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The Devil in the White City

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The Devil in the White City

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A non-fiction story by Erik Larson is set in the early 1890s in Chicago. We are introduced to the architects of the city who had designed some of its most iconic buildings and areas such as the stockyards. These were the men who designed the 1893 Columbian Exposition otherwise known as the Chicago World's Fair. It was named for the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. Larson takes us into the world of Victorian Chicago and all its romance and dangers.

We might assume that Chicago was a much safer place then than now and we would be wrong. As hard to believe as it might be, Chicago was a far more dangerous place prior to the erection of the Fair. To venture anywhere in the city outside the most crowded areas even in broad daylight could cost you your life. Murders were, in fact, a daily occurrence. The city--like all the big cities of the America--was brutish, dark (with soot and very little lighting), squalid, filthy and ugly. The buildings were largely utilitarian and not decorative. The rich men who owned and ran the city were not about to spend money to make a building look attractive. They could have cared less about aesthetics. So a sweatshop looked like a sweatshop, a factory looked like factory and, like the workers inside, was dingy, dirty, grimy and in broken down from long, relentless hours of labor. Muggers, gangs and vandals roamed and ruled the streets. They would kill you for your clothing, your cheap jewelry, your pocket change or for no reason whatsoever other than you just happened to be there to get killed by them.

In the movie "The Gangs of New York" there is a depiction of the bones of murder victims being sold to medical schools. Larson confirms this to be true. Medical schools were in great need of skeletons and paid good money for fully intact ones. There was a no-questions-asked policy regarding such specimens. Graves were robbed and unfortunate stragglers waylaid to feed the demand. Today, wigs are made from human hair grown by people for the express purpose of eventually shearing it off and selling it--at least, that's what we are told. In Chicago, Detroit, New York, St. Louis, Boston and other such cities, the hair obtained for wigs came from murder victims. When a prostitute or some other unfortunate woman was waylaid, raped and murdered and her body tossed into a ravine or alley, if she had nice hair, rag-and-bone men would vie for the honor of shearing it off, washing it and selling it to wig manufacturers for a tidy sum. Few wearers of wigs and toupees back then gave any thought of where the hair they sported upon their own thinning pates had come from, of who it really belonged to and how they had come to lose it. I think the same is true of today.

When we hear politicians today criticizing the crime-ridden cities their opponents represent--Obama and the terrible state of Chicago are frequent targets of these attacks and that, indeed, it was the influx of minorities that destroyed the security of those cities--we should bear in mind that those cities were always dangerous. The amount of crime will rise and fall over the years and decades but there was never a time when those cities were safe and the amount of minorities made little difference in the prodigious crime rates.

But following the world's fair held in Paris in 1889 (Exposition Universelle), the opportunity for a new world's fair came to the shores of the U.S. Most assumed that New York would shoulder the burden and glory of erecting this fair but Chicago stepped forward and demanded the honor. After some debating and fighting, the Windy City was given the nod. The city's top architect' headed by Daniel Hudson Burnham, John Root and Frederick Olmstead set about designing how the fair was to be laid out and built. They had an incredibly short time to work and the weather during much of the building effort was horrendously bad but they worked on with an army of laborers.

The one thing, that Burnham and the other men were adamant about was that somehow, they would have to be outdo the Eiffel Tower as the centerpiece of the fair. The tower in Paris was built specifically for the Exposition Universelle and was the tallest structure in the world at that time and the world was utterly astounded by it. The men in Chicago talked it over and decided they should not build a taller structure just to best Paris. No, Paris, deserved that honor. Chicago would have to respond with something completely out of the blue that would make everyone forget about the Eiffel Tower but no one knew what yet. All sorts of structures were built in miniature or meticulously laid out in blueprints and presented to a committee who would vote upon the viability. Many factors were involved but none of the designs cut muster for one reason or other.

Not until a young engineer named George Ferris stepped forward with his idea was any considered grand and unusual enough to qualify as the centerpiece of the fair. He proposed an enormous, revolving steel wheel fitted with 36 cars that each held dozens of people. So ambitious was this project that Ferris couldn't finish it on time for the fair's opening day. It would be some weeks before it was ready. For one thing, the ground was frozen solid and the wheel's base had to be anchored very firmly into the ground but nothing could dig through the frozen surface. In desperation, Ferris thought up something simple and yet ingenious, something that had never been done before. He had hot steam pumped into the ground until it became soft and pliable and the digging began. When the wheel was finally constructed it, stood 264 feet in diameter with 36 cars each accommodating five dozen guests. Far shorter than the Eiffel Tower but far more stunning in its function.

