and movement in lower Broadway and the renowned business streets in its
vicinity. And I really was disappointed by the ordinariness of the
scene, which could be well matched in half a dozen places in Europe, and
beaten in one or two. If but once I had been shoved into the gutter by a
heedless throng going furiously upon its financial ways, I should have
been content.... The legendary "American rush" is to me a fable. Whether
it ever existed I know not; but I certainly saw no trace of it, either
in New York or Chicago. I dare say I ought to have gone to Seattle for
it. My first sight of a stock-market roped off in the street was an
acute disillusionment. In agitation it could not have competed with a
sheep-market. In noise it was a muffled silence compared with the fine
racket that enlivens the air outside the Paris Bourse. I saw also an
ordinary day in the Stock Exchange. Faint excitations were afloat in
certain corners, but I honestly deemed the affair tame. A vast litter of
paper on the floor, a vast assemblage of hats pitched on the tops of
telephone-boxes--these phenomena do not amount to a hustle. Earnest
students of hustle should visit Paris or Milan. The fact probably is
that the perfecting of mechanical contrivances in the United States has
killed hustle as a diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical side
of the Exchange was wonderful and delightful.
The sky-scrapers that cluster about the lower end of Broadway--their
natural home--were as impressive as I could have desired, but not
architecturally. For they could only be felt, not seen. And even in
situations where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a rule,
to my mind, architecturally a failure. I regret for my own sake that I
could not be more sympathetic toward the existing sky-scraper as an
architectural entity, because I had assuredly no European prejudice
against the sky-scraper as such. The objection of most people to the
sky-scraper is merely that it is unusual--the instinctive objection of
most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!
I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the
unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share
the feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architectural
grandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of these
buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold,
prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendid
notion, an inspiring notion; it thrills. But the building itself is
ugly--nay, it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry _into_ it
will make it otherwise.
[Illustration: A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER]
Similarly, the Metropolitan Building is tremendous. It is a grand sight,
but it is an ugly sight. The men who thought of it, who first conceived
the notion of it, were poets. They said, "We will cause to be
constructed the highest building in the world; we will bring into
existence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance company
ever had." That is good; it is superb; it is a proof of heroic
imagination. But the actual designers of the building did not rise to
the height of it; and if any poetry is left in it, it is not their
fault. Think what McKim might have accomplished on that site, and in
those dimensions!
Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in the execution of
these enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in a
perverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed
upon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result here and there has
been worse than dull; it has been distressing. But here and there, too,
one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant
of a sky-scraper demands--as I am informed he does--the same windows,
and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin by
accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative
pretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, on
Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself
soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory
and agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as the promise
that a new style will ultimately be evolved.
In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the
sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the massed sky-scrapers illuminated
from within, as seen from any high building up-town, is prodigiously
beautiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The early night
effect of the whole town, topped by the aforesaid Metropolitan tower,
seen from the New Jersey shore, is stupendous, and resembles some
enchanted city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact that
a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery representation of a
frothing glass of beer inconceivably large--well, this fact too has its
importance.
But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism than that which
disengages itself from them externally. You must enter them in order to
appreciate them, in order to respond fully to their complex appeal.
Outside, they often have the air of being nothing in particular; at best
the façade is far too modest in its revelation of the interior. You can
quite easily walk by a sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it. But
you cannot actually go into the least of them and not be impressed. You
are in a palace. You are among marbles and porphyries. You breathe
easily in vast and brilliant foyers that never see daylight. And then
you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with which the building
and every other building in New York is secretly honeycombed, and the
palisade is opened and an elevator snatches you up. I think of American
cities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark recesses
innumerable elevators are constantly ascending and descending, like the
angels of the ladder....
[Illustration: THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT]
The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into what
is modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its grandeur
no European business office, save such as may have been built by an
American. You look forth from a window, and lo! New York and the Hudson
are beneath you, and you are in the skies. And in the warmed stillness
of the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you would have
imagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-master
at sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories above this story. You
walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that the
rent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six thousand dollars
a year! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that is
represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishing
chess-board of windows. And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is,
and the poetry of it.
More romantic even than the sky-scraper finished and occupied is the
sky-scraper in process of construction. From no mean height, listening
to the sweet drawl of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans like
dwarfs at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them balance
themselves nonchalantly astride girders swinging in space, seen them
throwing rivets to one another and never missing one; seen also a huge
crane collapse under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil,
carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk below. That
particular mishap obviously raised the fear of death among a
considerable number of people, but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody in
America will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each story
of a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories--twenty men
snuffed out; thirty stories--thirty men. A building of some sixty
stories is now going up--sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic
hearths to be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how many
widows, orphans, and other loose by-products!
