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CHICAGO
:?3
H. C. ChatfieldTaijlor
'^th lUustvations by
Lester G.Hornbu
Presented to the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY
by the
ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY
1980
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2008 with funding from
IVIicrosoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/chicago_OOchatuoft
The Water Tower
Chicago
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CHICAGO
By H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR
DRAWINGS BY
LESTER G. HORNBY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
MDCCCCXVII
COPYRIGHT, I917, BY HOBART C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR AND LESTER G. HORNBY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published December iqi'^
ilifi
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
1 1
Field Museum, Jackson Park
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
Vll
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 9TH
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
54
67
70
74
80
The Cathedral^ Washington 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
• 113
1.
. 120
. 124
A River JVarehouse
I. the 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 Hfe, 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 field in which industrial wars
4
State Street from the Van Buren Loop Station
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 who 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 Louis Joliet should
have foreseen its commercial future! "It
will be possible to go from Lake Erie to
the Mississippi by a very good navigation,"
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, w^hose 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 th-e 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 wonderinglndians 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 av^ay.
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
"'^f
f..-/
r<
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 voyageurs 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 Wolf 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 w^ooded 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-smelling 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
doiF 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
'The Canon of ^incy Street from Fifth yi venue
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
2 I
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 fVabash 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 of 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 IV est Randolph Street
m
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 1871. 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
The Board of Trade Building from LaSalle Street
^ ii^h
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 of
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
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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, I 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 Fain
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
Chicago
been dug out of the mud. One day, so the
story goes, the famiUar 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
n
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
1 860 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
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 mattres cT hotels gar cons de res-
taurant^ 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" street cars 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 IVashington Street
III. The Great West 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 JVashington Street
^i^.v
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 thatw^hen 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
53
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
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 mothers in 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
buffalo 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 pat res familiar um 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 1
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 battaHon 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.
65
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
r^'
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
^: \ A\i\lui
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, moreover, 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 few 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 IlHnoisan
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 of
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
,--<v
*
M
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 martyred 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
'^^^r:^^--^^
■'p;.
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 w^as 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
75
Chicago
on summer evenings, cooling themselves
v^ith palm-leaf fans, w^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
71
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 remote corner
of the temporary City Hall, whose nick-
name, the "Rookery," has been perpetu-
ated by the office 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, i^ ^^s 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
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 aesthetic 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. rhe North Side
V
THE NORTH SIDE
CHICAGO appeared raw and bare to
Miss Harriet Martineau when she
visited it exactly eighty years ago: yet she
confessed that she had never seen a busier
place. It was enjoying at the tinne 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 William 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 fond 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 of 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 vo\~
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 w^ith 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, Hke 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 ot 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 squatter
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 fight 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 ha\'ing 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.
Chicago
The Lake Shore Drive and its adjoin-
ing streets then became our Mayfair. To
this day, however, a few 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 w^hich
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 of the next generation
will be this newly made portion of 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
The North Side
Webster Avenue, all the southern portion
of its present acreage having once been a
cemetery. Toward the end of the Ci\il
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 w^as 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
/;/ Lincoln Park
The North Side
one may see disporting tlicnisclvcs 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 ot 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.
The Skyline of Park Row
VI. rhe Soul of the City
\^^
r\'\
■J:-.
B,v
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 ha\'e 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 dav
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 wiW 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. It 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
Washington 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, 1 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
121
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 Y'orker 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 T 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
I 2
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-
126
The Soul of the City
cuted; hence the dream of a "city bcau-
tifuT' bids fair to come true before the
city is a century old. Indeed, 1 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,StackcT 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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