Image

Many were worried that it was so flimsy that it would crumble under its own weight, it did not. Many others insisted that it would topple in the first good windstorm. When one such storm finally hit and did a good deal of damage to many of the buildings at fair, the Wheel was unfazed. In fact, people were trapped on the wheel when the storm hit and yet were much safer than people on the ground. the Wheel simply turned in the wind and the cars swung easily to and fro causing minimal discomfort to the the passengers compared to the chaos on the ground. Even more remarkable, the Wheel functioned perfectly well on the first try! Everyone expected it would take months of fine-tuning and redesigning before it would be safe enough for the public but as soon as it was erected and tested, it functioned perfectly and never faltered throughout the run of the fair which lasted from 1 May to 30 October in 1893. It soon became the main attraction and millions of people rode on it.

The fair was so popular that it changed the American cultural landscape. One man, Sol Bloom (who actually brought Ferris's idea to Burnham and the others), proposed that a "midway plaisance" be established where the various exhibits could be sampled one after the other including the Wheel. Burnham granted Bloom's request and the term "midway" or "carnival midway" made its way into the American lexicon. Every carnival and amusement park built thereafter had a midway in imitation of the Chicago World's Fair and every one had a Ferris Wheel for the same reason. Cotton candy, funnel cakes and what not were also first sold at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In fact, a lot of new-fangled foods were sold at the many restaurants and eateries that dotted the 700-acre fair. These included everything from Shredded Wheat to Aunt Jemima pancake mix to Cream O' Wheat. Some foods debuted at the fair, some came earlier regionally but made their world debut in Chicago but all became permanent fixtures of the American eating experience, part of American daily life forever afterward.

The fair featured exhibits from all over the world, all manner of flora (courtesy of Olmsted) and fauna--pygmies, belly dancers, Chinese acrobats, whirling dervishes, camels, zebras, lions, pythons, exotic orchids, plants, trees, vines, grasses and so on (many of the "faraway" performers were actually American but who knew?)--there were snake-charmers, magicians, escape artists, musicians (some playing a new-fangled music called ragtime), incredible fireworks displays all courtesy of Sol Bloom who certainly did his part to make the fair interesting and fun. When the belly dancers had no music to dance to and the pianist had no idea what kind of music to play, Bloom, neither a musician nor composer, spontaneously dashed off a melody for him to use. Bloom never copyrighted it which would have made him a mint if he had:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THcamJ5WSFQ

The fair used thousands upon thousands of electric light bulbs, then a brand new phenomenon. People were so astonished at the sight of so many dazzling lights that soon nearly every home in the country was fitted for these electric lights. For people to come to the fair, the city had to be made safe and attractive. So for the first time, Americans had the idea of electric streetlights, police patrols guided by a central dispatcher and buildings made to look beautiful and parks to dazzle the eye.

When the fair came to an end, it was a sad business. Many missed the bustle of crowds, the beautiful "White City" all lit up, many of the laborers were thrown out of work and something else that happened that Larson covers that threw a definite pall over the city and its fair.

But then who is the Devil that the title of the book mentions? A serial killer lived in Chicago at this time--Herman Webster Mudgett--who used the fair as a lure to procure victims. He was an incredible psychopath but, like so many of them, was very charming and convincing in his mannerisms. He could elicit sympathy from those who disliked him and sweep women off their feet. But he killed without mercy, without provocation, without remorse and he could kill anybody--no one was off limits to Mudgett. When his secrets were uncovered, no one could believe that he could have operated as long as he did without discovery. No one could believe the depths of his depravity.

"The Devil in the White City" is my first book by Erik Larson but it won't be my last. One of the things that impresses me about him is that he will go to any length to document his story and yet does not a have staff of interns to look stuff up and fly off to parts unknown to gather data. Larson operates alone and yet leaves no stone unturned in his quest for the story. So when you're in the mood for non-fiction that reads like the best fiction out there to the point where you even have to wonder if it could really have happened (and it did) pick up this amazing story by Erik Larson and enjoy.
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