The Devil in the White City

When I was growing up in Iowa, Chicago was "The City," a place of wonder, with museums, exotic animals, musicals, and skyscrapers. All the best field trips and family vacations took me to Chicago. I saw Phantom of the Opera at the Auditorium Theater, went up to the top of the Sears Tower, saw my very first dinosaur skeletons at the Field Museum and marveled at the creatures of the deep at the Field Aquarium. I saw Picasso for the very first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, and went to an exhibition that introduced me to Monet. It might sound funny, but my first sight of water that stretched to the horizon was Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. The boats and the infinity of the water made a huge impression on me. And, did I forget to mention the zoo?

So maybe that's why I enjoyed Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City so much. Sure, there were people burned alive in kilns, some graphic dissections, and a taste of the body snatching trade to appeal to my spec fiction sensibilities, but what really kept me reading Larson's book was the architecture. The book recounts the events that led up to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and along the way, the history of the architects who designed and built the fair's famous White City. Some readers may thrill at the mention of the first Ferris Wheel, but I got goosebumps hearing about how the Auditorium Theater was built, and how landscape architect, Frederick Olmstead (who also designed Central Park in New York), chose Andrew Jackson Park as the site for the World's Fair, because it looked over Lake Michigan, the best view in Chicago.

The Devil in the White City showed the Chicago of the 1890's for what it was- a filthy urban center based on the meat packing industry. How could a city of butchers that built its suburbs upwind of the stockyards and whose garbage-strewn streets bred cholera transform itself into the host of the spectacular World's Colombian Exhibition? Larson takes us step by step through the transformation of the fairgrounds and the city. He contrasts this move toward the modern, the civilized, the striving toward establishing culture in the Midwest, with the brutal acts of a serial killer who dwelt and killed in Chicago as the White City rose up, then burned down.

The 1893 Chicago World's fair is coming up in a lot of my reading lately- Sarah Vowell's books, as well as Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. It was a lot of fun to delve more deeply into this historic event.