city, and you began. You knew the number of miles of subway from the
Bronx over to Brooklyn, and the number of stories in the Woolworth
building, all those things, and when you caught your breath, the
stockman asked you if Tom Sharkey really had a saloon in your town, and
was Steve Brodie still alive, and did New York folks like to go down to
the Statue of Liberty on pleasant Sunday afternoons. You answered those
questions, and then you told the stockman more--of London, made of
dozens of Omahas, where the United States was but a pleasant and withal
a somewhat uncertain dream, of Paris the beautiful, and of Berlin the
awfully clean. When you were done, you went with the stockman to eat in
a basement--that is the Chicago idea of distinction in restaurants--and
he took you to a lively show afterwards.
Now you never would have wandered into a Broadway hotel lobby and made
the acquaintance of a perfect stranger, dined with him and spent the
evening with him--no, not even if you were a Chicagoan and fearfully
lonely in New York. It is the Chicago that gets into a New Yorker's
veins when he comes within her expanded limits, it is the unseen aura
of the West that creeps as far east as the south tip of Lake Michigan.
It made you acknowledge with hearty appreciation the "good mornings" of
each man as he filed into the wash-room of the sleeping car in the early
morning. You never say "good morning" to strangers in the sleeping cars
going from New York over to Boston. For that is the East and that is
different.
* * * * *
A Chicago man sits back in the regal comfort of a leather-padded office
chair and tells you between hurried bites of the lunch that has been
placed upon his desk, of the real town that is sprawled along the Lake
Michigan shore.
"Don't know as you particularly care for horse-food," he apologizes,
between mouthfuls, "but that's the cult in this neck-o'-woods nowadays."
"The cult?" you inquire, as he plunges more deeply in his bran-mash.
"Precisely," he nods. "We're living in cults out here now. We've got
Boston beaten to culture."
He shoves back the remnant of his "health food" luncheon with an
expression that surely says that he wishes it was steak, smothered with
onions and flanked by an ample-girthed staff of vegetables, and faces
you--you New Yorker--with determination to set your path straight.
"Along in the prehistoric ages--which in Chicago means about the time of
the World's Fair--we were trying to live up to anything and everything,
but particularly the ambition to be the overwhelmingest biggest town in
creation, and to make your old New York look like an annexed seaport. We
had no cults, no woman's societies, nothing except a lot of men making
money hand over fist, killing hogs, and building cars and selling stuff
at retail by catalogues. We were not æsthetic and we didn't
particularly care. We liked plain shows as long as the girls in them
weren't plain, and we had a motto that a big lady carried around on a
shield. The motto was 'I will,' and translated it meant to the bottom of
the sea with New York or St. Louis or any other upstart town that tried
to live on the same side of the earth as Chicago. We were going to have
two million population inside of two years and--"
He dives again into his cultish lunch and after a moment resumes:
"The big lady has lost her job and we've thrown the shield--motto and
all--into the lake. We're trying to forget the motto and that's why
we've got the cult habit. We're class and we're close on the heels of
you New Yorkers--only last winter they began to pass the French pastry
around on a tray at my club. We learn quickly and then go you one
better. We've finally given Jane Addams the recognition and the support
that she should have had a dozen years ago. We're strong and we're
sincere for culture--the university to the south of us has had some
funny cracks but that is all history. Together with the one to the north
of us, they are finally institutions--and Chicago respects them as such.
"Take opera. We used to think it was a fad to hear good music, and only
the society folks went to hear it--so that the opera fairly starved to
death when it came out here. Now they are falling over one another to
get into the Auditorium, and our opera company is not only an
institution but you New Yorkers would give your very hearts to have it
in your own big opera house."
"You'll build an opera house out here then," you venture, "the
biggest--"
He interrupts.
"Not necessarily the biggest," he corrects, "but as fine as the very
best."
The talk changes. You are frankly interested in the cults. You have
heard of how one is working in the public schools, how the school
children of Chicago work in classrooms with the windows wide open, and
you ask him about it.
"It must be fine for the children?" you finally venture.
"It is," he says. "My daughter teaches in a school down Englewood way,
and she says that it is fine for the children--but hell on the teachers.
They weren't trained to it in the beginning."
You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could
not have understood how a man like this--head of a giant corporation
employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big
houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and
influences--would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are
beginning to understand the man--the man who is typical of Chicago. You
come to know him the more clearly as he tells you of the city that he
really loves. He tells you how Sorolla "caught on" over at the
Institute--although more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the
brilliance of the Spaniard's reception--and how the people who go to the
Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and more solid literature all
the while. Then--of a sudden, for he realizes that he must be back again
into the grind and the routine of his work--he turns to you and says:
"And yesterday we had the big girl and the motto. It was hardly more
than yesterday that we thought that population counted, that acreage was
a factor in the consummation of a great city."
