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The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below.
Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-840O
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
JW 20
SEP 2 1 1994
26 H95
L161— O-1096
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY. OF ILLINOIS
THE PERISTYLE AT THE LAKE FRONT
THE BOOK OF
CHICAGO
Author of "THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA,"
"THE BOOK OF NEW YORK," "THE BOOK
OF BOSTON," ETC.
ffli IKWAW Of THt SEP 8 1931 • OF ILLINOIS
Illustrated with Photographs and with Drawings by HERBERT PULLINGER
THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
1920
COPYRIGHT 1920 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
The Book of Chicago
- ' I
CONTENTS
CHAPTEB , PAGE
I THIS is CHICAGO! 1
II A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS 9
III "WE WILL Go AND GET THEM" . . ... . 22
IV THE LAKE FRONT 38
V OVER RUSH STREET BRIDGE 49
VI THE LOOP HOUNDS 67
VII STREETS AND WAYS . 84
VIII CLUBS ARE TRUMPS . . ."••«' . .. . ". 101
IX THE PASSING OF PRAIRIE AVENUE .... 114
X SOME BOOKS AND WRITERS . .... • • 131
XI How ART CAME TO CHICAGO 155
XII SOME MATTERS OF BUSINESS 172
XIII A MODERN CORSAIR 188
XIV TRAITS AND ASPECTS 198
XV Music . . .214
XVI WHERE ONCE WAS THE WHITE CITY . . . 227
XVII AN OXFORD OF THE WEST 239
XVIII THE DUKES OF CHICAGO ....... 256
XIX A MARQUETTE CROSS 269
XX OUT IN THE SUBURBS 286
XXI THE EXTRAORDINARY MAKING OF GARY . . 297
XXII THE SOLITARY DUNES 307
XXIII WHY CHICAGO Is! 316
XXIV THE GOLD COAST . . . . . , . . .326 XXV A CHILD AND ITS A-B-C . . 339
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Peristyle of the Lake Front .... Frontispiece
The Post-Office . Title Page
A Lion of the Boulevard Opposite Heading
PAGE
The Lincoln Monument (heading) 1
A Boston-like Doorway (initial) 1
The Heart of Chicago (facing) 6
The Coliseum ........ (tailpiece) 8
A Fine Home Type (initial) 9
Projected Union Passenger Station . . (tailpiece) 21
The La Salle Statue . . . . . , (initial) 22
Beauty and Business . . . . . . (facing) 26
Formal Garden in a Park (tailpiece) 37
The Houdon Washington (initial) 38
The Lake Front Glory of Chicago . . (facing) 44
Chicago from the Lake (tailpiece) 48
The Old Water Tower (initial) 49
The Vista of Adams Street .... (facing) 58
The Grant Monument (tailpiece) 66
In the Heart of Business (initial) 67
Michigan Boulevard at Night . . . (facing) 76
City Hall and County Building . ... . (tailpiece) 83
The Fourth Presbyterian Church . . (initial) 84
The South Water Street Market . . . (tailpiece) 100
A Boulevard Drive (initial) 101
The Mullion-Windowed University Club (facing) 104
Clubhouse on the South Shore . . . (tailpiece) 113
The Massacre Monument (initial) 114
ILLUSTKATIONS
PAOl
Alexander Hamilton (tailpiece) 130
Interior of Blackstone Library . . . (initial) 131
The Logan Monument (facing) 134
The Public Library (tailpiece) 154
An Art Institute Vista (initial) 155
The Art Institute (facing) 158
Fountain of the Great Lakes .... (tailpiece) 171
Chicago's "Boul' Mich." . . . . . (initial) 172
The Wall Street of Chicago .... (facing) 180
The Freight Subway (tailpiece) 187
A Lakeside Venetian Home .... (initial) 188
The Great Municipal Pier .... (tailpiece) 197
A Modern Bridge (initial) 198
The New Field Museum (facing) 206
The Blackstone Theatre (tailpiece) 213
Stairway in the Public Library . . . (initial) 214
A Water Garden (tailpiece) 226
Main Entrance of the University . . (initial) 227
A Beautiful Ruin of the White City . (facing) 232
La Rabida (tailpiece) 238
The Three Towers (initial) 239
Some Towers of the University . . . (facing) 248
The University Library (tailpiece) 255
The Illinois Centennial Monument . . (initial) 256
The Courtyard of Hull House . . . (facing) 262
A Bascule Bridge . . . . . . . . (tailpiece) 268
In the Ghetto (initial) 269
The Marquette Cross (facing) 278
One of the Great Hospitals . . . (tailpiece) 285
The Lake Shore of the North Suburbs . (initial) 286
One of the Long Bathing Beaches . . (facing) 294
A North-bound Driveway (tailpiece) 296
The Gary Tower (initial) 297
One of the Gary Schools (tailpiece) 306
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
A Sandhill in the Dunes ..... (initial) 307
The Dunes of Lake Michigan . . . (facing) 310
Shifting Sands and Dark Trees . . . (tailpiece) 315
A Georgian House on Astor Street . . (initial) 316
Oxford-like Charm, at the University . (facing) 322
Homes of the Lake Shore Drive . . . (tailpiece) 325
Fine Parkside Living (initial) 326
Along the Shore of Lake Michigan . . (tailpiece) 338
A Garden Gateway (initial) 339
The Lincoln Monument (facing) 342
A Lagoon of Lincoln Park .... (tailpiece) 347
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
CHAPTER I
THIS is CHICAGO!
HIS is Chicago! The city looks out upon Lake Michigan from a stretch of unbroken flatness. Her morn- ing face shines brightly in the sun.
This is Chicago ! An audacious city that audaciously set herself in a swamp: but the swamp long ago was obliterated and only the audacity remains. A city of dreams and with the practical ability to
1
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
make the dreams come true. A city of energy and strength; of immensity of strength. It was long ago written that a city set upon a hill cannot be hid; yet here upon a plain is a city that cannot be hid.
An interesting city, yet with great areas of the un- attractive. An extraordinary city, yet with much that is extraordinarily ordinary. An amusing city, yet with a great deal of dullness. An admirable city, yet in many respects unadmirable in the ex- treme. A beautiful city in long and glorious stretches, yet in its massing of miseries a terrible city. A gay yet sober city. A bright dull city. A happy unhappy city. A light-hearted, buoyant, vivacious, debonair city, a city with an air ! — in fact, in another sense, a city with airs that are often very fierce ones, blowing straight in from the lake, with drenching rain or pitiless cold.
I shall write of the people as well as of the city for in a peculiar degree the people have made their city. I shall write of their character and characteristics. I shall aim to set forth the city and the spirit of the city. I shall describe the city in its present seeming and at times the descriptions of the present will summon up remembrance of things past.
A city with much of charm, with much of dignity, with much of beauty. A very human city, with pleasantly piquant peculiarities. A city of the well- bred, of people of cultivation, yet also a city of the contrary of all this. A city all alive, vividly alive.
All this is Chicago. A city, one sees, of contra-
2
THIS IS CHICAGO!
dictions, and of contradictions more than usually conspicuous. A city to be loved. A city where people live in careful comfort while their neighbors live beyond their means — and sometimes, die beyond their means. A pretentious city; with a vast deal of unpretentiousness even on the part of such as might be pardoned personal assertion. Important city that it is, it is filled with a sense of that import- ance; and its people are naively ready to tell of it at any time and at any place and to any person. To the Chicagoan, Chicago is the most important sub- ject in the world, so why should he or she not speak of it frankly and unabashed ! That Chicago novelist understood this who described a young woman as "a true daughter of Chicago; she had rather talk to a stranger about her own town than about any other subject." And it is a very old story that tells of a funeral in New York at which the clergyman, not having much to say, asked any of those present to offer a few words about the departed, whereupon there was silence until a stranger arose and re- marked that, as no one seemed to want to talk of the deceased, he would take the opportunity to tell them something of Chicago.
Keady though Chicago is to exploit herself, even to vociferation, it is one of the oddest contradictions of the city that although there is a firm here which makes a feature of guidebooks for principal Amer- ican cities, it publishes no such book of Chicago ! I was told that a few years ago a Chicago guide was published by them, and that it was under considera-
3
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
tion to do so again. And I think it may safely be said that this is the only opportunity for exploita- tion that has ever been missed.
And after all, I think that Chicago, in the matter of self-assurance, never really surpassed Boston, judging by a Boston newspaper reference to one of its churches, built less than a century ago, as the "Westminster Abbey of Boston"! And this is re- mindful of an impression which has come more and more to assert itself ; and that is, that there is much of essential likeness between Boston and Chicago, much of likeness in spirit between the old city of the Atlantic coast and this new city which gazes off, as if into a glorious future, across the shimmering sweeps of Lake Michigan. And, evoked by this men- tion of Boston, comes the odd fact that I have seen more "Boston bags" in Chicago than anywhere else except in the city which gave that extremely service- able and good-looking leather bag its name.
The old-time Chicagoan who alliteratively ex- pressed his faith in "women, wine, whiskey and war, ' ' spoke, broadly, for his city. And it may well ask, — leaving out the three last items and taking just the first — what other city can boast of the contem- porary and diversified activities of three such leaders as Frances Willard, Jane Addams and Mrs. Potter Palmer !
In Chicago, money talks. And it was a clever Chicagoan who observed that when money talks it talks offensively. And yet, usually, in this unusual city, there is a disarming frankness, or even child-
4
THIS IS CHICAGO!
likeness, about it. As, just the other day, the son of a chewing-gum maker, in telling to a newspaper of his acquisition of a house on the Lake Front, says: "My father bought it from Brewer Blank, and now its mine. A gift from my father f No ! I paid him a hundred and twenty-five thousand for it, in good hard cash. My father 's city home will be at the Hotel So-and-so" (naming the most expensive). "But he spends most of his summers at Lake Geneva, and he's got a winter home in Pasadena, and he owns all of Catalina Island. ' ' This, you notice, with wealthy insouciance; rather desirous, one would gather, of taking the world into his wealthy con- fidence ; and ending with the delightfully unexpected Catalina touch !
Chicago is a hospitable city. One who comes with introductions, as the friend of some Chicagoan's friend, or who is known, is given a fine and cordial welcome. And not only is the coming guest wel- comed, but a guest's parting may be unexpectedly speeded : as, when a man, not with proper credentials — for he was an absconding bank cashier from New York — crept with hesitation into the hall where was in progress a Saturday night meeting conducted by a Chicagoan who, as the head of an educational insti- tution and as an essentially undenominational preacher, is in the habit of capturing the hearts of his hearers. The absconder, deeply moved, sought a private talk with him at the close of the meeting, and made confession of his misdeeds. He had left New York by a Friday evening train. Not until
5
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
Monday morning would there be discovery of his crime. With a Chicagoan, to think is to act. Con- vinced that the trembling man before him felt genuine remorse and was of potential honesty of pur- pose, the preacher said: "You will go back to New York to-night. I will go with you. We will take the midnight train ; and when the bank opens on Monday morning you and I will be together there to meet your directors. ' ' And they were.
The seal of the city mingles the present and the past. A sheaf of wheat is in the middle ; and, oddly and of course quite unintentionally, there is some- thing about the way in which it is presented in mid- air, which suggests the idea that it is held on a pair of hidden horns. There is a ship under full sail before a brisk northeast wind ; and sailing ships are now an uncommon sight here in these days of steam. There are rippling waves represented, and this, naturally, the city still has in its view; although many a Chicagoan, some in jest but most of them in very serious earnest, have lamented the presence of the lake as something which has prevented the laying out of streets to the eastward. And you will be told that thousands and thousands of Chicagoans have never seen the lake ; this being literally the case, be- cause immense numbers of foreigners, living to the west of the river, do not readily get to the Lake Front even if they come to the central business sec- tion.
The seal of the city also bears the representation, au naturel, of a Chicago baby, on a Botticelli half-
6
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
THIS IS CHICAGO!
shell; and, for contrast, there is a standing Indian, clad sedately in trousers: and this restraint can scarcely be credited to modest Victorian influence, for Chicago received her charter as a city and became the Queen of the Great Lakes in the very year in which Victoria became Queen of Great Britain.
That the Indian stands on a bluff seems to be wrong, for Chicago is too uniformly level to have a bluff ; and then comes the thought that it is precisely right after all, for Chicago, from the beginning, has made bluffs and has successfully stood upon them.
The motto of the city, upon the seal, "Urbs in horto," seems curiously at variance with the swift- ness of the city's life; but it brings up thoughts of the charm of the past, when Chicago won the name of the " Garden City"! And still the influence of those early days successfully persists, in the con- tinued building of detached homes, instead of houses built closely one against another. And with that spirit of charming open living, still so prevalent, there was a friendliness of life which has had much to do with the city's progress; there came a fine sim- plicity, which gave the characteristic first-name in- timacy, and set the ideal of public school education as co-education. A home city, a garden city — one sees, again, that this city of gigantic business is a city of contradictions. And although gardens are not now common, and although most of the old-time houses have disappeared, one may come, here and there, upon some delightful reminder of the ' ' Garden City" of the past, as when I noticed, well out on
7
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
Lincoln Avenue, a spacious old square-front house; a house with more than a suggestion of the dilapida- tion that so readily comes with age; with great an- cient hedge of lilac, and, yes ! an ancient garden.
Although Chicagoans speak in superlatives in praise of their city, there is now and then an excep- tion, who will animadvert upon it with savagery, in some New York or Boston interview or article; as for example a poet who, complaining poignantly of his city, was asked why he continued to live there, to which he replied, "with a hopeless gesture," and with modest poetic implication: "Why did Dante stay in Florence? Because it was his particular hell. Chicago is mine."
"And he has really opened up his heart," said a Cliff Dweller to a Cliff Dweller group, who were discussing the interview.
"No," countered another, with a smile; "he merely opened up his spleen."
8
CHAPTER II
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
HE Chicagoan con- siders that his city's zone of influence is very wide. Within a radius of five hundred miles, he will tell you, there live fifty million peo- ple, able to leave their homes in the evening and breakfast in Chicago the next morning. And this to the Chicagoan is a statement well rounded and complete. That the fifty million do not all take advantage of the situation merely means that they do not, all of them, all the time, rise to their opportunity.
Chicago is "the greatest railway center in the world. " No Chicagoan asks you to prove this ; they do not need proof. And Chicago is immensely proud of the fact that all the trains which enter the city stop there ; that it is, for all, the terminal.
The first railway timetable of Chicago, so it is still kept in mind, dates back to 1858 ; and this is remind- ful of other firsts in the career of the city. For, al- though I am writing of the Chicago of today and of
9
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
what I see and hear around me, the spirit of the present is so closely interwoven with the spirit of the past that the past, to some extent, cannot but be con- sidered.
It was in 1804 that the first white child was born here ; less than a century and a quarter ago ; and no one need smile because the firsts of Chicago are recent. Eather, there should be amazement, that from such recent beginnings such vast results have come. Every city must have a beginning. Eomulus and Eemus and the wolf and the lupine luncheon were once quite as new as the happenings that have made Chicago. And as to wolves, their cries were still heard on the Lake Front, now lined by hotels and business blocks, little more than a century ago, as they pawed over the neglected and bleaching bones of the victims of the massacre by the Indians in the war with England. And to me it more than any- thing else represents Chicago's youth, that Joseph Jefferson, the lovable " Joe," so recently dead that his vivid personality seems still alive, walked this very Lake Front, as a little boy, with his father who, gun in hand, hunted for wolf or wild duck.
While hunting was thus possible along the lake, a near-by section was busy with saws and hammers. Boy that he was, little Joe was impressed by the rawness and newness. Everywhere, as he describes it, boardwalks were going down and frame buildings were going up; there were wooden houses, wooden hotels, wooden churches, and a wooden theater in which the family fortunes were sunk.
10
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
All about were sand dune and morass and swamp and prairie; and from those early days has come down the local use of the word "prairie" as mean- ing, not a broadly smiling sweep of grass and flowers, the picture evolved elsewhere by the word, but grim, bare, level stretches, or endless miles of scrub growth, wicked and wet.
What was outwardly but a rough and raw little place, made formally a city in 1837, as soon as the necessary handful of population had gathered, did not choose for its first mayor a man of corresponding roughness of aspect, but one who had just dis- tinguished himself by building the first house in Chi- cago from an architect's plans, and whose thoughts turned naturally to culture and art and European travel. From the first there was a surprising leaven in Chicago's loaf. And tales have come down, al- most mystically vague — for already the rise of Chi- cago seems almost fairy tale — of men and women in broadcloth and silks and diamonds attending parties in the hastily put together frame houses such as those of which Jefferson tells, and of the talk often turning to the best books and writers.
And the very first book to be printed and bound and published in Chicago was the city directory! Could anything be more delightfully characteristic — publicity for every Chicagoan in the first book !
The first coroner of Chicago, one learns, was a certain Clark, and his first inquest, as the old record somewhat tautologically tells, was on "the body of a dead Indian." Nowadays, one may hear the
11
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
charge — or boast! — that the city, in this twentieth century, averages a murder a day.
The first Sunday liquor law went into force in 1834, and although activity was encouraged by giving the informer half of the fine, which was five dollars, there seem to have been no particular results. That the first steam fire engine was put into use in 1857 under the mayoralty of the redoubtable Long John Wentworth is still remembered, as is also the fact that he promptly put it to a use not intended by the inventor; the literal washing out of an unsavory settlement just at the edge of the city. For although Chicago proper was not at that time very large, Chi- cago improper was looked upon as being very much too large indeed, and so, to the glee of a good share of the population, or rather of a bad share of the population, who looked on as at a show, the fire engine was made to turn its hose on some poor little shanties, with their women denizens, on the shore just north of the site of the present great recreation pier ; and the hose stream drove wreckage into the lake, while the wretched human wreckage, drenched and miserable, crept, drenched and miser- able, away.
The first water main was laid in 1836 — two miles of wooden pipes ; but it was not until twenty years afterwards that the first sewers were laid. And I place these two facts together because I have just read the claim that at present the combined water and sewer mains of the city are longer than the com-
12
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
bined length of the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Missouri.
The first vaccination was in 1848, and it was the great topic of conversation until 1850, when classical music, or at least opera, was first presented. That the town assumed, in 1833, such dignity as attends the making of a fire warden, does not imply that one was not needed still earlier ; and it was not till 1841 that it bourgeoned with the greater glory of its first city marshal.
As the city gives the impression of having an astonishing number of drug stores, it being really difficult to get away from the sight of one or more of them at every moment, it may be remarked that the first drug store was of 1832 ; though it need not be supposed that there was any difficulty in getting terrific boluses or terrific doses of firewater for the terrific attacks of fever and ague inseparable from a new settlement in such a wet place.
The year 1833 was notable religiously, for in that year the earliest Presbyterian church was organized, the first Baptist church was built, and the first perm- anent Eoman Catholic parish was organized. There also began, that year, Chicago's first newspaper, a weekly: and it was in 1839 that a new newspaper an- nounced, with a cheerful earnestness that would not forego a pleasantly punning expression of it, that "We now launch our bark on the great ocean of the world, with plenty of sheet, but still with no certainty of sale. " It was some years after this that the press
13
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
was offered that public subject of discussion, a de- tective department, for not until 1850 did Chicago have its first detective, which is not to say that many a wrong-doer was not previously detected; the first formal detective being one Allen Pinkerton, after- wards not unknown to fame, particularly for dis- covering the supposed danger which made Lincoln, on a memorable occasion, turn up his collar and pull down his hat and make his way into Washington unobserved. And mention of the emancipator is re- mindful that the first white settler of Chicago, as distinguished from explorers and temporary abiders, was, as Chicagoans themselves express it, a black man ; but just a West Indian negro, as they will ex- plain, after you have been properly surprised.
