The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Read online

  For Jean Scott and Dotty

  Best friends and Buffalonians

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1. RAINBOW CITY

  2. SUMMER IN THE CITY

  3. THE FAVORED GUEST

  4. THE BLOOD-COLORED TEMPLE

  5. THE EMERGENCY

  6. THE RISE AND THE FALL

  7. AFTERSHOCK

  8. FREEFALL

  9. THE ESCAPE OF THE DOLL LADY

  10. THE ELEPHANT

  11. THE TIMEKEEPERS

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Rainbow City at night: the view from the Esplanade.

  THE

  ELECTRIFYING

  FALL OF

  RAINBOW CITY

  Prologue

  1901

  It was closing in on dusk that November day when people in the stadium, who had been shivering in the cold, were finally rewarded with a show. They could see movement in the shadows—gray shapes in the gray light—and soon they could make out the animals. Three small elephants moved into the chasm of the arena and, with them, a giant hulk. He was the one they waited for—Jumbo II, the largest mammal in captivity.

  The spectators stilled as the big elephant came to a stop. He ran his trunk lightly around the smaller animals, toying with them. The crowd quieted further when Jumbo’s owner, a big, mustached man with the moniker of The Animal King, stepped forward. In his tailored English, the King recounted Jumbo’s history, from his decorated army career in India to his long Atlantic crossing. He spoke of the elephant’s hard life at the Pan-American Exposition, which had just closed. Jumbo had been at the fair only a few months, the King explained, but it was clear he would never adjust to show business. He was disobedient and had a temper. Although he had not killed anyone, he might do so at any time. He must be destroyed.

  The elephant’s quiet presence may have unnerved some of the audience, and his playful attentions to the smaller animals may have stirred some doubt. But no one left. They wanted to see the old war veteran electrocuted.

  The shock would be delivered by voltage from Niagara Falls, twenty-six miles away. If the onlookers had been to the big Buffalo exposition at all over the previous six months, they would know how apt this moment was as an end to the fair. The Pan-American Exposition had been all about electricity. The most talked-about building was the Electric Tower, which, in homage to its wondrous source of power, gushed out a miniature waterfall. Electricity ran the fair’s generators and transported guests via street railways. Its alternating current turned on thousands and thousands of tiny lights at night, sending visitors into raptures.

  For some, then, it was fitting that Jumbo II be shocked to death. The event would be a supreme act of Western accomplishment: It would harness a natural wonder; it would control a mysterious power; and it would bring down one of Asia’s biggest beasts.

  The elephant’s demise would echo some of the most popular shows on the Midway, too. On the Lane of Laughter, as it was called, showmen prodded elks into high-water dives and goaded apes into theatrical performances. The Animal King himself had shipped a veritable ark to Buffalo. His press agent claimed that every beast—from snakes to lions to bears to monkeys—did his bidding. Before him, the agent asserted, “animals cower.”

  The victory dance that the Exposition performed over nature made the Pan-American fair unique. But it was not the only act in its global show of power. Like other fair promoters at the turn of the twentieth century, Pan-American directors celebrated their idea of civilization. Borrowing Darwin’s vocabulary (and eschewing his science), they staged a spectacle of development, where, at every turn, they taught fairgoers about which sort of humans had advanced and which had not. They chose the progress of the Western Hemisphere as the theme for the fair and signaled how far some nations—namely, the United States—had come and how others—namely Latin American republics—labored to catch up. Art directors had even applied these ideas to the tints they chose for exhibition buildings. At the southern entrance to the show, painters coated exterior walls in “barbaric” colors and brushed structures to the north with whiter tints. The pinnacle of civilization, at the northern end of the grounds, was the ivory-hued Electric Tower. The color scheme of the fair earned it the name of “Rainbow City.”

