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 Lester G-Hornbtj 
 
The Water Tower 
 
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 '.'l"-'5l 1.9' i-1 
 
Rush Street at the Bridge 
 
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 CHICAGO 
 
 By H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR 
 
 DRAWINGS BY 
 
 LESTER G. HORNBY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 MDCCCCXVII 
 
^\1 
 
 r> 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY HOBART C. CHATrlELD. TAYLOR AND LKSTSR G. HORNBY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Puhlixhfd December iQty 
 
Site of Old Fort Dearborn 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The River of the Portage 
 
 II. The Heart of the City . 
 
 III. The Great West Side 
 
 IV, The South Side 
 V. The North Side 
 
 VI. The Soul of the City 
 
 23 
 
 47 
 
 67 
 89 
 
 113 
 
 5032-14 
 
Field Museum, Jackson Park 
 
■\-mi. 
 
 Illustrations 
 
 The Water Tower ..... i 
 
 Rush Street at the Bridge {colored) Frontispiece 
 
 Site of Old Fort Dearborn . . . v 
 
 Field Museum, Jackson Park . . . vii 
 
 The Cathedral, Washington Street . ix 
 
 A River Warehouse . . , . i 
 
 State Street from the Van Buren Loop 
 
 Station ...... 4 
 
 Chicago River from Rush Street Bridge 10 
 
 Site of the Fort Dearborn Massacre . 14 
 
 vii 
 
Illustrations 
 
 The Canon of Quincy Street from 
 Fifth Avenue . . . . .20 
 
 A Bit of Old Wabash Avenue . . 23 
 
 From the Viaduct — The Loop Station 
 AT West Randolph Street . . .26 
 
 The Board of Trade Building from 
 LaSalle Street . . . . .28 
 
 The Market in South Water Street . 30 
 
 Michigan Avenue from Grant Park . 36 
 
 LaSalle Street at the Stock Exchange 40 
 
 Michigan Boulevard South from qth 
 
 Street ..... 
 
 In Old Washington Street 
 
 The Old "Marble-Fronts" of Washing- 
 ton Street ..... 
 
 The Church at Union Park . 
 
 Michigan Boulevard at the Art Insti- 
 tute ...... 
 
 In the Stockyards .... 
 
 The Douglas Monument 
 
 The Library ..... 
 
 Columbus Caravels of 1892 near La Ra 
 BiDA Convent .... 
 
 viii 
 
 42 
 47 
 
 50 
 54 
 
 67 
 
 70 
 
 74 
 80 
 
 84 
 
^he Cathedral, W ashhigton Street 
 
Illustrations 
 
 Where the Lake Shore Drive begins 
 In Clark Street at the Court House 
 Rush Street in the Old Residential Sec 
 
 TION ...... 
 
 In Lincoln Park .... 
 
 The Skyline of Park Row 
 
 Washington Street looking East from 
 Clark Street .... 
 
 Park Row at the Railway Station 
 
 89 
 
 102 
 
 106 
 108 
 
 I 20 
 124 
 
A River Warehouse 
 
I. T'he River of the Portage 
 
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 CHICAGO 
 
 I 
 
 THE RIVER OF THE PORTAGE 
 
 ONE night, after a supper given by 
 Richard Mansfield to Coquelin the 
 Inimitable, I stood beside Sarah Bernhardt 
 on the balcony of a Chicago hotel. The 
 moon had laid a silver trail across the lake, 
 the buildings of the city loomed shadowy 
 in the night. Below us blazed the lights 
 of Michigan Avenue ; from its pavement 
 came the rumble of many cabs speeding 
 to places of revelry. A moment of silence 
 had come to appease the fatigue of speak- 
 ing in a foreign tongue ; but it was broken 
 by the surpassing woman beside me. " I 
 adore Chicago," she exclaimed. "It is the 
 pulse of America." 
 
 3 
 
Chicago 
 
 For fifteen years that tribute to my 
 native city has been ringing in my ears; 
 — and now when my task, is to write of 
 its life, both new and old, those words 
 of Sarah Bernhardt come impulsively to 
 mind as the best with which to character- 
 ize its individuality among the cities of 
 the world. 
 
 " A little upstart village," an English 
 traveler called Chicago at the time when 
 the building of the Illinois and Michigan 
 Canal was begun. Barely a decade after 
 the first boat had passed through its locks, 
 our city contained a hundred thousand en- 
 ergetic souls; and now, just eighty years 
 since the first spadeful of earth was turned 
 for the digging of that momentous ditch, it 
 houses well considerably two million men, 
 women, and children foregathered from 
 practically every land on earth. The new- 
 est great City of the newest great Coun- 
 try, it is the held in which industrial wars 
 
 4 
 
State Street from the Van Buren Loop Station 
 
•fMY' 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 are fought and civic experiments tested 
 — the crucible in which a most dispro- 
 portionate mixture of native and alien 
 manhood is fused into American citizen- 
 ship. May not this municipality which has 
 grown from a little upstart village to a 
 huge upstart city within the ken of some 
 born within its limits, who are still in the 
 land of the living, be termed, without un- 
 due bravado, " The pulse of America "? 
 
 To the stranger within her gates the 
 most forbidding part of Chicago is the re- 
 gion of dilapidated buildings and ill-paved 
 streets adjoining the Rush Street Bridge. 
 Yet this rookery is the part of our city best 
 entitled to be qualified as old, for here is 
 the seat of a history vying in age with 
 almost any in the land. Here, too, is the 
 main reach of the river whence sprang the 
 city's greatness and from which it takes its 
 name. 
 
 Once it flowed turbid into the lake; now 
 
 5 
 
Chicago 
 
 it runs lucid, albeit artificially, to the Mis- 
 sissippi. Yet to the casual beholder it has 
 ever been unprepossessing, even the sav- 
 ages u'ho first beheld it dubbing it the 
 "Checagou," or "River of the Wild Onion." 
 The name bears another interpretation, 
 however, more pleasing to our pride, the 
 word "Checagoe," according to one philol- 
 ogist, at least, meaning something "great" 
 or "strong." Since it more aptly typifies 
 the city on its banks, may not this inter- 
 pretation of the name of our river be ac- 
 cepted in lieu of the one which has long 
 tarnished our fame? But this plea is lead- 
 ing me afield. 
 
 Innumerable ages before the kindly 
 Illinois were driven from its shores by the 
 ruthlessly efficient Iroquois, or before the 
 « canoe folk," as the Pottawattomies were 
 called, had first dipped their paddles into 
 its waters, the Checagou began flowing 
 into our stormy lake. Its source was near 
 
 6 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 a muddy pond, a dozen or so miles from 
 its mouth, and its course, till it met its 
 affluent, was toward the Polar Star; then 
 for about a mile it flowed eastward, but 
 until the Anglo-Saxon came with dredge 
 and pier, a bar created by the storms of 
 winter made it trickle into the lake near 
 where the Art Institute now stands. 
 
 After its junction with the river Guarie, 
 as its prosaic northern branch was once 
 called, its left bank was wooded, but gen- 
 erally its shores were soggy and flat. In 
 truth, it was a forbidding creek, and quite 
 insignificant, too, even to the Indian on 
 its banks, till he discovered that its source 
 lay but a portage away from a beauti- 
 ful stream flowing toward the Father of 
 Waters. 
 
 On the long journey from the great 
 lake to the great river, this meant less 
 shouldering of his canoe ; therefore, in- 
 stead of trudging across the sun-scorched 
 
 7 
 
Chicago 
 
 prairie, he paddled up our river to its 
 source, carried his birch-bark craft to the 
 River of the Plains, then glided on its 
 waters to the Divine River, as the Illinois 
 was called by Sieur Louis Joliet, our dis- 
 coverer. 
 
 For a century and a half the white man 
 followed the trail the red man had trod; 
 then he dug a canal along the route of 
 the portage and dredged away the sand- 
 bar that prevented the Wild Onion River 
 from flowing freely into the lake. When 
 the vessels which had brought merchan- 
 dise to the little trading-post at its mouth 
 began to reload their holds with prairie 
 grain borne to their very hatches by the 
 boats of the new canal, Chicago, the city 
 of destiny, arose overnight. 
 
 Strange that intrepid Louisjoliet should 
 have foreseen its commercial future! "It 
 will be possible to go from Lake Erie to 
 the Mississippi by a very good navigation," 
 
 8 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 he informed his government. "There 
 would be but one canal to make." The 
 making of that one canal inaugurated 
 Chicago's prosperity; yet nearly two cen- 
 turies and a half after Joliet wrote those 
 prophetic words, his dream has come but 
 partially true, it being still impossible for 
 boats of a commercial size to pass from 
 Lake Erie to the Mississippi. The water- 
 way project, however, which he outlined 
 to the authorities of New France has be- 
 come a political question to those of Illi- 
 nois. Perhaps within another two centu- 
 ries and a half his dream may be realized 
 to the full. 
 
 May the ship canal which one day makes 
 Chicago a thriving seaport bear his name, 
 both honor and justice making it his right- 
 ful due. He captained the first band of 
 white men who paddled down our river, 
 and he foresaw our greatness ; yet Mar- 
 quette, his missionary chaplain, and the 
 
 9 
 
Chicago 
 
 chevalier de La Salle, his successor in pio- 
 neering, have been unduly honored at his 
 expense. Henri de Tonty, too, the Nea- 
 politan soldier of fortune, whose courage, 
 loyalty, and tact long held our land for 
 the crown of France, is another hero of 
 our romantic past neglected by our build- 
 ers of monuments and namers of streets. 
 
 But in berating historic justice for the 
 slowness of her pace, I am forgetting our 
 ugly river. When ill unto death upon its 
 banks, Pere Marquette, the zealot, called 
 it the " River of the Portage," a prettier 
 and more appropriate name by far than 
 "Wild Onion." Yet a moment ago I spoke 
 of it as our ugly river. It was a sop to 
 popular opinion, I confess, since to me it 
 is beautiful — a river of infinite mystery 
 rimmed by material might. 
 
 Thus it appears in the glow of a fading 
 day, when the massive symmetry of the 
 warehouses upon its banks is mellowed by 
 
 lO 
 
Chicago River from Rush Street Bridge 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 the smoke of its industry, and the white 
 ships at its wharves are crimsoned by the 
 sun's last rays. Indeed, I seldom cross the 
 Rush Street Bridge afoot without stopping 
 to gaze at this alluring river, and to dream 
 of the changes time's magic has wrought. 
 If the air be calm, and the smoke curl 
 eerily about the giant buildings, I seem to 
 hear, above the clanging, hissing noises of 
 the city, the click of the pioneer's axe, the 
 war-cry of the painted savage. The huge 
 warehouses and the towering office build- 
 ings seem to vanish in the gray evening 
 mist, while in their place appears brown 
 prairie land stretching unbroken to the 
 setting sun. Through it the river threads 
 its glowing way ; yet even at the vision- 
 ing twilight hour it is hard to realize that 
 Indians once spread their tepees on its 
 shores and sowed their golden corn, hard 
 to picture the swift canoes of voyageur and 
 priest gliding down its silent reaches. 
 
 1 1 
 
Chicago 
 
 Yet once the land where Chicago stands 
 was a prairie wilderness for which success- 
 ive tribes of red men battled, and once, 
 for a century, it was under the lilied ban- 
 ner of France. By right of conquest it 
 passed to a witless king, to remain under 
 his scepter till a handful of his rebellious 
 subjects, led by a prescient young soldier, 
 wrested it from him. Then our river's life 
 of energy began. 
 
 Near the sand-spit at its mouth stood the 
 lonely cabin of the negro. Point de Saible, 
 earliest inhabitant of record. For a song 
 he sold it to Joseph Le Mai, coureur du hois 
 turned trader; in the mean time Antoine 
 Ouilmette, a fellow Frenchman, married 
 a squaw and built himself a cabin a goodly 
 stone's-throw away. 
 
 One day, "a big canoe with wings," as 
 the wondering Indians called her, anchored 
 at the river's mouth, and began to unload 
 both soldiers and supplies. Trees of a vir- 
 
 12 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 gin forest were felled, a blockhouse, bar- 
 racks, and stockade of logs were built, the 
 flag of a newly born nation was unfurled; 
 then John Kinzie, " the father of Chicago," 
 bought Le Mai's log house, and began to 
 barter tobacco and rum for peltries and 
 corn. 
 
 Under good Captain John Whistler, its 
 builder and first commander, Fort Dear- 
 born, as the new post was called, was peace- 
 able, but with the coming of his tactless 
 successor, the Indians its guns were meant 
 to awe became defiant. When a senseless 
 war broke out between our new nation 
 and its mother land, they daubed upon 
 their cheeks the black paint which augured 
 death and chanted their terrifying songs. 
 
 When the soldiers of the little garrison 
 marched forth with their women-folk in 
 fatuous retreat one scorching August day, 
 the Indians escorted them along the lake 
 shore till the feathered heads of fellow 
 
 13 
 
Chicago 
 
 savages peered above the yellow summits 
 of a cluster of sand dunes; then they dug 
 heel into their ponies and galloped away. 
 
