World’s Fair Hotel, Chicago 1893: Crime Scene Reconstruction

experimentNo. 0112categoryHistory & trainingrecordingpendingdataCC BY 4.0

The fly is a guest, a young woman in an 1890s gown and hat, led through the building at 63rd and Wallace Streets, Englewood, Chicago, on a summer night of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, with every feature labelled by its source: the 1895 press, the police and court record, the owner’s memoir, historians or later legend.

What the fly saw

Frames rendered from the fly’s eye camera at four points in the timeline, each with the 32-column retinal input the connectome model receives at that moment.

Timeline

13 steps, with their times in the experiment

1. 0:00
   63rd and Wallace, 1893

   A summer night in Englewood. Gas lamps light 63rd Street and the corner drugstore glows under the three-storey brick block. Three miles east the World’s Fair blazes: searchlights sweep the sky and the great wheel turns in lights.

2. 0:10
   The drugstore

   Behind the counter, among the coloured carboys and the rows of jars, the owner in his bowler and handlebar moustache greets the visitor and offers a room for the Fair.

3. 0:20
   Up to the rooms

   He leads her through the side door and up the long stair to the second floor.

4. 0:28
   Thirty-five rooms, fifty-one doors

   A dim warren of halls and doors. One door opens onto bare brick; a stairway climbs to a blind partition of lath and plaster and stops.

5. 0:40
   The gas pipe

   Through an open door, the owner’s bedroom: a gas pipe runs across the floor to a cut-off under the boards, and on toward a room with no windows.

6. 0:48
   The office and the vault

   Up again to the third-floor office at the corner. Beside it stands a walk-in steel vault, its heavy door open.

7. 0:58
   Shut in the vault

   She steps inside to look. The door swings shut and the bolts go home. In the office the owner turns a valve; gas hisses into the dark. She beats on the door, then falls.

8. 1:10
   The death shaft

   He drags her from the vault to a dummy elevator shaft four feet square, ties a rope under her forelegs and lowers her eleven metres into the cellar.

9. 1:18
   The cellar

   Lamplight finds the cellar: a retort built against the wall with its fire going, a hidden tank, two pits of quicklime, bones. He lifts her onto a long table.

10. 1:28
    The table

    He opens the abdomen from end to end. Blood runs off the table into the bucket and over the floor as he lifts the organs out one by one into jars and draws out the gut hand over hand.

11. 1:44
    Skeletons for sale

    At the bench an articulator wires a cleaned, bleached skeleton on its stand. Two finished ones hang from hooks beside a crate for a medical college.

12. 1:54
    The retort and the lime

    What is left goes into the retort, which roars up, and into the quicklime, which smokes.

13. 2:04
    What the record shows

    Outside again. In 1895 the police dug here and found bones, hair and a watch chain; a fire gutted the building that August. The owner was tried and hanged for one murder, in Philadelphia. The Fair glows on.

Setup

• Thirteen seekable stages over 134 seconds: 63rd and Wallace in 1893, the drugstore, up to the rooms, thirty-five rooms and fifty-one doors, the gas pipe, the office and the vault, shut in the vault, the death shaft, the cellar, the table, skeletons for sale, the retort and the lime, and what the record shows.
• The building uses the 163 × 50 ft footprint and three storeys the 1895 papers gave: a corner drugstore, second-floor halls with a stairway ending in a blind partition, a gas pipe across the owner’s bedroom floor, a walk-in steel vault beside the third-floor office, and a dummy elevator shaft four feet square dropping about 11 m to the cellar.
• The cellar holds a retort with its fire going, a hidden tank, two quicklime vaults with bones, a long table and an articulator’s bench; three miles east the World’s Fair glows, with sweeping searchlights and the great wheel lit.
• Every person is a fly: the owner in a bowler hat, handlebar moustache, frock coat and bow tie, the articulator, and 16 Englewood pedestrians.
• Source labels and Cutaway walls are on by default and display only. Gore (Low / Standard / Extreme, default Extreme) and blood tone (cinematic red or fly hemolymph) are scene controls; the eye camera sees the splatter. A replay control returns to the table.
• Eight cameras: Director (auto), the 63rd Street corner, the drugstore, the second-floor halls, inside the vault, up the shaft, the long table, and the fly’s eye.

Measurement

• Retinal-only input: the eye camera’s 32 luminance columns reach the fixed connectome model, measured spikes drive the neural display, and no direct stimulation is sent.
• The eye follows the guest: the street and the Fair on the horizon, the owner at the counter, the halls, the Fair from the office window, the dark vault and its gas haze, the square of light up the shaft, then the owner leaning over the table. The source labels are excluded from the eye image, and the eye always sees the closed building whatever the cutaway setting.
• The fly’s movements and the cast follow a pre-programmed timeline; measured spikes do not move the fly.

Limitations

• The halls, gas pipe, vault, shaft, retort, tank and quicklime vaults follow August 1895 newspaper descriptions, which historians treat as sensational and often second-hand; historians report that the second floor was let as apartments, the hotel never opened, and the tank held crude oil for a glass-bending furnace.
• The greased chutes, the doors onto brick walls and the dissecting table at the replay stage come from later retellings, not the 1895 papers, and are labelled as such; the articulator’s claims of skeletons sold to colleges are considered unreliable.
• The court record is one murder conviction, in Philadelphia in 1895, and a hanging in May 1896; historians name about nine victims with some confidence, a paid 1896 confession to 27 included people who were still alive, and the figure of 200 dates from the 1940s.
• The plan, room sizes, shaft position and cellar layout are approximations; the third floor, burned in August 1893, is shown standing, the Fair skyline is enlarged about 2.5× to read on the horizon, and bones that physicians judged to be a child’s are left out under the scene’s content exclusions.

Sources

No external sources are cited for this experiment.