On the same night the Titanic sinks, April 12, 1912, Daniel Hudson Burnham is aboard the Olympic, thinking about his years planning the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which was held in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.
Chicago is a rapidly growing city in 1890, and is eager to prove itself to the already established Eastern cities of the US (particularly New York). Chicago wins its bid to host the World’s Fair and swells with civic pride. Daniel Burnham and John Root, Chicago’s leading architects, receive artistic control over the buildings at the Fair.
While Burnham and Root are trying to assemble a team, a doctor who calls himself H. H. Holmes arrives in Chicago. Holmes, though, was born Herman Mudgett. Women are attracted to him, partly since he doesn’t follow the traditional rules of courtship. He is already married to a woman named Clara, but he abandons her before coming to the city. Interestingly, Holmes enjoys the putrid smells of the slaughterhouses that are the major industrial core of Chicago.
Holmes purchases a drugstore that becomes popular since he attracts a lot female customers. Holmes marries a woman named Myrta (though he is still married to Clara under his real name), but immediately begins to neglect her. He purchases a lot of land across the street from the drugstore, which he turns into a strange home that, once he hears about the World’s Fair, he decides to run as a hotel. Even though the building contains rooms and equipment that are later found to have been used for numerous murders, Holmes attracts very little attention at the time due to his charm and skill at making sure no one knows what he is doing.
From his workers, Holmes assembles a group of accomplices, including Benjamin Pitezel and Charles Chappell. To finance the expensive undertaking of the hotel, he fakes the signature of Myrta’s wealthy great-uncle and invites him to stay in his new hotel. Long afterward, Jonathan believes that Holmes tried but failed to kill him in the night.
Burnham and Root slowly assemble a team of renowned architects, including Charles McKim, Frederick Olmsted, and Louis Sullivan, and they start on their designs for the Fair. They agree to hold the exposition on the grounds of Jackson Park, which overlooks Lake Michigan. Root dies, but Burnham resolves to continue on designing the Fair buildings.
The architects present their building designs, but Burnham doesn’t want one building to outdo the others. Sullivan does not like the neoclassical style of the World’s Fair, but other architects embrace the aesthetic. Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park and now the Fair’s landscape architect, plans a dreamy, gorgeous and well-plotted aesthetic for the lagoons and grounds, while the famous architects devise elaborate and impressive edifices to surround the Grand Court.
Burnham, who is understandably stressed by building what amounts to a city in two years and meeting Chicago’s goal of competing with, or even besting, Paris’s exposition from the late 1880s, tirelessly supervises the construction of the buildings, negotiating with unions and his board of directors.
In 1891, Carter Henry Harrison, the popular former mayor of Chicago, surprisingly loses his election. This disappoints Patrick Prendergast, a young Irish immigrant and a mentally ill man. He vows to campaign for Harrison’s next attempt, and Harrison does indeed win.
While the Fair is being built, Holmes attracts visitors to his “World’s Fair Hotel.” Ned and Julia Conner and Julia’s sister, Gertrude, rent apartments in his building and Holmes offers them jobs. Gertrude leaves under mysterious circumstances. Holmes tricks Ned into buying his debt-ridden drugstore. Ned eventually leaves after coming to the conclusion that Holmes and his wife are having an affair, and that he cannot handle the drugstore. Holmes charms Julia, impregnates her, and then murders her while pretending that he is going to give her an abortion that she has agreed to.
Holmes also murders Emeline Cigrand, another beautiful woman he seduces. Holmes attracts very little attention from the lodgers and local police force even while carrying out these dastardly deeds. In Boston years back he had met Minnie Williams, a wealthy woman; Holmes seduced her then and starts to do so again through letters, and she moves to Chicago to be with him. She thinks they get married, but there is no record of this. Holmes asks her to invite her sister Anna to come visit them and tour the Fair when it opens.
Burnham, who wants to build a structure that can match the Eiffel Tower, awards a Fair concession to George Ferris. Design on what will become the famed Ferris Wheel is slow; meanwhile, other buildings are damaged by rain and snow. Burnham’s friend Francis Millet advises that the buildings be painted white, giving them a distinctive appearance that earns the nickname “the White City.” In addition to the Ferris Wheel, exhibits planned include motion pictures, dancers, “exotic” people from around the world and light bulbs. Buffalo Bill brings his Wild West show nearby.
When the Fair is finally opened, it loses money and has a slow start, as the nation does not yet know if traveling there is worth the money during an economic slowdown, but after the Ferris Wheel is completed and other events and enticements are planned, it becomes profitable—the toast of Chicago and the nation.
Before the end of the Fair, Prendergast assassinates Mayor Harrison because Harrison did not give him the position he thought he was entitled to. He is put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
As the Fair ends, Holmes murders Anna and Minnie and sets part of his hotel on fire to collect a large insurance claim. However, insurance investigators are skeptical and begin to come together to go after Holmes. He eludes them, and leaves the city with his new wife Georgiana Yoke and Pitezel. He is finally apprehended when he calls in a life insurance claim on Pitezel and the Pinkerton Detectives track him down.
Detective Frank Geyer of Philadelphia, where Holmes is sitting in jail awaiting trial, is tasked with finding Pitezel’s three children, all of whom were last seen in Holmes’s care. He also assumes Holmes actually killed Pitezel, but Holmes is sly and canny and will tell Geyer nothing.
Geyer follows Holmes’s trail through Indianapolis and Toronto, and finds that he has indeed murdered three of Pitezel’s children. Although Holmes denies it initially and writes a memoir, trying to seem sympathetic, he is sentenced to death. He admits some things and claims that he is changing into the Devil; ominously, people involved with his execution experience troubling things.
Burnham is seen as the greatest architect of his day, and the World’s Fair changes American architecture, science, and culture in many ways. On the Olympic, Burnham learns that Francis Millet, who was on the Titanic, died; Burnham dies afterward.
