The prime movers of Chicago's prosperity are a trinity of remarkable businessmen: Marshall Field (retail), Philip Armour (meat-packing) and George Pullman (railway sleeping-cars). The first skyscrapers are rising, the nation's railroads are converging, conmen work the city streets, white slave traffickers prowl the stations looking for fresh young country girls new to town, boodling politicians take public handouts from on-the-make businessmen, meat-packing millionaires rise at 6.00 a.m. to catch out and fine starving tubercular workers arriving late to work, strong-arm women mug tourists, the Chicago River is an open sewer, City Hall is covering up a smallpox epidemic, the new Elevated Railway rumbles relentlessly overhead, the smoke-filled city stinks, middle-class lady social workers struggle in the slums, murder rates and 'disappearances' have soared.

This is the place which won out against New York to host the World's Columbian Exposition, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. Starting in May 1893 the World's Fair, as it has become known, has proved the most successful of its kind ever, attracting over 27 million visitors from all over the world. Now, with two weeks left to go it is coming to its triumphant close.

Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, just to the south of the City, the World's Fair is a vast extravaganza of fifteen vast, electrically lit, Neo-classical buildings, moving walkways, towering golden statues, Venetian canals, educational lectures, international cafes and state-of-the-art technology. It takes visitors a week to do and see everything and it all looks great until you look more closely, the building themselves aren?t real at all. They're made of wood and plaster painted white and the approaching winter weather combined with the ravages of time will soon consign it all to oblivion.

But the true focal point of the Fair for many is not the 'White City' but the Midway Plaisance just outside it, a colorful mile-long fairground of freak shows, a Turkish 'village', stunts, jugglers and performing animals' all dominated by the world's first Ferris wheel. The Plaisance is the work of private enterprise driven by greed rather than public committees claiming a desire to serve the public good. It is jam-packed with men, women and children fresh up from the country and prey to every form of low-life imaginable.

But there's a more exciting attraction still - a must-see for every visitor to Chicago and a place that gets the biggest plug of all in the newly published, first Baedeker's Guide to America: the Union Stock Yard. There's just nothing else like it in the world. The Yard is a 500-acre site now thirty years old and at the height of its commercial power, into which up to 15,000 hogs and cattle are brought daily by train from the Midwest daily to be slaughtered, dressed and trained back out in refrigerated cars to the East Coast and Southern markets, and beyond them to the world. Here, stockmen on horses jostle with buyers, railway men, auctioneers, butchers, and the armies of under-paid, over-worked stockyard workers on a network of roads, walkways and killing floors running with offal and blood. The air is filled with the smoky stench of meat processing, the lowing of cattle and the penetrating squeals of dying hogs. It is a workers' hell on earth, a businessman's money-making dream, an urban planner's nightmare, and a sensational thrill for the genteel lady tourists who like the spectacle of stripped-down, strong men with knives killing hogs at the rate of three a minute.

Naturally Chicago's city fathers don't want the tourists to know about 'Back of the Yards' close by, the filthy slum that has grown up on the swamp-land adjacent to the Yard to house its underpaid, ill-fed, mainly immigrant workers. Its houses are jerry built, its streets are flooded open sewers filled with excrement, industrial waste and rotting meat in which children play with the maggots. It is too hot in summer and freezing in winter, the downtrodden immigrant population is perpetually sick with chronic disease and overwork. Here, groups of Germans, Italians, Irish, Lithuanians, Poles and Russians form rival enclaves between which no quarter is given. Everybody wants to get out of 'Packingtown' and will do anything they can to do so; meanwhile the men drink, the women suffer and the children starve.

In fact the only people who care in a city without serious social welfare provision are those who work and live in Hull House, the first and most famous settlement house in America, set up in 1889 among the Westside Halsted Street slums by social reformer Jane Addams and supported by a network of likeminded women. It can educate, campaign, and change lives but it can never stop the steady march of a progress that hopes its going to Heaven but right now seems headed for Hell.

Naturally, Chicago, like all great cities, is a place of contrasts. A few blocks away is Prairie Avenue, a street of exclusive, fabulous mansions, mostly ugly and overblown, built by the city's self-made men. But the area's in rapid decline because the new railway lines out of Chicago now run nearby, bringing constant noise and soot. To make matters worse for the rich denizens of this elite residential area, new city ordinances have driven the prostitutes and pimps from downtown and they have set up their brothels nearby in the new Levee So the clever money is now moving out and north of the City, to the select environs of the Gold Coast.
That's where a new young architect Frank Lloyd Wright, now setting up his own practice, is finding private clients with enough money and imagination to bankroll his dazzling new vision of what domestic architecture should be and in so doing founding the revolutionary new Prairie School of Architecture. Wright draws on the very same industrial 'production line' techniques that have been pioneered and developed by meat packers like Philip Armour for killing and dressing hogs in the Union Stock Yard to create his buildings and their decoration

But Chicago's five-time laisser-faire mayor, Henry Carter Harrison, also believes in turning a blind eye to the world's oldest profession - prostitution. It thrives in the Levee: the most notorious of the city's red-light districts, north of the Yard, south of downtown, adjacent to Prairie Avenue. Imagine every depravity, debauchery and vile criminality and it's here. Brothels, saloons, opium dens, gambling houses overflowing with every kind of footpad, panderer, pimp, addict, prostitute, beggar, thief and fool that ever lived. So dangerous that the police don't venture there; so patently corrupt that a local judge has said that if you get mugged, raped or murdered there it's your own fault. No matter: during the World's Fair the Levee and its dens are doing a roaring trade.

Even as they do so, barely more than a couple of hundred yards away, the City's great and good are parading themselves most evenings at The Auditorium Theatre, a new cultural centre built especially for the Fair. This brand-new stylishly decorated electically lit 1000-seat theatre/concert hall, whose tower is Chicago's tallest, is one of the focal points of Chicago society. It is the biggest and best in town, its corridors and nooks and crannies endless, its décor lavish, its theatre is setting new standards internationally.

After the show visitors can take a stroll along the promenade overlooking Lake Michigan nearby, or on waking in their hotels at night and opening a window, hear the brand new Elevated Railway running along its first stretch, a four mile run from downtown to Jackson Park, scene of the Fair. It's just been opened, so the Loop as it came to be known does not yet exist. Still, the El is shiny new, modern, fast and efficient and its overhead rumble is a new feature of the city environment. As are the railway termini which daily disgorge visitors from out of town, thousands of them, from all over America and the world, anxious to enjoy the last days of the Fair and experience a city like no other seen before.

Visitors like Emily Strauss, our heroine. A young, still inexperienced journalist, from New York, who arrives this very morning in search of a lost girl and maybe herself as well. She's a woman like thousands of others, in a city that doesn't care, who must make good fast or risk losing everything, including her own life...
© William Horwood & Helen Rappaport