* * * * *
[Illustration: Michigan Avenue and the wonderful lakefront--Chicago]
So you see that Chicago is only America, not boastful, not arrogant, but
strong in her convictions, strong in her sincerity, strong in her poise
between right and power together, and not merely power without right.
A city set in the heart of America must certainly take strong American
tone, no matter how many foreigners New York's great gateway may pour
into her ample lap in the course of a single twelvemonth. Chicago has
taken that dominating tone upon herself.
She is a great city. Her policemen wear star-shaped badges after the
fashion of country constables in rural drama, and her citizens call the
trolleys that run after midnight "owl cars," but she is a great city
none the less for these things. Her small shops along Michigan avenue
have the smartness of Paris or of Vienna, the greatest of her department
stores is one of the greatest department stores in all the land, which
means in the whole world. It is softly carpeted, floor upon floor, and
the best of Chicago delights to lunch upon one of its upper floors.
Chicago likes to go high for its meals or else, as we have already
intimated, down into basements. The reason for this last may be that one
of the world's greatest _restauranteurs_, who had his start in the city
by Lake Michigan, has always had his place below sidewalk level on a
busy corner of the city.
The city is fearfully busy at all of its downtown corners. New Yorkers
shudder at Thirty-fourth street and Broadway. Inside the Chicago loop
are several dozen Thirty-fourth streets and Broadways. There you have
it--the Chicago loop, designed to afford magnificent relief to the town
and in effect having tightly drawn a belt about its waist. The loop is a
belt-line terminal, slightly less than a mile in diameter, designed to
serve the elevated railroads that stretch their caterpillar-like
structures over three directions of the widespread town. Within it are
the theaters, the hotels, the department stores, the retail district,
and the wholesale and the railroad terminals. Just without it is an arid
belt and then somewhere to the north, the west and the south, the great
residential districts. So it is a mistake. For, with the exception of a
little way along Michigan avenue to the south, the loop has acted
against the growth of the city, has kept it tightly girdled within
itself.
"Within the loop," is a meaningful phrase in Chicago. It means
congestion in every form and the very worst forms to the fore. It means
that what was originally intended to be an adequate terminal to the
various elevated railroads has become a transportation abomination and a
matter of local contempt. For you cannot exaggerate the condition that
it has created. It is fearful on ordinary days, and when you come to
extraordinary days, like the memorable summer when the Knights Templar
held their triennial conclave there, the newspapers print "boxed"
summaries of the persons killed and injured by congestion conditions
"within the loop." That takes it out of being a mere laughing matter.
It is no laughing matter to folks who have to thread it. Trolley cars,
automobiles, taxicabs, the long lumbering 'buses that remind one of the
photographs of Broadway, New York, a quarter of a century ago or more,
entangle themselves with one another and with unfortunate pedestrians
and still no one comes forward with practical relief. The 'buses are
peculiarly Chicago institutions. For long years they have been taking
passengers from one railroad station to another. A considerable part of
Western America has been ferried across the city by Lake Michigan, in
these institutions. For Chicago, with the wisdom of nearly seventy-five
years of growth, has steadily refused to accept the union station idea.
St. Louis has a union station--and bitterly regrets it. Modern big towns
are scorning the idea of a union station; in fact, Buffalo has just
rejected the scheme for herself. For a union station, no matter how big
or how pretentious it may be architecturally, will reduce a city to
way-station dimensions. St. Louis is a big town, a town with
personality, the great trunk lines of east and south and west have
terminals there; but the many thousands of travelers who pass through
there in the course of a twelvemonth, see nothing of her. They file from
one train into the waiting-room of her glorious station--one of the few
really great railroad stations of the world--and in a little while take
an outbound train--without ever having stepped out into the streets of
the town.
In Chicago--as it is almost a form of _lese majeste_ to discuss St.
Louis in a chapter devoted to Chicago we herewith submit our full
apologies--four-fifths of the through passengers have to be carried in
the omnibuses from one of the big railroad stations to another. They
know that in advance, and they generally arrange to stop over there for
at least a night. This means business for the hotels, large and small.
It also means business for the retail stores and the theaters. And it is
one of the ways that Chicago preserves her metropolitanism.
And yet with all of that metropolitanism--there is a spirit in Chicago
that distinctly breathes the smaller town, a spirit that might seem
foreign to the most important city that we have between the two oceans.