And this mortality, I believe, takes no account of the long battles
that are sometimes fought, but never yet to a finish, in the steel webs
of those upper floors when the labor-unions have a fit of objecting more
violently than usual to non-union labor. In one celebrated building, I
heard, the non-unionists contracted an unfortunate habit of getting
crippled; and three of them were indiscreet enough to put themselves
under a falling girder that killed them, while two witnesses who were
ready to give certain testimony in regard to the mishap vanished
completely out of the world, and have never since been heard of. And so
on. What more natural than that the employers should form a private
association for bringing to a close these interesting hazards? You may
see the leading spirit of the association. You may walk along the street
with him. He knows he is shadowed, and he is quite cheerful about it.
His revolver is always very ready for an emergency. Nobody seems to
regard this state of affairs as odd enough for any prolonged comment.
There it is! It is accepted. It is part of the American dailiness.
Nobody, at any rate in the comfortable clubs, seems even to consider
that the original cause of the warfare is aught but a homicidal
cussedness on the part of the unions.... I say that these accidents and
these guerrillas mysteriously and grimly proceeding in the skyey fabric
of metal-ribbed constructions, do really form part of the poetry of life
in America--or should it be the poetry of death? Assuredly they are a
spectacular illustration of that sublime, romantic contempt for law and
for human life which, to a European, is the most disconcerting factor
in the social evolution of your States. I have sat and listened to tales
from journalists and other learned connoisseurs till--But enough!
* * * * *
When I left New York and went to Washington I was congratulated on
having quitted the false America for the real. When I came to Boston I
received the sympathies of everybody in Boston on having been put off
for so long with spurious imitations of America, and a sigh of happy
relief went up that I had at length got into touch with a genuine
American city. When, after a long pilgrimage, I attained Chicago, I was
positively informed that Chicago alone was the gate of the United
States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible and even
misleading. And when I entered Indianapolis I discovered that Chicago
was a mushroom and a suburb of Warsaw, and that its pretension to
represent the United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the
United States being obviously Indianapolis.... The great towns love thus
to affront one another, and their demeanor in the game resembles the
gamboling of young tigers--it is half playful and half ferocious. For
myself, I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold all I saw.
While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as very characteristically
American, I assert that the unreality of New York escaped me. It
appeared to me that New York was quite a real city, and European
geographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail) usually locate
it in America.
Having regard to the healthy mutual jealousy of the great towns, I feel
that I am carrying audacity to the point of foolhardiness when I state
that the streets of every American city I saw reminded me on the whole
rather strongly of the streets of all the others. What inhabitants of
what city could forgive this? Yet I must state it. Much of what I have
said of the streets of New York applies, in my superficial opinion, for
instance, to the streets of Chicago. It is well known that to the
Chinaman all Westerners look alike. No tourist on his first visit to a
country so astonishing as the United States is very different from a
Chinaman; the tourist should reconcile himself to that deep truth. It is
desolating to think that a second visit will reveal to me the blindness,
the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of my first. But even as a
Chinaman I did notice subtle differences between New York and Chicago.
As one who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate, where soft
coal is in universal use, I at once felt more at home in Chicago than I
could ever do in New York. The old instinct to wash the hands and change
the collar every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago,
together with the old comforting conviction that a harsh climate is a
climate healthy for body and spirit. And, because it is laden with soot,
the air of Chicago is a great mystifier and beautifier. Atmospheric
effects may be seen there that are unobtainable without the combustion
of soft coal. Talk, for example, as much as you please about the
electric sky-signs of Broadway--not all of them together will write as
much poetry on the sky as the single word "Illinois" that hangs without
a clue to its suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue. The
visionary aspects of Chicago are incomparable.
[Illustration: A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO]
Another difference, of quite another order, between New York and
Chicago is that Chicago is self-conscious. New York is not; no
metropolis ever is. You are aware of the self-consciousness of Chicago
as soon as you are aware of its bitumen. The quality demands sympathy,
and wins it by its wistfulness. Chicago is openly anxious about its
soul. I liked that. I wish I could see a livelier anxiety concerning the
municipal soul in certain cities of Europe.
