “Don’t Be Afraid”

  Pilgrimage

  A Hotel for the Fair

  The Landscape of Regret

  Vanishing Point

  Alone

  PART II:

  An Awful Fight

  Convocation

  Cuckoldry

  Vexed

  Remains of the Day

  A Gauntlet Dropped

  The Angel from Dwight

  Dedication Day

  Prendergast

  “I Want You at Once”

  Chappell Redux

  “The Cold-Blooded Fact”

  Acquiring Minnie

  Dreadful Things Done by Girls

  The Invitation

  Final Preparations

  PART III:

  In the White City

  Opening Day

  The World’s Fair Hotel

  Prendergast

  Night Is the Magician

  Modus Operandi

  One Good Turn

  Nannie

  Vertigo

  Heathen Wanted

  At Last

  Rising Wave

  Independence Day

  Worry

  Claustrophobia

  Storm and Fire

  Love

  Freaks

  Prendergast

  Toward Triumph

  Departures

  Nightfall

  The Black City

  PART IV:

  Cruelty Revealed

  “Property of H. H. Holmes”

  Moyamensing Prison

  The Tenant

  A Lively Corpse

  “All the Weary Days”

  Malice Aforethought

  EPILOGUE:

  The Last Crossing

  The Fair

  Recessional

  Holmes

  Aboard the Olympic

  Notes and Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Erik Larson

  Copyright Page

  To Chris, Kristen, Lauren, and Erin, for making it all worthwhile

  —and to Molly, whose lust for socks kept us all on our toes

  Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.

  DANIEL H. BURNHAM

  DIRECTOR OF WORKS

  WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893

  I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

  DR. H. H. HOLMES

  CONFESSION

  1896

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Map: Rascher Publishing Company. Chicago Historical Society (ICHi–31608).

  Prologue: World’s Columbian Exposition Photographs by C. D. Arnold, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Part I: Chicago Historical Society. ICHi–21795.

  Part II: World’s Columbian Exposition Photographs by C. D. Arnold, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Part III: Photograph by William Henry Jackson. Chicago Historical Society. ICHi–17132.

  Part IV: © Bettman/CORBIS

  Epilogue: Chicago Historical Society. ICHi–25106.

  Notes and Sources: Chicago Historical Society. ICHi–17124.

  Chicago, 1891.

  EVILS IMMINENT

  (A NOTE)

  IN CHICAGO AT THE END of the nineteenth century amid the smoke of industry and the clatter of trains there lived two men, both handsome, both blue-eyed, and both unusually adept at their chosen skills. Each embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized the rush of America toward the twentieth century. One was an architect, the builder of many of America’s most important structures, among them the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.; the other was a murderer, one of the most prolific in history and harbinger of an American archetype, the urban serial killer. Although the two never met, at least not formally, their fates were linked by a single, magical event, one largely fallen from modern recollection but that in its time was considered to possess a transformative power nearly equal to that of the Civil War.

  In the following pages I tell the story of these men and this event, but I must insert here a notice: However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document. The action takes place mostly in Chicago, but I beg readers to forgive me for the occasional lurch across state lines, as when the staunch, grief-struck Detective Geyer enters that last awful cellar. I beg forbearance, too, for the occasional side journey demanded by the story, including excursions into the medical acquisition of corpses and the correct use of Black Prince geraniums in an Olmstedian landscape.

  Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

  ERIK LARSON

  SEATTLE

  PROLOGUE

  Aboard the Olympic

  1912

  The architects (left to right): Daniel Burnham, George Post, M. B. Pickett, Henry Van Brunt, Francis Millet, Maitland Armstrong, Col. Edmund Rice, Augustus St. Gaudens, Henry Sargent Codman, George W. Maynard, Charles McKim, Ernest Graham, Dion Geraldine.

  Aboard the Olympic

  THE DATE WAS APRIL 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63–65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it. What he did know was that his foot hurt badly, more than he had expected. He was sixty-five years old and had become a large man. His hair had turned gray, his mustache nearly white, but his eyes were as blue as ever, bluer at this instant by proximity to the sea. His foot had forced him to delay the voyage, and now it kept him anchored in his suite while the other first-class passengers, his wife among them, did what he would have loved to do, which was to explore the ship’s more exotic precincts. The man loved the opulence of the ship, just as he loved Pullman Palace cars and giant fireplaces, but his foot problem tempered his enjoyment. He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars. The pain reminded him daily that his time on the planet was nearing its end. Just before the voyage he told a friend, “This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.”

  The man was Daniel Hudson Burnham, and by now his name was familiar throughout the world. He was an architect and had done his work pretty well in Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Manila, and many other cities. He and his wife, Margaret, were sailing to Europe in the company of their daughter and her husband for a grand tour that was to continue through the summer. Burnham had chosen this ship, the R.M.S. Olympic of the White Star Line, because it was new and
glamorous and big. At the time he booked passage the Olympic was the largest vessel in regular service, but just three days before his departure a sister ship—a slightly longer twin—had stolen that rank when it set off on its maiden voyage. The twin, Burnham knew, was at that moment carrying one of his closest friends, the painter Francis Millet, over the same ocean but in the opposite direction.

  As the last sunlight of the day entered Burnham’s suite, he and Margaret set off for the first-class dining room on the deck below. They took the elevator to spare his foot the torment of the grand stairway, but he did so with reluctance, for he admired the artistry in the iron scrollwork of its balustrades and the immense dome of iron and glass that flushed the ship’s core with natural light. His sore foot had placed increasing limitations on his mobility. Only a week earlier he had found himself in the humiliating position of having to ride in a wheelchair through Union Station in Washington, D.C., the station he had designed.

