Devil in the White City

This book was recommended to me by my brother & wife. I must admit that their description was not what compelled me to read the book. It sounds like it would be boring.

The book is about how the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was built and run with a concurrent thread about a serial killer that lived nearby.

There were not a whole lot of grisley details about how Dr. H. H. Holmes lured and killed young women into his strange hotel. There were enough to make it pretty clear what happened, but no gratuituous violence. It was not clear to me why he was doing the killings, but that's something I could say for most serial killers or sadists. The author speculates that the doctor simply enjoyed wielding power over his victims.

The more compelling story was the World's Fair itself. The strange mix of geniuses and hard driven individuals that worked on the design and oversaw the building of the fair was a compelling picture. On one hand, they struggled against a desire by government and the public to have an amazing fair, rivaling the recent one in Paris where the Eiffel tower was built. On the other hand, they could not get approvals and decisions from most of the major players until it was almost too late. An ambitious scope of building, coupled with a shortened time scale to get it done meant the project was a pressure cooker of stress for those responsible to get it built.

My favorite part of the story was the construction of the first Ferris Wheel, which was a real monster. It was so tall, it must have been horrifying to ride. Instead of chairs, the passengers were in cars the size of railroad freight cars.

The thought I'm left with, when I finished the book is that the Fair was kind of sad. Many of the people involved were ruined by it, and the country slipped into a depression by the time it launched. The entire site was burned down shortly afterward, and even the Ferris Wheel was cut up for scrap after a few years.

Most people don't even remember much about the 1893 World's Fair, but the book is peppered with all kinds of little details about firsts that the Fair brought on. This is the place that AC power finally beat out DC power, directly shaping the world we live in today. Smaller details, like the introduction of Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jacks, Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, and the hamburger are sprinkled through the book.

Mostly, there is the ghostlike picture in your mind of an entire artificial city painted white, with the knowledge that it was not going to last very long that makes the fairgrounds seem like a dream.