There is poetic vagueness about what is said to have been the city's first university; most Chi- cago'ans look upon it as a myth if they have heard of it at all; and if there is to be a city myth it is certainly a charming imagination to have it a sup- posititious university of "St. Mary's of the Lake." It is more interesting from its very vagueness than it would be with date and endowment definitely dis- covered, if it ever really had a date and an endow- ment, or with the idea of its existence definitely destroyed.
Whatever others may think of the city, Chicago has always prided herself, on the whole, with efficiency of city government, and this in spite of ter- rific political contests in which the bitterest charges and countercharges have been made ; and in spite of
14
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
the most extreme statements regarding jobbery and corruption. But in the matter of street cleaning, or atmosphere cleaning, no Chicagoan has been harbor- ing prideful feelings. The thick dust, driven in clouds from uncleaned streets, the thick black smoke emerging in clouds from myriad chimneys, with much of it heavily sinking to the level of the pave- ments and swirling in evil blotchings, mark what, as I write, is the most apparent of the city's delin- quencies. Soap is the prime Chicago necessity. But the people have so triumphed as to keep them- selves a spotless folk, after all, in this so far from spotless town. And yet Monday morning does not show a clothes-line aspect, either on the roofs or in the yards. So sooty is the city that drying must needs be done in kitchen or basement or attic. The white waist of an elevator girl lasts for two days' use.
It has been an important factor, in the develop- ment of Chicago, that the business section of the city is practically where it was a half century ago, or even a century ago. Where Chicago began, she has continued. There could be no greater contrast be- tween New York and Chicago in this particular, New York having swept ceaselessly on for miles and miles with its constantly shifting merchandizing head- quarters.
In the very early days, before Chicago established herself here, the place was avoided even by the Indians themselves as a marshy terror, even though the importance of the Chicago Eiver portage was in
15
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
early days recognized. Yet the site upon which Chi- cago was to arise was claimed by three States : nat- urally enough, Chicagoans will concede, in view of the consequence that was to accrue; indeed, they deem the only matter for surprise to be that Chicago was not claimed by more than three !
The claim of Virginia was by right of conquest, George Rogers Clark, a Virginian, having led Vir- ginians in the marvelous campaign which secured the Northwest Territory for the United States. (Clark Street is named for him.) Connecticut claimed by right of its charter, which gave ownership due west to the Mississippi. New York claimed by conquest ; but the conquest was quite by indirection, New York having humbled the Iroquois and claimed rulership over them, and the Iroquois having previously ex- tended their claims of dominion over the Indians of the Illinois region. But Virginia, Connecticut and New York agreed rather gracefully to unite in turn- ing over to the United States Government their claims to the Illinois country.
But, for a time, this locality was actually governed as part of Virginia. Delightful old Marietta, in Ohio, was the seat of the government for a time under the Ordinance of 1787, for Illinois ; and a little later Vincennes, in Indiana, became the center of government for the Chicago region; and the long- faced, long-headed fighter, William Henry Harrison, later to be known an "Tippecanoe," and still later to be President and the grandfather of another President, was made governor.
16
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
When Illinois took on the dignity of Statehood, after a probational period as a Territory, Chicago was almost put into Wisconsin ! For the bill declar- ing Statehood designated a line along the southern end of Lake Michigan, by which the then village of Chicago was to be left out of Illinois and put into Wisconsin! But an Illinois territorial delegate to Congress succeeded in having the line so altered as to leave Chicago in Illinois: the delegate being a certain Nathaniel Pope; who was later to achieve another kind of fame by becoming the father of the Civil War soldier, General John Pope.
To name the counties in which the place was lo- cated would surely make Chicago seem a lost sort of place. For a time it was in Illinois County, later in Wayne ; then, for a few years, in no county at all, owing to some geographical oversight. Later, Chi- cago became, in turn, in Madison County, in Ed- wards, in Crawford, in Clark, in Pike, in Peoria; and only after this bewilderng succession of changes did the city, in 1831, settle into homely Cook.
It has more than once occurred to me that the names of the counties of Illinois not only represent the home-loving Americanism of the State, but have themselves had an influence in encouraging the admirable homely and patriotic qualities. Cook County, indeed, is prosaically named; and not far away is the likewise prosaically named Bureau County! And glancing further at the map, it will be i^oticed that there is profusion of names of homely and intimate quality, as, Edward County, Will
17
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
County, Henry, Alexander, Edgar. No wonder that a first-name intimacy is such a common feature, here beside Lake Michigan. And a further homely touch comes in the recognition of Mrs. Grundy in Grundy County I
But patriotism in county names is even more marked. There are Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, Moultrie and Greene, Knox, McDonough and Madison, Marion and Hancock, Franklin, Schuyler, Boone and Wayne, Pulaski and Fayette, Gallatin and Warren and St. Clair and Perry, Ran- dolph, Marshall, Putnam and Stark. The name of Burr is intentionally absent; Illinois would have nothing of him ! But there is, instead, a Jo Daviess County in honor of the man who, in Kentucky, prose- cuted Burr for treason in the early days of the con- spiracy, when Burr was still in control of wealth and power. Daviess died at Tippecanoe : a battle which somehow seems to have furnished a Battle Eoll for Chicago.
A Chicago poet who won considerable fame, Moody, sang of his own city in what was meant to be swinging phrase :
"Gigantic, willful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gate,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue,
Molding her mighty fate."
When Joaquin Miller wrote of San Francisco as being at the western gate it meant something. But Chicago is not at any particular gate. She is not
18
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
even at the foot of Lake Michigan, where every easterner thinks she stands, but on the western shore, some miles above the lower end of the lake, so that her lake frontage is not to the northward but altogether to the east. The city is not a gateway, which implies a place to pass through, but is markedly a stopping point, as several million folk have demonstrated.
Chicago is an extremely cosmopolitan city. Both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are hers. The Chi- cago newspapers advertise, impartially, sailings to Honolulu or Plymouth, to Japan or France. There is a sort of insouciance about it. And also there is insouciance in her evident determination to remain young no matter how the years are piling up. With all the intense absorption in work, there goes also an intense absorption in play; and you will notice such advertisements as that of the * * Fisherman 's Special," whose times are so arranged as to take Chicagoans, with equipment of dining cars and sleep- ing cars, from Friday night until Monday, on long trips up among the lakes of Wisconsin.
With all its rush, of work and play, the city is not too busy to be honest, so one would gather from the great number of advertisements of purses lost; for this would seem to indicate a well-founded assump- tion as to the likelihood of recovery. Or is it merely indicative of a sort of na'ive trustfulness! — for I notice very few advertisements of purses found. And there are so many advertisements of lost dogs that it must needs be that excellent kind of a city, a
19
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
dog lover's city; even though, in these days of motor cars, dogs are seldom seen except in the parks. Pick up any newspaper ; in the first one are adver- tisements for an Airedale named Eip ; for a Pekinese named Bubbles, light brown with two white front paws; don't you wish you could find the faithful Kip, and don 't you wish you could restore the white- pawed Bubbles to his mistress? And in the same paper I notice that there is a lost " little black and tan dog, named Daisy." All good homely names, too; and the naming of dogs is an indication of character — of the owners, not of the dogs, except in the sense that dogs usually follow the character of their owners. I like to think of the names of George Washington's dogs, such as Juno, Mopsey and True- love.
Chicago is justly known as the Windy City. Great v/inds come sweeping from the lake. And Chi- cagoans laugh, and say that they blow cobwebs from the brain. But even while thus jesting, they never for a moment believe that Chicago brains have any cobwebs. And I knew that the Chicagoan who soberly remarked to me that the winds thus take the place of vacuum cleaners meant it for humor only. Constantly, one notices examples of the city's quick and uncobwebbed thinking. For example, not long ago a man entered his motor-car with two thousand dollars that he had just drawn from a bank; three men boarded his car as he started off, and attacked him; two of the men dragged him from the wheel, and held him down, fiercely struggling, while the
20
A CITY WITHOUT COBWEBS
third put the car to top speed. But a man in the conning tower of a lift bridge saw the approaching car and saw that there was something very wrong, so, instantly, one hand reached for the lever that closed a gate across the roadway and the other hand instantly set in motion the mechanism that started the bridge upward, and thus the car, desperately braked, and skidding, was stopped.
And there comes to mind the homely comment of a Chicago paragrapher upon a labored editorial of a famous New York editor, who loves lengthily to plummet the abstruse; this editorial he worked out with more than usual labor and argument to the triumphant conclusion that * ' Therefore, the egg came before the hen or else a miracle happened"; upon which the uncobwebbed paragraphical comment was the brief but overwhelming, ' l No, the egg came after the hen or else a miracle happened."
21
CHAPTER III
WE WILL, GO AND GET THEM
HICAGO cares noth- ing for grandfathers. It is not a city of an- cestor worship. It is not a city of descend- ants, for the very idea of descent is repugnant to all for which Chicago stands. A descendant is one who goes down, and Chicago- ans will not admit the thought. A descendant is one who, descending, looks back at lofty peaks. But the ascendant — and every Chicagoan is or hopes to be an ascendant! — looks forward, as he climbs, to brilliant heights — although the literal minded may object to the use of such terms in regard to this city of absolute level. And this is one of the delightful contradictions : that, with every citizen on the same level, all are- climbing. The vital and important matter, in regard to any Chicagoan, is not what his grandfather did, or who his grandfather was, but what he himself is now doing to advance himself and
22
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
the city — the two interests being deemed to be the same.
But although the present outweighs the past, there is, -at the same time, an unusual degree of present- day interest in the events of the past. I do not know of any other city where the local historical museum is considered to be a matter of such importance and worthy the close attention of the most advanced men and women. And though ancestry is subordinated to present-day achievement, ancestry combined with present-day achievement may be highly regarded.
A politician would like, if he could, to claim descent from the first Irishman of Chicago, who came in 1830. And any citizen would like, as a matter of pride and interest, to be able to point to his father's or grandfather's name on that first formal tax roll of the little place, of 1825, when the property was valued at $4707 and the total tax was fixed at $47.07 and apportioned among thirteen taxpayers. And so recent is that date, that until a few years past a few Chicagoans could claim a birth-date antecedent to that of the tax-roll.
One of the most interesting visitors to the World's Fair, in 1893, was a charming lady, under sixty, who, her home then being in the South, was the invited guest of the city because she was a Kinzie, descended from the earliest and most important of settler families. She was so closely connected with the past that when she died, so recently as 1917, and then only 82 years old, she had for years enjoyed the dis- tinction of being the oldest living white child born
23
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
here. Her face looks out, charming ir its sweetness and youth, from a portrait of 1856, ;:-y Healy, the painter who put Chicago on canvas. And it is such dates and the realization of the dates which point out the extraordinary recentness of old Chicago. There are a number of Chicagoans, some ten in all, still alive as I write, who were born here previous to 1840. There are business houses still in existence which date back as far as the incorporation of Chi- cago as a city. The yesterday of Chicago is thus to-day; or, as a practical philosopher put it, to-day is the to-morrow that we were wondering about yester- day.
In an effort to connect Chicago with the men of the Revolution some have claimed, and the story is once in a while repeated, that George Washington once remarked to Anthony Wayne that at the mouth of the Chicago was to arise one of the great cities of the future. Benjamin Franklin really did say that about the mouth of the Cuyahoga, where Cleve- land has since risen, and he was thoughtful enough to put it on paper, and Chicago would fain do better than Cleveland in the way of prophecy. But no- body really believes the Washington tale; and Chi- cagoans prefer to point out, with a laugh, the place where Washington would have had his headquarters had he ever come to Chicago.
Chicago does not need visionary associations with the past. Not only is there the Battle Roll of Tip- pecanoe — and it is a striking fact that Chicago names should figure as prominently as they do in
24
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
the story of that brilliantly fought battle of 1811— but there was also the little Black Hawk War, which made Chicago a center of importance for a time, and which had the participation of many men of future prominence. All were in Chicago as much as they could be, for small though it was it was full of life. And it ought to be remembered that Chicago, though really but a village, organized and sent out four com- panies to the war.
Among the future great men was Zachary Taylor, afterwards to be President, and he was in Chicago as lieutenant-colonel. Abraham Lincoln was here as captain of volunteers. And Jefferson Davis was in the war, and in Chicago, as lieutenant in the regular army. Likely enough, Davis and Lincoln passed each other on the muddy road beside Fort Dearborn, which stood near the mouth of the river: and it is curious to think how little either of them thought of the conflict, then thirty years away, in which they were to be opposing leaders and Presidents.
A half century after the Black Hawk War — in 1881, to be precise — Jefferson Davis was again in Chicago. He was on his way from New Orleans to Montreal, and stopped over, in Chicago, to see the Duke of Sutherland, who was passing through : and, as the English reporter expressed it, in his story (it was Eussell, of the London Times), Davis sent word that "he. would be glad to pay his respects to the Duke of Sutherland, if His Grace would receive him." I should not like to think that an American who had made, though on the wrong side, a great
25
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
figure in our national life, really sent a message thus phrased; and, indeed, Eussell as a correspondent was never to be altogether trusted, especially when "Your Gracing.'* But he was probably right when he described Jefferson Davis as being at this time almost white-haired, with close-cut beard and mustache. On the very day of the call of Jefferson Davis on the duke, Chicagoans were setting in place a memorial tablet on the site of Fort Dearborn, and the Times man makes Davis say that he had once been in command of the fort : a statement which, of course, Jefferson Davis could not have made, as he was never in command at Fort Dearborn, but was for a time in command of another fort, Winnebago, in Wisconsin.
Another lieutenant who was here, for the Black Hawk War — like Davis, a dapper West Pointer — was Robert Anderson; and when, long afterwards, after his defense of Fort Sumter, he met President Lincoln, and was asked by him if he remembered their first meeting, Anderson replied that he did not remember ever having met him before, whereupon, slowly, the tall, sad man replied, ' ' Thirty years ago, you mustered me into service in the Black Hawk War." How such essences and flavors of history add delight to a region! And how whimsically de- lightful, among other historical memories, was the great contrast between Lincoln and Douglas, be- tween the giant Lincoln and the "little giant" Doug- las, between "six feet four and four feet six" as Chicagoans like to express it ; and Lincoln was really
26
BEAUTY AND BUSINESS
OF THE UHWERSITY OF ILUNOIS
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
well over six feet and Douglas was barely more than five.
It was in Chicago that Lincoln was nominated for the first time for the Presidency ; and this is remind- ful of the proud record of Chicago for national po- litical conventions and of the general success of Chi- cago-made candidates. And what, Chicagoans ask, can New York show, in the matter of such conven- tions, and the national leadership that they represent?
Grover Cleveland was nominated in this city for the two times that he was successful in the Presi- dential race, leaving to St. Louis the unenviable dis- tinction of nomination for failure. Benjamin Har- rison was nominated here for his winning campaign, and it was a Minneapolis nomination from which he went down in defeat. Roosevelt was nominated here for victory; and if he was afterwards given a nomination here for defeat, it was for an election at which it was another Chicago nominee, Taft, who won. And this gave Chicago the chance, which it cheerfully seized, of putting an addendum to a popu- lar pleasantry. For Chicagoans had loved the simple humor of the story of the two citizens dis- puting as to the merits of the at one time contem- poraneous Illinois Senators, Mason and Cullom; of Cullom's giving up his seat in a street car to a lady and Mason's giving up his seat to two ladies: and now that Taft had, in an important sense, joined the Chicago political family, he was made to give up his seat to three ladies.
27
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
It was here in Chicago that Harding was nomi- nated. Hughes was nominated here for his unsuc- cessful race. Bryan was given his first nomination here, and here it was that he electrified the country and leaped to fame as an orator with his perorative crucifixion and cross of gold. Grant was nominated in Chicago for his first election; and it was here that this mighty son of Illinois made the third term effort which so bitterly aroused national feeling. But how superbly the effort was made, with the hold- ing together, throughout two days and thirty-six ballots, of the unbroken and unbreakable Three Hundred! The blood stirs with the thrill of that battle; and those Three Hundred might well be versified by some American Tennyson, even though they went down to defeat in a wrong cause, but as it is, the only verse in connection with it, I believe, is that which, declaimed by Conkling in his nomi- nating speech, aroused the delegates and spectators to wild acclaim :
"And when asked what State he hails from, Our sole reply shall be, He hails from Appomatox And its famous apple tree."
Garfield was nominated for a winning election in Chicago. McKinley received in Chicago the nomi- nation for his first election. And it was in Chicago that Blaine was nominated, when Robert G. Inger- soll, that orator of Illinois, always associated with Chicago in the mind of Easterners, won a mag-
28
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
nificent oratorical triumph with the speech in which the outstanding phrase was that in which Blaine was personified as the Plumed Knight.
And all at once, at this thought, the misty years roll away, and the site of the future Chicago is seen, in the light of two centuries before that speech, as literally aglow with the armor and glory and cos- tumes and plumes of literal knights.
The word "Chicago," has come down through the centuries almost unchanged, in the effort to repro- duce Indian pronunciation: "Chicajo," Chacha- jou," "Chekegou," "Chassagoac." The word meant, in the Indian tongue, "strong"; assuredly an admirable word to characterize the city that was to be. The "strong," some have suggested, came from the prevalent wild onion ; others think it came from the quite as prevalent swamp-cabbage. It would seem, more probably, that the word came from the name of a great Indian chief, if the chief did not take his name from the locality. "Chicagou" was an Indian chief who went to Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth, about 1725, and it was set down in early annals, by one of the French priests, that the chief was given a splendid snuff-box by the Duchess of Orleans; a sufficiently odd feature to be the outstanding reminiscence of a curious visit.
There was a Chikagou or Chassagoac, a chief on Lake Michigan, some half a century before that; and it may be taken as probable that the first chief of that name was the father of the second, although, as no ages are mentioned, they may have been one
29
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
and the same; remindful of the two skulls of St. Peter shown to the tourist in Rome, one of the saint when he was a young man and one when he was old.
At any rate, the great La Salle, most picturesque, most daring and most romantic of the wonderful Frenchmen who plunged far through the Western wilderness while the English colonists were still hug- ging close to the Atlantic coast, had long conferences with Chassagoac, as he understood the name, the then great chief of the Illinois country. He was known by name quite as early as was the Chicago Portage ; and it is therefore probable that the local- ity was given its name from him. And the prob- ability is greatly strengthened by the reference, by Father Marquette, to a chief Chachagwession at the southern end of Lake Michigan.
La Salle and Chassagoac talked much together, on the shores of the lake, and together they made the first trade agreement of Chicago, the scene of what myriad of trade agreements since! And, indeed, one sees that romance and trade went hand in hand in the beginnings of Chicago, just as they have con- tinued to do.
Chassagoac and La Salle agreed together upon the exchange of furs for merchandise, and La Salle con- summated the agreement by handing to the Indian — with such delightful detail has the story come down — some hatchets, some knives, one kettle, one red blanket. How absolutely delightful to know that it was red ! And the first business agreement
30
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
of Chicago had thus to do with hardware and dry- goods and furs.
