The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

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.

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.

“Never before in 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.”

“a human being with his skin removed.”

What does this mean

In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.

Jack the Ripper’s five-murder spree in 1888

This

What insane juxtaposition this is. On the outside tfhe fair is light and fun but underneath the true city is grimy and dark.

oozed

Um ew

“a gigantic peepshow of utter horror, but extraordinarily to the point.”

Whitechapel Club,

This sounds like the most badass club-the original Murderinos

“They are blue. Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue

He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long.

Is this the trait of a great manipulator or someone lacking social skills, such as someone on the spectrum?

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.

Both Olmsted and Hunt were hard at work on George Washington Vanderbilt’s manor, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina,

“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.”

horse-drawn fire trucks.

Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time:

there's a place in france song

Within the fair’s buildings visitors encountered devices and concepts new to them and to the world. They heard live music played by an orchestra in New York and transmitted to the fair by long-distance telephone. They saw the first moving pictures on Edison’s Kinetoscope, and they watched, stunned, as lightning chattered from Nikola Tesla’s body. They saw even more ungodly things—the first zipper; the first-ever all-electric kitchen, which included an automatic dishwasher; and a box purporting to contain everything a cook would need to make pancakes, under the brand name Aunt Jemima’s. They sampled a new, oddly flavored gum called Juicy Fruit, and caramel-coated popcorn called Cracker Jack. A new cereal, Shredded Wheat, seemed unlikely to succeed—“shredded doormat,” some called it—but a new beer did well, winning the exposition’s top beer award. Forever afterward, its brewer called it Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The White City had drawn men and protected them; the Black City now welcomed them back, on the eve of winter, with filth, starvation, and violence.

The fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12 a national holiday, Columbus Day,

the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts, transformed into a permanent structure, now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

1901 Burnham built the Fuller Building at the triangular intersection of Twenty-third and Broadway in New York, but neighborhood residents found an uncanny resemblance to a common domestic tool and called it the Flatiron Building.