  Visitors were urged to hurry to Buffalo, to take a last look at a vanishing world. This might be a final chance to meet the Apache Geronimo, who had been brought all the way from his Oklahoma prison. Plains Indians had traveled east by rail from faraway reservations and were reenacting battles and losing the West again, show after show. Filipino warriors had arrived, too, and were living and performing in a miniature Native village. The Philippines was such a new possession that even as the fair opened, American soldiers in the distant Pacific were still killing and dying to assert their sovereignty.

  And visitors were told to see Niagara Falls before it disappeared. Word had it that even the mighty world wonder could be threatened. Engineers had been drilling tunnels through its broad cliffs to produce the miracle of electric power. But what would be the result? The thunderous cataract might be reduced to a rock ledge and a trickle of water.

  And seeing Jumbo II, the big elephant, was a must. There he stood, motionless in the dark stadium, as attendants circled around him with wires. One man in the crowd thought he looked like a grand piano, the way his legs were sprawled and tied. The Animal King claimed that the elephant knew something was about to happen: “He’s crying like a baby,” he said.

  The King may have been right. Maybe Jumbo did sense something was up. Maybe the elephant sensed that everybody there, including the man at the power switch, was in for a big surprise.1

  The Pan-American Exposition that featured the veteran elephant opened its gates in May 1901. Buffalo joined an illustrious set of cities that had sponsored similar events, during what would become known as the grand era of world’s fairs. Begun in 1851 with London’s Crystal Palace, expositions had, by the 1890s, become colossal social magnets. Those located in Western Europe and the United States flaunted military and industrial power, new technologies, and consumer goods. They became extravagant advertisements for nation states, and, when possible, showcased colonial possessions. Produced by men with big egos and fat wallets, they became sites for superlatives, offering visitors the latest, the best, and the company of the most famous.

  In 1901, Buffalo hoped it had the formula down. It would borrow displays from earlier fairs, add a novel theme and design, spend big money on a midway, and count on visitors—millions of visitors. The Queen City of the Lakes, as it was known, also offered visitors Niagara Falls, just a trolley ride away. Some folks in this determined metropolis dreamed that the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 would be the biggest fair of the age, more popular even than Chicago’s extravaganza in 1893. The United States had pulled itself out of a grinding recession, and more people had pocket money. There was the new century to celebrate, too. Rainbow City would bring the country into the 1900s with dazzle and pomp.

  If it performed as promised, the Exposition would also allow Buffalo to finalize its grand potential. The city had always had ambition, it seemed, but needed a push to achieve greater prominence. Maybe it was playing second fiddle to New York City, the urban behemoth to the southeast, that humbled it time and again, or the fact that the halcyon days of the Erie Canal had passed. Or perhaps the challenge rested with residents who believed their big city was more of a way station than a destination. As one of them put it, Buffalo was “such a convenient stopping-off place from North to South and East to
West.”

  In 1901, city leaders had no patience for such humility. It was time for Buffalo to think big.

  When it debuted in May 1901, the Pan-American Exposition portended nothing but success. Despite wet weather, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to western New York in early summer and praised the fair’s architecture and fountains, its sparkling tower, and especially its nighttime illumination. They marveled at the latest wonders of American might and ingenuity, and, for the very first time, came face-to-face with exhibitors and guests from Cuba, Mexico, and even Argentina and Chile. They found the ridiculous, raucous Midway irresistibly charming. The Exposition attracted such enthusiastic patrons that some local fans trekked to the fair over and over again. One Buffalo schoolteacher walked through the fair’s front gates on more than thirty separate occasions.

  There were critics, of course. Some observers balked at the fair’s design. Others were underwhelmed by the color scheme. And there were people on display, in the Midway, who acted out. They protested their part in the show, sometimes publicly and sometimes quietly, in ways that only those with eyes or ears alert to such things would notice. At least two of them had come to the United States not to celebrate the nation’s imperial plans but to undermine them, by force.2

  But, looking back, these were all minor disruptions—nothing compared with what happened in the fall. It was in September, as the weather cooled, that desperation took hold. It possessed a slight, brown-haired man who had come to the fair from Ohio. Compelled by illness and personal pain, this man, who went by the name of Fred Nieman, signed into a Buffalo lodging house. Laid off from a factory job, Nieman saw himself as a casualty of the country’s industrial progress. Too few people in America were wealthy, he thought, and too many were poor. He also hated the country’s recent push for empire. Unlike millions of others who held these beliefs and protested them with their votes, Nieman was succumbing to a compulsion to do more. He focused his mind, his increasingly sick mind, on the American president. In September 1901, he began to stalk him.