 A brave frontiersman who knew their 
 treacherous ways waved his hat in warn- 
 ing; an incompetent captain ordered his 
 men to charge. They obeyed valiantly, 
 though outnumbered ten to one. Sniping 
 from behind the dunes till the ranks of the 
 soldiers were thinned, the blood-lusting In- 
 dians rushed with tomahawk and knife 
 upon the women and children huddling 
 beneath the white canopies of army wag- 
 ons. At the end of fifteen agonizing min- 
 utes the soldiers still alive surrendered to 
 their savage enemies, who danced on the 
 morrow in triumph about the smoulder- 
 ing embers of the little fort. 
 
 That skirmish of barely more than a 
 century ago Chicago has called its "Mas- 
 sacre," and a monument depicting it has 
 been erected at the corner of Calumet 
 
 14 
 
Site of the Fort Dearborn Massacre 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 Avenue and Eighteenth Street. A com- 
 memorative tablet, too, of the little stock- 
 aded army post is embedded in the walls 
 of the saloon at the southern end of the 
 Rush Street Bridge, which with historical 
 irony bears the name of" Fort Dearborn." 
 Although the most blood-curdling 
 event in all our history, the "Massacre" 
 was of slight moment, since the fort at the 
 river's mouth was rebuilt, and garrisoned 
 from time to time, until another Captain 
 Whistler marched its last force of regulars 
 away, just twenty years after the battle of 
 the Sand Dunes. The Indians had risen 
 again, meanwhile,and under the surly chief 
 named Blackhawk had caused such a com- 
 motion throughout the land that valiant 
 old " Fuss and Feathers" himself brought 
 both an army and an epidemic of cholera 
 to our little fort. It was then that lanky 
 Abe Lincoln, a country lawyer, shouldered 
 a musket with the militia of his town. 
 
 15 
 
Chicago 
 
 During those stirring years the pack- 
 trains which bore furs and peltries to John 
 Kinzie's trading-post were crowded off 
 the trails by the canvas-covered wagons of 
 sturdy New Englanders trekking to our 
 prairie land; and the Mackinaw barges 
 of the voyageiirs were replaced upon the 
 blue waters of Lake Michigan by the white- 
 sailed schooners of enterprising merchants. 
 When Blackhawk laid down his blood- 
 stained arms, and all the Indians of the 
 prairies gathered at our river's mouth to 
 sell their fertile hunting-grounds to the 
 White Father at Washington, a few score 
 of log houses and clapboarded stores and 
 saloons had been built upon its banks. 
 
 On Wolt Point, the headland where the 
 Guarie joined the River of the Portage, 
 stood Elijah Wentworth's tavern ; across 
 the stream, and near the place where 
 Mark Beaubien had begun to build his 
 more ambitious Sauganash Hotel, was this 
 
 i6 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 innkeeper's Eagle Exchange, first of the 
 famous hostelries within the "Loop." A 
 post-office, too, had been opened in a log 
 hut a few yards away, and our " mush- 
 room village," as a traveler called it, was 
 preparing to incorporate itself as a full- 
 fledged town. 
 
 No sooner had our charter been granted 
 by the newly created State of Illinois than 
 Gurdon S. Hubbard, who died only thirty 
 years ago, built our first brick building. 
 When, with some four thousand inhabit- 
 ants, we became a city four years later and 
 began to dig the canal which made us 
 prosperous, this notable citizen built our 
 first warehouse and started our first line 
 of steamers. Meanwhile, the Federal Gov- 
 ernment dredged away the sandbar at the 
 river's mouth, and built restraining piers. 
 Then the first boat passed through the 
 locks of the new canal. 
 
 Presto, a marvelous change was wrought 
 
 17 
 
Chicago 
 
 in our placid river! No longer did the offi- 
 cers of Fort Dearborn hunt wolves upon 
 its wooded shores, or fiery young Indians 
 fight deadly duels there for love of a Chip- 
 pewa maiden. With bewildering speed the 
 piles of its many miles of wharfage were 
 driven into its miry bottom; while ware- 
 houses for the storage of merchandise and 
 elevators for the unloading and loading of 
 cargoes of grain arose beside it. In spa- 
 cious yards along its low shores yellow tim- 
 ber from the forests of the north was stored 
 in symmetrical piles, until the drayman 
 could haul it to the prairie and the car- 
 penter saw and hammer it into houses with 
 peaked roofs, or mansions with filigreed 
 cupolas. 
 
 Wherever the traffic of the city growing 
 so magically upon its banks had burst its 
 bounds, the river was spanned by a red 
 wooden turn-bridge. Up their steep ap- 
 proaches jaded horses staggered the whole 
 
 i8 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 day long, while the busybody tugboats, 
 churning the waters beneath them into 
 slimy foam, puffed asphyxiating smoke 
 into the nostrils of perspiring citizens; for 
 those were the piping days when more 
 vessels were cleared from our river than 
 from any harbor in the land. To stand on 
 the Rush Street Bridge at nightfall was 
 then a joy indeed to the lover of ships. 
 
 A bell clangs, a red ball rises on a lit- 
 tle pole, and slowly the bridge swings into 
 the stream, its brawny tender bending his 
 weight to the lever. Straining at the haw- 
 ser of her snorting tug, a graceful schooner 
 glides toward the ruffled lake, her sailors 
 singing a merry "Ye Ho" to the rhyth- 
 mical creaking of her halliards in their 
 blocks. Slowly her sails climb her sleek 
 masts. "Cast off! " shouts the skipper at 
 her wheel. The jibs speed up the iron 
 headstays and fill to the evening breeze ; 
 the tugboat whistles in token of farewell ; 
 
 19 
 
Chicago 
 
 another vessel has been added to the grain 
 fleet whose sails dot the blue horizon as 
 far as the eye can see. 
 
 Those days of the river's glory are ended, 
 for now the huge steamers of heartless rail- 
 way corporations crawl past our bascule 
 bridges at night, with their siren whistles 
 shrilling above the nerve-wracking clatter 
 of automobile horns and trolley gongs. 
 Occasionally, however, a weather-beaten 
 " lumber hooker," loaded to her guards 
 with sweet-smelHng pine, steals into the 
 river at dusk. The waves have battered 
 most of her paint away, and her sooty old 
 sails are patched in many places ; yet to 
 me she is a thing of beauty, and as she 
 is towed past the bridge where I stand, I 
 doff my hat to her in memory of the trim 
 barkentines and schooners of my youth. 
 They lie, alas, in Davy Jones's locker or 
 are rotting at some remote wharf, where 
 the small boys of the neighborhood know 
 
 20 
 
I^he Canon of ^incy Street from Fifth Avenue 
 
The River of the Portage 
 
 too little of Marryat and Cooper to play 
 my boyhood games of pirate and man-o'- 
 war's-man upon their warped and pitch- 
 less decks. 
 
 Though a forest of slender masts no 
 longer rises from our river, and the wooden 
 warehouses and elevators upon its banks 
 have been replaced by huge structures of 
 steel and brick, it is still beautiful. Yes, I 
 repeat the word boldly, for I met Gari 
 Melchiors and Walter McEwen on the 
 Rush Street Bridge one day, gazing at the 
 white steamers and the grimy buildings 
 veiled in the evening mist. "The most 
 beautiful thing in all Chicago is the river," 
 exclaimed one of these painters. " Alas," 
 sighed the other, " only Whistler could do 
 it justice." 
 
 To an art-loving citizen of our city 
 Whistler himself once said: "Chicago, 
 dear me, what a wonderful place ! I really 
 ought to visit it some day, for you know 
 
 21 
 
Chicago 
 
 my grandfather founded it and my uncle 
 was the last commander of Fort Dear- 
 born ! " Had he deigned to visit the site 
 of the frontier post his grandfather built 
 scarcely more than a century ago, he would 
 have found a city as smoke-ridden as Lon- 
 don, and a gray river as suited to his genius 
 as the Thames. 
 
A Bit of Old Wabash Avenue 
 
II. The Heart of the City 
 
 
II 
 
 THE HEART OF THE CITY 
 
 THE river's two branches, and the 
 reach through which, united, they 
 flow to the lake, divide Chicago, like the 
 proverbial Gaul, into three parts, called 
 prosaically the North Side, the South Side, 
 and the West Side. Ethnologically as dif- 
 ferent as are New Yorkers, Brooklynites, 
 and Harlemites, the inhabitants of these 
 three territorial divisions view each other 
 askance and mingle but little. There is a 
 neutral land, however, where they transact 
 business by day and enjoy themselves by 
 night, and because the trains of the ele- 
 vated railways run around it, instead of 
 into it and out again, as they do into the 
 Wall Street district of New York, it is 
 called the "Loop." 
 
 Here a quarter of a million people of 
 
 25 
 
Chicago 
 
 both sexes are dumped six days a week by 
 the transportation lines to toil for their 
 daily bread. When the office buildings and 
 stores vomit them into the streets at night- 
 fall, they hang to straps in surface,steam, or 
 elevated cars, until they reach the houses 
 and flats they designate as home ; but no 
 sooner is the soot washed from their faces 
 than a goodly proportion ot them hasten 
 back to the Loop again, for here are the 
 clubs, theatres, restaurants, and hotels, as 
 well as the banks, offices, and department 
 stores. Indeed, when the street lamps and 
 protean signs begin to glisten, the aspect 
 of the Loop alters entirely. Restless men 
 and neurotic women no longer scamper 
 from sky-scraper to sky-scraper; in their 
 places are affable strollers who tarry now 
 and then to gaze at the modish manikins 
 displayed in the gay shop windows. The 
 street cars still deposit people in the Loop, 
 but they are merry-makers, not toilers, 
 
 26 
 
From the Viaduct — The Loop Station at West Randolph Street 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 and some of them actually find time to 
 smile. The horse truck, moreover, and the 
 motor van have disappeared, and only the 
 limousine and taxicab remain to menace 
 life. 
 
 A cauldron of human endeavor by day, 
 a pleasure spot by night, the Loop is lit- 
 erally, as well as metaphorically, the heart 
 of the city. Technically speaking it is the 
 part of our so-called " Business District" 
 encircled by the ugly posts and girders of 
 the elevated railways. In reality, however, 
 it extends to the lake and river, and as far 
 south as the Blackstone Hotel; for within 
 this area of less than a square mile is found 
 everything material or aesthetic which the 
 inhabitants of our three "sides" enjoy in 
 common. 
 
 Less than fifty years ago this Loop was 
 a waste of smouldering ruins; yet the 
 builder of the sky-scraper has been almost 
 as ruthless a destroyer as the Great Fire 
 
 27 
 
Chicago 
 
 itself, so different in aspect is the business 
 district of to-day from that which arosefrom 
 the ashes of i 87 i. Should some Rip Van 
 Winkle of Chicago awake from a sleep of 
 twenty years to wander in bewilderment 
 through its canyon-like streets, he would 
 hardly find an unaltered landmark, even 
 the familiar Board of Trade being shorn 
 of its tower. Now and then, however, 
 he would stumble upon a familiar object 
 sadly changed in appearance, — McVick- 
 er's Theatre, for instance, sunk from its 
 legitimate estate to ten-cent vaudeville, 
 and the once proud Palmer House, now a 
 drummers' haunt. The old Chicago Club 
 building, too, is reduced in quality to a 
 flashy restaurant; the Tremont House is 
 a college annex, and the Grand Pacific, 
 though still a hostelry, is considerably 
 curtailed, both in size and social stand- 
 ing. Yet these, and a few grimy old 
 six-storied structures with mansard roofs 
 
 28 
 
"Tbe Board of Trade Building from LaSalle Street 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 crouching indigently, here and there, 
 between brand-new office buildings of 
 twenty-story haughtiness, are all that is 
 left in the Loop of the ante-World's Fair 
 city, — unless it be a familiar name or 
 two, such as "Buck and Raynor," or "The 
 Tribune," appearing on some corner as 
 of yore, but upon a building wholly 
 strange. Barely a step outside the Loop, 
 however, is dingy old South Water Street 
 unaltered in aspect, and still made im- 
 passable for man and beast by the boxes 
 and barrels heaped upon its sidewalks, 
 and the rows of hucksters' carts backed 
 up before its grimy doors. 
 
 If this Rip Van Winkle were a man of 
 taste, he would marvel, I fear, at the lack of 
 it shown by the builders of new Chicago. 
 The magnitude of its fire-proof structures 
 might, it is true, fill his heart with ad- 
 miration for the indomitable power that 
 they symbol; yet seldom would it thrill 
 
 29 
 
Chicago 
 
 to architectural beauty, and then only 
 because an occasional architect had dis- 
 covered that a sky-scraper need not of 
 necessity be either entirely shoddy or en- 
 tirely ugly. There is, for example, an aca- 
 demic appropriateness in the utilitarian 
 Gothic of the new University Club, and 
 a feeling of architectural correctness in 
 the graceful Renaissance bank building at 
 the northeast corner of Monroe and Clark 
 Streets; for here, at least, there is pleasing 
 imposture, its base giving the appearance 
 of sufficient strength to bear its weight. 
 