Perhaps the least subtle difference between New York and Chicago springs
from the fact that the handsomest part of New York is the center of New
York, whereas the center of Chicago is disappointing. It does not
impress. I was shown, in the center of Chicago, the first sky-scraper
that the world had ever seen. I visited with admiration what was said to
be the largest department store in the world. I visited with a natural
rapture the largest book-store in the world. I was informed (but
respectfully doubt) that Chicago is the greatest port in the world. I
could easily credit, from the evidence of my own eyes, that it is the
greatest railway center in the world. But still my imagination was not
fired, as it has been fired again and again by far lesser and far less
interesting places. Nobody could call Wabash Avenue spectacular, and
nobody surely would assert that State Street is on a plane with the
collective achievements of the city of which it is the principal
thoroughfare. The truth is that Chicago lacks at present a
rallying-point--some Place de la Concorde or Arc de Triomphe--something
for its biggest streets to try to live up to. A convocation of elevated
railroads is not enough. It seemed to me that Jackson Boulevard or Van
Buren Street, with fine crescents abutting opposite Grant Park and
Garfield Park, and a magnificent square at the intersection of Ashland
Avenue, might ultimately be the chief sight and exemplar of Chicago. Why
not? Should not the leading thoroughfare lead boldly to the lake instead
of shunning it? I anticipate the time when the municipal soul of Chicago
will have found in its streets as adequate expression as it has already
found in its boulevards.
Perhaps if I had not made the "grand tour" of those boulevards, I might
have been better satisfied with the streets of Chicago. The excursion,
in an automobile, occupied something like half of a frosty day that
ended in torrents of rain--apparently a typical autumn day in Chicago!
Before it had proceeded very far I knew that there was a sufficient
creative imagination on the shore of Lake Michigan to carry through any
municipal enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final conclusion.
The conception of those boulevards discloses a tremendous audacity and
faith. And as you roll along the macadam, threading at intervals a
wide-stretching park, you are overwhelmed--at least I was--by the
completeness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness with which the
system is in every detail maintained and kept up.
[Illustration: A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE--CHICAGO]
You stop to inspect a conservatory, and find yourself in a really
marvelous landscape garden, set with statues, all under glass and
heated, where the gaffers of Chicago are collected together to discuss
interminably the exciting politics of a city anxious about its soul. And
while listening to them with one ear, with the other you may catch
the laconic tale of a park official's perilous and successful vendetta
against the forces of graft.
And then you resume the circuit and accomplish many more smooth,
curving, tree-lined miles, varied by a jolting section, or by the faint
odor of the Stock-yards, or by a halt to allow the longest freight-train
in the world to cross your path. You have sighted in the distance
universities, institutions, even factories; you have passed through many
inhabited portions of the endless boulevard, but you have not actually
touched hands with the city since you left it at the beginning of the
ride. Then at last, as darkness falls, you feel that you are coming to
the city again, but from another point of the compass. You have rounded
the circle of its millions. You need only think of the unkempt, shabby,
and tangled outskirts of New York, or of any other capital city, to
realize the miracle that Chicago has put among her assets ...
You descry lanes of water in the twilight, and learn that in order to
prevent her drainage from going into the lake Chicago turned a river
back in its course and compelled it to discharge ultimately into the
Mississippi. That is the story. You feel that it is exactly what
Chicago, alone among cities, would have the imagination and the courage
to do. Some man must have risen from his bed one morning with the idea,
"Why not make the water flow the other way?" And then gone, perhaps
diffidently, to his fellows in charge of the city with the suggestive
query, "Why not make the water flow the other way?" And been laughed at!
Only the thing was done in the end! I seem to have heard that there was
an epilogue to this story, relating how certain other great cities
showed a narrow objection to Chicago draining herself in the direction
of the Mississippi, and how Chicago, after all, succeeded in persuading
those whom it was necessary to persuade that, whereas her drainage was
unsuited to Lake Michigan, it would consort well with the current of the
Mississippi.
And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve round some corner
into the straight, by Grant Park, in full sight of one of the most
dazzling spectacles that Chicago or any other city can offer--Michigan
Avenue on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric standards in
Michigan Avenue is a cluster of six huge globes (and yet they will tell
you in Paris that the Rue de la Paix is the best-lit street in the
world), and here and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines of
light pour down their flame into the pool which is the roadway, and you
travel continually toward an incandescent floor without ever quite
reaching it, beneath mysterious words of fire hanging in the invisible
sky!... The automobile stops. You get out, stiff, and murmur something
inadequate about the length and splendor of those boulevards. "Oh," you
are told, carelessly, "those are only the interior boulevards....
Nothing! You should see our exterior boulevards--not quite finished
yet!"
