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Originally Posted by Dom1
I don't think I would be too interested in that book, based on the topic, but if I run across it I would probably read it because you mentioned it on here.
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You may or may not when you hear more.
The book is about two stories happening simultaneously in Chicago. One is about winning the right to have & all the freakin' hell they went through to put on the Worlds Fair. The second is about Mr. Holmes the man who created a hotel of death & killed probably 20 plus women while this was all happening.
& never got caught in Chicago for it. Cops never knew & were literally right down the street from the building.
Chicago was known as the black city. One for all the coal burning in the basements of buildings to power them for electricity. It would literally get so black that one could not see a block down the street in downtown during the winter. Two for it's rather brutal nature. It was known as the slaughter house king of the country. The Hog butcher to the world. The slaughter factory on the South Side was a house of horrors in it's own right. Men standing ankle deep in blood cutting away factory like in these massive open pits the hogs in machine like precision. The city smelled of blood & decay. Horses would die in the streets & be left there to later expand & explode. This was the machine that thousands poured into as they began the building of the worlds largest city, the White city (Columbian exposition) as it later became known because they painted the entire city white. They brought some of the greatest architects in the world to turn a crappy sand underneath a foot layer of dirt cesspool on the south side, Jackson Park & turned it into a completely magical city. Oh but the living hell they went through. The amount of people that came to Chicago, disappeared, died & all this in less than two years.
In that background a pharmacist/doctor, a man in which women were drawn to like flies, who so happened to be a serial killer prayed on young insecure girls coming for the first time into the new exciting & dangerous city. This guy built a building that he later turned into a weird kind of hotel. It had rooms with no windows & gas lines that went to each room & a double lined cast Iron oven in the basement. To get rid of 'evidence'.
He designed it himself but never used the same contractor or laborers for any one part. He kept firing them for not doing the work to his specifications there by insuring only he knew why those gas lines were going into those rooms. He could do this because of so many workers coming to the city to work at the building of the grand exposition. A fair to be a shining example of this countries abilities & to Show up the Paris worlds fair. To be the greatest ever.
To show how Great this young country truly was.
By the way the term windy city came from this whole period because of Chicago's windy talk about their youthful greatness. Turns out they proved they could back their words but damn the living hell they went though is awe inspiring.
Suffice it to say I have barely scratched the surface of all the stuff in this story & all of the peoples, like Wild Bill Coyote, Susan B Anthony, the workers rights movement, some of the countries Greatest architects including the great landscape architect of central park who were all alive & involved in this amazing event in this time.
I am amazed by the achievements of the White city & it's subsequent disappearance. The only things being left are the Arts building now called the Museum of Science & industry & the remnants of the island at the center of the white city behind that museum. I lived right by it & rode by that place almost every day & never knew....Now I go back with a whole different & awe inspiring perspective.
The story of the Ferris wheel alone is worth the book.
A few interesting notes. If it were not for the Chicago worlds fair we would not have Tesla's invention of AC vs. DC electricity. A bid between General Electric & Westinghouse was played out to see who would win the rights to light up the city. Westinghouse won out. Because alternating currents could go further & they were a much cheaper bid.
Without the daring achievement of a young 20 year old architect who won the rights to create a showpiece greater than the Eiffel Tower. A fragile looking MASSIVE wheel larger than anything anyone had ever seen A man By the name of Ferris. We would not have the now common ferris wheel today. Even today I do not think there has been one as huge as the one at the Chicago Worlds Fair.
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