  The Burnhams dined by themselves in the Olympic’s first-class salon, then retired to their suite and there, for no particular reason, Burnham’s thoughts returned to Frank Millet. On impulse, he resolved to send Millet a midsea greeting via the Olympic’s powerful Marconi wireless.

  Burnham signaled for a steward. A middle-aged man in knife-edge whites took his message up three decks to the Marconi room adjacent to the officer’s promenade. He returned a few moments later, the message still in his hand, and told Burnham the operator had refused to accept it.

  Footsore and irritable, Burnham demanded that the steward return to the wireless room for an explanation.

  Millet was never far from Burnham’s mind, nor was the event that had brought the two of them together: the great Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Millet had been one of Burnham’s closest allies in the long, bittersweet struggle to build the fair. Its official name was the World’s Columbian Exposition, its official purpose to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, but under Burnham, its chief builder, it had become something enchanting, known throughout the world as the White City.

  It had lasted just six months, yet during that time its gatekeepers recorded 27.5 million visits, this when the country’s total population was 65 million. On its best day the fair drew more than 700,000 visitors. That the fair had occurred at all, however, was something of a miracle. To build it Burnham had confronted a legion of obstacles, any one of which could have—should have—killed it long before Opening Day. Together he and his architects had conjured a dream city whose grandeur and beauty exceeded anything each singly could have imagined. Visitors wore their best clothes and most somber expressions, as if entering a great cathedral. Some wept at its beauty. They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat. Whole villages had been imported from Egypt, Algeria, Dahomey, and other far-flung locales, along with their inhabitants. The Street in Cairo exhibit alone employed nearly two hundred Egyptians and contained twenty-five distinct buildings, including a fifteen-hundred-seat theater that introduced America to a new and scandalous form of entertainment. Everything about the fair was exotic and, above all, immense. The fair occupied over one square mile and filled more than two hundred buildings. A single exhibit hall had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, all at the same time. One structure, rejected at first as a “monstrosity,” became the fair’s emblem, a machine so huge and terrifying that it instantly eclipsed the tower of Alexandre Eiffel that had so wounded America’s pride. Never before had so many of history’s brightest lights, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, Henry Adams, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Nikola Tesla, Ignace Paderewski, Philip Armour, and Marshall Field, gathered in one place at one time. Richard Harding Davis called the exposition “the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War.”

  That something magical had occurred in that summer of the world’s fair was beyond doubt, but darkness too had touched the fair. Scores of workers had been hurt or killed in building the dream, their families consigned to poverty. Fire had killed fifteen more, and an assassin had transformed the closing ceremony from what was to have been the century’s greatest celebration into a vast funeral. Worse had occurred too, although these revelations emerged only slowly. A murderer had moved among the beautiful things Burnham had created. Young women drawn to Chicago by the fair and by the prospect of living on their own had disappeared, last seen at the killer’s block-long mansion, a parody of everything architects held dear. Only after the exposition had Burnham and his colleagues learned of the anguished letters describing daughters who had come to the city and then fallen silent. The press speculated that scores of fairgoers must have disappeared within the building. Even the street-hardened members of the city’s Whitechapel Club, named for the London stalking grounds of Jack the Ripper, were startled by what detectives eventually found inside and by the fact that such grisly events could have gone undiscovered for so long. The rational explanation laid blame on the forces of change that during this time had convulsed Chicago. Amid so much turmoil it was understandable that the work of a young and handsome doctor would go unnoticed. As time passed, however, even sober men and women began to think of him in less-than-rational terms. He described himself as the Devil and contended that his physical shape had begun to alter. Enough strange things began happening to the men who brought him to justice to make his claim seem almost plausible.

  For the supernaturally inclined, the death of the jury foreman alone offered sufficient proof.

  Burnham’s foot ached. The deck thrummed. No matter where you were on the ship, you felt the power of the Olympic’s twenty-nine boilers transmitted upward through the strakes of the hull. It was the one constant that told you—even in the staterooms and dining chambers and smoking lounge, despite the lavish efforts to make these rooms look as if they had been plucked from the Palace of Versailles or a Jacobean mansion—that you were aboard a ship being propelled far into the bluest reaches of the ocean.

  Burnham and Millet were among the few builders of the fair still alive. So many others had gone. Olmsted and Codman. McKim. Hunt. Atwood—mysteriously. And that initial loss, which Burnham still found difficult to comprehend. Soon no one would remain, and the fair would cease to exist as a living memory in anyone’s brain.

  Of the key men, who besides Millet was left? Only Louis Sullivan: embittered, perfumed with alcohol, resenting who knew what, but not above coming by Burnham’s office for a loan or to sell some painting or sketch.

  At least Frank Millet still seemed strong and healthy and full of the earthy good humor that had so enlivened the long nights during the fair’s construction.

  The steward came back. The expression in his eyes had changed. He apologized. He still could not send the message, he said, but at least now he had an explanation. An accident had occurred involving Millet’s ship. In fact, he said, the Olympic was at that moment speeding north at maximum velocity to come to her aid, with instructions to receive and care for injured passengers. He knew nothing more.

  Burnham shifted his leg, winced, and waited for more news. He hoped that when the Olympic at last reached the site of the accident, he would find Millet and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage. In the peace of his stateroom, Burnham opened his diary.

  That night the fair came back to him with extra clarity.

  PART I

  Frozen Music

  Chicago, 1890–91

  Chicago, circa 1889.

  The Black City

  HOW EASY IT WAS TO DISAPPEAR:

  A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before i
n civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.”

  The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. “The parlors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now) rather dull places,” wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent trait of old Chicago. “It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone.” In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to “a human being with his skin removed.”

  Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city’s rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was “roasted.” There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the Ripper’s five-murder spree in 1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America, who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns.