Carter Harrison Sr. had already been elected mayor 4 times, steering the city through some of its most tumultuous labor battles of the 1880s, including the Haymarket Affair, where he famously walked through the morass of rioters without so much as wrinkling his suit. After his first go-around as mayor, Harrison devoted himself to other pursuits(including running the Chicago Tribune), until Chicago was gearing up to host the Columbian Exposition.
At this point, Harrison felt the need to run again in order to help steer the preparations, and so he ran once again in the 1893 election and won. One of the many Chicagoans who campaigned for Harrison was a newspaper distributor by the name of Patrick Pendergast. Pendergast was also very concerned about the danger that railroad grade crossings posed to the public(14 years later, it would seem that others saw the same danger). While he was campaigning, Pendergast got the crazy idea that if Harrison won he would appoint Pendergast to the Corporation Counsel. Long story short, it didn't happen.
Once Harrison took office, he busied himself with final preparations for the fair, one of which involved leaving the operation of the red-light district under the control of two crooked aldermen. The fair opened up on May 1, 1893 to rave reviews. Over the next six months, the fair welcomed millions of guests from around the world, and introduced us to such things as the Ferris wheel, ice cream cones, and even the Vienna Beef hot dog. And if folks tired of the official activities, they could always schlep over to Buffalo Bill just outside of the fairgrounds. And if they were really unlucky, they ran into H.H. Holmes. At the end of October, the fair was entering its final weeks, and the attitude was one of happiness and fulfillment. That is, except for Patrick Pendergast, who had spent the whole year stewing over his presumed snub at the hands of Harrison. Finally, Pendergast decided to act. On October 28, Pendergast slipped into Harrison's house, and when Harrison awoke to investigate the commotion, Pendergast fatally shot him.
The city was instantly plunged into a state of mourning, and all celebrations associated with the end of the fair were cancelled. Pendergast turned himself in to the authorities later on that same day. He was initially attempting to plead insanity, but that did not work. He was then convicted and sentenced to die. During the appeals process, he was awarded a temporary victory thanks to the efforts of Clarence Darrow, but ultimately was still executed on July 14, 1894(31 years later, Darrow would have better luck defending monkeys than murderers). Carter Harrison was the first mayor to be assassinated(though not the last), as well as the first to die in office(again, not the last either)
Showing posts with label Chicago Week. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Week. Show all posts
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Day 283: The Ripper(?) in the White City-Chicago Week Day 4
It is the Spring of 1893, and the city of Chicago is all aflutter with activity. The city has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Great Fire 22 years earlier(partially at the expense of the town of Singapore, but that's for another day), and it is overcoming the final hurdles before the World's Fair comes to the door. The South Side Rapid Transit company is breaking in its new elevated railcars(the first to grace the city) at stops such as 35th Street and Roosevelt. The newly re-elected Mayor is putting the final touches on the entertainment packages, and John Coughlin is putting the final touches on his. The White City is being constructed in present-day Jackson, Washington, and Midway parks.
But as all of these preparations are being made, Herman Mudgett is busy too-converting his piece of land into a fantastic castle, which will serve as his very exclusive hotel for the duration of the fair. Mudgett's background was in medicine, and he had studied at the University of Michigan. While there, he started down a road that would foretell his ultimate destiny. While he was a student, he would occasionally break into the storage areas for the cadavers and rearrange the bodies to make it look like the victims had died accidentally, that way he could collect on the life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1884, at which point he came to Chicago. When Mudgett came to the city in 1885, he came upon a pharmacy in the Englewood neighborhood owned by an elderly couple. When the man got sick, he would help the woman take care of the shop. Eventually the man died, and Mudgett talked his widow into selling him the store. The sale was finalized, and Mudgett worked out a deal where he would pay the widow a sum of roughly $100 a month(that's about $2,500 in today's money). Eventually, Mudgett fell behind on the payments. It was at this point where the widow mysteriously disappeared. To head off any nosy neighbors, Mudgett simply answered that she was on a long trip to California.
Over the next several years, Mudgett acquired several other properties to amalgamate them into a monstrosity three blocks long. At the same time, Mudgett started going by the alias H.H. Holmes. As construction was proceeding, Holmes met up with Benjamin Pletzel, a crooked carpenter. When the structure was completed, it had Holmes' drugstore on the ground floor, and then the upper floors held Holes' personal office as well as a maze of over 100 windowless rooms, which were arranged into a maze to confuse those inside. When Holmes opened up for business, he instructed all of his employees to take out life insurance policies paid for by Holmes, that he was the sole beneficiary of. He would then make his selections from the staffers, and then kill them through various means, be it asphyxiation or other ways. After they were killed, he would send the bodies down to the basement, where he would dissect them, cremate them, destroy the bodies in lime pits, and even other means, including a stretching rack.
The year after the fair, Holmes left Chicago for St. Louis. It was here where he was briefly incarcerated for a Horse swindle, and while he quickly made bail, he met up with an inmate who pointed him in the direction of a crooked judge who would let him pursue an insurance scam. He found the judge, but he wouldn't have it. So Holmes did the next best thing. He went back to his old partner Pletzel and killed him instead. Not just that, but he took advantage of Pletzel's grief-stricken widow to allow him to take 3 of her 5 kids. Holmes proceeded to take the kids all over, before killing them. Eventually, Holmes was caught due to getting sold out by that old cellmate from St. Louis(whom he had neglected to pay off). When the truth came out about the Pletzel children, Holmes' fate was sealed. Holmes met the hangman's noose on May 7, 1896(thus making Holmes' demise happen in the same year as another icon of the fair, the Republic statue). The inmate who sold out Holmes was later killed by police in 1909. In 2003, Erik Larson took Holmes' story as the main plot line for his novel Devil in the White City.
One more factoid of note: a descendant of Holmes later claimed that Holes could have also been the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in 1888. As proof, handwriting analyses were done on some of Holmes' writings in comparison to letters written by Jack the Ripper. While the samples matched at a rate of over 97%, experts are still skeptical, as there are some doubts that the Ripper letters were actually composed by the killer himself. Regardless, it is certainly an interesting factoid.
But as all of these preparations are being made, Herman Mudgett is busy too-converting his piece of land into a fantastic castle, which will serve as his very exclusive hotel for the duration of the fair. Mudgett's background was in medicine, and he had studied at the University of Michigan. While there, he started down a road that would foretell his ultimate destiny. While he was a student, he would occasionally break into the storage areas for the cadavers and rearrange the bodies to make it look like the victims had died accidentally, that way he could collect on the life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1884, at which point he came to Chicago. When Mudgett came to the city in 1885, he came upon a pharmacy in the Englewood neighborhood owned by an elderly couple. When the man got sick, he would help the woman take care of the shop. Eventually the man died, and Mudgett talked his widow into selling him the store. The sale was finalized, and Mudgett worked out a deal where he would pay the widow a sum of roughly $100 a month(that's about $2,500 in today's money). Eventually, Mudgett fell behind on the payments. It was at this point where the widow mysteriously disappeared. To head off any nosy neighbors, Mudgett simply answered that she was on a long trip to California.
Over the next several years, Mudgett acquired several other properties to amalgamate them into a monstrosity three blocks long. At the same time, Mudgett started going by the alias H.H. Holmes. As construction was proceeding, Holmes met up with Benjamin Pletzel, a crooked carpenter. When the structure was completed, it had Holmes' drugstore on the ground floor, and then the upper floors held Holes' personal office as well as a maze of over 100 windowless rooms, which were arranged into a maze to confuse those inside. When Holmes opened up for business, he instructed all of his employees to take out life insurance policies paid for by Holmes, that he was the sole beneficiary of. He would then make his selections from the staffers, and then kill them through various means, be it asphyxiation or other ways. After they were killed, he would send the bodies down to the basement, where he would dissect them, cremate them, destroy the bodies in lime pits, and even other means, including a stretching rack.
The year after the fair, Holmes left Chicago for St. Louis. It was here where he was briefly incarcerated for a Horse swindle, and while he quickly made bail, he met up with an inmate who pointed him in the direction of a crooked judge who would let him pursue an insurance scam. He found the judge, but he wouldn't have it. So Holmes did the next best thing. He went back to his old partner Pletzel and killed him instead. Not just that, but he took advantage of Pletzel's grief-stricken widow to allow him to take 3 of her 5 kids. Holmes proceeded to take the kids all over, before killing them. Eventually, Holmes was caught due to getting sold out by that old cellmate from St. Louis(whom he had neglected to pay off). When the truth came out about the Pletzel children, Holmes' fate was sealed. Holmes met the hangman's noose on May 7, 1896(thus making Holmes' demise happen in the same year as another icon of the fair, the Republic statue). The inmate who sold out Holmes was later killed by police in 1909. In 2003, Erik Larson took Holmes' story as the main plot line for his novel Devil in the White City.
One more factoid of note: a descendant of Holmes later claimed that Holes could have also been the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in 1888. As proof, handwriting analyses were done on some of Holmes' writings in comparison to letters written by Jack the Ripper. While the samples matched at a rate of over 97%, experts are still skeptical, as there are some doubts that the Ripper letters were actually composed by the killer himself. Regardless, it is certainly an interesting factoid.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Day 282: The Midwest Firestorm and the Desolation of Singapore-Chicago Week Day 3
On the same day that Chicago was falling victim to the Flames of Hell, several other towns in the Midwest also suffered the same fiery fate. Our first stop takes us across the Cheddar Curtain to the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. In 1871, Peshtigo was a farming/logging town with a population of roughly 1,800 people. The townspeople would routinely use small fires to clear away brush and other debris so as to allow for building/farming. On October 8 of that year, a strong wind came in from the West and strengthened the smaller brush fires into one, much larger, fire. After burning for a while, the inferno became an all out, straight-outta-Hell firestorm, at some points reaching a mile high, five miles wide, traveling at speeds upwards of 90 miles per hour, and all raging hotter than the inside of a crematorium. At one point, the flames jumped the Peshtigo River and turned into what contemporary reports described as a fire tornado. When all the flames cleared, the damage proved severe. The conflagration had incinerated between 1.2 and 1.5 Million acres of land(aka, an area twice the size of Rhode Island). In terms of the Human cost, estimates generally put the death toll between 1,200 and 2,500. These figures are quite shaky, both because an accurate count was never done(partially because there was no one left alive to keep track of the dead in many cases), and also owing to the fact that many victims were thrown into mass graves. However, there were a group of nuns who had sought shelter from the fire in a church. Whiling away the inferno by praying inside of the local church, both they and the church escaped unscathed.
When the Peshtigo Fire got busy jumping rivers, one such span that it crossed was the Menominee River, which opened a pathway to Michigan, thus sparking the third raging inferno on the day, otherwise known as the Great Michigan Fire. The state of Michigan had just weathered a long hot summer, and in addition to that fact the logging industry had taken a firm hold in the state, with 16 different sawmills operating in the state by the 1860s. These mills combined to produce over 13 Million board feet of lumber, which made for a lot of excess pieces of wood left over from milling. When the Peshtigo Fire crossed over, this made for the perfect conditions to let the fire spread. And spread it did. When it was all over, the flames had burned the towns of Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, as well as many other smaller hamlets. All told, the flames consumed more than 2.5 Million acres in Michigan. The human cost was even harder to tabulate here than in Peshtigo. The only solid number that ever came out was roughly 500, but that was only based on self-reported numbers. Given that there were thousands of individual woodsmen in the forests of Michigan, it is entirely likely that the death toll was even higher. There has been much discussion over the years as to the cause of the simultaneous fire events, and one of the more interesting theories is out of this world. Literally. It has been theorized that a comet hitting the affected area could have ignited the abnormally dry environs, triggering the blaze. As I said, this is just a theory though.
The final victim of the Great Midwest Firestorm met its demise not through flames, but via other means. The town of Singapore, Michigan had been founded in 1836 by a New York land speculator, who desired to establish a port city that would rival even Chicago and Milwaukee. That never quite happened, but the town did see several interesting goings-on, such as the 1838 bank scandal that saw the Bank of Singapore engage in some money-shuffling with a neighboring town. In 1842 the town was brought to the brink of extinction when it was pounded by a snowstorm that lasted for 40 days and 40 nights(kinda puts Snowpocalypse in perspective, doesn't it). Eyewitness reports in the wake of the snowstorm are spotty, but the general consensus is that at the end of it all, a wizened old man emerged from a giant boat in the middle of town, followed by 7 other people and what appeared to be 2 of every kind of animal, all capped off with the appearance of a rainbow in the middle of winter. Wierd...
But even after surviving all of this, the town proved no match for the Great Firestorm. Oh, Singapore was unaffected by the flames, but not by the aftermath. After all, rebuilding Chicago into the crown jewel that it would become by 1893 took lumber. A LOT of lumber. Factor in all of the rebuilding that took place in Michigan, and you have a Herculean need for lumber. And where did ALL of the affected cities get their raw materials? Singapore, of course. The town was so heavily forested in the years after the fire that by 1875, what had once been an insipid logging town had been turned into a vast dune-filled wasteland thanks to all the deforestation. Today the ruins of Singapore lie buried underneath the Michigan Dunes at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River.
When the Peshtigo Fire got busy jumping rivers, one such span that it crossed was the Menominee River, which opened a pathway to Michigan, thus sparking the third raging inferno on the day, otherwise known as the Great Michigan Fire. The state of Michigan had just weathered a long hot summer, and in addition to that fact the logging industry had taken a firm hold in the state, with 16 different sawmills operating in the state by the 1860s. These mills combined to produce over 13 Million board feet of lumber, which made for a lot of excess pieces of wood left over from milling. When the Peshtigo Fire crossed over, this made for the perfect conditions to let the fire spread. And spread it did. When it was all over, the flames had burned the towns of Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, as well as many other smaller hamlets. All told, the flames consumed more than 2.5 Million acres in Michigan. The human cost was even harder to tabulate here than in Peshtigo. The only solid number that ever came out was roughly 500, but that was only based on self-reported numbers. Given that there were thousands of individual woodsmen in the forests of Michigan, it is entirely likely that the death toll was even higher. There has been much discussion over the years as to the cause of the simultaneous fire events, and one of the more interesting theories is out of this world. Literally. It has been theorized that a comet hitting the affected area could have ignited the abnormally dry environs, triggering the blaze. As I said, this is just a theory though.
The final victim of the Great Midwest Firestorm met its demise not through flames, but via other means. The town of Singapore, Michigan had been founded in 1836 by a New York land speculator, who desired to establish a port city that would rival even Chicago and Milwaukee. That never quite happened, but the town did see several interesting goings-on, such as the 1838 bank scandal that saw the Bank of Singapore engage in some money-shuffling with a neighboring town. In 1842 the town was brought to the brink of extinction when it was pounded by a snowstorm that lasted for 40 days and 40 nights(kinda puts Snowpocalypse in perspective, doesn't it). Eyewitness reports in the wake of the snowstorm are spotty, but the general consensus is that at the end of it all, a wizened old man emerged from a giant boat in the middle of town, followed by 7 other people and what appeared to be 2 of every kind of animal, all capped off with the appearance of a rainbow in the middle of winter. Wierd...
But even after surviving all of this, the town proved no match for the Great Firestorm. Oh, Singapore was unaffected by the flames, but not by the aftermath. After all, rebuilding Chicago into the crown jewel that it would become by 1893 took lumber. A LOT of lumber. Factor in all of the rebuilding that took place in Michigan, and you have a Herculean need for lumber. And where did ALL of the affected cities get their raw materials? Singapore, of course. The town was so heavily forested in the years after the fire that by 1875, what had once been an insipid logging town had been turned into a vast dune-filled wasteland thanks to all the deforestation. Today the ruins of Singapore lie buried underneath the Michigan Dunes at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Day 281: The Flames of Hell-Chicago Week Day 2
On October 8, 1871, Catherine O'Leary was finishing things up for the day, and then she went to bed. When she woke up the next morning, she had done nothing less than change the world. At around 9 PM the prior evening, a cow belonging to O'Leary allegedly knocked over a lamp, which in turn set some of the hay in the barn aflame,which in turn set the entire barn ablaze, which on turn spread to other places, and which in turn set the whole city on fire. Whatever the actual cause of the fire, the Fire Department first was made aware of the blaze at around 9:40. At that point, the sense of urgency was lacking, as there had already been a large blaze earlier in the week, and the firemen were tired.
