H.H. Holmes and the Devil's Hotel

Twenty-seven million people came to Chicago in the summer of eighteen ninety-three for the World's Columbian Exposition. They came to see the Ferris Wheel, which was making its first public rotation. They came to see electric streetlamps illuminating an entire city of white Beaux-Arts buildings constructed on the lakefront in under five years. They came to see what their country could do when it decided to show the world.

A man named Herman Webster Mudgett, operating under the name H.H. Holmes, had built a three-story building at the corner of Sixty-Third and Wallace in the Englewood neighborhood, approximately one mile from the fairgrounds. He had designed the building himself and supervised its construction, rotating out contractors before any of them could observe the whole plan. The building had soundproofed rooms. It had gas pipes whose valves could be controlled from outside the locked doors. It had a greased chute from the upper floors to the basement. In the basement, it had a kiln.

Holmes was a doctor, or had passed himself off as one. He was charming in the way that people who depend on charm for their survival tend to be. He rented rooms in the building during the fair. He hired young women as employees in the drugstore that occupied part of the ground floor. He made himself useful to families arriving in the city.

The precise number of his victims is not established in the public record. The figure of nine confirmed deaths reflects what the legal record could support after his arrest in eighteen ninety-four. Estimates of the total have ranged considerably higher, with some period claims reaching into the hundreds, but historians treat those numbers with significant caution: Holmes himself gave inconsistent accounts, and no systematic excavation of the site was ever conducted while the building stood. What can be said with confidence is that people came to Chicago for the fair and some of them did not go home, and that Holmes was responsible for some of those disappearances. The building was demolished years after his execution in eighteen ninety-six. The lot at Sixty-Third and Wallace is a post office now.

Erik Larson's two thousand three book "The Devil in the White City" restored Holmes to public attention by braiding his story against Daniel Burnham's construction of the fair. The juxtaposition Larson found was the one the city itself had offered: beauty and catastrophe built on the same ground, in the same summer, for the same audience.