  Later on that fall, others at the fair, acting out more personally, hoped to take limelight instead of a life. One of them was a middle-aged woman named Annie Edson Taylor. As desperate as Nieman but dangerous in a different way, Taylor shipped an enormous barrel from her home in Bay City, Michigan, to Niagara Falls. The big cask, she hoped, was her ticket out of poverty. She planned to use it to carry her over the cataract and dazzle Exposition crowds. The odds were not in her favor. Nobody had ever survived such a descent.

  Annie Taylor was a big woman—thick-bodied and tall. Espiridiona Cenda, also known as Alice Cenda, and most famously as Chiquita, was just the opposite. At just over two feet tall, the twenty-three-year-old Mexican was touted as the tiniest woman in the world. She was not only a Midway moneymaker; she had been crowned “mascot” of the Exposition. One day in late October, though, her English manager—the same Animal King who owned Jumbo II—said he heard cries from her quarters and found her gone. Making up a story, he told people that she had been kidnapped.

  Finally, there was the elephant. Problems started, officials said, when Jumbo began acting up in October. The heavily chained animal became obstreperous, and, not long afterward, the Animal King, still reeling from Chiquita’s disappearance, made the decision to try to kill him.

  These events, magnitudes apart in notoriety and impact, were carried out in very different ways—from disobedience to near-suicide to escape to murder. Some acts were repugnant; others praiseworthy. Two of the actors may have been mad, two others simply pushing for freedom, one step at a time. All of them, though, big and small, offered a rebuttal to the grand Exposition. They turned the fair, with its chest-thumping displays of sovereignty over people, animals, and the earth itself, into a shocking new show. The fair would indeed bring Buffalo onto the international stage, but in an astonishing manner. And it would herald the new century—but not in the way anybody expected.

  1.

  Rainbow City

  I

  SELLING BUFFALO

  Well before there was a fall season in 1901, there was, of course, a spring. In the springtime, nobody in Buffalo knew the name of the brown-haired man, or the big woman or the little one, or the name of the elephant. In their innocence, they were simply optimistic, even giddy, looking ahead to hosting one of the biggest shows on earth.

  They had a hard act to follow, though, and they knew it. For all their eagerness, in fact, Exposition organizers could not escape the name of another city: Chicago. From the day the Pan-American fair was conceived in 1895, to the year it was supposed to start in 1899, to the day it really began in May 1901, Chicago’s Columbian Exposition stood over them like a beacon and a taunt. There had been other big fairs, of course: London’s Crystal Palace and Philadelphia’s Centennial, both decades earlier. And in 1900, Paris’s Exposition Universelle had launched the new century.

  But Chicago’s world’s fair in 1893 had been an indisputable triumph, and Buffalo’s leaders dreamed that they might match Chicago’s numbers, or its style and beauty, or at least be compared to Chicago in a laudatory way.

  It wasn’t as though the “White City,” as Chicago’s exposition was known, had gone off perfectly. One of its chief architects had died before the plans had been fully realized, and the fair had opened unfinished. Then, at the very end of the exposition’s run, the city’s mayor had been shot and killed. To make the scene more desolate, a serial murderer had operated at the perimeter of the grounds.1

  Chicago’s fair proved to be a lot bigger than these sad events, however, and it garnered unprecedented praise. The White City, people said, inspired new industry, technology, and trade. It generated national discussions about modern architecture and art and city planning. And it had recorded more than twenty-seven million visits. Yes, some would confuse the number of visits with the number of people, and make preposterous claims, but it didn’t really matter. Any way you added it up, Chicago had been breathtaking.

