The Devil in the White City Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

The Chicago World Fair of 1893 and its amazing ‘White City’ was one of the most spectacular the world has ever seen. This is the incredible story of its realization, and of the two men whose tales it linked, and architect and a serial killer.

The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the chief builder of the White City, who created a magical landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome young doctor with striking blue eyes who used the attraction of the great fair – and his own devilish charms – to lure scores of young women to their death. Holmes would stroll through the fair at night, when an electric dynamo transformed it into an incandescent fairyland, with his unsuspecting victims on each arm.

While Burnham overcame politics, personality clashes and the fatal Chicago winds to bring together the creative talents of his architectural team in the transformation of swampy Jackson Park into the White City, Holmes was busy constructing his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World Fair Hotel and designed it to be a torture palace, complete with gas chamber and crematorium. Burnham, Holmes, and a colourful cast leap off the pages of this magnificent story, as Buffalo Bill, George Ferris, Thomas Edison and some 27 million others converge on the dazzling spectacle of the White City.

Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are gloriously displayed in this mesmerizing tale of the lefendary Fair that captured the spirit of America at the dawn of the twentieth century.