 Occasionally, too, a note of original- 
 ity is sounded, as in the case of the City 
 Club; but, generally speaking, the Loop is 
 barren of architectural charm. Its gran- 
 deur is inspiring, I confess, like that ot 
 lower New York; but a lover of the beau- 
 tiful will search it almost in vain, as he will 
 the business district of any American city, 
 for that which delights, rather than thrills, 
 
 30 
 
The Market in South Water Street 
 
^^-^-n. 
 
 '^^ 
 
 
 
 >^.. 
 
 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 the eye. Blame not the architects whose 
 task is to get the most rent per cubic foot 
 with the least possible outlay, but rather 
 the avaricious owners of real estate, and 
 the supine aldermen whose baneful or- 
 dinances have permitted our cities to be 
 distorted out of all architectural propor- 
 tion. Chicago, however, was the first of- 
 fender, the sky-scraper being its offspring. 
 Alas, if only some Baron Haussmann had 
 had the power to stifle it at the moment 
 of its birth, American cities might to-day 
 be beautiful. 
 
 Yet in no other way, it seems to me, are 
 the ideals and characteristics of a people 
 at the different periods of its existence so 
 definitely expressed as by its architecture, 
 — particularly that which is ecclesiastical 
 or governmental ; and nowhere, 1 believe, 
 is the truth of this so clearly demonstrated 
 as by the different court-houses and city 
 halls which have stood from time to time 
 
 31 
 
Chicago 
 
 within the part of the Loop which in the 
 city's infancy was known as the PubHc 
 Square. 
 
 Some eighty-five years ago two dozen 
 town lots were given by the State of 
 Illinois to the County of Cook for pub- 
 lic purposes; and with characteristic civic 
 improvidence sixteen of these were sold 
 almost immediately to pay the current 
 county expenses. The remaining eight, 
 however, have remained a public domain, 
 and to-day their entire area is covered by 
 the huge structure which houses the local 
 authorities with considerable regard for 
 their comfort, but with little for the feel- 
 ings of that small coterie of citizens whose 
 artistic souls are shocked by its incon- 
 gruous design. I hold, however, that these 
 aesthetic Chicagoans are wrong in de- 
 nouncing the pseudo-Roman architecture 
 of our county and city building. Let them 
 turn to the pages of Ferrero and learn 
 
 32 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 how like unto our American civilization 
 was that of ancient Rome, particularly in 
 matters of civic polity. Though the huge 
 Corinthian columns which surround our 
 municipal sky-scraper are but hollow 
 shams upholding nothing but themselves, 
 are they not the chief architectural note 
 of a building designed to house both a 
 Board of County Commissioners and a 
 Board of Aldermen ? The majestic pro- 
 portions of this up-to-date Hotel de Ville 
 typify Chicago's civic strength and cour- 
 age, and its pseudo-Roman lines the po- 
 litical corruption she shares with her sister 
 cities of the East. Surely, an architecture 
 which symbolizes both the good and the 
 evil of a city is appropriate to its chief 
 municipal structure! 
 
 A decade or so ago a county and city 
 building embellished by marble columns 
 and ornate cornices stood in the Public 
 Square. It rested, however, on crumbling 
 
 33 
 
Chicago 
 
 foundations and typified, it seems to me, 
 the parvenu life that we led between the 
 panics of '73 and '93. This was our "get- 
 rich-quick" period, and during it new- 
 comers from the four corners of the earth 
 made fortunes in a jiffy and built them- 
 selves flamboyant mansions of glazed brick 
 or variegated stone amongst the dignified 
 Victorian houses of the old citizens whose 
 fortunes had survived the Fire. Though 
 conceit for our city's magic growth burned 
 in the breast of every man-jack of us then, 
 and our architectural manifestations were 
 generally as shoddy as our pretensions, 
 this purse-proud period of our existence 
 begat, nevertheless, our spirit of "I Will," 
 and it culminated in that unforgettable 
 triumph of architectural beauty — our 
 World's Fair. 
 
 But our true character was engendered 
 by the sturdy New Englanders who settled 
 in the city after the opening of the Illi- 
 
 34 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 nois and Michigan Canal; and during the 
 fifties and sixties, when the tallest objects 
 in our midst were the spires of our many 
 churches, a building appropriate to the 
 austerity of our Puritanical days stood in 
 the Public Square surrounded by grass 
 plats, fountains, and flag walks, — the som- 
 ber stone Court-House we old Chicago- 
 ans remember, in which Lincoln's body 
 lay in state when on its way to final rest in 
 Springfield. Until its alarm bell pealed its 
 own death knell upon a night of holo- 
 caust, its cupola dominated a business dis- 
 trict in which the six-storied Sherman 
 House of imposing marble front held its 
 head proudly above its four-and five-stor- 
 ied brick contemporaries. 
 
 The street grades of this period were 
 raised three times within seventeen years ; 
 but until the advent of " Nicholson pave- 
 ment" the sign, "No Bottom Here," was 
 habitually displayed wherever a dray had 
 
 35 
 
Chicago 
 
 been dug out of the mud. One day, so the 
 story goes, the familiar head and hat of 
 General Hart L. Stewart showed above the 
 surface of Lake Street. "You seem to be 
 in pretty deep. General," shouted a friend. 
 "Great Scott!" exclaimed the wayfarer, 
 "I 've got a horse under me." But that 
 happened before the principal streets were 
 "planked " by order of the Common Coun- 
 cil, and in those days a one-storied Court- 
 House adorned by a Greek portico stood 
 in the Public Square. On its steps a fugi- 
 tive slave was once sold at public auction 
 by the sheriff, but was freed forthwith by 
 his purchaser, Chicago being long a cen- 
 tral station of "the underground railway." 
 Our business district was then composed 
 of wooden shanties, a few of which made 
 tinder for the flames of '71. Until the 
 late sixties, moreover, when the Board of 
 Trade forsook its dingy quarters in South 
 Water Street and our principal dry-goods 
 
 36 
 
Michigan Avenue from Grant Park 
 

 
The Heart of the City 
 
 emporium moved from Lake Street to the 
 familiar corner it still occupies, all of the 
 present-day Loop south of the Court- 
 House and east of State Street was a 
 residential district in which the " marble 
 fronts" of the newly rich adorned both 
 Michigan and Wabash Avenues as far north 
 as Washington Street. Even while our reg- 
 iments were battling at Shiloh and Vicks- 
 burg, the lot at the south side of the Court- 
 House was still vacant, and its surface so 
 far below the street level that when in '63 
 a circus spread its tents there, its patrons 
 were obliged to descend to their seats, as 
 into a cellar. 
 
 In those days the pedestrians in the 
 business district lost their breath so fre- 
 quently in following the ups and downs of 
 the street grades that the raising of them 
 became a serious problem, until George 
 M. Pullman, a young contractor from the 
 East, solved it by jacking up the Tremont 
 
 37 
 
Chicago 
 
 House a whole story without disturbing 
 the comfort of its guests. Meanwhile, 
 Uranus H. Crosby, our first "uplifter," lost 
 a fortune in providing us with a " surpass- 
 ing art temple," the vicissitudes of the 
 opera house and picture gallery in Wash- 
 ington Street which bore his name being 
 not unlike those of the Hotel Richelieu, 
 where, over a score of years ago, the late 
 "Cardinal" Bemis tried in vain to cosmo- 
 politanize us before our time. 
 
 In the city of to-day the twenty-storied 
 hotel at the northwest corner of Ran- 
 dolph and Clark Streets seems the most 
 substantial link with our business district 
 before the Fire, though its festive character 
 in nowise pictures to the old Chicagoan 
 the staid Sherman House of his youth. As 
 many hotels called by this name have been 
 erected on this corner as there have been 
 court-houses in the square opposite, the 
 first of them being known as the "City 
 
 38 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 Hotel" until the Honorable Francis C. 
 Sherman, our fifth mayor, bought it and 
 attached his name to the site, apparently 
 in perpetuity. 
 
 At the time Chicago was incorporated as 
 a municipality, the City Hotel opened its 
 doors; meanwhile its predecessor in pub- 
 lic hospitality, the Sauganash Hotel, was 
 being converted into our first playhouse. 
 This historic hostelry stood at the south- 
 east corner of Lake and Market Streets, a 
 site upon which at a later day the famous 
 "Wigwam" was built. Here Abraham Lin- 
 coln was nominated for the Presidency; 
 and during the momentous convention of 
 I 860 his political headquarters were at the 
 Tremont House, an hotel vying in impor- 
 tance with the Sherman House. Indeed, of 
 all the buildings in the Loop, the hotels 
 alone are rich in historic memory, the 
 names Briggs, Revere, and Clifton still 
 remaining, like that of Sherman, to recall 
 
 39 
 
Chicago 
 
 the days when the treasonable murmurings 
 of our Copperheads were so completely 
 stifled by the Lumbards' stirring singing of 
 the songs of George F. Root, that our full 
 quota of troops was dispatched to the 
 front. 
 
 Although the Palmer House and the 
 Grand Pacific were barely under roof 
 when the Great Fire swept them away, the 
 hotels which now bear these names are 
 among the oldest buildings in the Loop, 
 typifying to my generation the after-the- 
 Fire period, when we were bending our en- 
 ergies to the re-creation of our city. Our 
 homes were then in tree-lined avenues — 
 Dearborn, LaSalle, Michigan, Prairie, and 
 Calumet — and one or the other of these 
 "palatial hotels," as we were wont to call 
 them, was the Mecca of our social pilgrim- 
 ages "downtown." Will any old Chica- 
 goan ever forget the annual game dinner 
 at the Grand Pacific, when in best bib and 
 
 40 
 
LaSalle Street at the Stock Exchange 
 
b \ ' • < 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 tucker we partook of such obsolete viands 
 as antelope steak and roast buffalo brought 
 to us by grinning darkies, each balancing 
 upon an upturned palm a tray filled with 
 dishes shaped like canary birds' bathtubs? 
 The Palmer House, the Grand Pacific, 
 and also the new Tremont House were 
 then our pride, and their bonifaces among 
 our most esteemed citizens; for who did 
 not cherish a nod of recognition from 
 Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. 
 Rice? Their marble-floored lobbies were 
 our accustomed haunts, — except at con- 
 vention time, when the slouch-hatted 
 henchmen of Grant, Blaine, Logan, or 
 Garfield usurped our easy chairs and sul- 
 lied our favorite corners with their tobacco 
 juice. The sky-scraping hotels of to-day 
 with their maitres d' hotel, gar cons de res- 
 taurmit, and cuisines francaises, are not of 
 our Chicago soil as were those hostelries 
 of the after-the-Fire period; nor do they 
 
 41 
 
Chicago 
 
 play so notable a part in the life of the 
 city. 
 
 Indeed, the Palmer House and the 
 Grand Pacific during their " American 
 plan" glory differed as greatly from the 
 hotels of to-day as the tumultuous Loop 
 differs from our provincial business dis- 
 trict during the years when spavined horses 
 with tinkling bells upon their collars 
 dragged "bob-tailed" streetcars through 
 State Street, and the lusty children of our 
 prominent citizens cut capers around the 
 iron lions in front of Gossage's store while 
 their mothers shopped within. Instead of 
 the sedate family "rockaways" of that un- 
 pretentious age, with fly-nets upon the 
 backs of their long-tailed horses, and sleepy 
 "hired men," as we called our coach- 
 men then, dozing beneath their projecting 
 roofs, luxurious limousines now stand in 
 State Street, with French governesses in 
 their cushioned interiors to prevent the 
 
 42 
 
Michigan Boulevard South from ^th Street 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 pampered children of to-day from frolick- 
 ing with hoi polloi while their mothers shop 
 at "Field's." 
 
 Until the time of the Great Fire our 
 lawns were shaded by the cotton-wood 
 trees of Michigan Avenue and the waters 
 of the lake flowed to its curb. Grant Park, 
 with its museums, fountains, statues, grass 
 plats, and bare stretches of newly made land, 
 now lies where we old Chicagoans learned 
 to sail and swim. Noble Michigan Ave- 
 nue, moreover, has become a cosmopoli- 
 tan street emulating in the smartness of its 
 shops the Rue de la Paix and Fifth Ave- 
 nue ; but our metropolitan bigness lacks, 
 it seems to me, the charm of our small- 
 town days. Although we are less provincial 
 now, we are also less American than we were 
 before our New England ideals were atten- 
 uated by so potent an admixture of alien- 
 ism that Anglo-Saxon lineaments have be- 
 come a rarity in the faces of our people. 
 
 43 
 
Chicago 
 
 Time was when I knew a goodly pro- 
 portion of the passers-by in the downtown 
 streets — men, like myself, of New Eng- 
 land blood, whose fathers felled our forests 
 and tilled our prairie land. Now, as I 
 stroll through the heart of the city at the 
 hour when the great office buildings and 
 department stores are emptying them- 
 selves, I search the scurrying crowds in 
 vain for a familiar face; and as I am borne 
 on by the human torrent gushing from the 
 crag-like walls about me, I feel that, like 
 my Puritanical traditions, I belong to an- 
 other age. While insurgent fellow citizens 
 dodge recklessly beween the wheels of 
 passing motor cars in order to save a few 
 seconds of time, my ingenuous respect for 
 the law of the land halts my steps when- 
 ever a crossing policeman raises his white- 
 gloved hand. Bewildered by the hurly- 
 burly of my native city, I — a lonely figure 
 of a pristine day — try then to compre- 
 
 44 
 
The Heart of the City 
 
 hend the multifarious changes a few short 
 years have wrought in its life and char- 
 acter, try to realize that within my own 
 lifetime more than two million people 
 have been added to its population. 
 