La Salle wrote from here to the Governor-General of Canada a letter dated, "Du portage de Checagon 4 Juin, 1683." And in the winter of 1682-3 he built here a log house and a stockade — vanished long, long ago.
Another chief of the Chicago region, or the same chief with the name somewhat altered by the priestly chronicler (after all, names were necessarily set down by sound, and the excellent priest may have been a little deaf in one ear), declared that in the course of his life ; a life, as he said, of long wars and great affairs; he had known but three great cap- tains: Monsieur La Salle, Monsieur de Frontenac and himself. And never was there a more typical Chicago declaration!
Naivete is a cheerful characteristic of Chicago. Turning over the pages of a Chicago book, I noticed a street view, a view of Monroe Street, with a note stating that it was from an old engraving, "in the eighties"! I think that no other city, young or old, could so naturally refer to the eighties as "old." For, of course, being a street scene of Chicago, it was necessarily to the eighteen eighties that it re- ferred, and not to the seventeen eighties, when George Eogers Clark had just completed the heroic campaign that not only gave the Northwest Terri- tory to the United States, but, as another result, brought about the setting aside of school lands, still
31
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
owned by the city of Chicago, from whose rentals a considerable part of the daily expenses of the present-day public schools is secured : a most curious connection with romantic bravery of the past.
Nor did that "old" picture of Chicago mean the sixteen eighties, the period of the glorious La SaUe, who first reached Lake Michigan in 1679 and whose deeds and personality dominated the Chicago and Illinois region till his death, less than ten years later, in 1687.
The history of Chicago has a background of proud memories and picturesque tradition. Nor does this mean that picturesqueness can belong only to the distant past. Chicago of the present may at any moment offer picturesqueness, and the picturesque- ness may be very fine indeed ; as on a day during the strike of April, 1920, when fifteen hundred striking carpenters of Chicago marched to Melrose Park, a suburb that had suffered devastation from a hurri- cane, and worked all day at building and repairing, gladly giving their labor free. Those fifteen hun- dred men, marching and working without pomp or display, make a fine and memorable picture.
This city, young though it is, is also a city of age, and of pictorial age. "Winds come blowing, straight from the land of romance. One thinks again of the days of La Salle. What costumes and what finery, here at the mouth of the Chicago ! The noble ban- ners, the white fleur-de-lis, steel corslets flashing in the sun, leather jerkins, colorful scarfs, gallant plumes! And, in picturesque contrast, the priestly
32
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
robes of black or gray. We see La Salle himself, not like his ineffective statue in Lincoln Park, but splendid and stern, in steel breastplate and with belted baldric and sword; we see him in a scarlet cloak with gold facings, a figure noble and superb; we see him, in the pages of another chronicler, in scarlet cloak thick-edged with gold, a man of scarlet gorgeousness. And he had a costume of white and gold which he donned only for occasions of special impressiveness and display. A stately, command- ing, always effectively clad figure, there in the dis- tant wilderness, La Salle appreciated to the full, as George Washington later appreciated, the value of finely-clad dignity.
The purple and gold of chivalry, the strange and haunting scenes, the devotion of friend to friend, the magnificent enterprise, the gay bravery, the instant readiness to engage in either battle or barter, the personal bravery of those early men, the marvelous things they attempted and performed !
Near Niagara La Salle built a ship, Le Griffon, and it was the first to sail into the waters of Lake Michigan. At Green Bay he loaded it with furs. It set out upon its Eastward way. And the imagi- nation is instantly aflame with the picture of that boat, the first sail boat on Lake Michigan, setting out to return through the profound loneliness.
A little later and La Salle, at the Chicago Portage, begins to be disquieted from receiving no news of his vessel, for a great storm had swept the lake shortly after it set sail. A little later still, he makes
33
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
up his mind that his boat was lost in the storm. And in an effort to make sure he resorts to a plan which even now, with all the appliances of these recent days, with steam and electricity, railroads and telegraph, would be a difficult plan to carry out. For, to find if his boat was wrecked, and to find if survivors needed aid, he had the entire coast line of Lake Michigan searched! But no wreck or wreck- age was discovered, and the boat was never again heard of.
The loss of his ship was a great blow to La Salle ; to his finances as well as to his ambitions. For this splendid knight, this gallant soldier, was first of all a trader. He had been given a trading grant and privileges by the French government, and owned a trading station on the St. Lawrence, and depended on his profits in trade. And that represents the Chicago of to-day: picturesqueness and trade! La Salle could not have given the locality a better be- ginning. Not, it may be added, that he was con- nected with the Chicago Portage alone, for he was up and down throughout the entire Illinois country ; but he was always returning to the Portage, and passing through by way of the Portage, and his mind was a great deal upon the Portage. Business and imagination was the keynote of the life of Chicago, as it was the keynote of the life of La Salle : Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle — and what a fine and rolling and satisfactory name it is !
La Salle 's greatest friend was an Italian-born trader, the great Tonti : and a connection altogether
34
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
bizarre links the name with the modern business of modern days: for Tonti 's father was an insurance man, who was so clever as to invent, in those far- away times, a form of insurance still known, from his name, as the Tontine !
When La Salle and Tonti were apart they would write each other in letters tucked in the crotches of trees, or left hanging to branches, to be found by the intended recipient weeks or months afterwards.
While the English were laboriously exploring a few miles up the Delaware beyond Philadelphia, or cautiously treading the Bay Path, out toward the Berkshires, Frenchmen became closely familiar with thousands of miles of wilderness from Quebec to beyond the future Chicago. The name of one of them, Du Lhut, is retained in the name of the city at the head of Lake Superior. Marquette and Joliet are remembered by the cities of those names. Tonti is kept in memory by a romantic modern little vil- lage, Tontitown, with a romantic history, that I once came upon, tucked away in the Ozark Mountains. The name of La Salle is the name of a town not many miles from Chicago ; but, even more fittingly, man of adventurous finance that he was, his name has been given to the street which is the Wall Street of Chi- cago.
What journeys those early Frenchmen made! They would travel thousands of miles, unchecked by blazing sun or bitter cold, by plumping rains or sweeping sleet or snow. And how they reveled in the beauty of long and lovely days! What delight
35
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
was theirs in the charming sweeps of plain, the dark solemnity of the- forests !
La Salle went on a visit to France ; and at length, to Tonti, in the Illinois country, came a rumor that his friend, bound again for America, had been wrecked on the coast of Florida. Instantly Tonti prepared to cross the immensity of wilderness that lay between Lake Michigan and Florida, to seek for and succor his friend; but, as he was starting — and the imagination is appalled by the intended effort—' there came the news that it was not on the Florida coast but near the mouth of the Mississippi that La Salle needed him; and so down the Mississippi he went, following its bends and sweeps for vast mileages, and at the river's mouth he sought for La Salle but sought in vain, and at length he re- turned, heavy-hearted and sorely anxious.
La Salle was really in trouble, on the Mexican Gulf, but far to the westward of the Mississippi's mouth; and he started for Illinois and Tonti, with his party, striking across country, attempting the impossible. He was slain on the way by a traitor, and thus came to an end the wonderful friendship of two wonderful men.
It is well for Chicagoans to remember La Salle; every Chicagoan ought by the vision splendid to be on his way attended. And especially because, by some miracle of transference, of transmission, the spell which La Salle cast over the region of Chicago has outlasted the centuries. La Salle was a Norman. And the ancient Norman prayer was:
36
"WE WILL GO AND GET THEM"
"Lord, we do not ask thee for the desirable things of life, but merely to tell us where they are and we will go and get them." And that ancient Norman spirit, exemplified so magnificently by La Salle, is the very spirit of Chicago to-day.
37
CHAPTER IV
THE LAKE FBOETT
LMOST alone among great cities, quite alone among cities of the first im- portance in size, Chicago faces directly out upon a mighty sea — a sea that is mighty although it is an inland sea. Homes and busi- ness blocks look off into the blue and purple distances, across bound- lessness of watery space; and the water shimmers and swirls and ripples, or comes thundering in huge breakers, directly in front of beautiful homes and stately mercantile structures. From the windows, one may look out at water and sky of ever-changing colors, at a lake of cold yellow under clouds of purplish black, at a lake all blue under the bluest of skies, at a lake of dazzling white and green. The city faces out right royally. And sunrise is a marvel, when it suffuses the frontage with showered gold. Or one watches the evening colorings after the sun has set, with opalescent blues and steel grays, with shifting shadowings, weird, uncanny, beautiful, till
38
THE LAKE FBONT
the darkness deepens all into one black mass. Or, as one of the Chicago poets expresses it,
"The fog comes On little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on."
But it is told in all earnestness, and not in jest, that a visiting Englishman, looking out over the view, from his hotel window, on his first morning here, remarked casually, how odd it was to have a reservoir in front of a hotel !
Although there is a lake frontage of some twenty- six miles, the term "Lake Front " is used, by Chicagoans, as descriptive of about a mile of Michi- gan Avenue; and it is one of the most wonderful city miles of the world. The mile holds shops and office buildings, clubs and hotels, built closely and massively and with splendid effect, and facing out, across a superb roadway, to the water.
A line of massive buildings ; square-topped, gable- topped, tower-topped. Buildings of gray and of ivory-white, of red and brown, in varying shades. Buildings of twentieth-century design contrasting with buildings quite as modern but following old- time appearance. There are little balconies, and there are human figures in bronze or stone and there are shields of stone. There are oval windows, stone garlanded, and there are lions' heads and eagles in stone. A Diana surmounts a lofty tower: a stone
39
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
owl, gravely apexed, tops a superbly designed club building, a tall and spacious building, Gothic in design in infinite detail, with balconies and oriel windows. Another club building displays, up under its cornice line, a chariot-race frieze. An- other club building shows the stateliiiess of tall Gothic windows.
But not for a moment is it forgotten, that it is not the buildings alone or the lake alone, but the combination of the buildings, and the lake and the boulevarded avenue, and the space between the avenue and the lake, that makes the magnificence of this one-sided thoroughfare. For all these busi- ness blocks and club buildings and hotels occupy one side only of Michigan Avenue ; all face the lake and the rising sun, across the open space, known as Grant Park, which is definitely planned not to inter- cept the view but to give it a formal setting and extension, while at the same time masking the rail- way.
One-sided avenues are a feature of beauty, a feature of distinguished importance, in various cities of the world. There is remarkable Princes Street in Edinburgh, looking far across at the line of the ancient town and the castled rock; there is Blva degli 'Schiavoni, facing out across the water in still more ancient Venice ; there is the Lungarno, bordering the yellow river of Florence; there is Beacon Street, facing with modest pride over Boston Common; there is Riverside Drive, with its superb view of the Hudson; and with all these one-sided
40
THE LAKE FRONT
thoroughfares of beauty, some of them with many centuries behind them, the new and the noble one- side avenue of Chicago proudly holds its own.
Nor is it that all the buildings are beautiful, but that throughout the- Mile the effectiveness is con- tinued and beautiful. There is constant collective beauty; and some of the buildings are of striking individual beauty. There is wide variety; and Chicagoans themselves like to point out, for ex- ample, the Fine Arts Building, and to say that the first story is of Roman architecture, the second Greek, the third Greco-Roman, and the fourth catch- as-catch-can.
Housed in these buildings are big clubs and little clubs, and other organizations, largely literary or musical. One has the hall of the city's orchestra. There are shops for jewels and laces and furs and pictures, for fine raiment and fine linen. There are hotels of world-wide fame. There are business buildings with mighty and massive pillars. There are buildings that rise in airy strength. There are doorways of diversity, including one that is Egyptian, like a cave. You see long balconies, and little single-window balconies, and buildings with no balconies at all. You catch sight, far up, of a Venetian gable.
Within one of the buildings is a swimming place, a great pool within surroundings of white marble; and hard-headed business men order luncheon be- fore their noonday plunge, and have it served, if they so desire, on little tables beside the pools, and
41
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
feel a restfulness from eating, clad only in breech- clouts, and in a little while, impeccably dressed, hurry off to their business again.
The great broad sidewalk, the superb breadth of the street, the throngs of the well-dressed (for seldom do the other classes venture upon the Mile), the constant streams of motor-cars (not trolley- cars; nothing so common as that!), give an air of vivid life, as of a city aglow with wealth and happi- ness.
At the northern end, in the space between the driveway and the lake, an imposing peristyle, still new enough to be almost white, gives dignity and beauty, like a bit of ancient Greece, with its classic columns and its sweeping grace and its nobility of size and proportions.
Set stately between avenue and water 's-edge, stands the Art Institute, a building of dark-mel- lowed stone, with 'broad-stairwayed entrance and lions of bronze.
The long terraces, the stone balustrades, the spac- ing and spaciousness, all are part of a splendid plan, splendidly carried out. But also, between the avenue and the lake, stretch the sunken tracks of a railway, out of sight but not out of mind, for there is constant noise and there are constant clouds of blackest smoke and blackest soot, shriveling the grass and shrinking the shrubs that the city bravely tries to grow.
The space between roadway and water, given nobility at one end of the Mile by the peristyle,
42
THE LAKE FRONT
and beauty midway by the Art Institute, has at its southern end the Field Museum of Natural History.
This is of tremendous size, of classic design, with mighty rows of mighty pillars along the central facade and the mighty wings. It is said to be the largest marble building in the world : seven hundred and sixty-seven feet long, if one cares precisely to know, and three hundred and fifty in width. It is hugely Grecian. It is a royal palace. And yet in spite of its immensity of perfection, it lacks some spirit and leaves one rather cold.
The boulevarded Mile of Michigan Avenue — the Chicagoans lovingly call it their "Boul' Mich." — is as impressive by night as by day; when darkness comes creeping in from the lake, and the boulevard lightens and brightens, with the flare of thousands of motors, with the glow of lighted windows, with the splendor of lines of illumination from six- clustered lights on metal poles, when everything is seen in a glorified indistinctness, with the beauty of buildings and roadway idealized, and with a sort of magic in it all.
Yet it was hard to induce business and buildings to come here until a few years ago ; and even now, at the end of the Mile, to the southward, the beauty ends, and there comes suddenly a garishness, as of a mining camp, with two-story buildings paltrily bedizened.
The development of the Lake Front in front of the city's very center has been a proud achieve- ment : and the plans of the city are for further and
43
THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
even superb development along a far greater stretch of water-front. And if one should deem any of the plans impossible — well, Irving Bacheller, in one of his novels, pictures a visitor to early Chicago listen- ing to the extravagant prophecies of a Chicagoan; absolute impossibilities! — but the odd thing, con- tinues the novelist, was that within a few years all the prophecies had come true!
Without control of the important mile of frontage the city could not even have begun its principal shore improvement; and there were powerful in- terests ranged against the city; and the able work, against those interests, of a Chicago lawyer named Melville Fuller, had much to do with giving him the acclaim and prominence that led to his being made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And the Lake Front has become to Chicago, in its ultimate importance and its vital representation of the city, much like Boston Com- mon to Boston.
Fuller had also, as a Chicago lawyer, been con- nected importantly with another case of interest to the people of Chicago and also connected with Michigan Avenue ; for Fuller was the leading lawyer for the much-loved and much-honored Episcopalian rector, Cheney, in his trial for heresy; Cheney after- wards becoming Bishop Cheney of the church or- ganization named, with breezy superiority, the "Re- formed" Episcopal Church. And Bishop Cheney has but recently died. He almost rounded three- score years of ecclesiastical service in Chicago. He
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became rector of Christ Church at Michigan Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street — but it was in 1860, and Michigan Avenue was then not even a street, but merely a rough lane, and the vicinity was deemed quite outside of Chicago, in a cluster of houses of railwaymen, called * ' Carville, ' ' with a great unbuilt- upon region between it and what was then Chicago proper. Ordained, and ready for his first church, Cheney had come to Chicago to visit his fiancee and he found a church in " Carville." And, as he loved to tell, Christ Church needed a rector and he needed a parish, so he was glad to take the charge, at a salary of $750 — with the express understanding that the church must be made to prosper sufficiently, under his rectorate and Divine Providence, to justify such a great sum. There were but seven members when he preached his first sermon ! Year by year, Christ Church and its rector grew old to- gether, and the growth of Chicago swept over the locality and far beyond, and the church stood by him in his trial and followed him into the "Reformed," and when he was made bishop it was stipulated that he was to remain its rector.
Cheney liked to remember, too, that the Mexican War had made a deep impression upon "Carville," for what was years afterwards to become Twenty- second Street was Ringgold (a little later a name of the Civil War also), and the future Twenty- third Street was Palo Alto, and the Twenty-sixth Street of to-day was Buena Vista.
The streets leading from Michigan Avenue, in the
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Mile section, are themselves notable for the care- fully arranged vistas in connection with them and the Lake Front. And always, with these vistas, the blue waters of the lake make the final back- ground. Looking down Randolph Street one sees the peristyle, and completing the view through Monroe Street is a sweeping bow of roadway and on either side a large square-sided shaft of stone; opposite Adams Street (one notices that the names here are of early American biography) is the beauti- ful central front of the Art Institute, and looking down the vista of Madison Street there is a fountain with admirable stone pillars, topped with round- balled stone.
Making an impressive ending for the vista of East Ninth Street is a statue of General Logan, on horse- back, high-mounded, greatly pedestaled, caught in bronze in "heroic attitude, the sculptor having at- tempted the difficult task of perpetuating a triumph- ant moment.
St. Gaudens made this Logan. And it was un- veiled on a day of glorious sun and high wind, with booming cannon and much processioning of soldiers, most prominent being those who had been General Logan's own. In the grand-stand, in apparent amicability, sat the widow, Mrs. Logan, and by her side the sculptor, St. Gaudens: and few knew that Mrs. Logan had wished her husband put in bronze as a statesman instead of as a general, and that she had argued the matter in vain with St. Gaudens, and had then sought to have him supplanted, by the
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committee, by another sculptor. All of which amused St. Gaudens, years afterwards, when he wrote of how Mrs. Logan and he sat together in seeming friendliness.
It seems odd to think of setting up " Black Jack" of Illinois and Chicago as statesman rather than soldier: and yet, after all, as a Congressman and Senator he showed much ability ; as in his measured reply when, the impeachment of President Johnson being proposed, fear was expressed that it would lead to a revolution ; whereupon he said, with char- acteristic Chicagoan crushingness : "A country which in time of war and excitement can stand an assassination of so good and great a President as Abraham Lincoln, will stand the impeachment of as bad a President as Andrew Johnson."
Blaine remarked of Logan that, although there had been more able American generals, and more able American statesman, he did not know of any one else who had so successfully combined the two careers.
Superb though -the Lake Front is, it was amazing to find at its northern end, at the little railway station for suburbanites, an eating room such as one would expect to find only in some little town of the Western plains : an astonishingly narrow, funny place of frame; temporary, of course — but the temporary has lasted for years. Necessarily the place will some day go: perhaps it has gone even as I write; but not to be forgotten are the eight high-revolving chairs, each screwed to the floor, the
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rail for the feet, the triangle of pie under its glass dome, the doughnuts and sandwiches under their glass domes, the coffee machines — all perhaps excel- lent enough but amusingly like something very far away and long ago.
On this splendid Lake Front there comes to mind a comparison with Boston ; somehow, the two cities seem naturally to offer themselves for comparison! each is a city whose people have the highest esteem for their own — Boston, the city that looks so cheer- fully backward to grandparents, and Chicago, the city that looks so cheerfully forward to grand- children; Boston, the city whose cherished outlook is the Back Bay, and Chicago, the city whose cherished outlook is the Lake Front.
