The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

The pain reminded him daily that his time on the planet was nearing its end.

“This prolonging of a man’s life doesn’t interest me when he’s done his work and has done it pretty well.”

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.”

Paul Lindau, an author and publisher, described it as “a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point.”

Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. “I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future,” he wrote. “In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years.”

Six steam-powered dredges the size of floating barns gnawed at the lakeshore, as five thousand men with shovels and wheelbarrows and horse-drawn graders slowly scraped the landscape raw, many of the men wearing bowlers and suitcoats as if they just happened to be passing by and on impulse chose to pitch in.

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.

This constant Victorian minuet of false grace consumed time. He needed more power—not for his own ego but for the sake of the exposition. Unless the pace of decision-making accelerated, he knew, the fair would fall irreparably behind schedule, yet if anything the barriers to efficiency were increasing in size and number.