THE METROPOLIS Of THE SOUTH. 379
The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there
were as many ships as ever : but the long array of steamboats had
vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of It was left.
The city itself bad not changed—to the eye. It had greatly
increased in spread and population, but the look of the town was not
altered. The dust, waste-paper-littered,, was still deep in the streets;
the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the kerbstones were still half
full of reposeful "water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still
—in the sugar and "bacon region—encumbered by casks and barrels
and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses
were as dusty-looking as ever.
Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than
formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its se\ eral processions of
hurrying street-cars, and—toward evening—its broad second-story
verandas crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the
latest mode.
Not that there is any * architecture* in Canal Street: to speak in
broad, general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except
in the cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-
seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it
is true. There is a huge granite U. S. Custom-house—costly enough,
genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It
looks like a state prison. But it was built before the war. Archi-
tecture in America may be said to have been born since the war.
New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck—and in a sense the
bad luck—to &ave had no great fire in late years. It must be so.
If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell
the ' burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architect ui-e
over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. The
* burnt district * of Boston was commonplace before the fire; but now
there is no commercial district in any city in the world that can
surpass it—or perhaps even rival it—in beauty, elegance, and taste-
fulness.
However, New Orleans has begun—-just this moment, as one may
say. When completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately
and beautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural
graces; no shams or false pretences or uglinesses about it anywhere.