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CHAPTER V
OVER RUSH STREET BRIDGE
HE year 1894 saw the appearance of "Trilby," in which Du Maurier, both artist and novelist that he was, presented a widespread British belief in regard to Chicago. For Du Maurier, writing of the rich Miss Lavinia Hunks of Chicago (and the use of the name "Hunks" was in itself deemed a marvelous bit of humor), described her as "so lamentably, so pathetically plain that it would be brutal to attempt the cheap and easy task of describing her. He calls her "a grotesque little bogey in blue," completing his description with a picture that makes her the extreme of unattractive ugliness.
He knew nothing of Chicago, but unfamiliarity with a subject has never been a bar to our friends across the water. In fact, Du Maurier himself pictures his laird as making a pronounced success with pictures of Spain — until he actually went there.
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Poetic justice, literary and artistic justice, came quickly in regard to Chicago. For "Trilby," with its description of what English readers might sup- pose to be typical of Chicago womanhood, was not much more than upon the bookshelves when, in 1895, an Englishman of note married a Chicago girl ; and the English learned what ' * Miss Hunks ' ' was really like. Her name was Leiter, Mary Victoria Leiter, and she was wealthy, and she was fine looking, and of grace and charm and beauty, with a distinguished air to which the British themselves did honor. And as the wife of a peer, who became Viceroy of India, the highest women of the British aristocracy waited eagerly and often humbly for a word or nod from her.
And what a marvelous transformation it was! Here in Chicago Mary Leiter lived, in a house over Bush Street Bridge. And as if by the touch of an enchanter, she is placed in state as a vicereine, pre- siding over the court of India, with her life a con- tinuous pageant, with guards gorgeous in purple and gold, with elephants, with the most brilliant Oriental splendor; and all her honors borne with unostentatious grace and dignity. The magic tales of India tell of no more brilliant transformation.
That was "Miss Hunks" of reality. Nor was Mary Leiter, wife of Viceroy Curzon, the first American woman to become a vicereine, for Mary Caton, granddaughter of the highly picturesque Charles Carroll of Carrollton, had long before mar- ried the brother of the Duke of Wellington, the
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Marquis of Wellesley, who had been ruler of India and was then viceroy, or technically lord-lieutenant, of Ireland. Mary Caton; or to be precise, Mrs. Patterson, for she was a widow; was not a Chicagoan. But quite a number of Chicago young women have become the wives of Europeans, and a notable fact is that their husbands, on the average, much more than foreign husbands of wives from other American cities, have become men of active achievement; showing apparently the vigorous value of the Chicago spirit. One may name, as an example, Admiral Beatty, so successfully prominent in the great war, who had married a wife from Chicago.
A large, square-fronted, square-topped house, four stories in height, with great large square windows, at the corner of Ontario and Rush Streets, is the house from which Mary Leiter went forth. The lower story is classic in design, with fluted Doric columns at the windows and a great stone balustraded balcony. Smooth gray stone for the lower floor, and for the upper three a reddish-tawny brick, makes a somewhat odd effect. There are but two windows to each floor, on the front of the house, and each of these great windows has but a single great pane of glass, with no dividing crosspiece.
Near by is the great Cyrus H. McCormick home, a huge mausoleum — like a pile of brown stone. For this region, in the latter part of the eighteen hun- dreds, was one of great wealth. It is a small neigh- borhood of large houses. But the importance of
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the vicinity has mostly gone. Eooming houses and little shops have come near by, and the big houses themselves have an air of shabbiness, and the gardens, with their high brick walls, share ther dis- couraged air, in a sort of sooty sadness.
McCormick had his portrait painted by Cabanel; afterwards, made a member of the Legion of Honor, and receiving in due course the red ribbon of the Legion, McCormick wanted it painted on his por- trait, and so the picture was packed up and sent to France to have the touch of red added by Cabanel himself.
In this immediate vicinity, at Huron and Cass Streets, is a large church of gray sandstone, with high-pitched roof of dark slate; it is the Church of St. James, and was long deemed and seems to be still deemed the leading Episcopalian church of the city, for those who wish the mingled odor of society and sanctity. The houses close by are not quite of Leiter or McCormick costliness, although large and comfortable, with grass plots; and it is not surprising to learn that most of the congregation nowadays come from a distance. The home* of Laura, in that famous Chicago novel, "The Pit," was cornerwise opposite ; a house built as the church rectory, and recently torn down; and she and Jad- win were married at St. James's.
In spite of social standing, the church has but ordinary architectural standing; and one fancies that the square tower, with one toothpick standing higher than the other three, is a trifle better than the
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rest of the church ; and you learn that this may pos- sibly be owing to this part being older, having stood through the Great Fire, when all the rest of the structure was destroyed.
For the Great Fire, having leaped across the river, swept this entire region, and went devastat- ingly on to the northward. Not a house is now standing in this part of the city, that stood before the fire. It is generally said that the Mahlon Ogden home, which has since been torn down, was the only house that escaped, and that it was left standing alone in the midst of smoky desolation. But the home of a policeman also escaped. And it seems .as if the story of a dry cistern and the saving of a house by deluging its roof with cider deserves to be kept in mind.
After the Great Fire, Chicago must have presented what seemed a series of Gothic ruins ; for photographs of the time show church after church destroyed, except for lonely looking walls, solitary crocketed-like- fragments, hollow-eyed ruins, all seeming grim and very ancient.
What is practically the Fire Monument of Chicago is the old water tower, standing in the Lincoln Parkway. Although this is the only structure still standing past which the fire swept in this northern section, there has been persistent ef- fort to have it destroyed, in the alleged interests of improvement; and determined have been the ef- forts to retain it in place, as an honored memento of a terrible event ; for in the days after the fire it
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served as a helpful landmark for wandering multi- tudes searching1 for the spots where stood their homes. Nor is it without a certain impressiveness. A tall shaft rises from a cluttered and clustered base, having twelve towers at varying heights. It is all white stone, and, pseudo-Gothic though it is, is effective in its own odd way and looks much more like a Gothic monument than a water tower.
A curious cluster of Moorish-looking buildings at Cass and Ohio Streets, with onion-domes, crescent- topped, dominates that vicinity, and one finds it to be Medinah Temple, of the Masons.
In this same immediate region stands a large and fortress-like building, heavy and solid and unin- teresting in appearance, but with a great deal of interest in reality. For this is the building about which much of the life and interest of the city re- volves; the building of the Historical Society.
Surely no other city, to welcome a distinguished general as the new commander of the military de- partment, would give him a reception at its histori- cal society rooms and have the best people of the city present ; but Chicago does things in its own way, and that is precisely what it did for General Wood.
The activities of the Historical Society are sur- prising in scope. Take any report of a year's do- ings ; and it will show what such a society can do and be. For example, in November the annual meeting, with distinguished folk a-plenty. On a December afternoon, three hundred teachers came, on invitation, to listen to an illustrated lecture on
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Chicago history. Isn 't that fine ! Early in Feb- ruary, a reception and tea with five hundred guests, the names of the committee who worked to make it a success including the people of the city most prominent socially and in wealth. There was old- fashioned silver on the tea-table, the orchestra played airs of three-quarters of a century ago, and there was a costume exhibit, notable from the fine gowns that were shown, inherited from mothers or grandmothers. And as a special point there was present, attired in the gown she had worn at her wedding, the daughter of the first president of the Historical Society.
Another time they had a reception with such at- tention to interesting detail as the reproduction, on the invitations to the reception, of a picture show- ing a reception at the White House in 1865: this having a local touch because Miss Arnold, one of those in the receiving line, remembers being at a White House reception in 1865 with her father, an Illinois Congressman and a biographer of Lincoln.
Another time, and there is the exhibition of a collection of pieced quilts and hand-woven cover- lets and old-time home-made agricultural imple- ments, many of them gathered and presented by Emerson Hough, the Chicago novelist.
The constant interest in the past, in a city so markedly a city of the present, is highly interesting. When the Society makes an acquisition the news- papers treat the matter as news of general interest, to be prominently featured. And it is astonishing
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what a quantity of interesting material has been gathered. There is a little old brass-nail-studded cylindrical hair-trunk, still containing the wedding dress of Mrs. Rebecca Heald, the wife of Captain Heald. It was carried on horseback on their wed- ding trip, in 1811, to Fort Dearborn, when he took command of the post. One pictures the young bride and this sweet wedding dress in the- wilderness of that time; and the couple were happy for the brief period before the outbreak of the war with Eng- land. Then came the attack and massacre ; she was captured; and this trunk was carried to St. Louis by one of the Indians. There it was recognized and ransomed by a friend of Heald 's, who sorrowfully sent it to the young wife's parents, fully believing that she must be dead. But to the amazement of all she was alive, a prisoner, and after a while she was set free. And this trunk and its contents, with its strange eventful history, is here. Sir Walter Scott, had he been a Chicagoan, would have written a novel around such a relic, with such a series of happenings ! And it would have been one of his best.
And here is a miniature of Captain Wells, who bravely gave his life on the eventful day of massacre. And how it brings him actually before us! — with his high red collar up to his very ears, and his blue coat and white epaulets and brass buttons and the black stock under his chin. A blue- eyed, long-nosed, pleasant-faced young man — and
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somehow that distant day of death seems very, very real and very close.
There is a wide variety of the unexpected here. And notable is the very last letter that was written by John Brown. It is to his sister Mary, and is dated at Charlestown, November 22, 1857. He knows that certain death is at hand, but he writes calmly, in kindly comforting fashion. He had grieved, he said, from fear that they would feel ashamed because of his death on the scaffold, but her letter had reassured him, and * ' Now I have done. May the God of peace bring us all again from the dead." And he is "Your affectionate brother, John Brown."
And here is the richly embroidered coat worn by Colonel Baum, who led the Hessians and British at the Battle of Bennington, in the Revolutionary War. Baum was mortally wounded, and his blood- stained coat was handed to a young American soldier named Wood; and it remained in family possession for generations, and was brought by a Wood to Chicago, and at length found its place here.
The building is crowded with mementoes and por- traits, with letters and documents, but, far more important than these things, is the spirit in which the Historical Society is regarded. It stands not merely for the past, but for what is interesting or important in the past, and it aids materially in up- holding civic pride. And it has become quite a habit, in all seriousness and not from humor, when
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any one asks a question which cannot at once be answered, to refer him to the Historical Society; and this, even with questions entirely unconnected with anything connected with history.
This district gives the impression of being a sec- tion set apart, a district by itself, a community gathered here just over Rush Street Bridge; or at least, where Eush Street Bridge stood for so many years.
The lake is not far away, and projecting into the lake is one of the things of which Chicago is most proud, an immense municipal pier. It is near the mouth of the river. It is at the end of Grand Ave- nue. Chicago declares it to be the greatest of all municipal piers, of any city ; it has a length of three thousand feet and its uses are mainly for public recreation.
A little farther along the shore was "Shanty- town, ' ' ruled over by the ' * Queen of the Sands ' ' ! — and one sees, that in Chicago even vice is apt to have a picturesque side, at least in nomenclature.
That the Kush Street Bridge could exist for so many years after its inadequacy was painfully evi- dent is one of the things which point out the con- tradictoriness of Chicago. And it not only long continued its inadequate existence, but Chicagoans felt a pride in it ! At the northern end of Michigan Avenue, that wonderful Mile, two immense streams of traffic merged to cross a rickety, narrow, unsightly bridge : "the bridge with the greatest traffic of any bridge in the world," Chicagoans declared, stand-
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ing ready to give figures regarding vehicles and pedestrians crossing any bridge in London or Paris or New York if you would but listen. It seemed only a busy, overworked little bridge. Yet this in- adequate bridge, that any other city would have done away with over night, took years and years for Chicago to replace. And this a city of triumphantly big things ! A new bridge, no matter how elaborate, across that narrow stream, could not for a moment be compared with any one of the majestic bridges across the East River, in New York, or even with one of the great high-level bridges of Cleveland; yet these cities never made the pother and bother over any one of them that Chicago made over this.
And the standpoint was always so amusing. I re- marked to a Chicago business man, one day, in re- gard to its obvious shortcomings, but he could not see them, although at that very moment, as we looked, there was inextricable jamming and locking of 'buses and motors and vans, and the little old bridge was shaking like a ship in a storm. "It's a good bridge," he said, puzzled; "a perfectly good bridge. Why, that bridge carries more traffic — " and so on.
But at length the so-long-needed improvement was got under way, and in 1920 it was completed, and now a really fine and adequate bridge, a two-story bridge, connects Michigan Avenue with the splendid region to the northward, and the advance of business blocks and apartment houses on the farther side of the river has received important impetus.
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The abutments of Bush Street Bridge, on the south bank of the river, marked the center of the stockade of the long-vanished Fort Dearborn. And Chicago itself was for quite a while known by the name of Fort Dearborn.
Every trace of the fort has gone. Indeed, it is a very literal fact that so far as the city's early history is concerned the sites alone are the sights. There are no buildings associated with the men and the stirring events of even a century ago. There is no bit of stockade, no doddering house front, no building incrusted with the literal or figurative patina of time.
The spot where the beginning of the continuous settlement of Chicago was made was where, long afterwards, the Kush Street Bridge touched the north bank of the river. The man who began the continuous settlement came here during the Revolu- tionary War ; a black man from San Domingo, bear- ing the ornate name of Jean Baptiste Point de Saible. He sold his log house to a trapper French- man, and the Frenchman sold it to John Kinzie, the first American, the first real settler. It was in 1804 that Kinzie and his family settled here, and from time to time he so altered and enlarged the house that its original aspect quite disappeared.
Kinzie was one of the early American silver- smiths. But there were few on Lake Michigan then to buy silverware: the fort was built in the same year that Kinzie came, and a few settlers drifted gradually in: and Kinzie, leaving his art largely in
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abeyance, became important as an Indian trader, receiving the boat sent annually by Astor's fur company and acquiring acquaintance and influence among the Indians. But he worked somewhat in silver, and a few old Chicago families treasure ex- amples of his skill.
Fort Dearborn was named after a man who never came here, never went west of Niagara ; but Chicago has the right to feel proud that the man whose name was given to the fort was full of a vital energy that was quite Chicago-like. He was no office-chair patriot. When he heard of Lexington he gathered a company of sixty and led them to the army, march- ing sixty-five miles a day. He fought at Bunker Hill. He was not only present at the surrender of Burgoyne but at that of Cornwallis. He was for eight years secretary of War under Jefferson. And it need not be matter of surprise that Dearborn was an officer in the War of 1812 as well as in the Revolution, for, after all, we were fighting the same King in both wars. And it was only a little while after the tragic episode of Fort Dearborn, that Wordsworth wrote sadly of the King whom we were for the second time fighting, as " deprived of sight and lamentably wrapped in two-fold night."
Tragedy came to Fort Dearborn through an order from General Hull directing Captain Heald to evac- uate the fort. This was the same Hull who in cowardly fashion surrendered Detroit. He was offered the opportunity to give up both Chicago and Detroit and actually seized the opportunity!
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It was in the first year of the War of 1812. The Indians had been promptly let loose against us along the border. To retreat from Fort Dearborn, for scores of miles, through the Indian country, with women and children and baggage (some of the gar- rison had their families with them, and a few scat- tered settlers, with their families, had sought shelter at the fort), was an impossibility.
It was not a great military happening, compared with the European events of the period. It was but an unfortunate tragedy that came from the employ- ment of Indian allies. It was tucked in, as to date, between Wellington 's great battles in Spain and the overwhelming Battle of Leipzig, when France was England's bitterest enemy and Germany and Austria were England's allies. How disconcert- ingly topsy-turvy is history! For in the War of 1812 we fought against England, and immensely helped France. But only a few years before, Wash- ington was drawn from what he had deemed final retirement to head the army for expected war with France.
The Chicago Massacre seems very near. Here by this black and sluggish stream — now black and always sluggish — the little party of nearly one hun- dred went forth to what they knew was almost certain death. Captain Wells, whose gay minia- ture we have just seen over yonder, blackened his face in Indian fashion, to show the grim despair of the situation. Near at hand, where now stands a great department store, the Indians had left their
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camp and had gone to the lakeside trail to wait.
In some contemporary account I have read of this as a "massacree," and I like the word; it sounds so much more terrible with the double "e." And it was the terror of this "massacree" which ac- counted in considerable degree for the energy with which Illinois took part in the Black Hawk War; poor old Black Hawk being rather puzzled by the ireful commotion rather unintentionally aroused.
Following the Black Hawk War the Indians were removed from what they, and their forefathers for centuries, loved as the Illinois country, and sent to the other side of the Mississippi. The United States was not ungenerous, so it would seem, for it freely handed out, at the last moment, sums of money to such Indians as claimed rights in land. And then came more than doubts as to the gener- osity of the government, or at least of its agents: for the money was handed out, to the total of many thousands of dollars, all in fifty-cent pieces, and white men, with great supplies of poor whiskey, stood by to tempt the red men to buy, and of course civil- ization beat savagery and took away almost all its silver wealth; it was only because adverse winds so delayed a ship, loaded with whiskey, that it could not reach here in time, that the Indians got away with any money at all. The visible supply of drink having vanished, the Indians, streaked and daubed with paint, drunkenly danced and yelled around what was to be the northern end of Rush Street Bridge and then, dancing and whooping, yelling,
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gesticulating, brandishing weapons, they circled about the future city's earliest localities, crossing the river at the southward and returning toward the lake along what was in time to be South Water Street, now a street jammed and crowded and thronged with wagons and with sellers and buyers of vegetables, poultry, eggs and butter; a survival, this street market, with its bordering commission houses, of a Chicago almost as old as the time of the Indians, and now marked, itself, for passing away in the interests of modern change.
With that wild orgy and wild march the Indians vanished from Chicago. Old settlers used to tell that, as they passed the Sauganash Hotel, where later the Wigwam was to stand, where Lincoln was to be nominated, a few visitors looked out, fright- ened, the Indians there having an access of wild fury.
The Chicago Eiver is a dark and dismal and somber stream, over which gulls sweep and dip and dive and utter their hoarse short cries, just as I have seen them dip and dive and heard them cry over some of the most beautiful river mouths in England; and gulls must have dived and cried here when the first explorers came, when Chicago was all wilderness ; and so these gulls are probably descend- ants of those that welcomed Joliet and Marquette and La Salle, and of those that later soared and swooped and cried on the day of the "massacree." The gulls of Chicago are of ancient pedigree.
The Chicago poets are, naturally, attracted by
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the waterside of the city, and one of them, Edholm, writes of the river:
"They have bound me with bridges,
With tunnels burrowed under me !
Incessant, unresting,
All day and all night,
Traffic roars over me,
And my uplook to the blessed sky
Is barred with girders, cables, stacks. ' '
And to another Chicago poet, Sandburg, it is a boat seeking the mouth of the river, in a fog, that appeals, and its sad-sounding whistle
"Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the harbor's breast, And the harbor's eyes."
Where the Kinzie house once stood, across the river from Fort Dearborn, a soap factory long ago arose ; and very recently the factory was torn down, in making room for the new bridge and its ap- proaches. Prominent on the side of the building, where countless Chicagoans have seen and read it, in the course of the years that it was there, was a huge sign reminiscent of the once familiar and homely custom of the week-end tub ! I happened to be passing, one day in 1919, when the last of the old sign was actually disappearing; and it showed, not literally the Saturday night bath as a custom, but as of Sunday morning; perhaps with the idea
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of its interfering less with a business day; at any rate, the sign, large and plain, read: " Wonderful Sunday morning bath soap."
