The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City Read online

  The fur-coated Buffalonians not only hoped to sell their grand theme; they also wanted to sell their hometown. As modest as they had been two weeks earlier in each other’s company, they now needed to puff out their chests. They had to remind legislators that the Queen City, boasting 370,000 people, was the eighth biggest municipality in the country. The Port of Buffalo was one of the most active shipping centers in the world, with traffic exceeding even that of the Suez Canal. The city was a miracle of electrical power, having tapped Niagara Falls for trend-setting streetlights and the country’s first electric streetcars. People could easily get to Buffalo, too, on the numerous trains that spiderwebbed through the region. More than half of all Americans—thirty-eight million people—could reach the city in a long day’s journey or less. Throw in Canada, and forty-five million people could get there on an overnight train. No other place in the hemisphere could claim that.

  Buffalo River with grain elevators and freighters, 1890.

  The delegates also had to remind congressmen that their city had cultivated men of education and ambition, including two American presidents, Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland. Its businessmen had made lots of money, too, first in the Erie Canal boom and then in the railroads. Situated as they were at the very eastern end of Lake Erie and edged by the Niagara River, Erie County capitalists had lived a middle-man’s dream, exchanging western boatloads for Eastern trainloads. The grain elevators that towered at the edge of the lake—which helped make Buffalo the greatest grain port in the world—spoke of their success. More recently, investors had started dreaming of steel and were planning big, belching furnaces along the lake.

  The Washington delegation could also boast that Buffalo was enterprising and modern. Its tallest buildings were designed by some of the country’s best-known architects, such as H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan. It had a green string of Olmsted parks. Its grand thoroughfare, Delaware Avenue, was arched with elms and chestnuts and anchored by imposing mansions built of every material deemed fashionable—sometimes in the same façade. And it had more asphalt streets than any city in the country. Passengers in other places suffered shattered nerves as they lurched over stone or gravel streets, but Buffalo residents enjoyed smooth, quiet rides. Throw in a turreted insane asylum—another architectural marvel—and a picturesque, Paris-inspired cemetery, and who could deny that Buffalo was a state-of-the-art city?

  Lafayette Square, Buffalo, ca. 1900.

  Then there was the climate. The Buffalonians made a special case for the advantages of their climate. They had, they said, enviable summertime temperatures. Industrialist Charles Goodyear went further, telling Congress that Buffalo was the “pleasantest place on Earth.” While the rest of the country sweltered during the summer dog days, Lake Erie fanned cool air over the Queen City. The “ lake effect,” in other words, meant a delicious breeze.5

  Congress liked what it heard. It voted to spend half a million dollars on a world-class exhibit.

  II

  CONFIDENCE MEN

  Later on, when the hard days in the fall of 1901 caused people to look back to the beginning, they ignored all the keen, unclouded pride and found sinister signs. Men of the Indian Congress on the Exposition Midway said they should have known—they had seen a “death bird.” Little Lone Wolf had spotted it—a black bird about the size of a sparrow, with pure white under its wings—sitting on the pole of his father’s tepee. Distraught, he told the village. Others caught sight of it and agreed on the bad omen: A chieftain was going to die.

  There were other signs, too, that things were amiss. The one big animal to die en route to the fair in April was a well-trained and costly buffalo. The same month, bicyclists were horrified to discover a body hanging from one of the Exposition entrances. Another had been thrown from the Electric Tower. When people learned that these were just dummies staged by Exposition workmen, they were relieved, but not completely. Why would anybody do such a thing?

  By May 20, 1901, when the Pan-American Exposition shook off its scaffolding and came to life, such unnerving questions had been forgotten. City officials were ready to show the world what could be done with hometown spirit, determination, and local money. Washington had paid for its big exhibit, and New York’s state government in Albany had pitched in to help put up a permanent building. But Buffalo, on its own, would shoulder the rest.6

  Exposition directors hoped for a bigger crowd than Chicago’s on opening day. While President McKinley, who was in California with his ailing wife, couldn’t deliver a dedication speech, Theodore Roosevelt, the popular vice president and former governor, would do the honors.

  The weather worked miracles. As Dedication Day unfolded, low-lying mists lifted Rainbow City’s pinnacles and spires into the air and delivered to the scene a sense of magic. Buffalo residents, who had put out flags and bunting and scoured their asphalt “as clean as a kitchen floor,” cheered a parade of soldiers, officials, and performers as they moved from downtown to the fairgrounds, three miles to the north. Traveling over Main Street and then up Delaware Avenue, Mexican troops, with Mexican musicians and Mexican cavalry, marched proudly alongside United States soldiers. Carriages brought along a beaming Mayor Diehl, Exposition President John Milburn, and Vice President Roosevelt, in a tall silk hat and black overcoat. Roosevelt became so excited at the cheering crowd that he stood up in his carriage for several city blocks. On Main Street, recognizing a Rough Rider from his Cuba days, he leaned out to grasp his hand. Far in the future, this habit of standing up to greet people would make Roosevelt a perfect target for a gunman, but now he met only cheering throngs.

  Almost an hour behind the military parade, Midway concessionaires wheeled up the same route with two miles worth of floats. When all the marchers had entered the grounds, and the crowds had hastened to join them, the Exposition opened with an air show. Carrier pigeons flew up and fanned out with news of the day, and gas balloons, kites, daylight fireworks, and an “eagle” flying a fifty-foot-long banner dotted the sky. A thousand more balloons rose and dropped souvenirs, and tiny shells burst open and set loose little flags.

  Vice President Roosevelt joined other dignitaries to walk across the Triumphal Bridge to the Esplanade, and at midday, to loud applause, he delivered a spirited drum roll under the rotunda of the Temple of Music. Almost bouncing with energy, he spoke on familiar themes: the need for hardy manliness; the iniquities of corporate wealth; a desire for Europe to relinquish its interest in the Western Hemisphere. He also uttered comforting statements to the delegates from Latin America. “None of us,” he said, “will rise at the expense of our neighbors.” His most laudatory words, not surprisingly, went to his own country. It was, he said, “the mightiest republic upon which the sun has ever shone.”

  Roosevelt and other officials also took time to tour the fair, including the Midway. The vice president visited the Diving Elks show and pronounced the elks’ steep plunge into a tub of water a “splendid act.” He also stopped at Frank Bostock’s animal arena, where Wallace, Jr., a lion, greeted him with a growl. Roosevelt laughed. Captain Jack Bonavita, Bostock’s lion trainer, then put another stubborn lion through a routine, and hit him with the end of a whip. When the lion snarled and swatted the trainer, he was whipped again. “There’s the nerve I like,” Roosevelt remarked.7

  Telegrams flew to Buffalo that day from all directions: from Ecuador and Haiti and Peru; from Canada and Cuba. William McKinley tapped congratulations from San Francisco and sent along a heartfelt message: “May there be no cloud upon this grand festival of peace and commerce,” he said.

  Newspapers joined in. “Today marks the birth of a new Buffalo,” one announced. Within days of opening, even without Chicago’s numbers, others proclaimed the fair a success. Within weeks, they became even more sanguine, announcing the “Glad News” that the Pan-American Exposition “will pay and PAY WELL!” This, they said, was based on conservative estimates. There was only one caveat. The projections were “barring accident.”

/>   Journalists across the country stirred the optimism. A reporter from the New York World declared the Pan-American “ought to be the most successful international exposition ever held in America.” Chicago had taken place, he explained, during an economic slump, when the nation was disheartened. Buffalo would get the benefit of prosperous times, and would be able to show off eight years’ worth of amazing inventions. And with Niagara Falls nearby, too? Those records were about to take a big, big tumble.

  It was gratifying, too, to read how people from one end of the country to the other were planning visits to Buffalo. In Butte, Montana, several excursion groups had purchased Exposition tickets. In Pueblo, Colorado, five trains of tourists were heading east. And in a remote settlement named Old Town, Maine, nearly half the population was packing its bags. It was hard for “real” Pan-American visitors to make it, of course, but Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, it was said, had taken a “personal interest” in the Exposition, and many of his countrymen had secured tickets on boats and trains. Wealthy Cubans, too, were said to be northbound.

