Harper's Chicago and the World's fair; the chapters on the exposition being collated from official sources and approved by the Department of publicity and promotion of the World's Columbian exposition

Preface

AT the suggestion of Messrs. Harper & Brothers the author of this work visited Chicago in the summer of 1891 and studied the plans and aims of those who were in charge of the World's Columbian Exposition. He became convinced that the Fair was almost certain to be of unparalleled magnificence and interest and more nearly universal in character than any that has ever been held. He was permitted to make public this impression in an article in HARPER'S MAGAZINE which had the merit of appearing when such an announcement — especially in a New York publication — was singularly timely. A large portion of the public, to some extent shocked by the failure of the Government to order the Fair held in New York, had been inclined to disparage the undertaking. Even before that, the pages of HARPER'S WEEKLY had

4 begun to build up that pictorial and literary record of the work which will finally form a brilliant history of the enterprise, and which has been accompanied by frequent ' i) articles in the BAZAR and YOUNG PEOPLE. In asserting that

XfCxthe Harpers have thus taken the lead — and held it — in exploiting the Exposition, the intention is not to boast of

*2 their enterprise, but to explain that the present work is only a further expression of the patriotic impulse that led them thus early to support our nation's gigantic effort to entertain and instruct the world.

This book does not pretend to be a guide, either to the great and interesting City of Chicago or to the Exposition which is to be held in one of its parks. Such a guide would be five times the size of this work, and little more companionable than a dictionary; indeed, it would be impossible at this time to compile such a work as would anticipate the wonders of the Fair in detail. This is rather a series of descriptions of the peculiarities and attractions of Chicago and of the most novel and inviting of those features of the Exposition in regard to which it has been possible to gain reliable information at this time — October, 1892. It is a book to be read at home and before the Exposition opens, rather than afterwards and upon the Fair Grounds.

What is written of Chicago has already appeared in the Harper periodicals. It should be of value if the author has improved his exceptional opportunities for studying the town. On the other hand, the chapters upon the Exposition were but little dependent on his ability, for each was written close upon a talk with some Exposition official who was enthusiastic over his work and whose statements were taken down while he talked and merely reclothed, in part, in the writer's own language, afterwards.

NEW YORK, October i, 1892.

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Contents

PAGE

PREFACE , V

CHICAGO

Chapter I The Main Exhibit

CHICAGO will be the main exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. No matter what the aggregation of wonders there, no matter what the Eiffel-Tower-like chief exhibit may be, the city itself will make the most surprising presentation. Those who go to study the world's progress will find no other result of human force so wonderful, extravagant, or peculiar. Those who carry with them the prejudices begotten of political rivalry or commercial envy will discover that, however well-founded some of the criticism has been — especially as to the spirit of the Chicagoans — the development of the place has not followed the logical deductions. Those who go clear-minded, expecting to see a great city, will find one different from that which any precedent has led them to look for.

While investigating the management and prospects of the Columbian Exposition, I was a resident of Chicago for more than a fortnight. A born New-Yorker, the energy, roar, and bustle of the place were yet sufficient to first astonish and then to fatigue me. I was led to examine the city, and to cross-examine some of its leading men. I came away compelled to acknowledge its possession of certain forceful qualities which I never saw exhibited in the same degree anywhere else. I got a satisfactory explanation of its growth and achievements, as well as proof that it must continue to expand in population and commercial influence. Moreover, without losing a particle of pride or faith in New York — without perceiving that New York was affected by the consideration — I acquired a respect for Chicago such as it is most likely that any American who makes a similar investigation must share with me.

The city has been thought intolerant of criticism. The amount of truth there is in this is found in its supervoluminous civicism. The bravado and bunkum of the Chicago newspapers reflect this quality but do it clumsily, because it proceeds from a sense of business policy with the editors, who laugh at it themselves. But underlying the behavior of the most able and enterprising men in the city is this motto, which they constantly quoted to me, all using the same words, " We are for Chicago first, last, and all the time." To define that sentence is, in a great measure, to account for Chicago. It explains the possession of a million inhabitants by a city that practically dates its beginning after the war of the rebellion. Its adoption by half a million men as their watchword means the forcing of trade and manufactures and wealth ; the getting of the World's Fair, if you please. In order to comprehend Chicago, it is best never to lose sight of the motto of its citizens.