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CHAPTER VI
THE LOOP HOUNDS
CITY that can designate a large part of its people as "Loop Hounds," and do it genially and have it taken good- naturedly, almost as a compli- ment and assuredly not as a criticism, must needs be an un- usual city, a city of quality and of qualities. It is a pleasant local phrase. It is used by Chicagoans just as they use "prairie dogs" to de- scribe the monumental lions in front of the Art In- stitute. They would resent "Loop Hounds" had the phrase not been made in Chicago.
The myriad whose occupational activities are centered within the Loop are the Loop Hounds ; and the term includes the big merchants, both wholesale and retail, and bankers, and city and county officials and judges and lawyers and uncounted thousands of workers in offices and stores. Within the Loop too, or at its very edge, where the city looks out over the lake, are almost every club and every hotel.
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Never in any city was there such a compact segrega- tion of important interests. The Loop is a parallel- ogram, formed by the Elevated lines, and including a limited number of city blocks. The trains come in from north and south and west and intricately and noisily box the compass and vanish. In com- mon parlance and understanding the Loop reaches from about Twelfth Street to the river, at the north, and from the south branch of the river to Grant Park; thus extending a trifle outside of the literal Elevated restrictions.
It has become the custom in Chicago to decry the Loop, to criticize it, to try to do away with it be- cause of congestion of business and traffic within its bounds. And it is amazing to notice how quickly the influence of the Loop vanishes; how quickly, leaving its precincts, one comes to raggedness of building, into the poorly built or even almost squalid regions. And it seems not much more than a stone's throw from the City Hall to great spaces used only as switch yards. The Loop Hounds are like Brahma chickens in so readily believing them- selves to be held within an imaginary boundary for their business affairs : what a foot-high wire is to a Brahma, the Elevated structure is to the Loop Hound.
The Loop, whether or not it has at length passed its usefulness, has been of incalculable benefit to Chicago. The close centering of every kind of life, of bankers and shoppers, club men and club women, public officials and merchants, making them all into
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one united family constantly and unavoidably meet- ing one another, has been an immense influence; and in addition there has been constant mingling, with all these, of all the many visitors to the city. With its interests united within the Loop, Chicago has grown in strength and power. Her business center stands within two blocks of where it stood in the earliest days. There has been no constant deser- tion of one business district for another as in New York, where the shopping has swept from City Hall almost to Central Park. The women of Chicago still go shopping within the district that has been the center from the days when pioneer merchants built the early shops such as those which Joseph Jefferson saw as a boy. And this holding to the old locality has given Chicago much of constancy, of stability, has made it a city holding fast to tradi- tion. And this steady holding to the Loop district — beginning many years before the building of Ele- vated tracks made a literal Loop — is the more re- markable when it is realized that the city has been extended to a length of nearly thirty miles. The Loop has given the city its homogeneity.
There is dramatic strength in the aspect of the buildings of the Loop, as seen from the farther side of the river. The buildings stand in the dignity of massed compactness, the dignity of strength and size and solidity. There are not the towering heights of New York, for the building law forbids ; and it has been suggested that Chicago put limita- tions on the height of her skyscrapers only when it
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
was clear that New York was leaving her hopelessly behind in the race for height: but such a cynical thought is not heeded or needed here by the lake! And Chicago is immensely proud of the fact that it is the city which first began steel framework con- struction of tall buildings, the factor which makes the lofty business building possible.
Prominent in the mass, seen from across the river, is a huge pillared building which loses much of its impressiveness when seen close at hand. It is the City Hall and county building, a great structure, oc- cupying the entire square between Washington, Clark, La Salle and Randolph Streets. But it sorely needs an open space about it, to give archi- tectural effect.
In fact what strikes a stranger at once, is the curious absence of any open square in the business section. In early days the city had an open public square; with a jail, in early American fashion, standing in one corner of it; but it was decided to utilize the conveniently vacant open space by build- ing the City Hall all over it.
The post-office is a huge building ; a mass of black- ish gray, with the dull green of copper; occupying the entire block, to the sidewalk lines, between Clark, Adams and Dearborn Streets and Jackson Boulevard. A great dome is in the center ; on each of the four fronts is a great, high-pedimented pil- lared wing; between the wings the spaces are filled with lower masses, topped with openwork balus- trades of stone. And unless very recently changed,
70
. THE LOOP HOUNDS
the post-office, excellent though it is as offering a sheltered passageway through from street to street, is most ingeniously planned to cause inconvenience to those using the building as a place to do ordinary postal business.
I like the Chicago impulse to put itself in print in regard to its own features: and it is Masters who versifically says :
"Around the Loop the Elevated crawls, And giant shadows sink against the walls "Where ten to twenty stories strive to hold The pale refractions of the sunset's gold."
Yet not everything is precisely what it ought to be. I went one evening, to where some five hundred were gathered in a hall on the top floor of a business block. There was one single elevator. There was only one stair, and it was of wood, twisting down alongside the elevator. I noticed no fire escape and no "Exit" signs. And men smoked freely.
Naturally, where business of every kind is so nar- rowly compressed, there are often busy street scenes, and Chicagoans themselves love to point to the intersection of State and Madison as the most crowded of all corners; "in the world," of course, and not merely in Chicago. And they indicate State Street as the greatest shopping district in the world. And the visitor, whether hesitant or not as to the acceptance of the claims, at least sees a great many people on the streets and sees exceedingly crowded stores: and often notices highly artistic care and
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
effectiveness in window displays, evanescent though they must necessarily be. And the waiting-rooms of the big department stores are not filled with women suburbanites, as in New York, but with women city dwellers.
Much of the architecture of the Loop is really not- able; some of it is extraordinarily fine. In "The Common Lot," by the Chicago novelist Herrick, a Chicago architect, who has been studying in France, is asked if he does not think a man ought to take back to his home what he has learned; and he re- plies, "Well, perhaps, if the place weren't just Chi- cago." But one does not see reason for this, for Chicago has been developing superbly.
There is, indeed, much that is odd or undesirable. There is a style which I find myself terming dis- tinctly Chicagoan; that of the Masonic Temple, for example, the skyscraper which everybody used to go to see as one of the wonders of the world ; and the Auditorium, a ponderous style, with great heavy arches; and there are such unusualnesses as the curves at the bottom of the Monadnock building and the curve-out at the top of the square Auditorium tower. But on the whole the average is markedly high, for beauty and dignity. And with many of the buildings expense has not been considered.
I entered, one day, one of the twenty-story build- ings, with no expectation of coming upon anything notable. The entrance-way opened into a great square-pillared Italian-like enclosed piazza, two stories high, all in white porcelain, and there was a
72
THE LOOP HOUNDS
glorious stair of white marble, and this costly in- terior court was surrounded by attractive interior shops, on two separate stories, here around the big central court, shops of hatters, opticians, tailors, manicures, shops for the sale of candy or cigars or flowers, the upper eighteen stories being offices. Chicago claims to spend more money on its business buildings than does any other city of the world.
These interior shops suggest a curious develop- ment of business here; for several office buildings have been quite given over to little shops, of book- sellers, dressmakers, a long variety of occupations, the offices being made into little shops by putting in show windows, looking into the corridors. The reason, of course, is the congestion of the Loop. Chicago has become quite accustomed to shop in office buildings: "light shop-keeping," they call it; and an advertisement of the best-known of these buildings expresses the claims for this kind of busi- ness. "On a rainy day when the sidewalks are muddily discouraging, what joy to be able to find just about everything a woman wants, and many things she had not realized she wanted, right here, down warm, bright corridors — an indoor city in itself. We have shops for many needs, and all purses, with merchandise fresh and ultra-new, which you will covet." Another point is that such massing of shopping is a further aid in maintaining the compactness of the business section.
When a druggist named Schmidt died, in 1918, the city showed how closely it may continue to keep,
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
with particularity, local records of a nature interest- ing to itself ; for it was announced that he had been one of the " veteran druggists of the city," for although he was under sixty when he died, he had been a druggist in the Loop for nearly forty years, and had opened his store on the second floor of a building at Madison Street and Fifth Avenue, thus being "the first druggist to open a store on the second floor of a business building not only in Chi- cago but in the United States."
Even some of the large banks of the city are on the second floors, there being such shortage of ground space within the Loop.
Bank buildings of the city run mainly to solidity and costliness, with heavy pillars on their fronts. There is, for example, the Northern Trust, with its dozen great stone columns rising from the second story and wreath-topped in stone. There is the Illinois Trust, in its long low building of gray stone, with its nine mighty Corinthian pillars in the center and half a dozen Corinthian pilasters at either side. And looking down narrow Quincy Street, beside this building, one sees highset pillars above an open balustrade of stone, and, towering far above and behind them, the great dome of the post-office, mak- ing in all an impressive vistaed view. The lofty Pantheon-like Central Trust is fronted by tall pillars; the interior is an open skylighted space, with marble and pilasters, with bronze doors palm- leaf paneled. There is a floor of black and white tesselation — one comes to think of the Loop as a
74
THE LOOP HOUNDS
district of black and white marble floors! — and around the upper part of the interior is a series of lunettes with paintings representing scenes in the history of Chicago. And there it is again : always, the importance of the history of the city; business of to-day interwoven with that intense feeling for the city's past. Another of the banks has four bronzes depicting scenes in the career of Father Marquette, because that famous man was for a brief space a Chicagoan.
One of the new perils that have come with a new world was shown, one day, in 1919, when an airplane dropped through the big skylight of one of these big financial buildings, carrying with it death and de- struction.
Another of the bank buildings has entrances of square patterned bronze, with yellow granite sup- ports to the building and yellow granite pillars ris- ing from the second floor ; and on either side of the entrance is a bronze entablatured lion, of heroic size. And that illustrates a cheerful idiosyncrasy of the city: the representation in bronze or stone of ani- mals and birds. Lions are favorites ; but I remem- ber noticing, twenty stories in air, a row of little stone owls. Another building has an owl upon the peak of a Gothic gable. I remember, too, a dome surrounded by eagles. Another building, not to fol- low tamely, has little stone human figures, far up aloft, out of sight except from the windows of a higher adjoining building.
One day I did a little dog hunting within the
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
Loop ; or, at least, I hunted for a bronze dog. For I learned that, a good many years ago, while his name and fame were still to be made, St. Gaudens modeled a dog as an advertisement, or a sort of trademark, for one of the big express companies; and I searched and inquired, thinking that such an odd thing must by somebody be known about; but everywhere I met with ignorance of it. There had been at least one removal of the offices; there had come indifference. Then, long afterwards, came the doing away with private management during the period of public ownership disorganization. The dog may still be trailed and found ; but he is not one of the Loop Hounds, after all, for he is a Loop Bull- dog.
La Salle Street is the Wall Street of Chicago, and as with New York, the financial district includes not only the street that gives name to the district, but some adjoining streets also.
The Board of Trade building, at the very edge of La Salle Street, on West Jackson Boulevard, is not in keeping with the wealth and dignity of the bank- ing and commercial buildings. It is ornate and un- beautiful, of a mixed style of architecture, with two tall stone women over the entrance and with a sort of pointed effect from some little towers that barely rise higher than the roof. But I turn to a Chicago publication and find that this building and its hall are "undoubtedly the grandest of the kind in the world." However, the wealth of Chicago nowa-
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LIBRARY OF THE
OF ILLINOIS
THE LOOP HOUNDS
days understands the beauties of architecture, and a new building is expected to be built.
What makes the Board of Trade building notable is that it holds the Wheat Pit ; which is not a sunken amphitheater sort of place, as one might suppose from the name, but a place far from sunken, reached by a stairway to the second floor. There one sees a big open hall, tall-windowed. One sees masses of excited men. One hears a roar of sound, a rum- bling shouting, strident boom of human voices, ris- ing and falling, sinking in volume only to break into greater and more vociferous noise. And, intermit- tently, when the tumult and the shouting dies, one hears the staccato ticking of the rows of telegraph instruments off at one side.
At regular intervals stand four big platforms, each three steps up from the floor, and three are de- voted to corn, to grain, to provisions, and the other is the so-called Wheat Pit. And what gigantic struggles have centered there !
Unlike other cities, there are few landmarks noticeable in the business section. The absence of open squares has much to do with this, the absence of monuments, the absence of noticeable alternations of highness and lowness in buildings. There is a sense of singular compactness and evenness in all the street scenes in the heart of the city. And ow- ing to the permeative coal smoke, the buildings are colored to much of uniformity as to black and drab ; and, more than in most cities, there is frequent
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
repetition of the same names over drug stores and eating houses and cigar shops and haberdashers, be- longing to chains of similar shops, so that many a stranger becomes bewildered, by encountering the same name and the same window display, at right and left and around the corner, in a short walk in the busy part of the city.
Alleys are frequent, between the main streets, but altogether without picturesque appearance, and without distinctive life of their own. That they are an aid in loading trucks, and that they uncomfort- ably break the level walking for those on the side- walks, is about all that can be said for them.
And yet, I remember a picturesque spot, off La Salle Street, where an alleyway, bordered by tall buildings of tawny brick, leads to and through and under a building of brown : and I remember another spot where an alleyway, almost picturesque, is blocked at its end, almost quaintly, by a small pillar- fronted building.
To quite a degree, businesses of a kind flock to- gether within the Loop. As, furniture dealers are gregarious, and so are dealers in pianos and harps ; and the harps of Chicago are played everywhere but in heaven ! Gregarious also are those who sell plants and seeds. And here is the beginning of an advertisement of one of the seed houses, and I quote it because of its racy Chicagoism :
"Nature's factory whistle is blowing. Can't you hear it? It is the morning song of the robin calling to you to start your garden. The earth is waking. The first green
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THE LOOP HOUNDS
tints of growing things suggest messes of tender peas, bunches of spicy, baby radishes and onions, new beans, spinach, chard and tomatoes."
In the buildings that are used for a multitude of indoor shops there is some attempt at getting people of a kind together; in one corridor osteo- paths are noticeable; in another, music wails from every room, -these being haunts of music teachers ; in certain corridors one notices only perfumery or drugs.
So solid is the general appearance of the Loop that two facts in regard to it are extraordinary: one being, that many of the buildings are put up on leased land — but the leases are mostly for ninety nine years, and I suppose that to the typical busy Chicagoan a century ahead has seemed an incred- ible time, short though has been the century just past. The other fact is that this so solid seeming city is mainly built on made ground. For the city was too low for drainage. It had to be set higher. And in Chicago, to realize the necessity of doing a thing is usually to do it forthwith. The project was decided upon in 1857 and in spite of appalling difficulties was carried into effect. " Every build- ing in the city must be raised the height of the mayor, and he is six feet seven," declared a news- paper humorously. Later, another raising was found to be necessary. On the whole, great areas of the city have been raised from eight to fifteen feet.
The Tremont House of 1857 was one that had to be raised. It was four stories high, of brick and stone.
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A stranger, arriving from the East, heard of the predicament from the sorely troubled proprietor, and said, "I'll do it for you; and your guests will not miss a single meal or a wink of sleep. ' ' Where- upon he placed five thousand jackscrews under the building and set over a thousand men at work, and the building rose, inch by inch, and the foundation mounted beneath it as it rose. And thus the task was done. The man who thus remarkably began his Chicago career was George M. Pullman. And it is odd to consider, that the line of achievement in which, afterwards, Pullman won worldwide fame, was based, after all, upon that idea of not letting people "miss a single meal or a wink of sleep."
A serious shortcoming which Chicago had to face was that of soil. For beneath the city is a great bed of clay which shifts and moves under pressure, and it was found that heavy buildings not only sank, but raised or lowered buildings adjoining; and as buildings must become still larger and heavier the only remedy was to use unusual pains and go to unusual depths with foundations.
There is no "Great White Way" in Chicago. There are bright spots at night, with somewhat of whirling electric signs and colored lights, but no great illumination and no outward indications of particular gayety. Not that Chicago is a sedate city, at night, but that even before the coming of prohibition there was no particular brightening and lightening of the ways.
Hotels are more a vital feature of Chicago life
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THE LOOP HOUNDS
than in most cities; one of the results of having a crowded life within the Loop. The hotels are freely made use of by the city people themselves and not only by visitors. One of the newest and biggest is not only thronged with men from out of town, but has many little rooms used steadily as meeting places or lunching places by this or that formal or informal Chicago organization. Another holds it- self so high that to be, say, at a dance there is almost equivalent to having the formal sanction of society.
You enter another hotel and find a long passage- way, where everybody meets everybody, a place full of animation. And there is a gorgeous Pompeian room, with pillars and pilasters of black and white, and wall panels of brilliant Pompeian red, and there are a fountain and an orchestra playing beside a sunken pool. And one may go into an English room, an Elizabethan room with dark oak and high ceiling, with windows of leaded glass, a room of wonderful effectiveness, in its subdued lights and its grave beauty, and you think of Haddon Hall and Knole.
And there is still the famous Palmer House, with its salmon-colored walls, which was long thought to represent the last word in hotel achievement. An English traveler set down more than a quarter of a century ago, that he was told it was "the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth. " Both Palmer and Mrs. Palmer stood high, and being a hotel keeper was not permitted to be any drawback. On the contrary, Palmer set his name, "Potter
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Palmer," plainly and prominently upon the Palmer House. In Chicago, hotelkeeping may still bring substantial public prominence: the Sherman who gave name to the Sherman House was three times mayor of this city.
The invention of the free lunch has always been claimed for a Chicagoan, and to another has been given such distinction as may come from the quick lunch. And many a Chicagoan has felt intense civic pride in these claims, for the city is markedly a gustatory city, a city with the love of eating, a city devoted to viands.
Everywhere in the city, throughout its length and breadth, there is an astonishing number of eating places. Nor does this mean that people have no home life. It means devotion to eating and to the pleasant sociability of eating in public places. And the feature is most strongly marked within the limits of the Loop. Wherever you look, in this central section you see some eating place. They are on corners and between blocks, they are on side- walk level and upstairs and in basements: cafe- terias, restaurants, waffle shops, with rivalry in not- distinguished names. There are the Universal, the Wonder, the Ontra, there are the Bed Star and the Puritan; there are the Pony and the Little Gem; one offers "Quick Lunch for Bizzy Business Men: Eat it and Beat it;" numbers have but a single word over the doors, "Eat." To the thou- sands that you casually see, add the dining-rooms in the hotels and clubs, and the dining-rooms tucked
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away in business blocks, and the vast dining-rooms of the department stores, and it is amazing.
And I remember a restaurant that seems as if transplanted direct from some French provincial city, where the leathery-faced proprietor stands be- hind his own mahogany comptoir, where there are formal lambrequins of velvet and gold over the windows, where a little fat bus boy brings in the silver-domed meat; with always the very atmos- phere of France, not unlikely added to by the en- trance of a couple of French officers in their uni- forms of horizon blue. And the wife and the daugh- ter of the proprietor come in, and he quietly sits down to dine with them at a table next the comptoir.
CHAPTER VII
STREETS AND WAYS
HAT the streets of Chi- cago were long and flat and without end and that they impressed him with a great hor- ror was how the author of "Plain Tales from
the Hills" in making
expressed it vain wails plains. But the fleeting
of visiting
from the
after all,
impressions
authors need not be taken too seriously by any city. Our own Hawthorne wrote quite similarly regarding what seemed to him the immense dreariness of London, but I never heard that London was particu- larly overcome by it. Probably, in the case of both men, it was a matter of getting tired and having their feet hurt them, and homely explanations are often the best.
