Free The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Page A

tonnage of those to be seen hourly passing in and out of Chicago harbor; and will never have seen such effects of reflected light or of clouds piling up from the horizon, as are to be enjoyed almost every summer’s day on the lake margin of the city.”
    Olmsted next considered four specific candidates: a site on the lakeshore above the Loop; two inland sites, one of which was Garfield Park on the western perimeter of the city; and of course Jackson Park.
    Although Olmsted himself preferred the northernmost site, he insisted Jackson Park could work and “produce results of a pleasingly becoming character, such as have not hitherto been aimed at in World’s Fairs.”
    Olmsted dismissed the inland sites out of hand as being flat and monotonous and too far from the lake. In critiquing Garfield Park, he again took a moment to express his annoyance at Chicago’s inability to select a site, a failure he found all the more exasperating given the elaborate boasts issued by the city’s leading men back when they were lobbying Congress for the fair:
    “But considering what has been so strenuously urged upon the attention of the country in regard to the number and excellence of sites which Chicago has to offer; considering what advantages the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia possessed in the neighboring scenery; considering what advantages of the same order would have been possessed by the Fair if it had been given a site in the beautiful Rock Creek Valley at Washington, of which the Nation is just taking possession for a Park; considering what superb views were presented of the Palisades and up the valley of the Hudson on the one hand, and the waters and varied shores of Long Island Sound on the other, from the site offered for the Fair by New York; considering all this, we cannot but fear that the choice of a site in the rear of the city, utterly without natural landscape attraction, would be found a disappointment to the country, and that it would give occasion for not a little ironical reference to the claims of an endless extent of
perfect
sites made last winter before Congress.”
    The emphasis was Olmsted’s.
    Burnham hoped this second report would at last compel a decision. The delay was maddening, absurd, the hourglass long ago upended. The board seemed unaware that Chicago now risked becoming a national, even global, embarrassment.
     
    Weeks passed.
    At the end of October 1890 the site question remained unresolved. Burnham and Root tended to their fast-growing practice. Contractors had begun erecting two of the firm’s newest, tallest Chicago skyscrapers, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Temple and the Masonic Fraternity Temple, at twenty-one stories the tallest building in the world. The foundations of both were nearly finished and awaited the installation of cornerstones. With architecture and construction such a fascination in Chicago, cornerstone ceremonies became extravagant affairs.
    The Temperance celebration took place at the corner of La Salle and Monroe, beside a ten-ton boulder of dark New Hampshire granite seven feet square by three feet thick. Here Burnham and Root joined other dignitaries, including Mrs. Frances E. Willard, president of the Union, and Carter Henry Harrison, a former mayor who, with four terms already under his belt, was again running for the office. When Harrison appeared, wearing his usual black slouch hat, his pocket quilled with cigars, the crowd roared a welcome, especially the Irish and union men who saw Harrison as a friend of the city’s lower classes. The presence of Burnham, Root, and Harrison beside the Temperance stone was more than a bit ironic. As mayor, Harrison had kept a couple of cases of fine bourbon in his office at city hall. The city’s stern Protestant upper class saw him as a civic satyr whose tolerance of prostitution, gambling and alcohol had allowed the city’s vice districts, most notably the Levee—home of the infamous bartender and robber Mickey