  The only New World friends who seemed somewhat lukewarm about the show actually lived close by—within shouting distance, in fact. Canada did send plenty of visitors to Buffalo throughout the season, but its government tacitly acknowledged that the “Pan” in the Pan-American Exposition was really directed to the south, and it spent less than Chile and Cuba on its national building. In early May, an Exposition delegation traveled to Ottawa to extend a personal invitation to Canada’s governor general to attend either Dedication Day or President’s Day, when McKinley would visit, then scheduled for mid-June. The governor general, Lord Minto, declared that “he would not be able to go on the twentieth, and he was also very much afraid that he could not get away on President’s Day.” He was unable to say when a special day for Canadians should be scheduled.

  But never mind. Rainbow City drew enough praise from other quarters. Distinguished visitors delivered glowing reviews. Nikola Tesla, the famous electrical engineer, who visited the fair even before it was finished, pronounced it “grand.” He would be kind, of course—his alternating current supplied the power that lighted the Exposition. But Thomas Edison praised it, too. He stopped at Buffalo in mid-July and was whisked away for a quick view of his incandescent lights at the Illumination. Taking in the nocturnal ritual, when tiny lamps grew in power until they outlined both buildings and grounds, he grew expansive. “This is the consummation of my grandest dream,” he exclaimed. “It exceeds in beauty and brilliancy anything heretofore created by man.” Other reports said he was more succinct. He called it “out of sight.”8

  III

  AN UNINVITED MAN

  Like other nearby cities, Cleveland, Ohio, put on extra trains to Buffalo that summer, and its railroads advertised specials to the Exposition. The local press cautioned, though, that it cost money to see the fair, and even more money to eat and stay near the show.

  How strange it must have seemed to his family, then, that brown-haired Fred Nieman—who did not have much money, who disliked cities, and who hated so much of what the fair celebrated—would want to spend time near the Exposition. Twenty-eight-year-old Nieman, a fair-skinned man with sky-colored eyes, had spent the spring and early summer at home on the family farm. He kept a quiet routine: He did undemanding jobs, read, and slept. His father, a Prussian immigrant, was out of work, and his stepmother, brothers, and sisters labored hard to get by. Yet Nieman’s family had some time ago given up hope of seeing him work hard. He was sick, he said.

  Nieman did have strength enough for some pursuits. He went eagerly to political meetings and he was able to walk, half a mile, to retrieve newspapers. He devoured newspapers of all kinds—Polish, English, labor, socialist, and what he called “capitalist” papers. He fell asleep reading the papers, and then he reread them. He paid close attention to articles about working people and strikes. And he liked reading about anarchists.

  Sometime in 1900, his family recalled, he read an article that provoked him or comforted him in a strange way. He clipped it out of the paper and it became so “precious” that he took it upstairs with him when he went to bed. It described the July 1900 assassination of King Umberto I in Italy, by an Italian American worker, an anarchist.

  In the midsummer of 1901, Nieman’s pattern of near-somnolence shifted. Displaying more energy, even a fevered intensity, he suddenly left home, boarded a train, and headed west. Then he reversed direction. By the third week of July, he had taken lodgings with a family in the town of West Seneca, a five-cent trolley ride from Buffalo. Writing to his older brother, Waldeck, he asked for ten dollars to be sent to a Fred Snider. That was a new name for him, just as Nieman had once been new. He had been born Leon Czolgosz.

  Ghost-like, Nieman disappeared from his boardinghouse in the morning and returned after dark. He told his housemates that he went to meetings, but he did more than that. He went to the Pan-American fair, where he did some odd work and wandered about, looking at displays and people, drawing conclusions and calculating. He was such a calm, pleasant-faced fellow, so carefully combed and dressed, that his anger must have been easy to miss.9

  IV

  THE ENTHUSIAST

  The men and women who had designed the Exposition, who had labored over drafting tables and fiddled with sketches and models, likely never pictured a man like Fred Nieman at Rainbow City. They had built the fair for people who were confident and who lived comfortably. Their ideal visitor would be someone smitten with the United States, who would take pride in the way that white Americans, with their sophisticated customs and arts, their advanced machines, and their ships and guns, were on the ascendancy. The perfect guest would be curious about foreigners, too, like the “up and coming” Latin Americans, and the “little brown men” of the Philippines, the new American possession. And the guest would lap up the curiosities and acts of the Midway, too, and buy ticket after ticket after ticket.