Although there are great areas of quiet in Chi- cago, as in the region of the Gold Coast, the city on the whole gives an impression of noise, and I am inclined to think that this is because the average
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STBEETS AND WAYS
Chicagoan has an actual love for noise, deeming it, subconsciously, as necessarily and pridefully a con- comitant of a city's energy and success. Walk on the sidewalk, in the central portion of the city, and you cannot hear your companion speak. Ride in a street car and you will find conversation impossible. The noise of the trolley cars is terrific, particularly at the unusually frequent switch intersections. Flat wheels, with their pounding jar, are common. Never, elsewhere, do you hear so many shrieking automobile brakes, nowhere else is there such a clat- ter of broken chains on the wheels. The delivery of coal at a high-class apartment house is likely to be made the occasion of a carnival of noise. Open a window, and a thunder of sound comes up.
There is a general sense of free-and-easiness, yet it does not show itself in the supposedly " Western " style of dress. The Chicago business man dresses like the business man of the East, except, now and then, for a hat with a slightly broader brim. But it is quite noticeable that the average Chicago busi- ness man has a more alert and forceful facial ex- pression and a better general air than has the average business man of the East. A city does not make such strides as this city has made without the striders showing it.
The average policeman does have somewhat of an easy-going air, compared with the police of most older cities. In height and build he is much like the New York policeman of the nineties, before the coming in of so many foreigners, and their accession
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
in large numbers to the New York force, lowered there the old-time American — or Irish! — physical standard.
If one does really notice an apparent heedless- ness on the part of a Chicago policeman, one must also notice that it disappears in an instant when there is anything to do : it is worth while to see him stop a speeder or some other traffic violator or gather up a blown-off hat, at the very moment when he might be thought to be wrapped in thought. And policemen in general, here, seem favorable to motorists. At a busy crossing, in a time of busy traffic, a car stalled at a crossing. There were only two young women in the car, and within twenty seconds twenty men were helping, or at least crowd- ing in an effort to help. One raised the radiator cover, another peered beneath the car. One came with gasoline, one with oil, one with a wrench, an- other with a screwdriver, others with nothing at all but the determination to aid. The policeman on crossing-post was master of ceremonies and let traffic fume and wait. And the two girls sat de- mure and quiet; and perhaps it should be added that they were unusually pretty.
The average of good looks, among what one terms the " higher" classes of Chicago women, is very high; in this, the city stands second to only one. The women clerks and stenographers are, in gen- eral, alert, self-possessed, capable, pleasant to look at, very feminine rather than strong-minded in type.
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STREETS AND WAYS
The 'buses of a line along the lake shore are in a double sense vehicles of discussion on the part of women and girls. One day, on a seat on the roof, immediately behind me, the conversation ranged from Mozart to the dramatic poets; but such pro- fundity did not keep them from very humanly switching to the clothes of a friend: "She has beautiful furs! But you know" an awed pause — "she paid for them on the installment plan!" There are such naive confidences as "I don't care for 'anything but reading and dancing"; a combination not met with in many places; and one day, directly in my ear: "I want to write a good short story and have money of my own."
It is often said that Chicago is not a colorful city ; and the grayish black to which soft coal smoke from myriad house chimneys and railway engines and factories has reduced so much of the city has really done away with much of the possibilities of brilliancy and variety of color. Arnold Bennett meant this when he said that Chicago reminded him of the Five Towns, which like this city, are remark- ably smoke grimed. And he looked upon Chicago 's smoky air as a mystifier and beautifier; which is certainly making a merit of misfortune. But Chi- cago has what his Five Towns do not have, the bright and vivid colorings that come from its posi- tion on the shore of the oftentimes brilliant lake. Another English visitor went home and wrote of "murky, grimy, choky Chicago."
And as to color — after all, it may be found here.
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
There comes the memory of seeing, on Monroe Street, two men in blue overalls and jumpers, load- ing green bales upon a high-sided wagon whose wheels and body were of bright yellow. And out on the western outskirts of the city I noticed a Russian-like effect in color, a warehouse of garish yellow standing in the middle of a field of swamp grass of vivid green. Even more strong color con- trast was in the Lake Calumet part of the city, where a building used for some kind of lime-burning work was all white as to roofs and sides, and the yard about was all white, too, from some deposit that fell or floated through the air, and against this striking and grim whiteness, rose two stacks from the tops of which came columns of excessively black smoke. And some recent pictures by Joseph Pennell show unexpectedness of color in supposedly commonplace portions of the city.
One is reminded of a marked difference between the Elevated lines of New York and those of Chi- cago, the latter running largely through rights of way, rather than through streets, thus giving much of unattractive and uninteresting views of squalid back yards and back doors, and at night running through darkness instead of along lighted streets.
Sunday night is a time for enjoyment. The theaters, at least the greater number, are open, and the advertising lights are blazing, and the billiard 'rooms are brilliantly lighted along their lines of tables, which are in full view. The sidewalks are thronged in a quite orderly but distinctly gay
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STREETS AND WAYS
fashion, although not so gay as before the incoming of recent laws.
Especially in those amusement and shopping centers which are away from the heart of the city is Sunday a day of promenading, motoring, dining and gayety. Always one notices these distant centers with interest. I do not refer to villages, taken into the city with small centers of business life already in existence, growing as the city grows, but centers which have sprung into busy and thronging life by what might seem chance. And there always comes to mind, more than others, the extremely busy and attractive center at Broadway and Lawrence Avenue, where for quite a region thereabouts stores have arisen, and moving-picture theaters; one or two of these being of extremely high standard as regards general plan and lavish- ness of expenditure. Chicagoans believe that there are about fifty outlying centers ; but visitors, with- out in the least doubting the statement, do not hap- pen to come upon so many as that. And, curiously, these local centers do not in the least offset the massed centering of the Loop.
As the State names its counties after dis- tinguished Americans, so the city similarly names many of its parks and streets; and it helps to up- hold the Americanism that one notes as a feature of the city. Among the parks are Washington and Lincoln, Grant and Jackson, McKinley and Garfield, and among the streets there are, as with the parks, Washington and Lincoln (the city does not tire of
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THE BOOK OF CHICAGO
Washington and Lincoln!) and a host of others, such as Sherman and Sheridan, Dewey and Custer and Polk and Taylor, Madison and Monroe and Webster.
The name of California is given to an avenue that runs for many miles, and Sacramento is also used as a name, there being a strong pro-California feeling here, but New York is quite ignored as a name, although the name of New England is used. Western Avenue is naturally and properly the long- est in the city, reaching from the southern limits of the city to the northern. Foreign names are used to some extent, including the one so often called, quite simply and frankly, "Goat" Street; and I was intrigued by the name of Napoleon some- where on a street corner.
It is odd for a city of the undoubted independ- ence of Chicago, that there is an intense following of the doings of the very rich; an idiosyncrasy which shows itself markedly in the "movies," where every action of wealthy men and women is watched with absorbed attention, and whose every motion, every act or gesture, of maid or valet, of the personal servant, is observed with fascinated absorption.
Some of the smaller politenesses, little nice- nesses, Chicago ignores. For example, few men take off their hats when standing on the street in talk with a lady. But hats-off is observed in eleva- tors the moment a lady enters. Many children are allowed to be lax in general politeness in public
90
STREETS AND WAYS
places ; it is seldom that a boy or girl gives up a seat in a street car for an old man or even for a gray- haired lady. Men do not greatly give up their seats to women, but this is coming to be the case in many cities, through the insistence of women themselves that they are in every way men 's equals.
In a street car one day I noticed an extraordi- nary devotion to courtesy. The car was so packed that nobody could move an inch. A woman, ad- mirably gowned, was quite unconscious of the fact that one of her hatpins kept touching the face of a man standing beside her and unable to escape. After quite a while he spoke, but even this was not to complain of his own injuries. For he said, gently: "Madam, I beg your pardon, but perhaps you would like to know that a drop of blood from my cheek is on the shoulder of your gown."
The surface cars are so run and managed as to be a matter of suffering, but some day Chicago will doubtless have subways like other great cities, or lines of motor 'buses. Now and then there is a car with a few vacant seats; and at such time I have noticed that there are almost sure to be several men and women standing, swaying and staggering as the car itself sways and staggers, and not taking any of the seats! One helplessly wonders why. Recently I saw this oddity commented upon in one of the newspapers, which published a letter asking if it could be explained by the fear of spoiling ex- pensive fur coats. To this another observer triumphantly replied that animals themselves wear
91
fur coats without injuring them. Upon which came a comment from the editor, dryly suggesting that a visit to the zoo would show whether or not furred animals injure their coats by sitting down.
The homes and business offices are heated per- fervidly; and I have wondered if this has anything to do with the baldness so common among youngish men. And one wonders also where the old men go ! For they are seldom seen except a few as exhibits at meetings of the Historical Society.
There is a smaller number of opticians shops to be seen, than in Boston or Philadelphia, and it naturally follows that there is a smaller than cus- tomary average of eye-glassed men. Although restaurants are incredibly numerous, the number of what are distinctively known as grocery stores seems small; at least, one does not notice many, although there are many of the type termed delica- tessen shops. Candy shops are common and so are shops for ice cream. It is curious to notice that artichokes are eaten quite commonly, even small shops selling them. And that Chieagoans are very largely farm boys and farm girls grown up is shown by the fact that so many, in springtime, love to cany home little bunches of sassafras root, the habit being apparently a survival from the times when every household held firmly to the tradition of sassafras as a " blood purifier."
There is a noticeably large number of little shops for repairing shoes. The astonishingly large num- ber of drug stores, most of them selling "soft
92
STREETS AND WAYS
drinks" and candy, makes for close competition; and one druggist has, at his shop door, a ther- mometer with shif table frame; with this he makes the weather seem a little colder than it is on a cold day and a little hotter than it is on a hot day; and people are so pleased to see a thermometer that expresses their feelings, that qnite a proportion of those who stop to look go in and buy.
Bordering the excellent residential sections there are a great many fine small shops, with articles for women or various supplies for households; small and intimate shops which it is pleasant to see still in existence as well as to see the great department stores. Much of the shopkeeping, alike in little places and big, is positively Parisian in standard, in attractiveness and charm. There are hat shops of French exquisiteness. And in the window of at least one prominent shop is "On parle Francois"; this being not only to attract such French as may come but also to please a large French element that settled here from Canada.
Chicago uses great quantities of box plants, with- out roots, in hotel and theater lobbies and as supple- mentary foliage in flower shops; and this is the more noticeable from the almost sacredness in which, in other cities, box is held.
Horses are still more in evidence than in most large cities ; and this gave a recent opportunity for a reporter, describing a street accident, to say that the horse was with difficulty "stood up on its four corners." Perhaps it was the same reporter who,
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narrating a bit of local heroism, declared that "Horatius had nothing on Jimmie."
Chicago has such oddities as houses with outside wooden steps up to the second-story front doors — not high steps to a merely high entrance, but steps leading ladder-like from the sidewalk to a literal second-story front door. It is presumably an idea retained from the time when most of the city was swamp, above which it was imperative to go. It is quite a feature with houses in the humbler districts, •and on an afternoon stroll one may count fifty or sixty of such houses. There are square miles of rather dingy, detached and discouraged dwellings built of wood, but they are more homey than the human hives of close-built cities, although the dinginess of sooty wood lends its aid to discourage- ment.
Overhanging cornices, in the business section, are permitted to drop water freely on the unhappy pedestrians, after a rain or when snow is melting. Every city has, from necessity, somewhat of this condition, but Chicago suffers particularly even in the best shopping districts. The sidewalks are also allowed to become sloppy, after a snow, and the cleaning of the sidewalks does not appear to be closely enforced, and the alleyway entrances that frequently cut across the sidewalks are often deep in slush. Often there is an unexpectedly steep step downwards from sidewalk to street pavement. Wet streets are largely due to the lowness of the city levels ; and one wonders, in all seriousness, why
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windmills are not utilized, as wise little Holland would utilize them. Chicago has the wind! There comes a general impression that it rains very easily here ; and indeed there are often sudden rains that may turn into drenching drives and go roaring through the streets. Nor is this impression of easy rain one which comes only to visitors, for it rains quite through "The Pit," book of Chicago by a Chicagoan that it is, and even the very last chapter begins, ' ' The evening had closed in wet and misty. ' '
Pavements are in general so excellent that some very bad ones, even in good residential districts, are noticeable by contrast. And these are remind- ers of the early days when all the streets were deep in mud. There are still places where, after a period of wet weather, one thinks of the oldest of Chicago stories, about a pedestrian noticing the head and hat of General Hart Stewart showing above the mud, whereupon, "You're in pretty deep, General!"; to which the reply: "Great Scott! I Ve got a horse under me ! ' ' And one needs to re- member not only that the city level has been raised but that up to the middle of the eighteen hundreds there were no sewers, and no sidewalks except a few planks. Old settlers tell, too, of water being sold by the bucketful, that being the drinking-water service of the city.
Chicago has no home district close to the business part of the city, that being a result of the solid de- velopment of business within a definite area, for it left no place for houses.
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Years ago, great lumber piles covered great areas along the river beds, but with the disappearance of the mighty forests of the neighboring States the piles have dwindled to comparative nothingness.
Chicago is a city of homes. And somehow the impression of an old-time friendliness of life has been retained; the comfortable, homey quality of life. And in spite of an immense influx of foreigners the American atmosphere has persisted, the American spirit is still dominant.
Even when the homes are in apartment houses the general aspect is so comfortable that the home- like impression remains. There are plots of grass and greenery around the buildings. The homes are detached, instead of being built closely shoulder to shoulder. Most of the apartment houses also have at least somewhat of lawn and greenery: they average four stories in height, and are generally so arranged that the rooms are grouped about a center, instead of being in a straight line like the cars of a railway train. There are also, too, some great caravansary apartment houses, tall and capacious. Huge beachside hotels, for both winter and sum- mer living, are a feature of life here, within the city limits but far to the south of the center and far to the north.
Chicago is not a towered or spired city ; there are few in all, and mostly they are where they cannot readily be seen. The street lights are admirable in appearance, in their round white globes on top of well-made poles ; and at many corners there are,
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on the lampposts, the letters "N," "S," "E," or "W," to tell strangers the points of the compass.
As showing one of the piquant contrasts of the city there comes the memory of a night following a mayoralty election. The day had been one of tremendous excitement. It had been a bitterly con- tested struggle with an almost unprecedented vote. Hundreds of thousands of ballots were cast. That night, huge crowds gathered to learn the result, especially in front of the building of a principal newspaper. But the crowd was quiet! Excite- ment and interest seemed to have vanished. Now and then came a cheer, but rather as if perfunc- torily. Nor was this because of doubt as to result, for very early it was seen which candidate was win- ning, nor was it that an unpopular man had won. It was a decorous street gathering, with a few boys hovering on the outskirts of the throng and from time to time spiritlessly essaying horns! The slo- gan of the winner was that he was not to be " bought, bluffed or bossed," and that was an ex- cellent example of Chicago's excellent advertising phraseology; which brief political phrasing makes me think of a brief religious wording on a placard in front of one of the churches: "Only once a stranger. ' '
For a city so full of the very essence of animated existence, it is odd to notice the great attention paid to the business of undertakers. Of course, Chicago is noted for its undertakings ; but not of that kind ! A show window centered with a gorgeous ' ' casket ' '
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is certain to attract a constant succession of awed and intent spectators. And there are such adver- tisements as "the spirit of emotion is tenderly woven into every bouquet from our sympathetic hands." At the same time, the city does not hold its cemeteries to be among its sights; visitors are not taken to them as to places of importance and in- terest ; not even to Graceland, where there are many of the most famous of Chicagoans, and where John Kinzie and his descendants rest ; in peace, one may hope, although to judge the future by the past, the original Kinzie will keep on moving, Graceland having been attained only after his body had been several times disinterred and moved on.
As a local description has it, in Graceland "there are presented suggestive features which, while not inharmonious with the purpose of a necropolis, are cheerful, quieting and restful." Although one may wonder under which heading comes the startling statement, in a description of one of the tombs, that "Five persons are now enclosed within its solid walls"!
The city cannot help being black so long as the smoke is permitted. And if you notice stenog- raphers lean out of high office windows to catch sight of something in the street below, you will at the same time notice that they first lay paper on the sill, to keep their hands clean. Much in the city being grim and grimy makes it the more noticeable that such a proportion of men wear white stockings, as if in defiance. Yet laundry is handled but
98
slowly. Glove-cleaners, in this city where gloves are so quickly soiled, expect to take a week for cleaning, or think it a special dispensation to do it in four days: the twenty-four hour glove service of other cities is unknown.
The iron boxes on the curbs, about two and a half feet long and eighteen inches high, are not pirate chests, although they give that picturesque re- minder, but are what they are marked as being, aids in keeping the city clean. They are usually so per- versely placed that, to lift the cover to drop in litter, one must leave the sidewalk and go into the gutter; but the people take pains to do this. But another use for them is advantage points for standing upon to see a parade or any excitement.
Although there is much of effort to keep many of the streets clean, many others are neglected. And vacant lots are likely to be entirely neglected. That wagons are permitted to be parked, throughout the night, in vacant lots, is an astonishing survival for so highly civilized a city. And a habit in some parts of the city, of throwing refuse matter upon vacant lots, does not represent the best possible method of garbage disposal.
The city of Edinburgh, in the Middle Ages and up to within less than a century ago, permitted the throwing of refuse from the windows of the many- storied houses whose quaintness gives such charm. And modern Chicago seems to have tried, at least in some parts of it, to simulate that ancient custom of an ancient city. For a recent superintendent of
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police, according to a publication of one of the women's clubs under date of 1917, sent out a notice directing his officers to check "the throwing of gar- bage from the windows of the first, second and third floors of buildings to streets and alleys." But why such favoritism to the fourth!
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CHAPTER VIII
CLUBS ABE TRUMPS
LUBS are trumps in Chi- cago ! Every- body belongs to a club ; everybody that i s clubable, that is, to use a word beloved of Doctor Johnson. Most men and women belong to sev- eral clubs. And there are some belong to many clubs.
All the principal clubs except, of course, the country clubs, are close together and close to every- thing in the heart of the city. Within a radius of less than a mile, within a few minutes' walking dis- tance from the banks, from the wholesale and retail stores, from the Art Institute, from the Public Li- brary, the clubs are located. They are busily used. Business men, authors, artists, bankers — at noon
101
and in the evening they are in these clubs. Clubs long ago became an intimate feature of +he daily life of Chicago.
There is a mingling of classes which is unknown elsewhere in anything like the same degree, and which is of vast importance to a city that would re- main open-eyed and possess continuously the vigor of youth. At a club where a stranger would expect to meet, for example, only writers, he will find, be- side the latest poet, the oldest bank president, be- side the author of a novel of Chicago life will be a dealer in laces or leather. And if he goes into a business man's club he will find, in conversation with a lawyer fresh from his case in court, a writer whose work has attracted national attention, he will notice the head of a department store or a promi- nent architect in conf abulative talk with an editorial writer from one of the newspapers. The meeting and mingling of engineers, architects, artists, mer- chants, manufacturers, novelists, essayists, para- graphists, poets, makes of the clubs a unique and powerful force. Every one finds an opportunity to give and receive ideas. And each club, though a meeting place for various classes, holds to its own distinctive line and develops most strongly along that line.
