The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Author:Erik Larson [Larson, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7631-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

Jacob Riis, the New York journalist who had devoted himself to revealing the squalid housing of America’s poor, came to Chicago bearing counsel of a graver sort. In March he gave a talk at Hull House, a reform settlement founded by Jane Addams, “Saint Jane.” Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, “interspersed,” as one visitor put it, “with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically.” Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.

At the time of Riis’s talk, Riis and Addams were two of the best known people in America. Riis had toured Chicago’s foulest districts and pronounced them worse than anything he had seen in New York. In his talk he noted the fast approach of the exposition and warned his audience, “You ought to begin house cleaning, so to speak, and get your alleys and streets in better condition; never in our worst season have we had so much filth in New York City.”

In fact, Chicago had been trying to tidy itself for some time and had found the challenge monumental. The city stepped up its efforts to remove garbage and began repaving alleys and streets. It deployed smoke inspectors to enforce a new antismoke ordinance. Newspapers launched crusades against pestilent alleys and excess smoke and identified the worst offenders in print—among them Burnham’s newly opened Masonic Temple, which the Chicago Tribune likened to Mount Vesuvius.

Carrie Watson, Chicago’s foremost madam, decided her own operation merited a little sprucing up. Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne, but now she resolved to increase the number of bedrooms and double her staff. She and other brothel owners anticipated a big spike in demand. They would not be disappointed. Nor, apparently, would their clients. Later, a madam named Chicago May recalled the boisterous year of the fair with a cringe: “What dreadful things were done by some of the girls! It always made me sick even to think of them. The mere mention of the details of some of the ‘circuses’ is unprintable. I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”

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