III
THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES
"Here, Jimmy!" said, briskly, a middle-aged administrative person in
easy attire, who apparently had dominion over the whole floor beneath
the dome. A younger man, also in easy attire, answered the call with an
alert smile. The elder pointed sideways with his head at my two friends
and myself, and commanded, "Run them through in thirty minutes!" Then,
having reached the center of a cuspidor with all the precision of a
character in a Californian novel, he added benevolently to Jimmy, "Make
it a dollar for them." And Jimmy, consenting, led us away.
In this episode Europe was having her revenge on the United States, and
I had planned it. How often, in half a hundred cities of Europe, had I
not observed the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at high
speed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculptures in the Medici
Chapel at Florence had I seen him, watch in hand, and heard him murmur
"Bully!" to the sculptures and the time of the train to his wife in one
breath! Now it was impossible for me to see Washington under the normal
conditions of a session. And so I took advantage of the visit to
Washington of two friends on business to see Washington hastily, as an
excursionist pure and simple. I said to the United States, grimly: "The
most important and the most imposing thing in all America is surely the
Capitol at Washington. Well, I will see it as you see the sacred sights
of Europe. By me Europe shall be revenged."
Thus it came about that we had hired a kind of carriage known as a
"sea-going hack," driven by a negro in dark blue, who was even more
picturesque than the negroes in white who did the menial work in the
classic hotel, and had set forth frankly as excursionists into the
streets of Washington, and presently through the celebrated Pennsylvania
Avenue had achieved entrance into the Capitol.
[Illustration: THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL]
It was a breathless pilgrimage--this seeing of the Capitol. And yet an
impressive one. The Capitol is a great place. I was astonished--and I
admit at once I ought not to have been astonished--that the Capitol
appeals to the historic sense just as much as any other vast legislative
palace of the world--and perhaps more intimately than some. The sequence
of its endless corridors and innumerable chambers, each associated with
event or tradition, begets awe. I think it was in the rich Senatorial
reception-room that I first caught myself being surprised that the heavy
gilded and marmoreal sumptuosity of the decorations recalled the average
European palace. Why should I have been expecting the interior of the
Capitol to consist of austere bare walls and unornamented floors?
Perhaps it was due to some thought of Abraham Lincoln. But whatever its
cause, the expectation was naïve and derogatory. The young guide, Jimmy,
who by birth and genius evidently belonged to the universal race of
guides, was there to keep my ideas right and my eyes open. He was
infinitely precious, and after his own fashion would have done honor to
any public monument in the East. Such men are only bred in the very
shadow of genuine history.
"See," he said, touching a wall. "Painted by celebrated Italian artist
to look like bas-relief! But put your hand flat against it, and you'll
see it isn't carved!" One might have been in Italy.
And a little later he was saying of other painting:
"Although painted in eighteen hundred sixty-five--forty-six years
ago--you notice the flesh tints are as fresh as if painted yesterday!"
This, I think, was the finest remark I ever heard a guide make--until
this same guide stepped in front of a portrait of Henry Clay, and, after
a second's hesitation, threw off airily, patronizingly:
"Henry Clay--quite a good statesman!"
But I also contributed my excursionist's share to these singular
conversations. In the swathed Senate Chamber I noticed two
holland-covered objects that somehow reminded me of my youth and of
religious dissent. I guessed that the daily proceedings of the Senate
must be opened with devotional exercises, and these two objects seemed
to me to be proper--why, I cannot tell--to the United States Senate; but
there was one point that puzzled me.
"Why," I asked, "do you have _two_ harmoniums?"
"Harmoniums, sir!" protested the guide, staggered. "Those are roll-top
desks."
If only the floor could have opened and swallowed me up, as it opens
and swallows up the grand piano at the Thomas concerts in Chicago!
Neither the Senate Chamber nor the Congress Chamber was as imposing to
me as the much less spacious former Senate Chamber and the former
Congress Chamber. The old Senate Chamber, being now transferred to the
uses of supreme justice, was closed on the day of our visit, owing to
the funeral of a judge. Europeans would have acquiesced in the firm
negative of its locked doors. But my friends, being American, would not
acquiesce. The mere fact that the room was not on view actually
sharpened their desire that I should see it. They were deaf to
refusals.... I saw that room. And I was glad that I saw it, for in its
august simplicity it was worth seeing. The spirit of the early history
of the United States seemed to reside in that hemicycle; and the crape
on the vacated and peculiar chair added its own effect.
[Illustration: ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE]