While holidaying in the great American West this summer, I read a fantastic, completely addictive, couldn't-put-it-down book. For those who haven't yet had the good fortune to delve into The Devil in the White City, you have quite a treat in store.
Before picking up Erik Larson's fine book at Philadelphia International Airport, I had been suffering from something of a reading hiatus. For over a year, I had been faffing about with the same (admittedly rather well written) George Washington biography. As a former English Literature student who devoured books quicker than you could down a pint of beer, this was a sorry state of affairs. Now I'm rather smitten with all pursuits literary. I have joined a book group and the public library is my new best buddy.
But more about The Devil in the White City...
It is 1893. The setting is Chicago: the most dynamic and energetic city in the Union. The World's Fair is about to get underway, and one of America's most notorious serial killers is at large. This is a tale of two utterly driven men. One is Daniel Burnham: the architect who masterminded and delivered the fair that transformed his beloved Chicago and captivated the world. The other is H.H. Holmes: enterprising, unfailingly charming, and intent on murder. Larson interweaves the two narratives into a thrilling historical account of the momentous and sinister events that played out in Chicago.
Ok, so you had me at "World's Fair". Since making a radio feature about the 1939 World's Fair in New York, I have been intrigued by these colossal exhibitions. They began to surface in France in the 1840s, but the first to really take the globe by storm was Britain's Great Exhibition of 1851. The famous Crystal Palace was a demonstration of Victorian confidence: an immense glass construction that boasted of British architectural and engineering prowess. Encompassing nearly a million square feet, Joseph Paxton's vast, yet elegant building hosted 14,000 exhibitors beneath its cast iron and glass structure.
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| London's Crystal Palace |
Call to mind any great Victorian who might be on your imaginary dinner party list. Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin and countless other leading luminaries visited the Crystal Palace to take in the spectacle. Six million people passed through the doors of what was essentially a gigantic greenhouse. The profits that it generated not only funded London's Victoria & Albert Museum, but also paid for the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum - quite a gift to the nation.
Charlotte Bronte summed up the scale and impact the great Fairs had on the public:
It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect.
Over 40 years later, ambitious Chicago set down a marker, vowing to deliver the most impressive global gathering ever unveiled. And she succeeded. 27 million came to marvel at Chicago's Columbian Exposition. The Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the dishwasher all had their premieres at the Fair. And it made an international superstar out of Buffalo Bill (more on him another time). Erik Larson's book transplants you to 1893, recreating the visceral scale of Chicago's Fair. Our hero Burnham's achievements are rendered so lifelike on the page, that I barely noticed that I had missed by boat by 120 years.
Breakfast cereals aside, the real stars of Chicago's show were its enormous white neoclassical buildings. Lit up like filmstars, they lent the Fair its grace and other-worldliness, and its pseudonym, The White City. The Fair's lauded landscape designer Frederick Olmstead may be better famed for creating New York's Central Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But perhaps the Fair's greatest legacy is in the neoclassical palaces that proudly define America's greatest metropolises today. Washington DC's Mall and the Lincoln Memorial, Chicago's Golden Mile, Philadelphia's Art Museum and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway all owe an architectural debt to Burnham and his White City.
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| Memorial Hall, Philadelphia |
Sadly, most of the Fairs' proud palaces have long since disappeared. My new home city of Philadelphia hosted the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, celebrating America's 100th birthday. Only two buildings survive today. Lost in faded grandeur in the bucolic Fairmount Park is Memorial Hall - a breathtaking Beaux Arts vision. And that's really saying something in a city littered with knockout architecture. This fine edifice calls to mind a time of lofty ambitions and limitless discovery. Those grand exhibition halls may have faded away, but their ghosts still grace our avenues and parkways.
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