I have spoken of the roar and bustle and energy of Chicago. This is most noticeable in the business part of the town, where the greater number of the men are crowded together. It seems there as if the men would run over the horses if the drivers were not careful. Everybody is in such a hurry and going at such a pace that if a stranger asks his way, he is apt to have to trot •* along with his neighbor to gain the information, for the average Chicagoan cannot stop to talk. The whole business of life is carried on at high pressure, and the pithy part of Chicago is like three hundred acres of New York Stock Exchange when trading is active. European visitors have written that there are no such crowds anywhere as gather on Broadway, and this is true most of the time ; but there is one hour on every week-day when certain streets in Chicago are so packed with people as to make Broadway look desolate and solitudinous by comparison. That is the hour between half-past five and half-past six o'clock, when the famous tall buildings of the city vomit their inhabitants upon the pavements. Photographs of the principal corners and crossings, taken at the height of the human torrent, suggest the thought that the camera must have been turned on some little-known painting by Dore. Nobody but Dore ever conceived such pictures. To those who are in the crowds, even Chicago seems small and cramped ; even her street -cars, running in breakneck trains, prove far too few ; even her streets that connect horizon with horizon seem each night to roar at the city officials for further annexation in the morning.

We shall see these crowds simply and satisfactorily accounted for presently ; but they exhibit only one phase of the high -pressure existence; they form only one feature among the many that distinguish the town. In the tall buildings are the most modern and rapid elevators, machines that fly up through the towers like glass balls from a trap at a shooting contest. The slowgoing stranger, who is conscious of having been " kneaded " along the streets, like a lump of dough among a million bakers, feels himself loaded into one of those frail-looking baskets of steel netting, and the next instant the elevator-boy touches the trigger, and up goes the whole load as a feather is caught up by a gale. The descent is more simple. Something lets go, and you fall from ten to twenty stories as it happens. There is sometimes a jolt, which makes the passenger seem to feel his stomach pass into his shoes, but, as a rule, the mechanism and management both work marvellously towards ease and gentleness. These elevators are too slow for Chicago, and the managers of certain tall buildings now arrange them so that some run " express " to the seventh story without stopping, while what may be called accommodation cars halt at the lower floors, pursuing a course that may be likened to the emptying of the chambers of a revolver in the hands of a person who is " quick on the trigger." It is the same everywhere in the business district. Along Clark Street are some gorgeous underground restaurants, all marble and plated metal. Whoever is eating at one of the tables in them will see the ushers standing about like statues until a customer enters the door, when they dart forward as if the building were falling. It is only done in order to seat the visitor promptly. Being of a sympathetic and impressionable nature, I bolted along the streets all the time I was there as if some one on the next block had picked my pocket.

In the Auditorium Hotel the guests communicate with the clerk by electricity, and may flash word of their thirst to the bar-tender as lightning dances from the top to the bottom of a steeple. A sort of annunciator is used, and by turning an arrow and pressing a button, a man may in half a minute order a cocktail, towels, ice-water, stationery, dinner, a bootblack, and the evening newspapers. Our horse-cars in New York move at the rate of about six miles an hour. The cable-cars of Chicago make more than nine miles an hour in town, and more than thirteen miles an hour where the population is less dense. They go in trains of from two to four cars each, and with such a racket of gong-ringing and such a grinding and whir of grip-wheels as to make a modern vestibuled train seem to slight its opportunities for noise. But these street-cars distribute the people grandly, and while they occasionally run over a stray citizen, they far more frequently clear their way by lifting wagons and trucks bodily to one side as they whirl along. It is a rapid and a business-like city. The speed with which cattle are killed and pigs are turned into slabs of salt pork has amazed the world, but it is only the ignorant portion thereof that does not know that the celerity at the stock-yards is merely an effort of the butchers to keep up with the rest of the town. The only slow things in Chicago are the steam railway trains. Further on we will discover why they are so.

I do not know how many very tall buildings Chicago contains, but they must number nearly two dozen. Some of them are artistically designed, and hide their height in well-balanced proportions. A few are mere boxes punctured with window -holes, and stand above their neighbors like great hitching -posts. The best of them are very elegantly and completely appointed, and the communities of men inside them might almost live their lives within their walls, so multifarious are the occupations and services of the tenants. The best New York office buildings are not injured by comparison with these towering structures, except that they are not so tall as the Chicago buildings, but there is not in New York any office structure that can be compared with Chicago's so-called Chamber of Commerce office building, so far as are concerned the advantages of light and air and openness and roominess which its tenants enjoy. In these respects there is only one finer building in America, and that is in Minneapolis. It is a great mistake to think that we in New York possess all the elegant, rich, and ornamental outgrowths of taste, or that we know better than the West what are the luxuries and comforts of the age. With their floors of deftly laid mosaic-work, their walls of marble and onyx, their balustrades of copper worked into arabesquerie, their artistic lanterns, elegant electric fixtures, their costly and luxurious public rooms, these Chicago office buildings force an exclamation of praise, however unwillingly it comes.

They have adopted what they call " the Chicago method " in putting up these steepling hives. This plan is to construct the actual edifice of steel framework, to which are added thin outer walls of brick or stone masonry, and the necessary partitions of firebrick, and plaster laid on iron lathing. The buildings are therefore like enclosed bird-cages, and it is said that, like bird - cages, they cannot shake or tumble down. The exterior walls are mere envelopes. They are so treated that the buildings look like heaps of masonry, but that is homage paid to custom more than it is a material element of strength. These walls are to a building what an envelope is to a letter, or a cover is to a book. The Chicago method is expeditious, economical, and in many ways advantageous. The manner in which the great weight of houses so tall as to include between sixteen and twenty-four stories is distributed upon the ground beneath them is ingenious. Wherever one of the principal upright pillars is to be set up, the builders lay a pad of steel and cement of such extent that the pads for all the pillars cover all the site. These pads are slightly pyramidal in shape, and are made by laying alternate courses of steel beams crosswise, one upon another. Each pair of courses of steel is filled in and solidified with cement, and then the next two courses are added and similarly treated. At last each pad is eighteen inches thick, and perhaps eighteen feet square ; but the size is governed by the desire to distribute the weight of the building at about the average of a ton to the square foot.

This peculiar process is necessitated by the character of the land underneath Chicago. Speaking widely, the rule is to find from seven to fourteen feet of sand superimposed upon a layer of clay between ten and forty feet in depth. It has not paid to puncture this clay with piling. The piles sink into a soft and yielding substance, and the clay is not tenacious enough to hold them. Thus the Chicago Post-office was built, and it not only settles continuously, but it settles unevenly. On the other hand, the famous Rookery Building, set up on these steel and cement pads, did not sink quite an inch, though the architect's calculation was that, by squeezing the water out of the clay underneath, it would settle seven inches. Very queer and differing results have followed the construction of Chicago's biggest buildings, and without going too deep into details, it has been noticed that while some have pulled neighboring houses down a few inches, others have lifted adjoining houses, and still others have raised buildings that were at a distance from themselves. The bed of clay underneath Chicago acts when under pressure like a pan of dough, or like a blanket tautened at the edges and held clear of underneath support. Chicago's great office buildings have basements, but no cellars.

I have referred to the number of these stupendous structures. Let it be known next that they are all in a very small district, that narrow area which composes Chicago's office region, which lies between Lake Michigan and all the principal railroad districts, and at the edges of* which one-twenty-fifth of all the railroad mileage of the world is said to terminate, though the district is but little more than half a mile square or 300 acres in extent. One of these buildings — and not the largest — -has a population of 4000 persons. It was visited and its elevators were used on three days, when a count was kept, by 19,000, 18,000, and 20,000 persons. Last October there were 7000 offices in the tall buildings of Chicago, and 7000 more were under way in buildings then undergoing construction. The reader now understands why in the heart of Chicago every work -day evening the crowds convey the idea that our Broadway is a deserted thoroughfare as compared with, say, the corner of Clark and Jackson streets.

These tall buildings are mainly built on land obtained on ninety-nine year leasehold. Long leases rather than outright purchases of land have long been a

' ' WAR "

favorite preliminary to building in Chicago, where, for one thing, the men who owned the land have not been those with the money for building. Where very great and costly buildings are concerned, the long leases often go to corporations or syndicates, who put up the houses. It seems to many strangers who visit Chicago that it is reasonable to prophesy a speedy end to the feverish impulse to swell the number of these giant piles, either through legislative ordinance or by the fever running its course. Many prophesy that it must soon end. This idea is bred of several reasons. In the first place, the tall buildings darken the streets, and transform the lower stories of opposite houses into so many cellars or damp and dark basements. In the next place, the great number of tall and splendid office houses is depreciating the value of the humbler property in their neighborhoods. Four-story and five-story houses that once were attractive are no longer so, because their owners cannot afford the conveniences which distinguish the greater edifices, wherein light and heat are often provided free, fire-proof safes are at the service of every tenant, janitors officer a host of servants, and there are barber -shops, restaurants, cigar and news stands, elevators, and a halfdozen other conveniences not found in smaller houses. It would seem, also, that since not all the people of Chicago spend their time in offices, there must soon come an end of the demand for these chambers. So it seems, but not to a thorough-bred Chicagoan. One of the foremost business men in the city asserts that he can perceive no reason why the entire business heart of the town — that square half-mile of which I have spoken — should not soon be all builded up of cloud-capped towers. There will be a need for them, he says, and the money to defray the cost of them will accompany the demand. The only trouble he foresees will be in the solution of the problem what to do with the people who will then crowd the streets as never streets were clogged before.

