reviewed by Stephanie Stubbs, Assoc. AIA

Can you feel it in the air? Chicago holds architectural mojo as no other city can do. It is possessed by the fresh, pioneering spirit of Sullivan, Burnham, Wright, the first skyscraper, a climb of steel and elevator to the sky, and the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 that rocketed the bold ascendancy of architecture as a profession and architects as keepers of can-do civic pride.

How neat: Erik Larson, who has captured that feeling in his national bestseller, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Mayhem at the Fair That Changed America, will serve as opening keynoter at the AIA national convention, June 10 in Chicago.

A bold portrait
The White City was, of course, the 1893 World’s Fair, meant to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. Chicago fought New York and Washington, D.C., long and hard for the honor of hosting the exhibition, and Larson paints a bold portrait of a brash young city eager to show the world what it’s made of.

Daniel Burnham, protagonist of The Devil in the White City, and his partner John Root (who, tragically, died before the fair was completed) led the venerable and veritable Who’s Who of architects contributing to the Herculean effort. They included (drum roll, please . . . ) Louis Sullivan, George Post, Charles McKim, Richard Hunt, Robert Peabody, and Henry Van Brunt—the crème de la crème of the design world and The American Institute of Architects. The 21-year-old Sophia Hayden designed the Women’s Building. (She got a $1,000 prize, Larson writes. The men each got $10,000.) Joining them as landscape architect was none other than Frederick Law Olmsted.

Heroes and heroics
It is thrilling to read Larson’s larger-than-life descriptions of the architects and their work. He paints them as heroes, but then, aren’t they? They designed and oversaw production of some 630 acres of parks and 200 buildings (some absolutely humongous) on unstable soil in some of the worst weather in a century. They battled fire and torrential rains, cranky city officials and impossible deadlines. They improvised and sometimes compromised, but they got the job done. And for a magnificent six months, 27.5 million visitors (the equivalent of one out of three people in the country at the time) marveled at the White City and afforded Chicago a new respect.

One feels for Burnham in the trenches: “Burnham fought to boost the rate of construction, especially of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which had to be completed by Dedication Day,” Larson writes. “In March, with just half a year remaining until the dedication, he invoked the ‘czar’ clause of his construction contracts. He ordered the builder of the Electricity Building to double his workforce and to put the men to work at night under electric lights. He threatened the Manufactures contractor with the same fate if he did not increase the pace of his work.”

Providing stark contrast to Burnham’s good is another tale. The dark side of the book is a car wreck of horror at which you can’t help but stare. It’s the story of H.H. Holmes, né Herman Webster Mudgett, a coldly calculating mass murderer and classic psychopath who uses the fair’s lure to snare victims, who included three wives and actually may have numbered in the dozens. He specifically retrofitted buildings to serve as an intricate part of his destructive plans. (And you’ll have to read the book to find out how!).

A novelist’s soul
Larson’s compelling style zips both tales smoothly down mostly parallel but sometimes crisscrossing tracks with deft speed that keeps curiosity high. He tells such a good story that you forget you’re ingesting history along with the narrative: “Larson is a historian . . . with a novelist’s soul,” writes the Chicago Sun-Times. Abetting him are both his meticulous research and the turn-of-the-century’s lost art of letter writing that he skillfully weaves into his tale.

Describing Olmsted’s landscaping parti, Larson writes, “Above all, he wanted the exposition landscape to produce an aura of ‘mysterious poetic effect.’ Flowers were not to be used as an ordinary gardener would use them. Rather, each flower, shrub, and tree was to be deployed with an eye toward how each would act upon the imagination. This was to accomplish, Olmsted wrote, ‛the mingling intricately together of many forms of foliage, the alternation and complicated crossing of salient leaves and stalks of varying green tints in high lights with other leaves and stalks, and therefore less defined and more shaded, yet partly illumined by light reflected from the water.’”

Readers be warned that the skill used to concoct visions of vegetative and constructed delight in the White City also paints the details of Chicago’s stockyards as well as Holmes’s dastardly deeds and their discovery. “The eeriest phase of the investigation began when the police, holding their flickering lanterns high, entered the hotel basement, a cavern of brick and timber measuring 50 by 165 feet. The discoveries came quickly: a vat of acid with eight . . . ”

A compelling legacy
Larson’s narrative skill is buoyed by the fact that the 1893 World’s Fair—as a slice of history—is just so darned interesting. The fair brought us so many fascinating innovations, from AC incandescent light bulbs to Cracker Jack to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The tale of design and construction of the world’s first Ferris Wheel, Chicago’s nose-thumbing answer to the Paris World Expo’s Eiffel Tower, presents its own absorbing, 250-foot-tall side show. But most importantly, the fair spawned a style of architecture and the City Beautiful movement, a new scope for city planning whose influences still are felt today.

The Devil offers a great read about the people and the buildings that shaped Chicago a century and several architectural mindsets ago. Its White side presents a perfect precursor to the AIA convention, evoking an almost palpable aura of Burnham, his friends, and their vast accomplishments. If nothing else, the book could transport us all a bit closer to the inexorable spirit that perennially brings us to “unite in fellowship” after all.

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