The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

The summary

On a gray January morning in 1891, America’s most celebrated architects stepped from their carriages onto a square mile of sand and half-dead oaks on Chicago’s South Side. This was Jackson Park, where the World’s Columbian Exposition was to open in twenty-seven months, and they “gazed,” Daniel Burnham wrote, “with a feeling almost of despair.” Robert Peabody said flatly, “It can’t be done.” Burnham looked at him: “That point is settled.”

It got built. And while it went up, a young doctor calling himself H. H. Holmes finished a building of his own a few streetcar stops west — block-long, with a soundproof vault, gas jets he opened from his closet, a greased chute to the basement, and a kiln that ran at three thousand degrees.

The fair was built on will, not genius

Burnham had flunked the entrance exams at Harvard and Yale. His gift was organization; his partner John Root supplied the art. Five days after that tour of Jackson Park, Root died of pneumonia at forty-one, and the papers assumed the fair had died with him. Burnham paced below the deathbed shouting “damn!” and was back at his desk Monday writing twelve letters. What followed was logistics enforced by temper, starting with the one-word sign over that desk: RUSH.

The beauty came from a few shared rules: neoclassical buildings clad in “staff” — plaster and jute over wood frames, not a brick on the grounds — with every cornice on the Court of Honor at exactly sixty feet. At a meeting the fair’s director of color happened to miss, the thought came: make it all perfectly white. The painter Frank Millet invented spray paint to finish in time. Visitors walked in and wept.

The last hole was the Eiffel Tower. Burnham told a dinner of engineers that the architects had covered themselves in glory while they had contributed nothing. A thirty-three-year-old steel inspector from Pittsburgh sat there feeling “cut to the quick,” and left with a machine already whole in his head: thirty-six cars the size of Pullman coaches on two 250-foot bicycle wheels, 2,160 people lifted three hundred feet at once. George Ferris’s wheel opened fifty-one days late and never faltered.

Holmes built the same city’s negative

Herman Mudgett of Gilmanton, New Hampshire, had already schemed to defraud insurers with cadavers before he reached Chicago in 1886, took a new name from the newest detective in fiction, and talked a dying druggist’s wife out of her store. She had gone to see relatives in California, he explained, and decided to stay.

He designed the block across the street himself and fired crews fast enough that no worker saw the whole plan. The second floor held thirty-five rooms, six corridors and fifty-one doors, some windowless and airtight. A bricklayer built the basement kiln, told it was for bending plate glass; the furnace man who boosted its heat later conceded it resembled “a crematory for dead bodies.” He never used force. He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much, and women adored him for it.

He chloroformed his bookkeeper Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl on Christmas Eve 1891, paid a man named Chappell thirty-six dollars to strip the flesh from her bones, and sold the skeleton to a medical college. He did the same a year later with his secretary Emeline Cigrand; when police finally opened the vault, a woman’s bare footprint was etched into the enamel inside the door. On July 5, 1893, the morning after taking two Texas sisters to the fair’s fireworks, he asked Anna Williams to fetch a document from that vault, then sat listening at the gas pipe.

His hotel opened with the fair and filled with young women; male travelers were told, regretfully, that there were no vacancies.

The real subject is the city

Larson claims less than the subtitle suggests. Everything in quotation marks comes from a document, and he keeps reaching for an explanation plainer than devilry. A thousand trains a day brought single women into Chicago — never before, Jane Addams wrote, had so many young girls been “suddenly released from the protection of the home.” The city logged nearly eight hundred violent deaths in the first half of 1892, and its few detectives, mostly ward-boss appointees, joked about a “mysterious disappearances department.”

People did notice him. A tenant watched two men haul a heavy new trunk out of his locked office and concluded he had murdered Emeline. She neither moved out nor went to the police, because nobody expected the police to care. Two families hired private detectives; Holmes shook their hands and told them to stop by anytime.

Both stories end in fire

Two days before the closing ceremony a delusional Irishman named Prendergast, convinced the mayor owed him a job, shot Carter Harrison at his front door. The celebration became a memorial. The next summer arsonists burned the seven great palaces during the Pullman strike, and Chicago watched the glow from its rooftops without regret.

The other ending took a Philadelphia detective, Frank Geyer, who had just lost his own wife and daughter in a house fire and spent the summer of 1895 canvassing hotel registers in five cities for three missing Pitezel children. He dug two girls out of a Toronto cellar and found the boy’s teeth and organs in an Indianapolis chimney flue. Holmes hanged in 1896 after confessing to twenty-seven murders, most of them lies. Nine are certain.

The bottom line

Larson’s argument is not that evil shadows greatness but that both fed on the same thing: a raw, anonymous city where nobody was watching. The fair drew 27.5 million visits and left America the Ferris wheel, alternating current and the City Beautiful movement; it also handed Holmes a supply of strangers. Read it for history that moves like a thriller without inventing a word — though be warned: the murders pull harder than the architecture, and the architecture is the better story.