This prophecy relates to a little section of. the city, but the city itself contains i8i|- square miles. It has been said of the many annexations by which her present size was attained that Chicago reached out and took to herself farms, prairie land, and villages, and that of such material the great city now in part consists. This is true. In suburban trips, such as those I took to Fort Sheridan and Fernwood, for instance, I passed great cabbage farms, groves, houseless but plotted tracts, and long reaches of the former prairie. Even yet Hyde Park is a separated settlement, and a dozen or more villages stand out as distinctly by themselves as ever they did. If it were true, as her rivals insist, that Chicago added all this tract merely to get a high rank in the census reports of population, the folly of the action would be either ludicrous or pitiful, according to the stand-point from which it was viewed. But the true reason for her enormous extension of municipal jurisdiction is quite as peculiar. The enlargement was urged and accomplished in order to anticipate the growth and needs of the city. It was a consequence of extraordinary foresight, which recognized the necessity for a uniform system of boulevards, parks, drainage, and water provision when the city should reach limits that it was even then seen must soon bound a compact aggregation of stores, offices, factories, and dwellings. To us of the East this is surprising. It might seem incredible were there not many other evidences of the same spirit and sagacity not only in Chicago, but in the other cities of the West, especially of the North-west. What Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth are doing towards a future park system reveals the same enterprise and habit of looking far ahead. And Chicago, in her park system, makes evident her intentions. In- all these cities and in a hundred ways the observant traveller notes the same forehandedness, and prepares himself to understand the temper in which the greatest of the Western capitals leaned forth and absorbed the prairie. Chicago expects to become the largest city in America — a city which, in fifty years, shall be larger than the consolidated cities that may form New York at that time.

Now on what substance does Chicago feed that she should foresee herself so great ? What manner of men are those of Chicago? What are the whys and the wherefores of her growth ?

It seems to have ever been, as it is now, a city of young men. One Chicagoan accounts for its low deathrate on the ground that not even its leading men are yet old enough to die. The young men who drifted there from the Eastern States after the close of the war all agree that the thing which most astonished them was the youthfulness of the most active business men. Marshall Field, Potter Palmer, and the rest, heading very large mercantile establishments, were young fellows. Those who came to Chicago from England fancied, as it is said that Englishmen do, that a man may not be trusted with affairs until he has lost half his hair and all his teeth. Our own Eastern men were apt to place wealth and success at the middle of the scale of life. But, in Chicago, men under thirty were leading in commerce and industry. The sight was a spur to all the young men who came, and they also pitched in to swell the size and successes of the young men's capital. The easy making of money by the loaning of it and by handling city realty — sources which never failed with shrewd men — not only whetted the general appetite for big and quick money-making, but they provided the means for the establishment and extension of trade in other ways and with the West at large.

It is one of the peculiarities of Chicago that one finds not only the capitalists but the store-keepers discussing the whole country with a familiarity as strange to a man from the Atlantic coast as Nebraska is strange to most Philadelphians or New-Yorkers. But the well-informed and "hustling" Chicagoan is familiar with the differing districts of the entire West, North, and South, with their crops, industries, wants, financial status, and means of intercommunication. As in London we find men whose business field is the world, so in Chicago we find the business men talking not of one section or of Europe, as is largely the case in New York, but discussing the affairs of the entire country. The figures which garnish their conversation are bewildering, but if they are analyzed, or even comprehended, they will reveal to the listener how vast and how wealthy a region acknowledges Chicago as its market and its financial and trading centre.

Without either accepting or contesting any part of the process by which Chicago men account for their city's importance or calculate its future, let me repeat a digest of what several influential men of that city said upon the subject. Chicago, then, is the centre of a circle of 1000 miles diameter. If you draw a line northward 500 miles, you find everywhere arable land and timber. The same is true with respect to a line drawn 500 miles in a north-westerly course. For 650 miles westward there is no change in the rich and alluring prospect, and so all around the circle, except where Lake Michigan interrupts it, the same conditions are found. Moreover, the lake itself is a valuable element in commerce. The rays or spokes in all these directions become materialized in the form of the tracks of 35 railways which enter the city. Twenty-two of these are great companies, and at a short distance sub - radials made by other railroads raise the number to 50 roads. As I have already said, in Chicago one-twenty-fifth of the railway mileage of the world terminates, and serves 30,000,000 persons, who find Chicago the largest city easily accessible to them. Thus is found a vast population connected easily and directly with a common centre, to which everything they produce can be brought, and from which all that contributes to the material progress and comfort of man may be economically distributed.

