The White City

The Arch of States had been standing for four months before anyone thought to wonder whether it would stand for four more. It was not built to last. None of it was. The colonnades, the triumphal arches, the marble balustrades along the lagoon, all of it plastered over timber, painted the particular shade of white that suggests not purity but intention. Chicago, in the summer of its great Exposition, had erected a city that knew from the first nail what newspapers would not admit for another year: that the future, in this instance, had an end date.

The Arch of States, that magnificent, impossible confection of plaster and horse-hair and human vanity, rose above the lagoon as though it had stood since the Romans themselves had laid its foundation. Gondoliers, imported at considerable expense from Venice, propelled their narrow crafts beneath it with expressions of professional serenity, conveying ladies in white summer dresses and gentlemen in straw boaters, all of whom had paid fifty cents for the privilege of pretending, for one afternoon, that Chicago was something other than Chicago.

Among them, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of July, sat Mr. Aldous Prentiss Fitch, Director of the Division of Public Illumination for the Exposition, a man of fifty-three whose whiskers had gone the colour of the buildings themselves. He had spent the better part of three years negotiating the contract that brought Mr. Westinghouse's alternating current into the fairgrounds. This fact had cost him the friendship of several men who preferred Mr. Edison's method, and which had illuminated, at the last count, ninety-two thousand electric bulbs across the Court of Honor. He was composing, in his mind, the speech he would deliver at the evening banquet, a speech in which the word Progress appeared no fewer than eleven times and the word poverty not at all.

"The City of the Future," he intended to declare, gesturing broadly at the colonnades, "stands before you. Behold what Man, in his highest aspiration, may achieve."

What Man, in his highest aspiration, had actually achieved was somewhat complicated by the matter of Emmeline Dusk.

Emmeline Dusk was twelve years old and had been picking pockets in the City of the Future for three weeks, with results that were, she felt, frankly disappointing. The gentlemen of the Exposition kept their wallets in interior jacket pockets, which required a closeness of approach that the warmth of the season made difficult to achieve without remark. The ladies carried reticules that closed with a sound like a small cannon. The gondoliers watched everything. And the Columbian Guards, those fine young men in their blue coats, had a particular way of looking at a child who stood too long near the ticket booth that made it clear that the City of the Future had, at minimum, inherited all of the past's opinions on the subject of ragamuffin girls.

She had come from the Back-of-the-Yards, where the smell of the slaughterhouses announced itself a full mile before you arrived, and where the houses stood so close together that their shadows fell not on the streets but on each other. Her mother packed sausage casings. Her father had packed sausage casings until the machinery settled the question of which was more replaceable: the Man or the machine. The answer, it transpired, was the Man.

The Exposition had been spoken of in the Yards as a kind of miracle, a vision of what the city could become, what they could become, if Progress continued its appointed rounds. Emmeline had walked the four miles to the Jackson Park entrance on opening day, had stood at the gates for a long hour, and had then walked the four miles home, because admission was fifty cents and fifty cents was three days of her mother's wages, and Progress, it appeared, charged admission.

She had returned the next morning through a gap in the fence near the South Pond that she suspected the groundskeepers knew about and had decided, in the way of overwhelmed men, to simply not know about. In three weeks, she had seen the great Ferris wheel turn its slow revolutions over the Midway; each car the size of a parlour, forty cars in all, carrying two thousand souls at once into a sky that did not care in the least about admission prices. She had watched, from the edge of the crowd on the Midway Plaisance, the Dahomean village and the Turkish theatre and the Egyptian street, all of them performing foreignness for the entertainment of people who had never left Illinois. She had eaten a thing called Cracker Jack, which cost a penny, and decided it was the most honest transaction the Exposition offered.

The gondola carrying Mr. Aldous Prentiss Fitch drew level with the promenade at half-past four, at the precise moment that Emmeline Dusk leaned too far over the balustrade, attempting to retrieve a handkerchief she had just liberated from a distracted professor of engineering, who had himself been distracted by the sight of the electric fountains beginning their evening display.

She did not fall into the lagoon. She came close enough that the gondolier stood up and swore in Italian, and Mr. Fitch, a man of instinct if not always of intention, lunged across the bow and caught her wrist.

For a moment, the two of them regarded each other across the gunwale — the Man who had helped design the White City, and the girl who had broken into it — with equal and mutual astonishment.

"You," said Mr. Fitch, recovering himself and noting certain things about her dress, her boots, the particular angle of her chin, "do not have a ticket."

"No, sir," said Emmeline.

"How did you get in?"

She considered this. "Through the gap by the South Pond, sir."

Something moved across his face that was not quite amusement or conscience, but perhaps a distant relation of both. He released her wrist. In his other hand, he was still holding the speech about Progress.

"And what do you think of it?" he asked. "The Exposition."

Emmeline looked at the Arch, at the marble colonnade, at the statuary, at the gondola, at the electric lights just beginning to glow orange in the long summer dusk. She looked at all of it for a long moment, with the thoroughness of someone who has learned to see things accurately, because, where she came from, accuracy was the difference between eating and not.

"It's very beautiful, sir," she said at last. "But it doesn't smell right."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The whole thing. It's plaster, isn't it? Painted to look like marble." She tapped the balustrade. A small flake came away under her thumbnail. "Back home, the buildings are ugly, but at least they're what they are."

Mr. Fitch looked down at his speech. Eleven instances of the word Progress. Not one word about the smell of the Yards, which on a westerly wind reached even this promenade, even now, beneath the electric lights and the imported gondoliers and the painted-plaster dream of the future.

He had a further, less comfortable thought, which arrived without announcement and could not be made to leave: that this child, who had broken through a fence to be here, had by her own account seen the electricity hall three times. He had not seen it once. He had designed its lighting contract, had approved its wiring diagrams, had signed his name to correspondence about it on eleven separate occasions, and had not once walked through its doors. She had visited what he had only administered. The distinction felt, at that moment, rather larger than he would have wished.

He folded the papers slowly. He had spent six months on that speech. It had been admired by three aldermen, a bishop, and the editor of the Tribune.

"What is your name?" he asked.

"Emmeline Dusk, sir."

"Miss Dusk." He straightened up. The gondola drifted. Above them, the Arch caught the last of the western light and glowed like something genuinely ancient, genuinely noble — which was, he supposed, rather the point. "Would you like to see the electricity hall? They have a tower of Westinghouse bulbs. Ninety-two thousand of them."

"I've seen it, sir. Three times. It's the best thing here." She paused. "It's real."

"Yes," said Mr. Aldous Prentiss Fitch, Director of the Division of Public Illumination, looking up at the plaster Arch in the gathering dark. "Yes, I suppose it is."

The banquet speech never arrived. Mr. Fitch sent word that he was indisposed. He was, in fact, standing beside a twelve-year-old girl from the Back-of-the-Yards in the electricity hall, watching Westinghouse's alternating current climb ninety-two thousand bulbs toward a ceiling that was, like everything else, plaster, but which, in that particular light, it seemed almost impertinent to question.

Emmeline had been here three times already. She stood now with the same stillness she had given the lagoon and the Arch and the Ferris wheel and the Dahomean village, the practiced, conserving attention of someone for whom wonder was not a luxury but a kind of reconnaissance. The light went up and up. Beside her, Mr. Fitch said nothing, which was, she thought, the first honest thing he had done all afternoon.

The White City would burn to the ground before the year was out. But that was later, and this was now, and the light, Mr. Westinghouse's light, sixty cycles per second, invisible and inexhaustible, did not flicker, and did not care, and did not go out.

Inspired by the World's Columbian Exposition · Chicago, 1893.