  It would be somebody like Mabel Barnes. Of all the visitors who made their way to the Exposition over its run from May to November, twenty-three-year-old Barnes, a Buffalo second-grade teacher, was likely the most eager and most loyal. She visited the Exposition before it opened, after it closed, and nearly every week in between—thirty-three times in all.

  The daughter of a Buffalo confectioner, Mabel had taken her first teaching job in the city just after graduating from high school. Now, in the summer of 1901, she dedicated her school vacation to the “Pan.” Riding her bicycle or using the streetcar, she arrived alone or brought along cousins and friends. Most often, though, she went to Rainbow City with an older friend named Abby Hale. Fortified by lemonade or ginger ale, the two women circulated through grand halls and state and country exhibits, sat through concerts and lectures, cheered at pageants and parades, and glided in launches through the Grand Canal and the Mirror Lakes. Mabel took notes nearly everywhere she went and picked up hundreds of cards, free samples, booklets, and guides. She carried away souvenirs, too—a piece of petrified wood, a coconut, and, for her lucky students, a vial of bees in alcohol. She gathered so many mementos that the scrapbooks she made of her visits ballooned into a fourteen-year project.10

  Mabel Barnes had probably never traveled to Chicago’s exposition. She would have been too young, and maybe without the means to go west in 1893. But if she had read about the White City at all, she would have known it had been a neoclassical masterpiece, an elegant tribute to Greece and Rome. What she saw on her first visit to the Pan-American on April 28th, three weeks before the official opening, was nothing of the sort. Arriving at the site north of the city, and ducking under scaffolding and skirting piles of bricks, she discovered a kingdom of domes and spires, ornate porticos and arcades. Planned by a group headed by New York architect John Carrère, the grounds next to Delaware Park took up a mile north to south and half a mile wide—350 acres in all—and were laid out in an inverted “T.” The long Court of Fountains made up the shaft, the wide Esplanade served as the base. The
buildings were covered with the same plaster concoction, called “staff,” that had adorned Chicago’s edifices. This romantic fantasyland, though, was a far cry from Chicago’s scheme. Buffalo’s designers, hoping to compliment their friends in Latin America, had wanted an “American” style, and they had found one, sort of, in the mission buildings of Spanish America—in Mexico City and in California. “It is in a sense indigenous,” explained one of Mabel’s guidebooks, for it “symbolizes the European conquest of the greater part of the Western Hemisphere.” Mabel didn’t note the irony. Wasn’t Spain the colonial power that had just been driven out of the hemisphere?

  It wasn’t just the turrets and towers that amazed Mabel. It was the Exposition’s color—its red-tiled roofs, gold minarets, blue domes, and yellow, orange, and red tinted walls. It had a hint of green, too, in every big façade, a hued homage to Niagara Falls.

  Map of the Pan-American Grounds, 1901. The Albright Art Gallery, lower left, was not completed in time for the Exposition.

  The colors of the exposition were meant to do more than simply delight visitors, Mabel noted. Drawing on the same theme that inspired the five hundred sculptures that dotted the fairgrounds, muralist Charles Yardley Turner used color to symbolize the struggle with the elements and “the progress of the race.” The “savage races,” he asserted, “have manifested a fondness for strong colors,” while “civilized man prefers greyer notes.” He painted the bodies of the Horticulture and Ethnology Buildings, near the southern entrance, shades of orange; the Temple of Music was “pure” red. He wanted fairgoers to be soothed by a whiter, more muted palette as they moved northward. The Machinery and Transportation and the Electricity Buildings all sported exteriors of light or dull greens, yellows, and grays. The focus of the fairgrounds, the four-hundred-foot-tall Electric Tower, the proclaimed acme of civilization, was tinted in the lightest ivory, cream, and gold.11