A financier who is equally well known and respected in New York and Chicago put the case somewhat differently as to what he called Chicago's territory. He considered it as being 1000 miles square, and spoke of it as " the land west of the Alleghanies and south of Mason and Dixon's line." This region, the richest agricultural territory in the world, does its financiering in Chicago. The rapid increase in wealth of both the city and the tributary region is due to the fact that every year both produce more, and have more to sell and less to buy. Not long ago the rule was that a stream of goods ran eastward over the Alleghanies, and another stream of supplies came back, so that the West had littie gain to show. But during the past five years this back-setting current has been a stream of money returned for the products the West has distributed. The West is now selling to the East and to Europe and getting money in return, because it is manufacturing for itself, as well as tilling the soil and mining for the rest of the world. It therefore earns money and acquires a profit instead of continuing its former process of toiling merely to obtain from the East the necessaries of life.

The condition in which Nebraska and Kansas find themselves is the condition in which a great part of the West was placed not long ago — a condition of debt, of being mortgaged, and of having to send its earnings to Eastern capitalists. That is no longer the case of the West in general. The debtor States now are Kansas, Nebraska, the two Dakotas, and western Minnesota ; but Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan (the States most closely tributary to Chicago) have paid off their mortgages, and are absorbing money and investing it in local improvements. What they earn is now their own, and it comes back to them in the form of money. This money used to be shipped to the East, to which these States were in debt, but now it is invested where it is earned, and the consequence has been that in the last five or six years the West has rarely shipped any currency East, but has been constantly drawing it from there.

In this change of condition is seen an explanation of much that has made Chicago peculiar. She has been what she would call " hustling." For years, in company with the entire Western country, she has been making money only to pay debts with. That, they say, is why men in Chicago have talked only " business ;"

that is why Chicago has had no leisure class, no reservoir of home capital seeking investment. The former conditions having changed, now that she is producing more and buying less, the rest will change also.

When we understand what are the agricultural resources of the region for which Chicago is the trading-post, we perceive how certain it was that its debt would be paid, and that great wealth .would follow. The corn lands of Illinois return a profit of $15 to the acre, raising 50 to 60 bushels at 42^ cents a bushel last year, and at a cost for cultivation of only $7 an acre. Wheat produces $22.50 an acre, costs a little less than corn, and returns a profit of from $12 to $15. Oats run 55 bushels to the acre, at 27 cents a bushel, and cost the average farmer only, say, $6 an acre, returning $8 or $9 an acre in profit. These figures will vary as to production, cost, and profit, but it is believed that they represent a fair average. This midland country, of which Chicago is the capital, produces 2,000,000,000 bushels of corn, 700,000,000 bushels of oats, 50,000,000 hogs, 28,000,000 horses, 30,000,000 sheep, and so on, to cease before the reader is wearied ; but in no single instance is the region producing within 50 per cent, of what it will be made to yield before the expiration of the next twenty years. Farming there has been haphazard, rude, and wasteful ; but as it begins to pay well, the methods begin to improve. Drainage will add new lands, and better methods will swell the crops, so that, for instance, where 60 bushels of corn to the acre are now grown, at least 100 bushels will be harvested. All the corn lands are now settled, but they are not improved. They will yet double in value. It is different with wheat; with that the maximum production will soon be attained.

Such is the wealth that Chicago counts up as tributary to her. By the railroads that dissect this opulent region she is riveted to the midland, the southern, and the western country between the Rockies and the Alleghanies. She is closely allied to the South, because she is manufacturing and distributing much that the South needs, and can get most economically from her. Chicago has become the third manufacturing city in the Union, and she is drawing manufactures away from the East faster than most persons in the East imagine. To-day it is a great Troy stove-making establishment that has moved to Chicago ; the week before it was a Massachusetts shoe -factory that went there. Many great establishments have gone there, but more must follow, because Chicago is not only the centre of the midland region in respect of the distribution of madeup wares, but also for the concentration of raw materials. Chicago must lead in the manufacture of all goods of which wood, leather, and iron are the bases. The revolution that took place in the meat trade when Chicago took the lead in that industry affected the whole leather and hide industry. Cattle are dropping 90,000 skins a week in Chicago, and the trade is confined to Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, and St. Paul. It is idle to suppose that those skins will be sent across the Alleghanies to be turned into goods and sent back again. Wisconsin has become a great tanning State, and all over the district close around Chicago are factories and factory towns where hides are turned into leather goods. The West still gets its finer goods in the East, but it is making the coarser grades, and to such an extent as to give a touch of New England color to the towns and villages around Chicago.