It is the spirit of Madison, or Ottumwa, or Jackson, perhaps a little
flavor still surviving of the not long-distant days when Chicago was
merely a town. You may or you may not know that in the days before her
terrific fire she was called "the Garden City." The catalpa trees that
shaded her chief business streets had a wide fame, and older prints show
the Cook County Court House standing in lawn-plats. In those days
Chicago folk knew one another and, to a decent extent, one another's
business. In these days, much of that town feeling remains. You sit in
the great tomb-like halls of the Union League, or in the more modern
University Club, perhaps up in that wonderful bungalow which the
Cliff-dwellers have erected upon the roof of Orchestra Hall, and you
hear all of the small talk of the town. Smith has finally got that
franchise, although he will pay mighty well for it; Jones is going to
put another fourteen-story addition on his store. Wilkins has bought a
yacht that is going to clean up everything on the lake, and then head
straight for laurels on the Atlantic seaboard. You would have the same
thing in a smaller western town, expressed in proportionate dimensions.
After all, the circle of men who accomplish the real things in the real
Chicago is wonderfully small. But the things that they accomplish are
very large, indeed.
They will take you out to see some of these big things--that department
store, without an equal outside of New York or Philadelphia at least,
and where Chicago dearly loves to lunch; a mail-order house which
actually boasts that six acres of forest timber are cleared each day to
furnish the paper for its catalogue, of which a mere six million copies
are issued annually; they will point out in the distance the stacks and
smoke clouds of South Chicago and will tell you in tens of thousands of
dollars, the details of the steel industry; take you, of course, to the
stock-yards and there tell you of the horrible slaughter that goes
forward there at all hours of the day and far into the night. Perhaps
they will show you some of the Chicago things that are great in another
sense--Hull House and the McCormick Open Air School, for instance. And
they will be sure to show you the park system.
A good many folk, Eastern and Western, do not give Chicago credit for
the remarkable park system that she has builded up within recent years.
These larger parks, with their connecting boulevards, make an entire
circuit around the back of the town, and the city is making a distinct
effort to wrest the control of the water-front from the railroad that
has skirted it for many years, so that she may make all this park land,
too--in connection with her ambitious city plan. She has accomplished a
distinct start already in the water-front plan along her retail shop and
hotel district--from Twelfth street north to the river. The railroad
tracks formerly ran along the edge of the lake all that distance. Now
they are almost a third of a mile inland; the city has reclaimed some
hundreds of acres from the more shallow part of Lake Michigan and has in
Grant Park a pleasure-ground quite as centrally located as Boston's
famous Common. It is still far from complete. While the broad strip
between Michigan avenue and the depressed railroad tracks is wonderfully
trim and green, and the Art Institute standing within it so grimy that
one might easily mistake it for old age, the "made ground" to the east
of the tracks is still barren. But Chicago is making good use of it. The
boys and young men come out of the office-buildings in the noon recess
to play baseball there, the police drill and parade upon it to their
heart's content, it is gaining fame as a site for military encampments
and aviation meets.
Chicago makes good use of all her parks. You look a long way within them
before you find the "Keep off the Grass" signs. And on Saturday
afternoons in midsummer you will find the park lawns thronged with
picnic parties--hundreds and even thousands of them--bringing their
lunches out from the tighter sections of the town and eating them in
shade and comfort and the cooling breezes off Lake Michigan. For Chicago
regards the lake as hardly more than an annex to her park system, even
today when the question of lake-front rights is not entirely settled
with the railroad. On pleasant summer days, her residents go bathing in
the lake by the thousands, and if they live within half a dozen blocks
of the shore they will go and come in their bathing suits, with perhaps
a light coat or bath-robe thrown over them. A man from New York might be
shocked to see a Chicago man in a bathing suit riding a motorcycle down
an important residence street--without the semblance of coat or robe;
but that is Chicago, and Chicago seems to think nothing of it. She
wonders if a man from Boston might not be embarrassed to see a coatless,
vestless, collarless, suspendered man driving a four-thousand-dollar
electric car through Michigan avenue.
Chicago is fast changing, however, in these respects. She is growing
more truly metropolitan each twelvemonth--less like an overgrown country
town. It was only a moment ago that we sat in the office of the
manufacturer, and he told us of the Chicago of yesterday, of the big
girl who had "I will" emblazoned upon her shield. There is a Chicago of
tomorrow, and a hint of its glory has been spread upon the walls of a
single great gallery of the Art Institute, in the concrete form of
splendid plans and perspectives. The Chicago of tomorrow is to be
different; it is to forget the disadvantages of a lack of contour and
reap those of a magnificent shore front. In the Chicago of tomorrow the
railroads will not hold mile after mile of lake-edge for themselves, the
elevated trains will cease to have a merry-go-round on the loop, the
arid belt between downtown and uptown will have disappeared, great
railroad terminal stations and public buildings built in architectural
plan and relation to one another are to arise, her splendid park and
boulevard system is to be vastly multiplied.