  Omaha, Nebraska, had held the most recent fair, in 1898. Known as “The Little White City,” it borrowed Chicago’s colors. In fact, Omaha might have used an even more dazzling tint, for, according to Harper’s Weekly, its neoclassical buildings—another nod to Chicago—were shockingly white. The magazine reported that men and women stood “stupefied at the entrance of the Grand Court, blinded as they would have been by a flash of lightning.”

  The Little White City was a small fair—drawing close to three million admissions. But it had been held during the Spanish-American War, when potential tourists were distracted, and it still had paid dividends of 92.5 percent to its stockholders.2

  Beat that, Buffalo.

  One night late in January 1899, forty Buffalo businessmen sat down at tables covered in linen and crystal, put roses in their lapels, and gathered for a do-or-die banquet. They had nursed the idea of a Pan-American Exposition for several years—at least since the Atlanta Exposition in 1895—but it was now time to give it up or go forward. Adding urgency to the occasion was the fact that Detroit also had hopes for a Cadillac Exposition, and expected to raise $500,000 within the week. If Buffalo wasn’t able to top the Michiganders and go to Washington with a strong show of support, the Detroit “boomers” would have their show and Buffalo would slide back into its daily humdrum.

  At that moment, a genial, philanthropic iron manufacturer named Frank Baird, an organizer of the banquet, came up with a plan. He would encourage one exuberant citizen to stand, and, in a grand gesture, pledge money to buy stock in the fair. Others, stirred by manly honor and civic duty, would leap to their feet and do the same. “The thing,” Baird predicted, would “take off like wildfire.”

  And it did. In less than four hours, rich men stoked with enthusiasm pledged almost $500,000. A week later, the group met at the exclusive Ellicott Club for a “smoker,” listened to a regimental band play a march, lit three hundred clay pipes, and cheered the fact that their fellow citizens had responded in kind. They had promi
ses of more than a million dollars.

  Most of the funds came from wealthy men, to be sure, but newsboys, firemen, artisans, laundrymen, butchers, and factory laborers invested money, too. The Polish community chipped in; the police chief put in a hundred dollars; a three-year-old girl named Esther Wedekindt sent in a bag of pennies.

  Buffalonians pinched themselves. The “slumbering city,” as one exultant resident put it, woke up. Another claimed the city was “newly discovered.” A third insisted that “people seem to be holding their heads higher.”

  Mayor Conrad Diehl, an earnest, hardworking physician, was beside himself. As he arrived at the smoker he declared it was a “hot time in the new town.” Diehl, who had backed the exposition idea since taking office, told the assembled men that city children had been following him on the streets all week, saying, “There goes Pan American!” After he made a toast with a stein of beer to the success of the fair, men shouted and waved their pipes.3

  A few days later, twenty-five of these men, resplendent in fur coats and huffing against the cold, waved good-bye to the mayor and boarded an overnight train to Washington. They carried with them not only the news that almost $1.2 million had been invested in the fair, but also what they hoped was a winning idea. The Pan-American Exposition would honor the progress of the Western Hemisphere. It would appeal to empire builders by drawing on the Monroe Doctrine: No Old World countries would be permitted to install formal exhibits. Latin American republics, which would be encouraged to sponsor exhibits, could show northerners something of their cultural achievements, but above all they could demonstrate that they were ready to do business with the United States. The Buffalo delegation expected the president and Congress, not to mention investors, to salivate over the idea of new resources and new markets.

  In extending invitations to Latin American countries that the United States had recently fought, annexed, or assumed some control over, Exposition promoters might naturally expect some resistance. But, as one commentator put it, the fair would send a message that, as of now, “their gigantic northern neighbor is a comrade and friend.” Furthermore, another observer commented, the fair would help Latin American republics “come to know our flag better; and to know it would be to love it . . . [for] it represents all that is highest in human government and human civilization.”4