In Old Washington Street 
 
III. The Great JVest Side 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GREAT WEST SIDE 
 
 ONE must be truly an old Chicagoan 
 to recall the time when the shady 
 streets which lie west of the river vied in 
 social standing with any in the city. Here 
 factories now belch their smoke upon the 
 mansard roofs of dilapidated tenements 
 that once were the mansions of wealthy 
 citizens whose scions blush for their origin, 
 the " Great West Side," as it is called de- 
 risively, being now a proletarian domain 
 remote from the ken of fashionable so- 
 ciety. 
 
 In all Chicago, however, there are no 
 streets so reminiscent of our strait-laced 
 past as are those of the disdained West 
 Side. Here block after block of "marble- 
 fronts" and red-brick mansions stand un- 
 altered, except by the ravages of time. 
 
 49 
 
Chicago 
 
 Their lawns are unkept, their iron balus- 
 trades are rusty; yet like decayed aristo- 
 crats who have known better days, these 
 grimy old houses of an austere past evince 
 a courtliness and dignity quite lacking in 
 the Lake Shore palaces of modern mil- 
 lionaires. Moreover, like the families that 
 once inhabited them, they antedate the 
 Great Fire, — a sine qua non of Chicago 
 patricianship. 
 
 Though the cabin erected by Jean 
 Baptiste Point de Saible, a San Domingan 
 negro, gives an apparent priority in age 
 to the North Side, the West Side may at 
 least challenge its rival in the matter of 
 antiquity. In 1683 the Chevalier de la 
 Salle was housed in a log fort somewhere 
 upon our river's banks, while a treaty 
 made with the Indians somewhat over a 
 century later by General Anthony Wayne, 
 speaks of "Chikago" as a place where 
 there was a fort. Tradition, as recorded 
 
 50 
 
'The Old '^Marble-Fronts " of Washington Street 
 

 ■>'^. 
 
 Wkl 
 
 ^--^}^ 
 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 by so credible an early settler as Gurdon 
 S. Hubbard, holds that this fort stood on 
 the western shore of the river not far from 
 Wolf Point, and that at the end of the 
 eighteenth century it was occupied as a 
 trading-post by Guarie, the Frenchman 
 by whose name the river's northern branch 
 was once called. 
 
 In view of this, may not those Chicago- 
 ans who, like myself, were born upon the 
 Great West Side, look with pride upon 
 their birthplace as once a domain of New 
 France, while leaving the North-Sider to 
 blush for the dusky parvenu who first in- 
 habited his land? Should a claim based 
 solely upon historical tradition be scouted 
 by our rivals, we of the West Side may 
 retort that our modest bailiwick was be- 
 yond peradventure settled by Caucasians; 
 since upon the West Side was situated the 
 indubitable farm called " Hardscrabble," 
 where, over four months before Chicago's 
 
 51 
 
Chicago 
 
 boasted " Massacre," two white men were 
 killed by the Indians. Any aristocratic pre- 
 tensions the South Side may hold shall be 
 dismissed forthwith by the declaration of 
 our notable pioneer citizen, " Long John" 
 Wentworth, that even as late as 1830 "the 
 South Side had no status." 
 
 The truth is, however, that Chicago 
 grew up around Fort Dearborn, such busi- 
 ness as there was in the early days being 
 transacted in its neighborhood. The in- 
 habitants then dwelt across the river, either 
 on the North Side or on the West Side; 
 but after the fort was abandoned a resi- 
 dential district sprang up on the South 
 Side which soon vied in popularity with 
 its rivals. After the Fire, when the inroads 
 of business began to drive residences far- 
 ther and farther away from the river, the 
 West-Sider found it increasingly difficult 
 to maintain social relations with his friends 
 in the other divisions of a rapidly growing 
 
 52 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 city. Selling his house for a song, he moved, 
 sometimes to the North Side, but more 
 usually to the South Side, where he re- 
 mained until the southward march of busi- 
 ness drove both him and the native South- 
 Sider to the uncommercialized portion of 
 the Lake Shore, lying north of the business 
 district. Thus the North Side has become 
 the exclusive abode of our "first families," 
 only a few of which, however, are indige- 
 nous to its soil. 
 
 With the rebuilding of the city after 
 the Great Fire, the glory of the West 
 Side waned, and with the passing of the 
 World's Fair, that of the South Side as 
 well. Time was, however, when the three 
 sides were of social parity; though I recall 
 the fact that when the Episcopal Cathedral 
 of Saints Peter and Paul was erected in 
 the quiet street where I lived, and a bishop 
 of Anglican mien and cosmopolite man- 
 ner came to dwell among us, we of West 
 
Chicago 
 
 Washington Street felt ourselves to be so- 
 cially a little superior to our friends in the 
 other divisions. This was half a century 
 ago. To-day the Cathedral is surrounded 
 by slums, and the staid old mansions of 
 West Washington Street, which have not 
 been demolished to make room for ugly 
 factories, have become tenements or lodg- 
 ing-houses. 
 
 That once proud street now bears the 
 pompous name of "boulevard," but ex- 
 cept for its pavement, which the authorities 
 keep in good repair, it presents no indi- 
 cation of its bygone quality. Even little 
 Union Park through which its passes on 
 its way to our circumambient chain of 
 boulevards, has become a mere breathing- 
 space where the unemployed doze in the 
 shade of its bushes. Yet I recall it as a vast 
 region of lawns, trees, and flower-beds, 
 whither I went of an afternoon to watch 
 a huge grizzly bear pace back and forth 
 
 54 
 
The Church at Union Park 
 
t*v' 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 in his pit-like cage, or merrily to race with 
 other children up an artificial hill which 
 seemed to me to be a mountain in height, 
 when panting I reached its summit. 
 
 Alas, that mountain has become a 
 mole-hill, and Union Park's blue lake, 
 on the waters of which I sailed my toy 
 boats, now appears but little larger than 
 a goodly sized fountain. But at the corner 
 where Washington Boulevard enters this 
 playground of my childhood, there is a 
 familiar block of "marble-fronts," and in 
 that street where, long ago, horse-chest- 
 nuts used to bloom, there are other houses 
 which I remember, some of red brick, with 
 here and there a weather-beaten cupola 
 upon a corniced roof, and some with clap- 
 board walls and shingle roofs. How dif- 
 ferent the prim town they recall to mind 
 from the seething world city of to-day; 
 for when the West Side was at its social 
 zenith, the righteousness of New Eng- 
 
 55 
 
Chicago 
 
 land was in the hearts of our foremost 
 citizens. 
 
 The Sabbath began on Saturday at sun- 
 down then, we children being held in 
 hushed restraint till after the forbidding 
 Sunday evening meal. With upper lips 
 clean-shaven, and sombre broadcloth coats 
 hanging loosely upon their lanky shoul- 
 ders, our fathers walked devoutly to 
 church, our hoopskirted mothersin bonnet 
 and shawl treading meekly beside them. 
 Meanwhile, "fast young men," as they 
 were called, speeded trotting horses past 
 the church doors, much to the scandal of 
 the pious. Like the "black-legs," as pro- 
 fessional gamblers were called, and their 
 brazen consorts, these Sabbath-breakers 
 were without our social pale. 
 
 When Dexter Park was in the heyday 
 of its glory, horse fanciers, both young and 
 old, drove sulkies and buggies through the 
 streets of the South Side. With the open- 
 
 56 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 ing of the West Side Driving Park, out on 
 the prairie near the present Garfield Park, 
 West Washington Street became their fa- 
 vorite haunt, not only in summer, but in 
 winter as well, when wrapped in warm 
 bufi'alo robes they raced their cutters over 
 the glistening snows, their trotters spurred 
 to valiant bursts of speed by jingling bells 
 and the cheers of the sport-loving crowds 
 thronging the icy sidewalks. 
 
 It was an inspiring sight, though it 
 shocked many a sanctimonious West-Sider, 
 by whom dancing and cards, as well as 
 horse-racing and play-going, were ta- 
 booed. Our more tolerant citizens, how- 
 ever, played stakeless whist and euchre, 
 or chasseed to the strains of "Johnny" 
 Hand's fiddle through the intricate figures 
 of the "Prairie Queen," while their sons 
 and daughters danced the schottische and 
 the polka redowa. Whenever Clara Louise 
 Kellogg or Christine Nillson sang, they 
 
 57 
 
Chicago 
 
 filed into the boxes and stalls of Cros- 
 by's Opera House, while their strait-laced 
 neighbors attended Wednesday evening 
 prayer meeting. 
 
 But for the strict and the liberal alike 
 a rigid simplicity of life obtained, a do- 
 mestic establishment consisting, during 
 those simple days, of a cook and a "sec- 
 ond girl" for the housework, and a "hired 
 man " to drive the " span " of family horses 
 and do the "chores." Dinner was served 
 at noon, omx patres familiar ut?i carving at 
 the heads of their tables, after duly saying 
 grace. On New Year's Day, however, when 
 the snow in the streets was crunched from 
 morn till night by the wheels of speeding 
 carriages, home cooking was supplanted 
 by the caterer's art. 
 
 Throughout that convivial day, and 
 late into its night as well, men in "stove- 
 pipes" and "swallow-tails" trooped up 
 and down our doorsteps. The tired host- 
 
 58 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 esses in crinoline, who stood in their gas- 
 lighted houses shaking white-gloved hands 
 the whole day long, were to be pitied; 
 yet their ordeal was less wearisome by far 
 than that endured by their New Year's 
 callers, for adjoining each velvet-carpeted 
 <' parlor" was a refreshment room. To 
 refuse a helping of chicken salad, scal- 
 loped oysters, or ice-cream and cake, 
 made the feminine dispenser of these 
 goodies frown and pout her pretty lips. 
 Moreover, the Commonwealth of Ken- 
 tucky is contiguous to the State of Illi- 
 nois; hence on more than one mahogany 
 board stood a bowl of egg-nog, or a de- 
 canter of Madeira that had journeyed 
 around the Horn, with a temptress from 
 the blue-grass land beside it. Picture a 
 popular bachelor's state of mind and body 
 after he had made an hundred calls ! 
 
 But only on that day of days did our 
 austerity give way to such conviviality. 
 
 59 
 
Chicago 
 
 Throughout the remainder of the year we 
 staid West-Siders, being firmly convinced 
 of our social and moral excellence, led 
 commendable lives. It is true that a few 
 upstarts built "elegant homes," as they 
 called them, in Ashland Avenue, and 
 splurged in a way to set disapproving 
 tongues a-wagging. But in West Wash- 
 ington Street between Halsted Street and 
 Union Park, in West Monroe and West 
 Adams Streets, where the little green 
 square called Jefferson Park nestles be- 
 tween them, and in those shady cross- 
 streets with the sirenical names of Ada, 
 Elizabeth, Ann, and May, we lived as pu- 
 ritanically as any village of New England- 
 ers, until the fateful night when the heavens 
 to the south and east of us were reddened 
 by fire and the bell on the stone Court- 
 House across the river began to peal a 
 frantic alarm. Then we rushed to our win- 
 dows and house-tops, or into the flame- 
 
 60 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 lighted streets, to gaze appalled upon the 
 conflagration that was destroying the city. 
 
 Through the slums of the West Side, 
 where it had started, its flames leaped 
 from roof to roof, the impotent streams 
 played upon it by the firemen evaporat- 
 ing in its inordinate heat. Fanned by a 
 southwest gale, it quickly reached the 
 river, where a blazing brand, carried by 
 the wind to the opposite bank, fell, of all 
 places, among wooden hovels near the gas- 
 works. In vain the weary firemen lashed 
 their horses across the bridges, for soon a 
 mighty report stifled for a moment the 
 roaring of the flames. The gas-works had 
 exploded; the South Side was ablaze, and 
 except for the glare of the fire upon our 
 window panes, we of the favored West Side 
 whose houses had been spared were in 
 darkness. 
 
 Throughout an agonizing night we 
 watched the business district burn, build- 
 
 6i 
 
Chicago 
 
 ing by building, block by block, then saw 
 the angry flames sweep northward. Above 
 the roar of the fire and the crash of fall- 
 ing buildings we heard explosions of oil 
 and chemicals, the bell on the Court- 
 House tolling a knell, meanwhile, till 
 with a mournful clang it fell into the re- 
 lentless flames that were lapping the skies 
 with their scarlet tongues. 
 
 When the sun rose over the wind- 
 swept lake, the devastated city and the 
 blue sky above it were hidden from our 
 sight by dense black smoke, cloud above 
 cloud, with gleaming fire beneath it. In 
 dismay we saw the flames rush northward 
 in their fury to the water-works, the 
 smoke above them filled with embers 
 borne onward by the gale. To the south- 
 ward we heard dull detonations, and soon 
 we knew that valiant " Little Phil " Sheri- 
 dan had upon his own red-tapeless in- 
 itiative blown up several blocks of houses 
 
 62 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 with army gunpowder, to stop the south- 
 ward progress of the fire. But all day 
 long, and into the night as well, it swept 
 on to the north unchecked, until arrested 
 by the open expanse of Lincoln Park and 
 a heaven-sent shower of rain. 
 
 All day long, too, the homeless trooped 
 through our West Side streets, begging at 
 our doors for food and shelter, — some 
 grimly bearing their lot, others in tears, 
 or frenzied with excitement. Over the 
 few bridges that were still unburned they 
 came, driving wagons filled with house- 
 hold goods, or trudging hand-in-hand 
 with crying children, their backs bent to 
 the weight of treasured objects, a baby's 
 crib, maybe, or a family portrait. But 
 some had only the rags they wore, and 
 some were without sufficient clothes to 
 hide their nakedness; for I remember that 
 my mother stripped my last suit from my 
 back to cover a shivering boy of my own 
 
 63 
 
Chicago 
 
 age, I being put to bed till clothing could 
 be procured for me. 
 
 While the ruins of the city still smoul- 
 dered, our undaunted citizens began to 
 rebuild it, and soon a new Chicago arose 
 from its ashes. But with the passing of 
 the old city, the character of the West 
 Side altered, its dignified mansions either 
 being razed for factory sites or reduced 
 in state. One by one its prominent fam- 
 ilies migrated across the river, the West 
 Side — except in remote regions that once 
 were pretty suburbs — being rapidly given 
 over to factories, sweat-shops, railway 
 yards, and tenements. Small wonder that 
 it became the scene of industrial strife 
 and bloodshed, as during the railway 
 strikes of '77 and '94. Once, moreover, 
 in the Haymarket Square, where within 
 my own memory farmers from the neigh- 
 boring prairie used to market their prod- 
 uce, a bomb was thrown by an unknown 
 
 64 
 
The Great West Side 
 
 hand into the ranks of a battalion of poHce, 
 — a crime for which four men, who had 
 preached, even if they had not practiced, 
 anarchy, were hanged, in order that society 
 might be safeguarded. 
 
 To-day the Great West Side is the 
 chosen field of the sociologist and the 
 settlement worker. Within its area lives 
 almost one half of Chicago's population; 
 yet scarcely more than a fifth of its in- 
 habitants are of American-born parent- 
 age. Counting those who were immi- 
 grants themselves, or whose parents were 
 born in a foreign land, the West Side 
 contains a German city as large as Danzig, 
 a Polish city the size of Posen, and a Bo- 
 hemian city the size of Pilsen. It harbors, 
 too, more men, women, and children of 
 Russian birth or parentage than are to be 
 found in Nizhni-Novgorod, together with 
 as many Italians as there are in Pisa, and 
 as many Swedes as live in Helsingborg. 
 
 6S 
 
Chicago 
 
 of Norwegians there are probably as 
 many as inhabit Trondhjem, and of the 
 Irish more than the city of Londonderry 
 houses. Some thirty languages, moreover, 
 are spoken in this vast melting-pot, where 
 scarcely more than a generation ago the 
 customs, speech, and traditions of New 
 England were so firmly planted that they 
 seemed ineradicable. 
 
Michigan Boulevard at the Art Institute 
 
IV. The South Side 
 
IV 
 THE SOUTH SIDE 
 
 ALTHOUGH the North Side is now 
 their abiding-place, many of our 
 "first families" lived until a decade or so 
 ago in houses of the South Side, which 
 have either been altered into automobile 
 show-rooms, or display in their dingy win- 
 dows the sign " Rooms and Board." The 
 encroachments of business, however, rather 
 than any fickleness on the part of its in- 
 habitants, have altered the character of 
 this once fair portion of the city, many a 
 loyal South-Sider having dwelt in his old 
 home near the lake until his light and 
 air were diminished by giant buildings, or 
 rouged denizens of the underworld be- 
 came his neighbors. 
 
 Only Hyde Park, a quondam suburb, 
 has been able to withstand the incursions 
 
 69 
 
Chicago 
 
 of both industry and infamy. Being the 
 most American portion of the city, it has 
 fought, back to the wall, with New Eng- 
 land weapons, protective associations and 
 law and order leagues having thus far pre- 
 served its upright character. Containing 
 the only " dry district " in an otherwise 
 "wet town," Hyde Park was, until some 
 thirty years ago, an outlying village with 
 trees in its quiet streets and lawns sur- 
 rounding its decorous houses. 
 
 But the South Side itself did not be- 
 come a favorite place of residence until 
 the digging of the canal had increased 
 our population twenty-fold in as many 
 years, and the " strap rails " of our first 
 railway had been laid across the western 
 plains. 
 
 When other tracks had been put upon 
 piles in the lake to deface for all time 
 our beautiful water front, and Chicago 
 had been linked by rail with the East, the 
 
 70 
 
In the Stockyards 
 
,M 
 
The South Side 
 
 driving of cattle and hogs through the 
 streets became such a nuisance that the 
 "Bull's Head" stockyards on the West 
 Side were abandoned, the " Myrick Yards " 
 near the new railway tracks along the lake 
 shore becoming the seat of our most 
 noted industry, until it moved westward 
 to its present site. 
 
 Transformed during these "boom" 
 years from a frontier town into a city 
 of an hundred thousand souls, Chicago 
 became, in the characteristically modest 
 words of a local guide-book, "the great 
 commercial entrepot of the lakes and Up- 
 per Mississippi, surpassing as a grain and 
 lumber market any in the world." As a 
 hog emporium, however, it was still ex- 
 celled by Cincinnati, the title of Pork- 
 opolis not being wrested from this rival 
 until army contracts had enriched our 
 packers. 
 
 Chicago bore at the time the name 
 
 71 
 
Chicago 
 
 of « Garden City," its streets being lined 
 with shade trees, and its lawns adorned 
 with flower-beds. A profusion of wild 
 flowers, moreov^er, mingled with the wav- 
 ing grasses of the prairies bordering it 
 upon the west, while to the north there 
 were virgin forests; and also to the south, 
 where Senator Stephen A. Douglas had 
 given ten acres of wooded land as a site 
 for a university. 
 
 When Lincoln's great adversary died, 
 a handful of students were already seek- 
 ing an education in a castellated building 
 of white limestone standing on the lake 
 shore between the city and Hyde Park. 
 A tew loyal Chicagoans had just seized 
 the town of Cairo and fired the first 
 Western shot of civil war ; so, when a 
 training camp for volunteers was estab- 
 lished near the university our dead Sena- 
 tor had founded, his name was reverently 
 given to it. When another great Illinoisan 
 
 72 
 
The South Side 
 
 captured Fort Donelson, Camp Douglas 
 housed his prisoners. 
 
 Throughout the war it remained a 
 prison compound, as well as a thorn in 
 Chicago's side; for whenever Southern 
 ■captives died from the rigors of the cli- 
 mate, our Copperheads accused the au- 
 thorities of cruelty and neglect; and at 
 one time they even plotted an uprising 
 of the prisoners, who were to burn and 
 loot the city. But their seditious plans 
 were uncovered before they were hatched, 
 and soon they were either "skedaddling" 
 to the disloyal southern portion of the 
 State, or marching before the muzzles ot 
 Federal guns, to join the very men they 
 had planned to liberate. 
 
 Being both a base of supplies for the 
 army and a mobilization point, as well as 
 a hotbed of sedition, Chicago became a 
 profitable haunt for those war leeches, 
 the contractor and the bounty-jumper; 
 
 73 
 
Chicago 
 
 while "black-legs" and "war-widows" 
 flocked to the city in such numbers that 
 by night the downtown streets were the 
 scene of brazen riotry. But meanwhile 
 the city's loyal young men were marching 
 forth to war, and their fathers, under the 
 leadership of the Board of Trade, were 
 raising and equipping regiments. Their 
 mothers and sisters, too, were making 
 bandages and lint, or working like Tro- 
 jans for the success of our memorable 
 Sanitary Fairs. 
 
 The first of these took place in Bryan 
 Hall when hostilities were at their height, 
 but the second was not held until we had 
 bowed our heads in sorrow while the body 
 of a martyrdd President was borne through 
 the streets to the tolling of bells and the 
 booming of minute guns. The joy of vic- 
 tory being stilled by grief, the temporary 
 Fair building, which had been erected 
 where the Public Library now stands, 
 
 74 
 
The Douglas Monument 
 
The South Side 
 
 became a house of mourning rather than 
 a place of gaiety; but the return of our 
 victorious troops and the presence at the 
 Fair of both Grant and Sherman made 
 us so gratefully benevolent that a quarter 
 of a million dollars was poured into the 
 coffers of the Sanitary Commission, the 
 Red Cross of those days. 
 
 The city had prospered during the war, 
 and its population had doubled ; but soon 
 the Great Fire laid it low. When a new 
 Chicago emerged from the ashes, the 
 broad avenues of the South Side became 
 a favored abode of our wealthiest men. 
 Before the Fire, the lake front, as well 
 as Wabash Avenue and State Street, had 
 been lined as far north as the present 
 Loop by their residences of white lime- 
 stone or red brick, standing either singly- 
 with lawns surrounding them or collec- 
 tively in blocks, as they were called, upon 
 whose stone doorsteps they used to sit 
 
 IS 
 
Chicago 
 
 on summer evenings, cooling themselves 
 with palm-leaf fans, v^^hile gossiping with 
 their next-door neighbors. 
 
 Many of these old-fashioned dwellings 
 were destroyed by the flames, and many 
 others have been torn down to provide 
 sites for sky-scrapers; but a few of them 
 may still be seen nestling in the lee of 
 some Michigan Avenue hotel or Wabash 
 Avenue warehouse, or, farther to the west, 
 in State Street, converted into junk-shops 
 and saloons. At the northern end of Grant 
 Park, too, there is an entire grimy row 
 of these houses of the past, with gaudy 
 signs upon their roofs which at night blaze 
 forth in an array of disappearing and re- 
 appearing lights; while here and there, in 
 the midst of the automobile show-rooms 
 of Michigan Avenue, a once proud man- 
 sion stands, with a dressmaker's sign or 
 that of a lodging-house keeper over its 
 dilapidated door. 
 
 76 
 
The South Side 
 
 Over half a century ago a New York, 
 newspaper declared that Michigan Avenue 
 might become "such a promenade as the 
 world cannot equal," a preeminence it 
 bade fair to attain until the motor-car in- 
 dustry made it a commercial street. For 
 a score of years after the Fire, however, 
 both its beauty and its fashionable su- 
 premacy were unchallenged, except by its 
 pretty neighbor, Prairie Avenue, where 
 Marshall Field, George M. Pullman, and 
 P. D. Armour, our great triumvirate of 
 wealth and industry, dwelt, and where, 
 for half a mile or so there were more 
 of the "palatial mansions" of which we 
 then boasted than in any other part of the 
 city. 
 
 These were the years when newly made 
 Croesuses built garish houses in the shady 
 avenues of the South Side, and, much to 
 the scandal of old-fashioned folk, served 
 wine at their tables. Our doors began to 
 
 77 
 
Chicago 
 
 be opened then by sleek men-servants 
 instead of by frowsy <' second girls" ; and 
 our family rockaways were replaced by 
 broughams and victorias with rosettes on 
 the head-stalls of their horses, and pole- 
 chains to clank pretentiously. For those 
 were the days when we strove to outdo 
 each other, especially on Derby Day, when 
 with field-glasses slung over our shoulders 
 and white "top hats" upon our heads, 
 we drove our high-steppers to the races 
 at Washington Park in every conceivable 
 form of "trap," as we had been taught by 
 our English grooms to call what hereto- 
 fore had been merely a "rig." 
 
 It was during that era of inordinate 
 growth and rapid money-making, when 
 a million souls were added to its popu- 
 lation within twenty years, that Chicago 
 became known as the "Windy City," an 
 aspersion due quite as much, I fear, to 
 the boastfulness of its inhabitants as to the 
 
 78 
 
The South Side 
 
 lake breezes which swept its streets. But 
 while we were trumpeting our city's ma- 
 terial greatness, aesthetic seeds were scat- 
 tered in our midst, the first ardent sower 
 in an untilled field being the author of 
 Tom Brown's adventures at Rugby and 
 Oxford. The books he induced his fellow 
 countrymen to give us for our intellectual 
 betterment, while the ashes of the Fire still 
 smouldered, became the nucleus of our 
 Public Library ; and when they reached 
 us, they were housed in a rernote corner 
 of the temporary City Hall, whose nick- 
 name, the "Rookery," has been perpetu- 
 ated by the ofiice building now standing 
 upon its site. 
 