Club characteristics which supposedly belong only to some old city with a long-established society, as a London, a Philadelphia, are found to be firmly established here. Here are clubs of exclusiveness, clubs the majority of whose members are men of
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settled position, literary clubs which seem of as firm consistency and of as excellent flavor as if long periods of time had gone into their making. Even the newer clubs quickly take on an air as of stability and age. And there are noble club buildings which would honor any city of the world. And, the city not being possessed of the mania of moving on, hav- ing no " uptown" bee in its civic bonnet, there is a feeling of permanency in the location of the clubs which is very restful. And already there are clubs in which, to gain membership, one must join a lengthening line of aspirants: one of the big clubs has a waiting list of twenty-two hundred.
But there are clubs and clubs. There are some whose memberships are frequently advertised, to sell or to buy. The newspapers run a regular ad- vertisement section of "Club and Association Mem- berships" and in it the names of a few clubs of repu- tation sometimes figure.
Instead of being sleepy places for sleepy men, or mere places for imbedding oneself in an easy chair to read the newspapers and magazines, or places for gossip and scandal — although there are doubt- less elements of all these — the clubs of Chicago are vivid with mental life. The club rooms are just as quiet and restful as those of other cities; they are not in the least noisy with conversation or argu- ment; but they are really meeting and thinking places, as well as places with a full proportion of comforts. Most of them have highly popular din- ing rooms and their being so centrally convenient
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for noonday getting together is of high importance. But they are not merely places where men make two chins grow where only one grew before.
Benjamin Franklin, with his Junto, made one of the aims of that remarkable club the welcoming to the city of visitors; and this idea is finely carried out in Chicago ; and many a traveler goes home and declares that in the city of Chicago he found the finest hospitality in the world. I recollect having heard this said as far away as in England and in France.
Women are prominent in the club life of Chicago : and not only as charming figures in the women's dining rooms of the men's clubs, or at the tea-hour in their own. Their club rooms, like those of the men, are within the circumscribed limits of the busi- ness center, and their clubs busy themselves in mat- ters of art and literature, in matters of home-mak- ing or social concern, in matters of public good or public evil.
The oldest club for women, among those that stand for civic service, is the Chicago Woman's Club, and in its half century of existence (it was founded in 1876) it has made an ever-lengthening record of achievement in arousing public opinion. It has from the first been an organized center of civic initiative and inspiration. And the club feels pride in the fact that within it originated the idea of the National Federation of Women's Clubs. With its more than thirteen hundred members, the club has thus far gone on without a building of its
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THE MULLION-WINDOWED UNIVERSITY CLl'B
1 f? iY
OF I HE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CLUBS ARE TRUMPS
own, but has had commodious quarters in one of the great office buildings facing the lake; but as I write plans are well toward completion for the put- ting up of a new building to be exclusively the prop- erty of this club.
Among the numerous delightful women's clubs — I was about to alter that, and say "delightful clubs for women," when it occurred to me that the first phraseology was the better after all — I may men- tion one of the newer ones, the Cordon, energetic, with a membership of well over five hundred and with a thoroughly delightful atmosphere. I do not remember being told of a specific purpose except to be an excellent club. Its rooms are in the Fine Arts building, with a pair of entrance doors of carved oak, as excellent in effect as if from some Spanish or Italian grandee's home of the Renais- sance. A room for dining has a monastic effect, with a raised floor at one end, with a sort of "above the salt" table. Walls and arches are in buff- plaster, and there are tables and chairs of mellow brown oak. The china has a narrow black haw- thorn border. And another long room parallel to this is all a greeny-blue as to chairs, with portraits of Italian ladies — we all love Simonetta! — and the fair faces of the Renaissance.
The Fortnightly is in the Fine Arts building ; and notabie is its meeting room, large and rectangular, with high-coved ceiling. It is of very quiet effect, with creamy walls, and a raised platform backed by green-toned tapestry. The especial feature is the
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presentation of important subjects by important people. When tea is served in quiet Canton china, it is in a small room that has old and lovely furni- ture. This club seems to average an unusual number of women of wealth and acknowledged posi- tion and to stand for the quiet and conservative in taste.
At the Fortnightly and at some of the other clubs, I noticed much of real lace, in collars and neck garniture, very quiet, not widespread shoulder dis- play, and mainly worn by elderly ladies and young matrons. There were Venetian, Brussels, Honi- ton ; and I think more of it is worn and prized here, as in England, than in any other American city that I have noticed.
The Eleanor clubs are for self-supporting girls, offering opportunity to sit and read or talk, and to meet callers, and where a girl may be accom- panied by a brother or a man friend in the dining room. The central club occupies practically an en- tire floor of an office building in the business center, with a membership of over eighteen hundred; and there are branch club houses in various parts of the city where girls may live who do not have homes of their own.
In Chicago, there is the Beresford Cat Club, and there are more than a dozen Households of Ruth, and there is a branch of the Daughters of Isabella, and there are three Councils of the Degree of Pocahontas, and there are a number of branches of the Knights and Ladies of Security, and there is
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the Prince of Wales Chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the British Empire. There are various Tents of the Daughters of Veterans, and there are also Daughters of the Confederacy.
It is astonishing and it is remindful of what mingling of blood went into the making of Chicago and from what proud American ancestry came the makers of the city, to find that here are organiza- tions, strongly entrenched, such as one's first thought would scarcely draw away from the Thir- teen Original States! For here are the Daughters of the Revolution, and here is a branch of the Society of Colonial Wars, and here are even May- flower descendants.
The Colonial Dames are also here, in this new city, and they have established an American His- tory scholarship at the University of Chicago, and are working steadily to increase patriotism, through aiming to give an understanding of Ameri- can institutions and ideals to foreigners of the city, by means of many lectures, by the buying and dis- tribution of books, and by interesting school teachers in the work.
The Arts Club, in its location on Michigan Boule- vard high up in an office building, is one of the examples of the extraordinary results that can be attained, without building especially but by utiliz- ing what may be found. There is a room, high and long, across the front of the building, and one notices the marble pillars, slender and dark-green, and black lamps with vellum shades. Back from
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this room extends a room so long and narrow as to be almost a corridor, and when dinners are served all is effective, with the long candle-lit table, the gowns, the faces, in the softly long perspective. An appreciation of the beauty-loving quality in Chicagoans comes upon one very strongly in a place like this. When there is a play given by members of the club, it is likely to be very well done; and I remember an excellent presentation of "The Im- portance of being Earnest." Local play-writing is encouraged, by an offer to give production to any play that is recommended by a special committee. The club is a club that is different, so to speak, for its object is to bring art lovers and art producers together, for mutual benefit, by means of exhibi- tions, decorations and plays.
There is so great an amount of club life that there is a marked lack of knowledge as to where people live. Men meet one another at the clubs and then vanish from one another's sight. It may even be the case that intimate friends meet at the club of one or the other of them, to the practical exclu- sion of home hospitalities; and the men's clubs with dining rooms where women are made welcome, and the women's clubs where men may dine, add to the ease of keeping up family friendships away from home.
The country clubs are, as with other great cities, of an attractive order, such as the Exmoor and Glen View, with golf as a principal feature; and there is the unique-looking South Shore, palatial
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albeit of stucco, with its immensities of corridor space, its superbness in size and proportions of the interior. In contrast to this is another club to the southward, the quiet, friendly, intimate Quadrangle Club at the University.
But one always comes back to the center of things, for in the center of things are almost all of the clubs.
The White Paper Club meets once a week at its meeting room in one of the central hotels. It is an interesting club, for one meets newspaper writers and artists, publishers and advertising managers, live men of live ideas; it is a lunching club, and there is good talk with the luncheons. And if, as at other clubs, the talk is sometimes of business, it is but making friendly use of club facilities. The idea that a club is a drowsy place, where business or the mere thought or mention of business is shocking, is not at all consonant with Chicago ideas. A Chicago club is a convenient place to talk busi- ness as well as a place for social gathering and con- verse, for rest and recreation. Now and then some one jibes, at some club or another, with such phrases as, "You meet your tailor there and talk business," but the majority of clubmen quite ignore such flings.
The Union League is important, and its member- ship id largely of oldish men (oldish for Chicago!) men of business, men of politics, men of wealth. And one notices that the name, as with the similarly named organization in New York, is the "Union
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League Club," instead of, as in Philadelphia, the 1 'Union League." The Chicago Club is likewise a club with a considerable proportion, and perhaps a preponderance, of what are here deemed oldish men. The club itself is more than half a century old, and its members are largely of the firmly es- tablished in wealth. It holds itself rather high and stiff — that is, stiff- for Chicago! — but the members smilingly admit that at the time of organi- zation it was necessary to instruct some of the im- portant men among the charter members as to the meaning and uses of a club and club membership. Among its members have been such men of national fame as Chief Justice Fuller, Robert T. Lincoln and General Sheridan. You may be told, also, that the first president of the club was one McCagg, and, with a fine particularity as to details, your club- member informant may add that he was the hus- band of the sister of the first mayor of the city. There used to be, frankly, a " millionaire's table," in this club; but the frankness of the early days has largely gone: there could readily enough be a roomful of such tables now, but they don't call them so.
The Chicago Athletic Association may stand as a type of strong and admirable club, with its great list of members, including a wide variety of classes, and its great and notable building looking out over the Lake Front; a roomy capacious building, of an architecture of which its members are immensely
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proud, and with a fine air of cheerful restfulness and an atmosphere of comradeship.
Equally typical, in its way, is a tiny little club which is not really a club at all but something which holds the finest essence of clubdom. I do not know anything in other cities precisely to compare with it. The Little Room, it is called. A group of men and women, of ideas and ideals, gather one after- noon of each week to interchange their ideas and judge of each other's ideals. Artists and authors meet there, with a sprinkling of architects: it is a closely friendly little group, meeting in the studio of Ralph Clarkson. It is so without pretense or pretentiousness that it can take with a smile the appellation of the " artistic holy of holies," be- stowed upon it in friendliness. A " quaint close corporation ' ' I have also known it to be termed.
The Cliff Dwellers is the name of a club which might be called the Larger Room, for it is much like the Little Room except that it is in every re- spect a formal club and that its membership is of men only. In the evening, however, and for dinner, women are guests. Primarily the Cliff Dwellers is a club for writers, and every local author is ex- pected to be a member; the club takes its name be- cause its rooms look out over the lake, from the very cornice line of one of the Lake Front build- ings. Artists belong, and professional and business men who are interested in artistic and literary sub- jects. It is not only a most agreeable club, in atmos-
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phere, but is a strong influence along the best lines of Chicago development.
The Commercial Club is an organization of lead- ers in Chicago life and finance, always ready to aid when an object especially appeals.
A club of weight and character, of large and im- portant membership, is the University Club. It occupies its own building, a building superb in size and symmetry, facing out toward the lake from Michigan Avenue ; a building Gothic throughout, as- tonishing in mastery of great height. It is, through- out, a surprising building in beauty and impressive- ness. And it is remarkable that in such a city of newness, university men should be so powerfully in evidence.
It is a men's club, distinctively, but there is a women's dining room; a large, low, pleasant room, of leather and oak; it might be a Cambridge or an Oxford room, perfect as it is in soft, rich, dignified detail, far removed from gloss and glow, filled at luncheon with wives and daughters and guests; a sort of happy, easy, protected type, far removed from the tawdry glories of a "peacock alley" and not to be seen from the street or corridor.
But the most remarkable feature is the great high main dining-room, splendid in its Gothic ef- fectiveness and with windows glowing with stained- glass color. This, you will be told, is the finest club dining-room in the world ; and you are inclined to gasp; and then you begin to wonder precisely which one you could place ahead of it ! It has not,
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indeed, the age and associations of some of the old dining halls, but Chicago merely feels, in the face of any such objection, that age and association will come with time. And I appreciate the sincerity of a member who gravely said to me : "When I eat my dinner here I feel as if I am dining in West- minster Abbey!"
And this reminds me that somewhere in the city there is a Society of St. George of Tanias! And, as if not to be outdone, others have formed a Tribe of Ben Hur. And are there not also the Royal Black Knights of the Camp of Israel!
CHAPTER IX
THE PASSING OF PRAIRIE AVENUE
EAIEIE AVENUE,
"the sunny street that held the sifted few,'* still remains in the mind and memory of many a Chicagoan as illustrative of all that is rich and splendid in city life. Some of the most costly of Chicago homes may still be seen there, and some of the city's most delightful peo- ple still dwell there, but social leadership, on the whole, has gone northward to the Gold Coast. With the departure of social leadership, even though some of the social leaders still have their homes there, the passing of Prairie Avenue began. As any great city grows, it leaves behind it once prosperous sections; and as this is the region of Prairie and Calumet and Indiana avenues it is remindful, through these names as- sociated with the Indians, of the custom of some of the tribes, when on the march, to leave behind to perish such as could not keep up with the necessary swiftness of the pace.
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THE PASSING OF PRAIRIE AVENUE
An example of the changes that have come is given by the First Presbyterian Church. It was prominent among the churches of this section and was just one block from Prairie Avenue. It took pride in having the tallest steeple in Chicago and in having a congregation of importance; but the church spire has vanished and the building stands bleak and bare and dreary, and the congregation has deserted the old building and has gathered in a new one elsewhere.
I think it was Dean Hole, that merry old soul, who first put a Prairie Avenue story in print, after it had passed for quite a while in Chicago circles by word of mouth. One of the very rich men of this very rich quarter, a man sour and dour, who had the reputation of being grasping, fell sick, and the doctor ordered that he walk every morning to his place of business. The first morning, he looked so unwontedly happy that his business partner asked him what had occurred. "I have done three splendid acts," the man replied. And he went on to say that as he walked down to business he saw a woman with a child in her arms weeping on the steps of a church. He stopped and asked her what was the matter and was told that she wanted to have her child baptized, but that a dollar was de- manded and she did not have it. Whereupon, "I have only a ten dollar bill. Take it. Go in, get the child baptized, and bring me the change. And so" — this with immensely satisfied triumph — "And so, I made a woman happy ; and placed her child upon
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the heavenly road; and I got rid of a counterfeit ten dollar bill and have nine good dollars in my pocket ! ' '
Dean Hole also quotes with joy some statements made in a speech of welcome at a dinner in his honor by one who seems to have been of Prairie Avenue: " Chicago is the largest city in America, has more miles of railroad, more vessel tonnage, more freight, larger parks, dirtier streets, a sootier atmosphere, a more malodorous river, more gamblers, more good things, more bad things, than any other city." That was some years ago, while Prairie Avenue still possessed more of the im- portant spokesmen for the city, but, to add to the joy of superlatives, I have before me a statement made in print this present year: "A casual in- vestigation shows that Chicago is America's prin- cipal piano market, its chief mail-order center, its leading stove market. The city has the busiest street corner in the world, the most traveled bridge in existence, the largest department store on the map, the largest art school on the globe." And all these from a mere ''casual investigation!"
The Prairie Avenue district is narrowly hemmed in by the railway tracks and lake on the east, and the encroaching business district on the west, mak- ing it impossible to expand or even to hold its own. From the northward, what may be called a sort of debris of business has been swept ahead of the Grant Park and Lake Front improvements, and only a few blocks to the southward is a region
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THE PASSING OF PRAIRIE AVENUE
which, as Chicagoans themselves love to put it, is the " greatest negro settlement outside of Africa!"
In this encroaching district immediately to the westward there stands what one is tempted to term the ugliest building in Chicago, a huge building, hugely barrel roofed, with pseudo-mediaeval battle- ments and towers. One day, in Rome, I was told of a Chicago woman visitor who asked if it were really true that the Pope never went outside of the Coliseum; adding, that they had a Coliseum them- selves, at home, in Chicago. And this is the Coliseum.
They hold great meetings there, the place at least being a convenience from its size, and now and then one sees upon it the sign of "Greatest Show on Earth" — which, oddest of all odd facts, is not, even with such a description, a Chicago show! — and it is a place for great conventions. And they tell you (those who boast of the "greatest settle- ment outside of Africa") that a darky, dressed with an elaborateness such as only a darky dandy can achieve, was walking past this huge building of ugliness from his nearby home when he was espied and accosted by a white delegate who thought him possible political prey. "Are you a delegate?" To which came the answer, coldly dis- dainful: "No, sah! No, sah! It's bad enough bein' a niggah without bein' a delegate!"
Hemmed in on all sides, actually and potentially, from the first, it is astonishing that men of astute business minds should have built in the Prairie
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Avenue district. And, indeed, there never were enough great houses in number, to explain the pre- dominance of the neighborhood for years. The ex- planation lay in the character of the individuals. The houses built by the wealthiest among them were not models of grace or beauty or dignity; they were put up in an era designated, from the name of the long regnant British Queen, as Victorian, although it might have been fairer and assuredly would have been more chivalrous to term them as of the period of Hayes or Arthur, or Benjamin Har- rison. But whether named from Queen or Presi- dents it was an era in which the wealthy reveled in the heavily and solidly and expensively in- artistic, with somewhat of a popular towered effect. In most of these bizarre houses of heavily heaped wealth, bizarre things were done, seeking bizarre effects; for example, as I remember noticing in the memoirs of a Boston woman who visited here shortly before the Great Fire, the serving of ices, at a luncheon in one of these great houses, was on actual calla lilies, each lily resting on its own leaf on the plate: "All in good taste," wrote the Boston visitor, so perhaps one is over critical in thinking that it was not a nice way to treat calla lilies.
Most of the great homes of this region that are still kept up as homes are closed and dreary during a great part of each year, the owners using them as city houses only, and living a more charming existence in some residential suburb, such as Lake
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Forest, or, still farther, perhaps drawn by the beauties of Lake Geneva.
Business has not only pressed close against the borders of the Prairie Avenue region but has actually begun to scatter through the district; and it seems odd to notice a once while residence turned into a factory for hairpins. Another house, made over for business offices, bears the saddening sign that it is for rent for " school or offices" or, last blow of all, "sanitarium."
But another and different business, as to outward aspect, with fine architectural effects, has also in- vaded the so recently socially sacred quarter. A big printing house has put up a building there, with a charming entablatured line, on the exterior of the building, of open books, in terra cotta : and the en- tire building is unobtrusively excellent in its effect. Another business structure has a fine stone balcony ; and there is a business building with an attractive line of armorial bearings.
When one notices the huge stones slanting down over the deep gutter crossings, one of the evidences of care for pedestrians in the already distant days, the feeling comes that the district might be worthy of a better fate than gradual desertion. And the thought of pedestrians brings thoughts of trolley cars, these being the two acknowledged methods of getting about, for the hoi polloi, up to recent years ; and this comes from the memory of a novel by a Chicago novelist, Robert Herrick (who was once highly praised for some verses written by the
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Robert Herrick of long ago, who died five years be- fore La Salle first reached the site of Chicago). In the novel by the Chicago Robert Herrick, the daughter of one of the Prairie Avenue palaces finds that her motor-car and chauffeur have vanished, and she is thereby quite helpless, having no idea how to get home; she thinks vaguely of taking a trolley-car, knowing, in a way, that people actually ride in trolley-cars and presumably reach certain destinations; but would not risk the experiment, never having been on a trolley-car in her life! — • a supposed situation which seems somewhat gro- tesque, for the distance is not great and a Chicago girl would surely have been sensible enough to walk.