Eventually, the gravity of the situation was realized, but by that point, the fire had grown very large. So large, in fact, that when it reached a tall church on the south end of the river, it literally jumped the banks and continued burning on the other side of the river. This was also right about the time when the fire started to encroach upon downtown. The first Holy Name Cathedral burned to the ground. The first Palmer House(which had just opened its doors 13 days earlier) burned to the ground. The original terminal for the Chicago & Milwaukee railroad burned to the ground. The offices of the South Park Commission burned to the ground. The very first home field of the Chicago Cubs even burned to the ground.
The first Marshall Field's location was under the gun, and that's when the employees took drastic action. Levi Leiter ordered every single horse in the possession of the company to the store, where the workers started rescuing every piece of inventory they could, and sending them on the horses to Leiter's house(which was out of the path of the conflagration). A young stock clerk even managed to get the store's pumps up and running, allowing use of the steam-powered elevators, as well as the use of fire hoses to wet down the side of the building to combat the advancing flames. When the water works burned, the battle to save Chicago had been lost and everyone knew it. The workers at Marshall Field's worked until the final second, with the last employee escaping the building mere seconds before flames engulfed the structure. The quick thinking of the Field's workers paid off, as the store was able to reopen only four weeks after the fire.
As for the rest of the city, things were rather different. The fire had burned 2,000 acres to the ground, destroyed $222 Million worth of property, and left a third of the city's population homeless. But you want to know what it spared? Among other things, the Water Tower and the Pumping Station. Regardless, the city was resilient, shipping in the first load of lumber to rebuild the very day that the fire finally died out. Potter Palmer secured a loan to rebuild as the ashes of his prized hotel were still smoldering. The city was already on the upswing. And as that reconstruction was going on, the debris had to go somewhere, right? Well, the debris from the fire was dumped into the Lake, creating what we know of today as Grant Park(and as a consequence, land-locking the Illinois Central tracks) By 1893, the city welcomed more than 21 Million people to a fair that would be talked about for decades to come.
But one important factoid remains. Just who caused the fire? Obviously, Mrs. O'Leary's cow didn't do it. The story had been fabricated to placate the anti-Irish sentiment rampant in the city at that time. Some sources point to Daniel Sullivan, who was the first person to report the fire. Allegedly, he set the hay on fire while trying to steal milk. But regardless, we may never know who truly started the fire. What we do know is that it revolutionized Chicago as we know it today, and it gave the city a fresh start to build on for the next 142 years and counting.
Eventually, the gravity of the situation was realized, but by that point, the fire had grown very large. So large, in fact, that when it reached a tall church on the south end of the river, it literally jumped the banks and continued burning on the other side of the river. This was also right about the time when the fire started to encroach upon downtown. The first Holy Name Cathedral burned to the ground. The first Palmer House(which had just opened its doors 13 days earlier) burned to the ground. The original terminal for the Chicago & Milwaukee railroad burned to the ground. The offices of the South Park Commission burned to the ground. The very first home field of the Chicago Cubs even burned to the ground.
The first Marshall Field's location was under the gun, and that's when the employees took drastic action. Levi Leiter ordered every single horse in the possession of the company to the store, where the workers started rescuing every piece of inventory they could, and sending them on the horses to Leiter's house(which was out of the path of the conflagration). A young stock clerk even managed to get the store's pumps up and running, allowing use of the steam-powered elevators, as well as the use of fire hoses to wet down the side of the building to combat the advancing flames. When the water works burned, the battle to save Chicago had been lost and everyone knew it. The workers at Marshall Field's worked until the final second, with the last employee escaping the building mere seconds before flames engulfed the structure. The quick thinking of the Field's workers paid off, as the store was able to reopen only four weeks after the fire.