 Like the Art Institute, which was cre- 
 ated, meanwhile, from the dust of the old 
 Academy of Design, the Library moved, 
 as it grew in importance, from place to 
 place, until it found its permanent abode 
 in Michigan Avenue. But before its pres- 
 
 79 
 
Chicago 
 
 ent building had obliterated a little pub- 
 lic square, called Dearborn Park, or the 
 walls of the Art Institute had risen near 
 the original mouth of the river, a ram- 
 shackle structure of brick and glass, sur- 
 mounted by three wooden domes and a 
 veritable forest of flag-poles, had stood 
 for a score of years on a pile of fire debris 
 dumped into the lake, — the Inter-State 
 Industrial Exposition Building, I mean, 
 where Chicagoans of my generation ac- 
 quired their first taste for the Fine Arts. 
 Here, as an adjunct to the dry-goods, 
 millinery, and manufactures, which were 
 exhibited each autumn to benefit the city's 
 trade, a collection of modern paintings 
 and sculpture was displayed; and here, 
 in a wing, converted temporarily into an 
 indoor beer-garden, Theodore Thomas 
 used to wield his baton during the month 
 of June, his symphonic concerts in this 
 quaint building being the harbingers of 
 
 80 
 
The Library 
 
The South Side 
 
 those now given just across the street by 
 the orchestra of which he was the founder. 
 
 Before public-spirited citizens had built 
 the Auditorium, grand opera, too, was 
 sung in the Exposition Building, where 
 pedestrian contests and horse shows were 
 also held, and where Garfield was nom- 
 inated for the Presidency. Our finest 
 achievement, moreover, was conceived 
 beneath its tawdry domes ; for at the an- 
 nual meeting of its stockholders, held in 
 1885, it was resolved that a great world's 
 fair be held in Chicago, to commemorate 
 the four hundredth anniversary of the 
 landing of Columbus. 
 
 That an uncouth Western town should 
 presume to represent the nation, appeared 
 mere bumptiousness to jealous cities of 
 the East; and when Congress had finally 
 selected Chicago as the site of the World's 
 Columbian Exposition, their contempt 
 was uttered so loudly that it reverberated 
 
 81 
 
Chicago 
 
 across the Atlantic to fill the hearts of 
 prospective exhibitors with misgiving. An- 
 gered by these sneers, Chicago chose the 
 words "I Will" as a battle-cry. 
 
 Though millions were raised for it in 
 panicky times, the success of the enter- 
 prise we fondly call our World's Fair was 
 due far less to the talent of its officers 
 than to the genius of its designer, John 
 Wellborn Root, and of the men selected 
 to execute his plans. When these were 
 gathered together for the first time, Saint- 
 Gaudens acclaimed it the greatest meet- 
 ing of artists since the fifteenth century, a 
 hyperbole justified by their achievement, 
 for at a time when mansard-roofs and 
 Qiieen Anne houses were disfiguring the 
 land far and wide, they created beside 
 the most material of cities an ethereal 
 city, so perfect in outline that it inspired 
 even the prosaic beholder with a longing 
 for beauty in his daily life. It was called 
 
 82 
 
The South Side 
 
 the "White City," and by day its walls 
 and columns, immaculate against an azure 
 lake and sky, made this an inevitable 
 name ; but when the sun set over the 
 prairies beyond, it became a place of 
 magic. Then the forms of its palaces 
 were etched in fire against the blackness 
 of the night, and while its fountains ex- 
 tended their misty veils before the won- 
 dering crowds upon the banks of its la- 
 goons, gondolas mellow with the light 
 of lanterns, mirthful with the songs of 
 Venice, glided out of the darkness, and 
 rockets shot upward from behind an en- 
 chanting peristyle to burst in a nebula 
 of stars. 
 
 But the building of our Fair and the 
 enjoyment of its marvels left us listless. 
 When the cosmopolitan crowds had gone, 
 we tried in vain to return to our hum- 
 drum ways. Brilliant men and women 
 from far and wide had been crossing our 
 
 83 
 
Chicago 
 
 thresholds, and royalty, even, had been 
 in our midst. We had grown accustomed 
 to officers in uniform and distinguished 
 foreigners with tiny decorations dangling 
 en brochette upon the lapels of their even- 
 ing coats; so we became bored with our 
 commonplace selves and regardless of the 
 motto " I Will." Furthermore, our purses 
 were empty, and we were forced to skimp 
 in order to pay the inordinate debts with 
 which a fleeting year of world-wide emi- 
 nence had saddled us. Meanwhile, the 
 sign "For Rent" darkened the windows 
 of stores and apartments, and the swards 
 of the parks were black with the recum- 
 bent forms of the unemployed. There 
 were strikes, moreover, of a riotous kind, 
 and while they were being quelled, the 
 white tents of an army dotted the lake 
 front. 
 
 Being the host of the World's Fair, the 
 South Side had expanded inordinately to 
 
 84 
 
Columbus Caravels of iS()2 near La Rabida Convent 
 
The South Side 
 
 receive the crowds ; therefore it suffered 
 during this distressing aftermath more se- 
 verely than its sister divisions. But when 
 a new century dawned, and the city, 
 heartened afresh, began to compete with 
 its old-time zeal for the industrial su- 
 premacy of the land, both the fortunes 
 and the aspect of the South Side altered. 
 Factories, furnaces, and cattle-pens began 
 to cover its bare prairies, and row upon 
 row of new houses and apartment build- 
 ings to appear upon its vacant lots. Its 
 proud mansions, meanwhile, were razed 
 to make room for places of business, 
 or reduced to housing quacks and petty 
 tradesmen. One by one their owners mi- 
 grated to the Lake Shore Drive or its 
 adjacent streets, the white macadam on 
 which their carriages and phaetons used 
 to rumble being oiled a dingy brown to 
 make a highway for motor cars. 
 
 Spreading trees of Michigan Avenue's 
 
 85 
 
 x 
 
Chicago 
 
 former days have been replaced by cement 
 posts with clusters of electric lights upon 
 them, and in the full mile of its length 
 which parallels the lake, massive twenty- 
 story buildings have arisen : though losing 
 in beauty, it has gained in grandeur. Here 
 are the finest hotels and the smartest shops, 
 the clubs, the Auditorium, the Public Li- 
 brary, and Orchestra Hall, and, flanked 
 by fountains and pylons in the green park 
 opposite, the Art Institute; for here is 
 centered the assthetic as well as the wordly 
 life of the city. 
 
 I sat, not long ago, on the deck of a 
 yacht in the harbor, marveling at the sight 
 of Chicago by night. Around me dim 
 anchor-lights were glimmering over the 
 water; while the steam of locomotives, 
 curling upward in fantastic clouds, veiled 
 the huge buildings before me in alluring 
 mystery. Far above the glare of Michigan 
 Avenue, their roofs and pinnacles were 
 
 86 
 
The South Side 
 
 outlined against the city's radiance. Some 
 were in darkness, others rimmed with 
 light; here and there an electric sign 
 flashed its brilliant hues; into the waves 
 beyond reached the Municipal Pier, its 
 graceful towers and slender form ablaze 
 with innumerable lamps. 
 
 Under the spell of the scene I pictured 
 a little garrison retreating in despair along 
 a desert shore barely a century ago; then 
 tried to realize that yonder broad stretch 
 of parkland had been made before my 
 eyes, and that I had seen one row of 
 buildings on this water front destroyed 
 by fire, and still another demolished to 
 make way for these mighty structures 
 looming in the night. 
 
Where the Lake Shore Drive begins 
 
V. The North Side 
 
 -r.--'-^' 
 
V 
 THE NORTH SIDE 
 
 CHICAGO appeared raw and bare to 
 Miss Harriet Martiheau when she 
 visited it exactly eighty years ago: yet she 
 confessed that she had never seen a busier 
 place. It was enjoying at the time a boom 
 in land values which a panic was soon to 
 dispel, and storekeepers hailed her, as she 
 passed their doors, with ofFers of farms and 
 building-sites. The streets, moreover, were 
 filled with speculators who crowded about 
 a scarlet-coated negro on a white horse 
 whenever he waved a red flag and shouted 
 the time and place of the next sale of lots 
 along the proposed course of the Illinois 
 and Michigan Canal. 
 
 Though the city numbered less than 
 five thousand inhabitants then, the Eng- 
 lish authoress acknowledges that there was 
 
 91 
 
Chicago 
 
 "some allowable pride in the place about 
 its society," her astonishment at having 
 found "an assemblage of educated, re- 
 fined, and wealthy persons living on the 
 edge of a wild prairie" being shared, I 
 venture to say, by many an Eastern vis- 
 itor to the Chicago of the present day. 
 Yet having known in former years some 
 of the very men and women who inspired 
 "the lively and pleasant associations" of 
 which she speaks, I can confirm her testi- 
 mony in regard to their culture. 
 
 Her host was WiUiam B. Ogden, our 
 first Mayor, of whomGuizot, the historian, 
 said, when viewing his portrait: "That is 
 the representative American, who is the 
 benefactor of his country, especially of the 
 mighty West : He built Chicago." And 
 the young lawyer who " threw behind him 
 the five hundred dollars a day" he was 
 making, in order to accompany her to 
 Mount Joliet, was Isaac N. Arnold, the 
 
 92 
 
The North Side 
 
 friend of Lincoln, who introduced into 
 Congress the first resolution for the abo- 
 lition of slavery. The distinguished visi- 
 tor, moreover, at a reception held for her 
 by Mrs. John S. Wright, undoubtedly met 
 many of the men whose names are in- 
 scribed in our Golden Book : John D. Ca- 
 ton, the lawyer, for instance; John Blatch- 
 ford, the Presbyterian Minister; Alonzo 
 Huntington, the State's Attorney; Mark. 
 Skinner, the school inspector; Philo Car- 
 penter, the druggist; Charles Walker, the 
 merchant; and perhaps young George W. 
 Meeker, a crippled student of the law, 
 well versed in French and Latin. 
 
 Miss Martineau's good opinion of the 
 founders of our city was shared thirteen 
 years later by Fredrika Bremer, a Swedish 
 novelist of world-wide reputation at the 
 time, who disliked the ugliness of Chicago, 
 but considered some of its twenty-five 
 thousand inhabitants "the most agreeable 
 
 93 
 
Chicago 
 
 and delightful people she had ever met 
 anywhere." They were "Good people, 
 handsome, and intelligent," she declared; 
 <' people to live with, people to talk with, 
 people to like and grow tond of, both men 
 and women; people who do not ask the 
 stranger a hundred questions, but who give 
 him an opportunity of seeing and learn- 
 ing in the most agreeable manner which 
 he can desire; rare people! And besides 
 that, people who are not too horribly 
 pleased with themselves and their world, 
 and their city, and their country, as is so 
 often the casein small towns, but who see 
 deficiencies and can speak of them prop- 
 erly, andean bear to hear others speak of 
 them also." 
 
 Within a restricted part of the vast city 
 of the present day the descendants of those 
 whose refinement and education impressed 
 both Miss Martineau and Miss Bremer so 
 favorably still maintain the traditions of 
 
 94 
 
The North Side 
 
 their race, Chicago being socially a New 
 England town as strait-laced as Boston. 
 The reader whose opinion of us has been 
 formed from the lurid tales of our de- 
 pravity which appear in magazines and 
 newspapers, or from a sojourn of a day or 
 two at some hotel within the Loop, will 
 smile incredulously at this comparison; 
 yet even while risking martyrdom at the 
 stake of popular opinion, I boldly declare 
 the society of Chicago to be more puri- 
 tanical than that of any great city in the 
 world. 
 
 Since my dictionary defines "society," 
 in the sense in which I have used this word, 
 as that portion of a community "whose 
 movements and entertainments and other 
 doings are more or less conspicuous," "ar- 
 istocracy" is manifestly the term I should 
 have chosen to indicate the class I have in 
 mind. However, it connotes age; there- 
 fore, it may provoke another smile. Yet 
 
 95 
 
Chicago 
 
 the blood of the people whom Miss Mar- 
 tineau and Miss Bremer met was as old 
 and pure as any in the land; hence I feel 
 justified in using this word to qualify their 
 descendants. 
 
 A few of the founders of Chicago were 
 from Virginia and Kentucky; yet the ma- 
 jority, coming from New England or 
 northern New York, brought with them 
 the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers, which 
 they planted so deeply in the soil that 
 even in this day and generation many of 
 their progeny refuse to serve wine to their 
 guests, or to desecrate the Sabbath with 
 a healthful game of golf. Though other 
 descendants of the pioneers observe the 
 puritanical traditions less strictly, as a class 
 they form a leavening influence in the life 
 of the city, a notable proportion ot the 
 men and women who direct its charities 
 or manage its institutions of learning and 
 culture being recruited from the ranks of 
 
 96 
 
The North Side 
 
 those whose fathers or grandfathers settled 
 on the shores of Lake Michigan within a 
 score of years after the Black Hawk War. 
 
 Although this class of the commun- 
 ity has ceased to govern politically, its 
 ideals are still potent; therefore it seems 
 to me to fall within the finer meaning of 
 the word "aristocracy." To describe its 
 lighter-hearted members, whose more or 
 less conspicuous doings adorn the pages 
 of the newspapers, "society" may be the 
 preferable term; yet even these toil as 
 their fathers did before them, Chicago 
 being a city without a leisure class. 
 
