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
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