She lived in a ''formidable pile of red brick" near Eighteenth Street; and that street is memor- able as the scene of the long-ago Chicago Massacre. For at what is now Eighteenth Street and Calumet Avenue the massacre centered ; and one pictures the doomed party making their slow way along while the Indians, from what we may term, on account of what was afterwards built there, their department store camp, gathered and watched and followed; and here they did their killing. There were no houses along the lake then, southward from the fort near the mouth of the river; there were no streets and no store; but one imagines the tragedy, at times, as if the party came up the brilliant Lake Front to be killed at Prairie Avenue. Calumet Avenue and Prairie Avenue adjoin and parallel
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each other, and the killing raged around where both these thoroughfares were to be. In those early days, along the lake there was but an ancient Indian trail used by dusky tribesmen for long genera- tions.
Never was a movement more definitely arranged, in every detail, for disaster. It was in August of 1812. War had broken out with England. The Indian allies of the English were hovering hungrily. The commander of the Fort, Captain Heald, de- cided to attempt to make the overland journey to Fort Wayne, the nearest place of refuge. He called the Indians together and told them of his plans! He promised them all the supplies and muskets and whiskey that his party could not carry, and the Indians met his declaration with ejaculations of joy. After that, he took several days to complete his preparations, and, upon Kinzie's warning him of the danger of handing over whiskey and firearms, he broke open what whiskey barrels remained and let the whiskey run out, and broke up the muskets ; all of which naturally angered the Indians.
Heald might have remained and defended the fort. General Hull, his superior, sent orders from Detroit to evacuate the post, but Heald might have exercised the right to act on his own judgment, he having full knowledge of the situation and General Hull not being in touch with it. Or he might, had he been a swiftly resolute man, have marched away without any delay, his only possible chance of mak- ing a safe retreat. But to wait for several days,
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and to let the Indians know all his plans, and to anger them needlessly by disappointment — the whole thing was such a series of blunders as could scarcely fall to the lot of one man to make. But Heald did not miss a single blunder.
He seems to have had something fewer than a hundred to care for, including officers and soldiers and a number of wives and children. A brave young American officer, romantically chivalrous and well acquainted with Indians and their ways, Cap- tain Wells, unexpectedly appeared, having made his way through the wilderness, from Fort Wayne, starting the moment he heard of the garrison's danger and hoping to be of help in defending the fort. He brought with him fifteen Indians, friendly to the Americans. Wells was bitterly and passion- ately angered when he learned that Heald was going to march them all out to what seemed certain death.
On August the fifteenth the party left the fort. It was a pathetic and desperate sight. Wells had painted his face black in Indian fashion, in token of certain death, and a few musicians brokenly played the Dead March. There were a few rough wagons; a few rode on horseback; most went on foot.
Kinzie, too, had to leave his home, and he put his family in his boat, to cross the lake, while he him- self disinterestedly accompanied the soldiers, hop- ing to be able to aid them through his own influence with the Indians.
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The tragic notes of the Dead March, the sobs of the children, the frightened silence of the women, the curses of the men, the already frightened brag- gadocio of Heald, the blackened face of Wells — the Indians spreading along abreast of the thin line and silent except for now and then a signal whoop — thus, holding to the trail close to the side of the lake, the refugees went on. One shivers at the imagination of the agony drawn out for two miles, with every moment the expectation of attack, and with the Indians flitting along like shadows.
After holding off for two miles, playing with the fugitives like cats with particularly helpless mice, the Indians swarmed to the attack. Even now mili- tary skill could have done something. Defense could have been made. The party could have fought its way back to the fort. But there was nothing of military skill in Heald. He was as in- capable as was General Hull himself. There was random fighting, there was desperate individual heroism, there was the killing of women and chil- dren and the killing and torturing and scalping of prisoners; the usual and expected details of Indian fighting. The whites lost some fifty in all. Some forty men and a few women were permitted to sur- render and their lives were spared owing mainly to the influence of Kinzie. Poor Wells was killed, after displaying desperate bravery and killing at least eight : and the savages devoured his heart that they might thus acquire a share of his courage: a compliment which he, more keenly than most men,
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would have appreciated had he been in a position where appreciation was possible. Heald, one finds, was among the saved; and his wife was saved through her readiness in presenting to the Indian who seized her the mule upon which she was riding — he not stopping to realize that her title to it had become suddenly very faint, and owing also to her promise that at some later day she would get for him a dozen bottles of whiskey. When the step- daughter of Kinzie, wife of Lieutenant Helm, the second in command, was on the point of being toma- hawked, when indeed she had received one stroke of the blade and was about to receive another, another Indian rushed in and, grasping her from the Indian about to kill her, dragged her toward the lake, close at hand, crying out that he would drown her; when in reality it was a feint to save her.
The Indians did not harm Kinzie. It was with reluctance that they even led him off as a prisoner. He was not long held captive, but he did not see Chicago again for some years and the fort was meantime burned by the Indians and the locality was for a time a place of desolation.
So the F. F. C.'s — it was too late to include them among F. F. V.'s, the Virginia government of Chi- cago having ended — the F. F. C.rs went a dreadful journey to a tragedy. And there a monument has been put up, at the lake-side end of Eighteenth Street, close behind the great Pullman mansion and facing out toward Prairie and Calumet Avenues. It is a spirited and excellent monument, a bronze
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grouping of figures on a lowish granite base. It is an odd feature, that this monument to the memory of a massacre actually perpetuates the saving of life instead of the taking of it, for it represents the rescuing of the wife of Helm, by Black Partridge, from the hands of the Indian who was about to kill her.
Upon the sides of the granite base are bronze bas- reliefs representing scenes connected with the massacre, and especially notable is that which shows the soldiers and civilians, in a long line, on foot, on horseback or in wagons, setting forth on their march to death ; a grimly effective bit.
The soot from the near-at-hand railway seemp thicker and blacker here than elsewhere even in the Prairie Avenue district, and thick lying cinders from the railway engines crunch beneath the feet as one walks around the monument.
With the great houses shuttered and deserted in winter-time, and with front steps and driveways thick with untrodden snow, much of the region then wears a desolate aspect. And I remember an odd and characteristic sight, a long double line, on an alley, of silent and unused-coach houses, out of which the barouches of the eighties used statelily to roll.
And as I noticed one closed house, of unusually pathetic dreariness, there came to me a verse by one of the Chicago poets (it was Grace Boylan, one of those who find inspiration in their own en- vironment) :
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"Cold and cheerless, bare and bleak, The old house fronts the shabby street; And the dull windows eastward gaze, As their cobwebbed brows they raise. ' '
And another of the houses, as I passed by one evening, made me think of some lines of another Chicago poet, Bodenheim:
' ' The ghost of a purple-roofed house That ever held repose. ' '
It was a few blocks to the southward of the dis- trict, that there stood the home of that Stephen A. Douglas who made so great a figure in Chicago and in the nation. And in tiny Douglas Monument Park, at the lake shore end of Thirty-fifth Street, is his monument. His marble sarcophagus is in view, within the crypt, and deeply engraved are the words which, good American that he was, he left as his final and solemn admonition: ''Tell my children to obey the laws and uphold the Constitu- tion." A round granite tower rises above the crypt, and aloft, on its top, stands Douglas in bronze. " Preparing to dive into the Lake," wrote a cynical Boston visitor; but in reality looking, in bronze, up on top of the granite, so old-time Chi- cagoans will tell you, precisely as he looked in life : and they will tell you that, though of bronze and granite character, the '* little giant" was a lovable and likable man.
To have the President of the United States, An- drew Johnson, lay the corner-stone of the Douglas
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monument was the occasion of one of the most curious episodes in American political history; for Johnson's trip to Chicago for the unveiling de- veloped into the famous " swinging around the circle" in the course of which there were so many exciting scenes and so many unwise statements. Petroleum V. Nasby, with his genial backhanded- ness of humor, declared the tour to have been under- taken "to arouse the people to the danger of con- centrating power in the hands of Congress instead of diffusing it through one man. ' '
Beaten by Lincoln for the Presidency, Douglas held the hat of his successful rival, that funny huge- ness of headgear, during the Inaugural address; and went to his home city to die. But he did not die in his own house : more fittingly, under the cir- cumstances, like a soldier meeting his end on the battlefield, he died at the old Tremont House, so closely associated with the political fortunes of both Lincoln and Douglas, and the scene of numberless political meetings and consultations and contests and speeches. From the balcony of that old Tremont House (it stood at Dearborn and Lake Streets) Douglas delivered to a huge crowd the first of his mighty speeches in rivalry with Lincoln, and from the same balcony Lincoln made a still more mighty reply: not of the formal Lincoln-Douglas debates, these, but immediately before that astonishing series commenced.
As the Convention which nominated Lincoln be- gan its sessions, the Illinois delegation met at the
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Tremont House and discussed among other things the tactics of the Seward men, who had organized a system of tremendous cheering at every mention of Seward 's name. One of the Illinois delegates told of a man whose voice could be heard against a storm on Lake Michigan, or, on a calm day, it was claimed he could be heard across the lake. Another knew where, on the Illinois River, lived a Doctor Ames, said to be unequaled as a shouter. Ames was telegraphed for, to come on the first train. The Chicago man was also secured. And at the head of parties of shouters on either side of the Wigwam, these two shouted and roared at every mention of Lincoln or whenever a Lincoln leader motioned with his handkerchief. Never was there such shouting! Seward 's men, mere mild New Yorkers, were out- classed into insignificance. And Lincoln was nomi- nated amid a terrific uproar of voices.
In 1856 Lincoln wrote of Douglas : ' ' Twenty years ago Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then — he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious — I, perhaps, quite as much as he. With me the race of ambition had been a failure — a flat failure. With him it had been one of splendid success." And it was in that year that Douglas4 farsightedly gave ten acres^ of land, at Thirty-fourth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, for the beginning of a "University of Chi- cago. He was one of the incorporators, was one of the trustees till the time of his death, and for at least part of the time president of the board. It
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did not succeed, as it would have done had Douglas lived. In the course of its years of financially troubled existence it won honor and friends, and in manly fashion it passed over its title, the University of Chicago, to the institution founded by Rocke- feller, and the new university courteously adopted the alumni of the old as her own, reenacted the de- grees of the old university, and placed a bronze bust of Douglas in one of the new university build- ings. But it did not establish itself, in accordance with the ideas of Douglas, immediately to the south- ward of the Prairie Avenue district.
The well-known men connected with the limited area of the Prairie Avenue region, the owners of the old homes there, won honor from this "city whose merchants are princes," to use the fine old phrase of old Isaiah, when writing of Tyre, a Chi- cago of the distant past. And he goes on to say that the city's " merchandise shall be for them that dwell before the Lord, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing" — to have sufficient food, and dur- able clothing (what a supposedly modern phrase put in by the Elizabethan translators!) and to be religious, were thus his ideals for a city ; and, some- what incongruously, there comes to mind the story of the minister who, living on one of the streets that cross Prairie Avenue, was called upon one evening to perform a marriage ceremony at his home, for a young couple, strangers to him: after which the new-made Benedick somewhat nervously took the clergyman aside and said: "I'm sorry that I
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haven't any money; but if you'll lead me to your cellar I'll show you how to make your electric meter stop registering"!
When I think of this district of Prairie Avenue there oome not only thoughts of tragic history and of "merchant princes," again to quote Isaiah, and of slow-vanishing glory, but also the memory of a huge apparent water tank, standing on a low flat roof near the Massacre Monument and seen from the railway, and bearing, when I saw it, the one word, mysterious-seeming under the circumstances, with nothing accompanying or explaining, "Milk."
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CHAPTER X
SOME BOOKS AND WEITEES
IPLING frankly railed at Chicago. Every- thing there was un-* pleasant or bad. He wandered "through scores of miles of these terrible streets, jostling some few hundred thousand of these terrible people." And he was worried because of the city's flatness. But Chicago took his criticisms with philosophic tolerance. "The truth seems to be that Mr. Kipling is an unusually bright fellow who enjoys a somewhat exaggerated opinion of his own brightness," as a newspaper expressed it; and then came one single crushing caustic retort to his unbridled comments: "Is it possible that Kipling, now twenty-four years of age, is at his perihelion, physically and intellectually?" And that cut Kip- ling deep.
It needed the clear-sighted West to discern or divine, what was not to be visible to the rest of the world for years, that Kipling, at the time he was
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writing of Chicago, had already begun to show signs of a fall from a marvelous rise ; at that time, or within a year or two afterwards, he had done prac- tically all the writing for which he is to-day held famous.
But there were noble possibilities of apprecia- tion, even for things American, in this young man of remarkable powers, seeing this country on his way to England from India, the land of his birth. For, a few days after leaving Chicago and going eastward, he called upon Mark Twain; he had, as he wrote, learned to love and admire Mark Twain fourteen thousand miles away ; and, as the two talk together, Mark rests his hand for a moment on Kipling's shoulder, and the young man is thrilled and humble. To him, as he expresses it, it is equal to being decorated with the Star of India, with blue silk, trumpets, and diamond-studded jewel, all com- plete; and then come creepy words, terrible words, showing that the calm query of Chicago had found an echo within his own consciousness: "If, here- after, in the changes and chances of this mortal life, I fall to cureless ruin, I will tell the superin- tendent of the workhouse that Mark Twain once put his hand on my shoulder; and he shall give me a room to myself and a double allowance of pauper's tobacco."
But while in the Lake Michigan city he spent his time in seeking new splenetic phrases. "They have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and the bulk of these men appear to be lower
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than Mahajans. The city is inhabited by savages. ' ' And how little Kipling could possibly have imagined that he was to become connected with Chicago by marriage! John Kinzie, the trader, had a son, also named John, who as a boy of nine years witnessed the Indian massacre from a little boat out in the lake, in which, with his mother, he had been placed for safety. He grew up a Chi- cagoan, and married a Connecticut girl of unusual qualities, a girl of family even according to the strictest code of social Pharisees, for she was a de- scendant of the great Governor Roger Wolcott. She had been given a fine education, and was pro- ficient in Latin and German and French; and to know of such people in early days in Chicago is to understand somewhat of the reasons for the city's intellectual advance. The wife of Kinzie really ranks first amon^ authors of the city, too, through her "Wau-Bun," a book of charm, still read and readable, concerning the early days of her city. (To be literally exact, it should be said that the first complete writing, here, long antedated Wau- Bun, it being the Portage de Checagou letter of La Salle; and that, a little earlier, Marquette wrote part of his Journal here.)
The author of "Wau-Bun" and her husband lost their own son, and they grieved bitterly, but strove to fill the place by adopting, from time to time, sev- eral nieces and cousins. One of these adopted children became Mrs. Joseph Balestier, and it was her granddaughter who became the wife of Rudyard
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Kipling. After which, so far as I have ever heard, he no longer criticized Chicago.
This city has had a goodly number of unusually good writers. But some go and settle in the East, after which Chicago forgets them, as does the world in general.
It looked for a while as if Hamlin Garland would be a Chicagoan. He was born in Wisconsin, and it seemed to him that this city was to be his destined literary home. He went East, however, instead; but after some years decided to obey the Chicago impulse and return. And the city offered him a cordial welcome. "We have for Mr. Garland the warmest affection, " wrote Eugene Field: "We admire his work, too, very, very much. Garland is young and impressionable; in an evil hour he fell under the baleful influence of William D. Howells, and — there you are. If we could contrive to keep Garland away from Howells long enough we 'd make a big man of him, for there is a heap of good stuff in him. In all solemnity we declare it to be our opinion that Howells is the only bad habit Garland has/' But Garland, although returning to this city, did not stay long after all, but went back to New York ; with the usual result.
Eugene Field was the Oliver Wendell Holmes of Chicago. "A fellow of infinite jest, of most ex- cellent fancy." Author of the city's classic, "Little Boy Blue," he was equally at home in verse or prose. But, though so much like Holmes, Field, be- side the Lake Front, could never have fallen into
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the habit of Holmes, beside his Back Bay, of sitting down and writing a poem, before going to bed, upon some lecture to which he had that evening listened !
In cleverness, in whimsicalness, in insight into humanity and character, in geniality, in real feel- ing, in wit and humor, in pungency, in camaraderie, in bonhomie, in marvelous facility, in genuine Americanism, the two were much alike. And here is an astonishing consideration which must be real- ized by any who would understand this city and its development : it is not that there is likeness between a man of recent time and a man of long, long ago: for although one was of old Boston and the other of new Chicago, the Boston man, born in the East, died in 1894, and the other was born in the West and died in 1895. Field started in life later than did Holmes, just as Chicago started out later than did Boston, but for many years the two writers were cotemporaries, and they died within a year of each other. (But in this city, where mighty sums are expended for statuary or memorials which, preferably, shall keep in mind distinguished Chicagoans, I have not noticed any memorial to Eugene Field, who so finely represented the best of the city's spirit.)
In book reviews or comments upon authors there has always been, here, a keeping away from the bland phraseology of the East. * ' The new national library will have space for four million books," writes Field; "we mention this merely to en- courage Mr. F. Marion Crawford to keep right on."
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That is all! And with such as that Chicago may defy the world.
It was Field who carried to perfection "the column that made Chicago famous"; and in that daily column appeared much of his hest work. Under the title of "A Line o' Type or Two" the tradition is continued by "B. L. T." — his name being Bert L. Taylor, but everybody knowing him by the initials. And the city's boast is that, al- though every city, little and big, follows and tries to imitate it, "the Line" continues to be the best column in the world. To "make the Line" by having some quip or cleverness accepted and used is the principal ambition of many a Chicagoan! And the "Line" forms a steady topic of conversation. Nor is it only a daily column of humorous and clever comment; it is that, but it is more than that, for it is flavorous with easy and humorous use of books and authors, of the classics and history: the kind of thing you would expect to find in Boston — but don't!
Looking in the catalogue of the Chicago Public Library I noticed Lorimer's "Letters from a Self- Made Merchant to his Son" indexed under "Busi- ness." It would naturally have been put under "Fiction"; it might have been classified as "Humor" or "Philosophy"; and as a matter of fact it is all these, including the classification of the library, for never were a business man and business matters described with such infinite and constant cleverness, with such swift felicity of
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phrase. As a matter of fact, the author was in- spired by a close acquaintance with one of the greatest of the men who made the city; but the book, and its saturation with human life, and the cleverness, are all Lorimer's, and the literary skill which masterfully uses colloquialisms to express character and ideas. Open it anywhere and you are fascinated. Start to quote from it and you quote the whole book.
It sold by hundreds of thousands: it was trans- lated into a score of languages: yet the name of George Horace Lorimer is barely known in Chi- cago except by such as know of him as editor of an Eastern periodical of wide circulation. Even at the library they are surprised to know of him as a former Chicagoan. And this is not a pose. It is absolute sincerity. It indicates a rule, not con- sciously formulated but none the less observed, regarding an author who goes East. But an author may go to California and remain closely in Chi- cagoan thoughts.
Mention of a magazine is remindful of a maga- zine of this city which begins, in large type, a full- page newspaper advertisement which is an excellent example of Chicagoan advertising; beginning, in sonorously measured phrase: "Fiction has been for centuries the most powerful influence on the thought and conduct of men and women " and con- tinuing: " Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, 'The Scarlet Letter/ to cite but a single instance, lighted a flame of human compassion in the breasts of our
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New England ancestors," and