 In the years before the Fire it was so- 
 cially a united city, but now the well-to- 
 do citizens who formerly lived in West 
 Washington Street and Ashland Avenue, 
 or in the shady boulevards of the South 
 Side, have migrated one by one to the 
 region lying between the Virginia Hotel 
 and Lincoln Park, this portion of the 
 
 97 
 
Chicago 
 
 North Side being now the abode of most 
 of the families which were eminent in the 
 days before the Fire, as well as of those 
 whose wealth is surpassing. In Hyde Park 
 and Kenwood, however, two former sub- 
 urbs of the South Side, a few old Chi- 
 cagoans still dwell, their sedate household 
 gods protected from the iconoclasm of 
 business by the walls of our University. 
 In this seemly neighborhood the atmos- 
 phere is academic, an element which dis- 
 tinguishes its life from that of the North 
 Side, where there is a greater indulgence 
 in the gaieties which attend society the 
 world over. 
 
 That the North Side has long been 
 a factor in our social life is evidenced 
 by a certain Mrs. Baird, who paid trib- 
 ute a century ago to the "hospitable in- 
 mates of the pleasant Kinzie home," the 
 fare of whose table was " all an epicure 
 could desire." Gurdon S. Hubbard, too, 
 
 98 
 
The North Side 
 
 was a guest at this board, when, as clerk 
 of a "brigade"of John Jacob Astor's voy- 
 ageurs, he visited for the first time the site 
 of the future metropolis he was to assist 
 in creating. Indeed, the Kinzies may be 
 said to be the founders of our society as 
 well as of our city, especially since a beau- 
 tiful daughter of the house was portrayed 
 by Healy. When this artist arrived on 
 the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago 
 numbered about seventy-five thousand 
 people, all of whom I verily believe he 
 painted. Nevertheless, the possession of a 
 Healy portrait is an incontestible proof 
 of a Chicago family's ancient lineage. 
 
 But I am traveling apace, since I meant 
 to record that both Miss Martineau and 
 Miss Bremer were entertained at dinner 
 by the second generation of the Kinzies 
 and heard from the lips of the author of 
 "Waubun" the story of the "Massacre." 
 The English visitor, moreover, attended 
 
 99 
 
Chicago 
 
 divine service in a large room of the Lake 
 House, a brick hotel which had just been 
 erected at the corner of Rush and Michi- 
 gan Streets with the intention of making 
 the North Side the centre of the city's 
 life. Being inaccessible to the business dis- 
 trict, except by ferry, this hostelry proved, 
 in the words of an early chronicler, " sure 
 death to its landlords," and within a few 
 years was sold for a tenth of its cost and 
 converted into apartments. 
 
 Though this attempt to turn the tide 
 of affairs northward ended in disaster, the 
 neighborhood of the Lake House became 
 a favorite place of residence and soon was 
 filled with stately mansions surrounded 
 by lawns and shade trees. But the aspect 
 of the North Side, like that of the other 
 divisions of the city, has altered as time 
 passed, the part of it which is now most 
 fashionable having been a Catholic ceme- 
 tery in the days before the Fire. With a 
 
 lOO 
 
The North Side 
 
 wholesome regard for their throats and 
 noses our fathers built their houses away 
 from the lake, Dearborn and LaSalle Ave- 
 nues being the streets which they pre- 
 ferred. Indeed, until almost the time of 
 the World's Fair what is now the Lake 
 Shore Drive was a barren, wind-swept 
 strand. 
 
 Being a place of residence rather than 
 of trade, the North Side has been com- 
 paratively free from strikes and riots such 
 as the more commercial divisions of the 
 city have witnessed from time to time. 
 Yet the first turbulence which disturbed 
 the even tenor of our municipal ways was 
 engendered in the part of it inhabited by 
 Germans ; for at the time when Know- 
 Nothing-ism was rife in the land, the city 
 had a Mayor of that persuasion who sought 
 to enforce a Sunday-closing regulation 
 which previously had been a dead letter. 
 
 While a test case was being tried in 
 
 lOI 
 
Chicago 
 
 the Court-House, a mob of saloon-keep- 
 ers and their adherents gathered on the 
 North Side, and, headed by a fife and 
 drum, proceeded toward the Public Square 
 resolved to end the legal proceedings by 
 violence. Improbable though it may ap- 
 pear, the police force of that day was 
 composed entirely of native Americans, 
 and with Yankee astuteness its chief per- 
 mitted a portion of the rioters to cross 
 the river to the South Side; whereupon 
 the Clark Street Bridge was swung and 
 the mob divided in half, a ruse whereby 
 it was quelled in sections, though not 
 without bloodshed. But before peace 
 could be made to reign throughout the 
 city, the Mayor was forced to order out 
 the militia and place cannon in the Pub- 
 lic Square, and not until the present day 
 has any chief magistrate dared to menace 
 anew the right of our German citizens to 
 the enjoyment of their Sunday beer. 
 
 I02 
 
In Clark Street at the Court House 
 
The North Side 
 
 Since the time when a lawless shanty 
 settlement called " Kilgubbin " was estab- 
 lished in Kinzie Street, the North Side 
 has been the field of an almost constant 
 warfare waged against squatters and their 
 rights, the most spectacular attack upon 
 them having been made in the year 1857 
 by "Long John" Wentworth, when, as 
 Mayor, he marched the police and fire 
 department to a nefarious part of the 
 Lake Shore called " The Sands " and 
 razed its brothels, amid the cheers and 
 hisses of the populace. Some thirty years 
 later the notorious Captain George Wel- 
 lington Streeter, while navigating the lake 
 in his galleon, was stranded on these very 
 sands. Finding his craft high and dry 
 when the storm had subsided, he claimed 
 the land surrounding it by right of dis- 
 covery, and even a term served in the 
 penitentiary for resisting officers of the 
 law with deadly weapons has failed to 
 
 103 
 
Chicago 
 
 daunt him; so to this day he remains a thorn 
 in the flesh of the rightful owners of what he 
 terms the "Deestrict of Lake Michigan." 
 Except for this warfare against sqqatter 
 sovereignty, the North Side has led a rel- 
 atively peaceful life. The Great Fire de- 
 stroyed it utterly, however, for after its 
 ravages only the frame mansion of Mahlon 
 D. Ogden and the cottage of a policeman 
 named Bellinger remained unburned in 
 practically the entire portion of it ly- 
 ing between the river and Lincoln Park. 
 While the fame of the flght made with 
 blankets and buckets of water to preserve 
 the Ogden house from destruction is the 
 more widespread, Bellinger's struggle to 
 save his humble dwelling is the more he- 
 roic; since he fought the flames single- 
 handed until his cistern ran dry, and then 
 with the inspiration of a genius quenched 
 them with the contents of his cider bar- 
 rels. 
 
 104 
 
The North Side 
 
 To-day not a single building remains 
 of those which stood between the river 
 and Lincoln Park in the days before the 
 Fire, the Ogden house having long since 
 been demolished to provide a site for the 
 Newberry Library. The North Side, there- 
 fore, is without any landmarks of Old Chi- 
 cago such as may still be seen on the West 
 Side, or in that portion of the South Side 
 which is adjacent to the Congress Hotel. 
 There are, however, in Rush Street and 
 Cass Street, as well as in the streets which 
 intersect them, a number of houses built 
 directly after the Fire which bear the sem- 
 blance of antiquity ; while in Dearborn 
 Avenue, LaSalle Avenue, and Wells Street 
 there are still some "marble-fronts" and 
 brick mansions with mansard-roofs to re- 
 call the past, these having been favorite 
 residential streets of the North Side until 
 in the decade before the World's Fair the 
 tide of fashion turned eastward. 
 
 105 
 
Chicago 
 
 The Lake Shore Drive and its adjoin- 
 ing streets then became our Mayfair. To 
 this day, however, a feu^ old families cling 
 to Rush Street and its traditions; but the 
 indications are that within a few years 
 even the beautiful Lake Shore Drive will 
 have altered in character, a generation be- 
 ing the longest period throughout which 
 a Chicago street has been able to main- 
 tain its social supremacy. Already a small 
 colony of fashionables has been estab- 
 lished north of Lincoln Park upon land 
 which only yesterday was reclaimed from 
 the lake; therefore it seems likely that the 
 exclusive quarter ot the next generation 
 will be this newly made portion oi the 
 Lake Shore. 
 
 The vast pleasure-ground which sep- 
 arates the Mayfair of to-day from that of 
 to-morrow was originally known as Cem- 
 etery Park, and it extended only from 
 half a block north of Wisconsin Street to 
 
 io6 
 
Rush Street in the Old Residential Section 
 
#i^W .^ 
 
 mn 
 
 4WA 
 
 "-'A 
 
 
 ' f 
 
 " ft***- 
 
 {•{■%■ 
 
The North Side 
 
 Webster Avenue, all the southern portion 
 of its present acreage having once been a 
 cemetery. Toward the end of the Civil 
 War, when the Common Council had 
 forbidden further burials in the cemetery, 
 it was called Lake Park; a name borne 
 only for a few months, however, for after 
 the assassination of the Great Emancipa- 
 tor his name was given to it. 
 
 Within my lifetime Lincoln Park has 
 quintupled in area, partly by the absorp- 
 tion of the Chicago Cemetery, partly by 
 the filling in each summer of a portion 
 of the lake; it being the intention of its 
 commissioners eventually to extend it by 
 this means some two or three miles north 
 of its present limits. 
 
 Although it was once fastidiously pro- 
 vided with " keep off the grass " signs to 
 prevent joy and gladness, it is to-day 
 quite as much of a playground as a 
 park, with tennis courts, baseball fields, 
 
 107 
 
Chicago 
 
 golf courses, yacht harbors, and bathing- 
 beaches, and I doubt if in all the world 
 there is a civic domain so widely or so 
 democratically used. Indeed, during the 
 summer months it is difficult at times to 
 perceive the grass of its broad meadows 
 at all, so thickly is it strewn with coat- 
 less human beings. 
 
 Lincoln Park is the oldest of our breath- 
 ing-spots of more than a hundred acres in 
 extent and the one most widely used by 
 the people of the city; it is the most cos- 
 mopolitan, too, in its aspect, the region 
 in which our patricians dwell being but 
 a small part of one of the six wards of 
 which the North Side is composed; for 
 although this is by far the smallest division 
 of the city, it houses, nevertheless, close 
 to half a million people, barely more than 
 a third of whom were born in these United 
 States. Indeed, I venture to say that in 
 Lincoln Park upon a Sunday afternoon 
 
 io8 
 
In Lincoln Park 
 
The North Side 
 
 one may see disporting themselves in ac- 
 cordance with their racial predilections 
 men, women, and children of quite as 
 many nationalities as there are kinds of 
 wild animals pacing to and fro in the 
 cages of its zoological garden. 
 
 Although we Chicagoans are inordi- 
 nately proud of the chain of parks and 
 boulevards encircling our city, we have 
 failed to pay due respect to the mem- 
 ory of John S. Wright, the pioneer citizen 
 who conceived its glories. " I foresee," he 
 said, when the city numbered less than 
 twenty-five thousand souls, "a time not 
 very distant when Chicago will need with 
 its fast-increasing population a park, or 
 parks, in each division. Of these parks 
 I have a vision. They are all improved 
 and connected with a wide avenue, ex- 
 tended to and along the Lake Shore on 
 the north and south, and so surround the 
 city with a magnificent chain of superb 
 
 109 
 
Chicago 
 
 parks and parkways that have not their 
 equals in the world." 
 
 The man who made this amazingly 
 true prophecy built at his own expense 
 the city's first schoolhouse. He has ex- 
 perienced, however, the proverbial fate 
 of a prophet in his own land, as well as 
 the ingratitude of a democracy ; for while 
 Dante, Schiller, Goethe, Humboldt, Kos- 
 ciuszko, Bismarck, and many lesser aliens, 
 even to some of purely local light, have 
 been so honored, not a single one of our 
 hundred parks or three hundred schools 
 has been named after John S.Wright. Yet 
 he was the first of those public-spirited 
 citizens whose zeal in the cause of learn- 
 ing and refinement has made Chicago, in 
 spite of its inordinate materialism, a city 
 of such aesthetic fruition that the munici- 
 pality actually purchases canvases from the 
 brushes of its own painters to adorn its 
 halls, and requires that a statue, before it 
 
 I lO 
 
The North Side 
 
 may be placed in any of its parks, shall 
 be approved by a committee composed 
 of its leading artists. 
 
 But if Chicago has ceased to be purely 
 a material city, it is due, in large measure, 
 to the descendants of those pioneers whose 
 refinement and education impressed Har- 
 riet Martineau and Fredrika Bremer so 
 favorably, a goodly majority of the men 
 and women who have created its insti- 
 tutions of learning and refinement, or 
 who work for its betterment, being scions 
 of those Anglo-Saxon families of New 
 England origin who migrated to Chicago 
 during the strenuous years intervening 
 between the birth of the city and its de- 
 struction by fire. 
 
