The Devil in the White City

Chicago wins the right to stage the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and appoints architect Daniel Burnham to turn an ambitious national promise into a functioning city of exhibition halls, lagoons and public spectacle. Burnham coordinates designers including Frederick Law Olmsted while confronting financial panic, labour conflict, construction delays, illness and the pressure to surpass the Paris Exposition. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr.’s enormous observation wheel becomes one of the fair’s defining attractions.

Nearby, physician and confidence trickster H. H. Holmes operates a building later associated with fraud, disappearance and murder, exploiting the anonymity and movement created by the expanding city and the fair. Larson alternates between Burnham’s struggle to create the White City and Holmes’s crimes, using their stories to contrast technological optimism with urban danger in Gilded Age America. The result is a history of the exposition, modern Chicago and the social conditions surrounding one of the period’s most notorious criminals.