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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.
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.”
Once built, the Montauk was so novel, so tall, it defied description by conventional means. No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
“The most marvelous exhibit of modern times or ancient times has now just closed successfully at Paris,” he told the Tribune. “Whatever you do is to be compared with that. If you equal it you have made a success. If you surpass it you have made a triumph. If you fall below it you will be held responsible by the whole American people for having assumed what you are not equal to.
Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.”
Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or remain motionless. When he resolved at last to move to Chicago, he was still using his given name, Herman Webster Mudgett.
after only one year moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the West’s leading scientific medical schools, noted for its emphasis on the controversial art of dissection.
And romantic stories: how Potter Palmer had been so in love with his wife, Bertha, that he had given her a luxurious hotel, the Palmer House, as a wedding present.
“Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.”
“a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.”
“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.”
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.
City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy. Walt came next, on December 5, 1901. The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie”
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They knew he was a killer, but he was a charming killer.
