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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.
In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.
It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze, that had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago “the Windy City.”
He had found his calling, he wrote in 1868, and told his parents he wanted to become the “greatest architect in the city or country.” The next year, however, he bolted for Nevada with friends to try his hand at mining gold. He failed. He ran for the Nevada legislature and failed again.
The Great Chicago Fire took nearly eighteen thousand buildings and left more than a hundred thousand people homeless.
Sherman told him he respected Burnham’s sense of honor but rejected his withdrawal. He said quietly, “There is a black sheep in every family.” Later Sherman, a married man, would run off to Europe with the daughter of a friend.
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
She told them Root was dead. In his last moments, she said, he had run his fingers over his bedding as if playing the piano. “Do you hear that?” he whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful? That’s what I call music.”
“I was born with the devil in me,” he wrote. “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”
For example, he directed a contest to choose a female architect to design the Woman’s Building for the fair. Sophia Hayden of Boston won. She was twenty-one years old. Her fee was the prize money: a thousand dollars. The male architects each got ten thousand.
Atwood had a secret, as it happens. He was an opium addict. It explained those eyes and his erratic behavior. But Burnham thought him a genius.
The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.
Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest. She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.
The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.
The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation. He composed a pledge that the Bureau of Education mailed to virtually every school. As originally worded, it began, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands …”
Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne,
The city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, “Our Carter,” even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale,
A giant map of the United States made of pickles.
Buffalo Bill promptly declared Waif’s Day at the Wild West and offered any kid in Chicago a free train ticket, free admission to the show, and free access to the whole Wild West encampment, plus all the candy and ice cream the children could eat. Fifteen thousand showed up.
“As the light was fading in the sky, millions of lights were suddenly flashed on, all at one time,” she recalled, years later. “Having seen nothing but kerosene lamps for illumination, this was like getting a sudden vision of Heaven.”
It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”
He used his remaining funds to buy two expensive suits, on the theory that whatever he did next, he had to look convincing. “But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.” Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations.
