Interesting story telling simultaneously about the Great Exhibition of Chicage (trying to outdo Paris, where its Eifel tower got shown to the world) and a mass murderer, mostly of women and girls, living very close to the exhibition grounds.
It can be a bit grinding though. Particularly the less juicy parts of the exhibit planning. Maybe there's a bit too many details, too slow a pace. Or it's just less my style.
Now Burnham pushed them even harder. He made good on his threat and doubled the number of men working on the building. They worked at night, in rain, in stiffling heat. In August alone the building took three lives. El.sewhere on the grounds four other men died and dozens more suffered all manner of fractures, burns, and lacerations. The fiar, according to one later appraisal, was a more dangerous place to work than a coal mine.
Even New York had apologized – well, at least one editor from New York had done so. Charles T. Root, editor of the New York Dry Goods Reporter and no relation to Burnham's dead partner, published an editorial on Thursday, August 10, 1893, in which he cited the ridicule and hostility that New York editors had expressed ever since Chicago won the right to build the exposition. "Hundreds of newspapers, among them scores of the strongest Eastern dailies, held their sides with merriment over the exquisite humor of the idea of this crude, upstart, pork-packing city undertaking to conceive and carry out a true World's Fair..." The carping had subsided, he wrote, but few of the carpers had as yet made the "amende honorable" that now clearly was due Chicago. He compounded his heresy by adding that if New York had won the fair, it would not have done as fine a job. "So far as I have been able to observe New York never gets behind any enterprise as Chicago got behind this, and without that splendid pulling together, prestige, financial supremacy, and all that sort of things would not go far toward paralleling the White City." It was time, he said, to acknowledge the truth: "Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world."
