were coming.
Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments.
“I could never make him out,” Erickson said.
A woman named Strowers occasionally did Holmes’s laundry. One day he offered to pay her $6,000 if she would acquire a $10,000 life insurance policy and name him beneficiary. When she asked why he would do such a thing, he explained that upon her death he’d make a profit of $4,000, but in the meantime she’d be able to spend her $6,000 in whatever manner she chose.
To Mrs. Strowers, this was a fortune, and all she had to do was sign a few documents. Holmes assured her it was all perfectly legal.
She was healthy and expected to live a good long while. She was on the verge of accepting the offer when Holmes said to her, softly, “Don’t be afraid of me.”
Which terrified her.
In November 1890 Holmes learned along with the rest of Chicago that the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition had at last reached a decision as to where to build the fair. To his delight, he read that the main site was to be Jackson Park, due east of his building at the lake end of Sixty-third, with exhibits also in downtown Chicago and Washington Park and along the full length of Midway Boulevard.
Holmes knew the parks from his bicycle journeys. Like most Americans, he had become caught up in the bicycle craze that was ignited by the advent of the “safety” bicycle, with its same-sized wheels and chain-and-sprocket drive. Unlike most Americans, however, Holmes sought also to capitalize on the craze by buying bicycles on credit, then reselling them without ever paying off the initial purchase. He himself rode a Pope.
The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the
Tribune
offered a six-room house for sale at Forty-first and Ellis, a mile or so north of Jackson Park, and boasted that during the fair the new owner could expect to let four of the six rooms for nearly a thousand dollars a month (about $30,000 in twenty-first-century currency). Holmes’s building and land were valuable to begin with, given Englewood’s continued growth, but now his property seemed the equivalent of a seam of gold ore.
An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.
Pilgrimage
O N M ONDAY EVENING, D ECEMBER 15, 1890, a day noteworthy in Chicago for its extraordinary warmth and elsewhere for the gunshot death of Sitting Bull, Daniel Burnham stepped aboard a train bound for New York and what he knew would be the most crucial encounter of the exposition odyssey.
He entered a bright green coach, one of George Pullman’s Palace cars, where the air hung with the stillness of a heavy tapestry. A bell clanged and continued clanging in a swinging rhythm as the train surged at grade level into the heart of the city at twenty miles an hour, despite the presence at arm’s reach of grip-cars, carriages, and pedestrians. Everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leaped past crossing gates waving a raccoon’s tail of white and black smoke. The train clicked by the Union Stock Yards, doubly pungent in the day’s strange warmth, and skirted sierras of black coal capped with grimy melting snow. Burnham treasured beauty but saw none for miles and miles and miles, just coal, rust, and smoke in endless repetition until the train entered the prairie and everything seemed to go quiet. Darkness fell, leaving a false twilight of old snow.
The exposition directors’ decision on where to locate the fair had caused a rapid acceleration of events that was encouraging but also unsettling, because suddenly the whole thing had become more real, its true magnitude more daunting. Immediately the directors had ordered a rough plan of the fair, to be delivered
Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments.
“I could never make him out,” Erickson said.
A woman named Strowers occasionally did Holmes’s laundry. One day he offered to pay her $6,000 if she would acquire a $10,000 life insurance policy and name him beneficiary. When she asked why he would do such a thing, he explained that upon her death he’d make a profit of $4,000, but in the meantime she’d be able to spend her $6,000 in whatever manner she chose.
To Mrs. Strowers, this was a fortune, and all she had to do was sign a few documents. Holmes assured her it was all perfectly legal.
She was healthy and expected to live a good long while. She was on the verge of accepting the offer when Holmes said to her, softly, “Don’t be afraid of me.”
Which terrified her.
In November 1890 Holmes learned along with the rest of Chicago that the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition had at last reached a decision as to where to build the fair. To his delight, he read that the main site was to be Jackson Park, due east of his building at the lake end of Sixty-third, with exhibits also in downtown Chicago and Washington Park and along the full length of Midway Boulevard.
Holmes knew the parks from his bicycle journeys. Like most Americans, he had become caught up in the bicycle craze that was ignited by the advent of the “safety” bicycle, with its same-sized wheels and chain-and-sprocket drive. Unlike most Americans, however, Holmes sought also to capitalize on the craze by buying bicycles on credit, then reselling them without ever paying off the initial purchase. He himself rode a Pope.
The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the
Tribune
offered a six-room house for sale at Forty-first and Ellis, a mile or so north of Jackson Park, and boasted that during the fair the new owner could expect to let four of the six rooms for nearly a thousand dollars a month (about $30,000 in twenty-first-century currency). Holmes’s building and land were valuable to begin with, given Englewood’s continued growth, but now his property seemed the equivalent of a seam of gold ore.
An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.
Pilgrimage
O N M ONDAY EVENING, D ECEMBER 15, 1890, a day noteworthy in Chicago for its extraordinary warmth and elsewhere for the gunshot death of Sitting Bull, Daniel Burnham stepped aboard a train bound for New York and what he knew would be the most crucial encounter of the exposition odyssey.
He entered a bright green coach, one of George Pullman’s Palace cars, where the air hung with the stillness of a heavy tapestry. A bell clanged and continued clanging in a swinging rhythm as the train surged at grade level into the heart of the city at twenty miles an hour, despite the presence at arm’s reach of grip-cars, carriages, and pedestrians. Everyone on the street paused to watch as the train leaped past crossing gates waving a raccoon’s tail of white and black smoke. The train clicked by the Union Stock Yards, doubly pungent in the day’s strange warmth, and skirted sierras of black coal capped with grimy melting snow. Burnham treasured beauty but saw none for miles and miles and miles, just coal, rust, and smoke in endless repetition until the train entered the prairie and everything seemed to go quiet. Darkness fell, leaving a false twilight of old snow.
The exposition directors’ decision on where to locate the fair had caused a rapid acceleration of events that was encouraging but also unsettling, because suddenly the whole thing had become more real, its true magnitude more daunting. Immediately the directors had ordered a rough plan of the fair, to be delivered
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