T^he Skyline of Park Row 
 
VI. "The Soul of the City 
 
 
 i^ltj, 
 
 „r"-<!i.ilL_i., 
 
 
 
VI 
 THE SOUL OF THE CITY 
 
 AMERICAN cities are so alike in 
 their physical aspects that artists are 
 wont to lament their lack of atmosphere. 
 Each has a "downtown" of ungainly sky- 
 scrapers, and a residential quarter filled 
 with the Italian palaces, French chateaux, 
 and Tudor castles of the rich, or the 
 more indigenous colonial mansions and 
 Spanish mission houses of the well-to-do. 
 They all have squalid tenement districts, 
 too, and purlieus dotted with cottages 
 and bungalows, and in all of them apart- 
 ment and flat buildings have arisen to 
 destroy home ties and disfigure the sky- 
 line. Moreover, they all have public build- 
 ings of pseudo-classic architecture, and 
 macadamized boulevards defaced by gar- 
 ish signs, while in their dirty streets trol- 
 
 115 
 
Chicago 
 
 ley gongs clang and the horns of motor 
 cars made in Detroit toot the whole day 
 long, and the crowds upon their sidewalks, 
 dressed in the same styles of ready-made 
 clothes, chew the same brands of gum. 
 
 With few exceptions, too, our cities 
 have corrupt governments and bands of 
 valiant reformers striving for their better- 
 ment; so that spiritually as well as phys- 
 ically they appear to the casual beholder 
 to be of a piece. Nevertheless, when I 
 read, in a magazine article not long ago, 
 the statement that "American cities are 
 all alike," I felt that the writer's view was 
 utterly superficial; for, in spite of their 
 bodily likeness, their souls are different, 
 the soul of a city being, to my mind, that 
 emotional or intellectual part of it which 
 finds expression in its moral achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 In the comic press New York is char- 
 acterized by affluence, Philadelphia by 
 
 ii6 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 pride of birth, and Boston by intellectu- 
 ality. There are families in New York, 
 however, as old as any in Philadelphia, 
 and men in Boston as vulgarly rich as any 
 in New York. There are women in Phil- 
 adelphia, too, as intellectual as any in Bos- 
 ton; yet in each of these cities there is 
 an inherent trait sufficiently marked to 
 justify this satire. 
 
 By the same token, I confess that Chi- 
 cago contains a sufficient number of brag- 
 garts with strident voices to warrant its 
 sobriquet of "Windy City." Boastfulness, 
 however, is not its chief characteristic, but 
 rather that energetic desire to be up and 
 doing, which is best defined by the col- 
 loquial word vim. The microbe of the 
 « Chicago Spirit," as this forcible element 
 of its soul is fondly called, is disseminated, 
 I firmly believe, by the breezes of Lake 
 Michigan ; for, while it is possible to lead 
 a tranquil or even a complacent existence 
 
 117 
 
Chicago 
 
 in other places, no sooner does one snifF 
 the air of Chicago than Hfe becomes a 
 turmoil of duty, every waking hour of 
 which is burdened by some obligation 
 which must be fulfilled before nightfall, 
 the word manana having no place in our 
 vocabulary. 
 
 Indeed our impulsive city is one huge 
 kettle of energy seething the whole day 
 long, no healthy man or woman being 
 able to exist without work of some kind or 
 other to do. Strangely enough its strenu- 
 ous future was foreseen by the Chevalier 
 de la Salle, almost the first white man to 
 breathe its invigorating air. In a letter 
 written upon the banks of the Chicago 
 River nearly two hundred and fifty years 
 ago, he made this amazing prophecy: — 
 
 This is the lowest point on the divide between 
 the two great valleys of the St. Lawrence and the 
 Mississippi. The boundless regions of the West 
 must send their products to the East through this 
 
 ii8 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 point. This will be the gate of empire, this the 
 seat of commerce. Everything invites to action. 
 The typical man who will grow up here must be 
 an enterprising man. Each day as he rises he will 
 exclaim, "I act, I move, I push," and there will 
 be spread before him a boundless horizon, an illim- 
 itable field of activity. A limitless expanse of plain 
 is here — to the east, water and at all other points, 
 land. If I were to give this place a name I would 
 derive it from the nature of the place and the na- 
 ture of the man who will occupy this place — ago, 
 I act; circum, all around: " Circago." 
 
 The enterprising inhabitants of this 
 gate of empire do arise each morning to 
 exclaim, " I act, I move, I push," it being 
 a city without idlers. The few men of 
 leisure it has bred acquired their fond- 
 ness for a life of ease in foreign lands, 
 and knowing the insalubrity of its air to 
 temperaments such as theirs, they visit it 
 only occasionally, and tarry within it only 
 long enough to collect rents or cut off 
 coupons. Despite the widespread belief 
 that no one lives in Chicago who is able 
 
 119 
 
Chicago 
 
 to live elsewhere, I doubt if even these 
 expatriates have ceased to regard it with 
 tender affection ; since of all the cities in 
 the land it is most fervently loved by its 
 inhabitants, and most imbued with civic 
 pride. 
 
 Gun-men haunt its streets, it is true, 
 and a murder is committed in them nearly 
 every day in the year. Jt is smoke-ridden 
 and disfigured by factories and railway 
 yards, and many of its streets are ill- 
 paved. Moreover, the people who throng 
 them are more carelessly dressed than 
 those in Fifth Avenue, and their voices 
 are not so well modulated as those of the 
 inhabitants of Boston. Their manners, too, 
 are of the kind the New Yorker defines 
 as Western ; yet within their hearts there 
 is the quality I have called vim^ as well 
 as an implicit belief in Chicago and its 
 future, which is certainly idealism, or akin 
 to it. 
 
 I 20 
 
fVashington Street looking East from Clark Street 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 The efFervescent affection displayed by 
 Chicagoans for their city is often viewed 
 in the Hght of mere bluster by the inhab- 
 itants of older places ; therefore, I was 
 overjoyed not long ago to find in a book 
 of travel, entitled " By Motor to the Golden 
 Gate," the Chicago spirit described with 
 both truth and understanding by a New 
 Yorker. Although Mrs. Price Post, the 
 author of this charming little book, de- 
 votes an entire chapter to Chicago and 
 its people, all of which I should like to 
 quote, I shall confine myself to this sym- 
 pathetic description of the civic loyalty I 
 have been attempting to depict: — 
 
 The Chicagoans love their city, not as though 
 it were a city at all, but as though it were their 
 actual flesh and blood. They look at it in the way 
 a mother looks at her child, thinking it the bright- 
 est, most beautiful, and wonderful baby in the whole 
 world. Tell a mother that Mrs. Smith's baby is the 
 loveliest and cleverest prodigy you have ever seen, 
 and her feelings will be those exactly of Chicagoans 
 
 12 1 
 
Chicago 
 
 if you tell them anything that could be construed 
 into an unfavorable comparison. They can't bear 
 New York any more than the mother can bear 
 Mrs. Smith's baby. At the very sight of a New 
 Yorker they nettle and their minds flurry around 
 and gather up quickly every point of possible ad- 
 vantage to their own beloved Chicago. Not for a 
 second am I ridiculing them, any more than I 
 would ridicule the sacredness of a man's belief in 
 prayer. Their love of their city is something won- 
 derful, glorious, sublime. They don't brag for the 
 sake of bragging, but they champion her with every 
 last red corpuscle in their heart's blood because 
 they so loyally and tremendously care. 
 
 This is a true analysis of the Chicago 
 spirit; even the boasting of her citizens be- 
 ing merely the exuberant loyalty of those 
 who love her tremendously. The New 
 Yorker, or the Bostonian, champions his 
 city, it is true, but not, I think, with every 
 last red corpuscle in his heart's blood, 
 because his city is merely an inheritance. 
 The Chicagoan, on the other hand, has 
 helped to create Chicago by the sweat of 
 
 122 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 his brow, consequently, he loves her as his 
 own offspring. He cannot bear New York 
 because he knows that it is a bigger, older, 
 and more sumptuous city than his own. 
 In argument he will admit readily enough 
 that New York is a wealthier and more 
 metropolitan city than Chicago, but he 
 will deny that it has more culture, and if 
 forced to admit that Chicago is uncouth, 
 he will say that New York is effete as well 
 as purse-proud. 
 
 The New Yorker feels that the smart- 
 ness and cosmopolitanism of his city lend 
 an air of distinction to an otherwise com- 
 monplace land; whereas the Chicagoan is 
 proud of his city because of its intense 
 Americanism. He knows that Chicago is 
 a stupendous product of the pioneer spirit 
 which has built the Nation. Eighty years 
 ago it was a frontier town of less than five 
 thousand souls; whereas to-day it is the 
 fourth, perhaps the third, largest city in 
 
 123 
 
Chicago 
 
 the world. Small wonder, he declares, that 
 its rough edges have not been smoothed, 
 since it has been growing too fast to take 
 count of its shortcomings. Moreover, it is 
 a veritable Babel in which some thirty or 
 more tongues are spoken; hence the as- 
 similation of its own people is certainly its 
 most pressing task. A third of its inhabit- 
 ants were born in foreign lands ; another 
 third have foreign-born parents ; while a 
 third of the remaining third have an alien 
 father, or an alien mother, so that of the 
 two and a half million people who inhabit 
 Chicago barely a fourth are Americans of 
 the second generation. It is in the hearts 
 of this small minority, however, that its 
 moral achievements have been almost en- 
 tirely conceived. 
 
 Its materialism has been so widely 
 trumpeted that to extol its spirituality be- 
 comes a civic duty on my part. Indeed, 
 when I reiterate that Chicago is the dis- 
 
 I 24 
 
Park Row at the Railway Station 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 tributing centre of the United States, as 
 well as the largest grain market and great- 
 est producer of packing-house products, 
 agricultural implements, and ready-made 
 clothing in the world, it is by way of 
 offering a contrast to the fact that it has 
 the largest art school in the land. 
 
 Furthermore, its university has an en- 
 rollment of over eight thousand students; 
 while Northwestern University, with some 
 five thousand more, although situated in 
 a suburb, is in reality one of Chicago's 
 institutions of learning. Indeed, if the 
 faculties and students of technical schools 
 such as the Armour and Lewis Institutes 
 and those of small colleges such as Lake 
 Forest be added to the faculties and stu- 
 dents of the city's two great universities 
 and its numerous medical colleges, and a 
 count be taken, as well, of its professors 
 and students of art, music, or the drama, 
 and the teachers in its public schools, I 
 
 125 
 
Chicago 
 
 venture to predict that the studious pop- 
 ulation of Chicago will be found to be 
 quite as large as that of the entire popu- 
 lation of Peoria, the second city in the 
 State. 
 
 Chicago has its own opera company 
 and two symphony orchestras, and a pub- 
 lic library which, in the circulation of 
 books, stands second in the United States. 
 Furthermore, it has two notable libraries 
 which are privately endowed, as well as 
 a great museum of natural history, and 
 an art museum which is visited by more 
 people than any art museum in the coun- 
 try. Its citizens contribute annually about 
 seven million dollars to organized charity, 
 and millions more to education, or what 
 the newspapers style "the uplift." More- 
 over, it has an aesthetic scheme for its own 
 beautification which is fondly called the 
 « Chicago Plan." One by one the prin- 
 cipal features of this plan are being exe- 
 
 I 26 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 cuted; hence the dream of a "city beau- 
 tiful" bids fair to come true before the 
 city is a century old. Indeed, I feel that 
 boastful Chicagoans, like myself, are jus- 
 tified in declaring that the growth of our 
 city's soul has been even more astonish- 
 ing than that of its body. 
 
 Other cities have universities, opera 
 companies, and museums, and plans for 
 their own betterment, it is true, and per- 
 haps their citizens are even more generous 
 to charity than Chicagoans; yet I believe 
 that their "uplifters" are less strenuous 
 than ours and their sense of civic duty less 
 pervading. Though life in industrial Chi- 
 cago is nerve-wrecking, it is as naught to 
 that led by the zealous citizens who pon- 
 der sociological problems while they bolt 
 their luncheons, and rush from committee 
 meeting to committee meeting, in the firm 
 belief that all the burdens of humanity are 
 theirs to alleviate. 
 
 127 
 
Chicago 
 
 This strenuous altruism is most deeply 
 embedded in the hearts of our women, who 
 play, it seems to me, a more active part in 
 public affairs than do their sisters of the 
 East. They play it capably, too, as well as 
 ardently, — an observation which has led 
 me to believe that the homes of those 
 Chicagoans whose wives are "uplifters" 
 are quite as serene as those of the conserv- 
 ative men of an older school whose wives 
 yawn placidly over their knitting. 
 
 Yet back of Chicago's strenuousness and 
 vim stands the spirit of her founders hold- 
 ing her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers being still a potent factor in her 
 life. They are in constant conflict, how- 
 ever, with those of other faiths, Chicago 
 being a forum as well as a melting-pot in 
 which Puritanism is but one of the almost 
 countless "isms" which are being upheld 
 within her vast limits in nearly all the 
 tongues of Europe and the Orient. 
 
 128 
 
The Soul of the City 
 
 "Hog Butcher, Tool-Maker, Stacker of 
 Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight- 
 Handler to the Nation," as one of her own 
 poets has called her, this city, whose shoul- 
 ders are big, is likewise a city whose en- 
 thusiasms are strong. Moreover, as an 
 inheritance, she possesses a New England 
 conscience to leaven her diverse char- 
 acter and make her truly — the pulse of 
 America. 
 
 THE END 
 
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