As for the rest of the city, things were rather different. The fire had burned 2,000 acres to the ground, destroyed $222 Million worth of property, and left a third of the city's population homeless. But you want to know what it spared? Among other things, the Water Tower and the Pumping Station. Regardless, the city was resilient, shipping in the first load of lumber to rebuild the very day that the fire finally died out. Potter Palmer secured a loan to rebuild as the ashes of his prized hotel were still smoldering. The city was already on the upswing. And as that reconstruction was going on, the debris had to go somewhere, right? Well, the debris from the fire was dumped into the Lake, creating what we know of today as Grant Park(and as a consequence, land-locking the Illinois Central tracks) By 1893, the city welcomed more than 21 Million people to a fair that would be talked about for decades to come.
But one important factoid remains. Just who caused the fire? Obviously, Mrs. O'Leary's cow didn't do it. The story had been fabricated to placate the anti-Irish sentiment rampant in the city at that time. Some sources point to Daniel Sullivan, who was the first person to report the fire. Allegedly, he set the hay on fire while trying to steal milk. But regardless, we may never know who truly started the fire. What we do know is that it revolutionized Chicago as we know it today, and it gave the city a fresh start to build on for the next 142 years and counting.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Day 280: A Call for a New Plan-Chicago Week Day 1
Author's Note: 120 years ago this week, the World's Columbian Exhibition celebrated Chicago Week, an occasion to show off just how far the city had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire that had hit 22 years previously. Well, I have deemed it appropriate to do the same here. Over the next 5 entries we'll be taking a closer look at the Great Chicago Fire and some of its related events, as well as uncovering 2 of the unseemlier stories from the 1893 Fair. But today, let us start out the series with a clarion call to re-analyze Daniel Burnham's famed Plan of Chicago
If you happened to read the Chicago Tribune this past Sunday, what I am talking about today might ring a bell. If not, get ready to find out. in 1909, Daniel Burnham drafted his famous Plan of Chicago, a tome which has more or less guided the city's development for the past century. The plan invoked the term "Paris on the Prairie", and postulated that all residents would be within walking distance of a park. While that part was mostly borne out, there were other fantastical elements that Burnham wanted included. For example, Burnham envisioned several man-made islands dotting the lakefront. Ultimately, only one of those was built, and that was finished in 1948 as an airport. It was not until 2003 that Northerly Island realized its full potential. Another area where Burnham's plan was deficient was on societal issues.
So here we are in 2013, with various ills affecting the city, be they a high crime rate, broken families, rampant unemployment, areas of urban blight that nobody dares to enter unless they absolutely have to, and then of course,(say it with me) THE CORRUPTION. As the Tribune states, many of us see these problems as "problems we tidily compartmentalize into separate silos, not as what they are: interlocked threats to a central city" And so with that spirit, the Chicago Tribune is calling for submissions for the New Plan of Chicago. And if any of you have any impetus to contribute to this plan, you can email the Tribune your idea at PlanOfChicago@tribune.com
If you happened to read the Chicago Tribune this past Sunday, what I am talking about today might ring a bell. If not, get ready to find out. in 1909, Daniel Burnham drafted his famous Plan of Chicago, a tome which has more or less guided the city's development for the past century. The plan invoked the term "Paris on the Prairie", and postulated that all residents would be within walking distance of a park. While that part was mostly borne out, there were other fantastical elements that Burnham wanted included. For example, Burnham envisioned several man-made islands dotting the lakefront. Ultimately, only one of those was built, and that was finished in 1948 as an airport. It was not until 2003 that Northerly Island realized its full potential. Another area where Burnham's plan was deficient was on societal issues.
So here we are in 2013, with various ills affecting the city, be they a high crime rate, broken families, rampant unemployment, areas of urban blight that nobody dares to enter unless they absolutely have to, and then of course,(say it with me) THE CORRUPTION. As the Tribune states, many of us see these problems as "problems we tidily compartmentalize into separate silos, not as what they are: interlocked threats to a central city" And so with that spirit, the Chicago Tribune is calling for submissions for the New Plan of Chicago. And if any of you have any impetus to contribute to this plan, you can email the Tribune your idea at PlanOfChicago@tribune.com
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