Chicago looks hungrily forward to her tomorrow. She is never discouraged
with her today, but with true American spirit, she anticipates the
future. The present generation cares little for itself, it can tolerate
the loop and its abominations, the _hodge-podge_ of the queer and the
_nouveau_ that distinguishes the city by the lake in this present year
of grace. But the oncoming generations! There is the rub. The oncoming
generations are to have all that the wisdom and the wealth of today can
possibly dedicate to them. There, then, is your Chicago spirit, the
dominating inspiration that rises above the housetops of rows of
monotonous, dun-colored houses and surveys the sprawling, disorderly
town, and proclaims it triumphant over its outer self.
13
THE TWIN CITIES
A fine yellow train takes you from Chicago to St. Paul and Minneapolis,
in the passing of a single night. And if you ever meet in the course of
your travel the typical globe-trotter who is inclined to carp at
American railroads, refer him to these yellow trains that run from
Chicago up into the Northwest. There are no finer steam caravans in all
the entire world. And when the globe-trotter comes back at you with his
telling final shot about the abominable open sleepers of America--and
you in your heart of hearts must think them abominable--tell him in
detail of the yellow trains. For a price not greater than he would pay
for a room in a first-class hotel over-night, he can have a real room in
the yellow trains. Like the compartments in the night-trains of Europe?
No, not at all. These are real rooms--a whole car filled with them and
they are the final and unanswerable argument for the comfort and luxury
of the yellow trains.
In such a stateroom and over smooth rails you sleep--sleep as a child
sleeps until Lemuel, the porter, comes and tears you forth by
entreaties, persuading you that you are almost upon the brink of--not
St. Peter but of St. Paul. Of course, Lemuel has let his enthusiasm
carry away his accuracy--even a porter upon a yellow train is apt to do
that--but you have full chance to arise and dress leisurely before your
train stops in the ancient ark of a Union station[E] upon the river
level at the capital of the state of Minnesota. For at St. Paul you
have come to the Mississippi--the Father of Waters of legendary lore. If
you have only seen the stream at St. Louis or at New Orleans, polluted
by the muddy waters of the Missouri or the Ohio or a dozen sluggish
southern streams, you will not recognize the clear northern river
flowing turbulently through a high-walled gorge, as the Mississippi.
There are a few of the flat-bottomed, gaily caparisoned steamboats at
the St. Paul to heighten the resemblance between the lower river and the
upper, but that is all.
[E] Since the above was written word has come of the
destruction of the Union station by fire, an event which
will not be regretted by travelers or by residents of the
place. E. H.
St. Paul owes her birth to the river-trade nevertheless. For she was,
and still is, at the real head of navigation on the Mississippi and in
other days that meant very much indeed. A few miles above her levee were
the falls of St. Anthony and a thriving little town called
Minneapolis--of which very much more in a moment. From that levee at St.
Paul began the first railroad building into the then unknown country of
the Northwest. The first locomotive--the _William Crooks_--which ran
into the virgin territory is still carefully preserved. And the man who
made railroading from St. Paul into a great trunk line system still
lives in the town.
He began by being assistant wharfmaster--in the days when there was
something to do in such a job. Today they know him as the Empire
Builder. The Swedes, who form so important a factor in the population of
the Twin Cities, call him "Yem Hill" and he loves it. But he is entered
in all records as James J. Hill.
To tell the story of the growth of Jim Hill from wharfmaster to master
of the railroads, would be to tell the story of one of the two or three
really great men who are living in America today. It is a story closely
interwoven with the story of St. Paul, the struggling town to which he
came while yet a mere boy. He has lived to see St. Paul become an
important city, the rival village at the falls of St. Anthony even
exceed her in size and in commercial importance, but his affection for
the old river town to which he has given so much of his life and
abundant personality has not dimmed. He has made it the gateway of his
Northwest and when one says "Hill's Northwest" he says it advisedly; for
while there might have been a Northwest without Jim Hill, there would
have been no Jim Hill without the Northwest.
He found it a raw and little known land over which stretched a single
water-logged railroad fighting adversity, and in momentary danger of
extinction through receivership; a trunk-line railroad at that time
distinguished more for its arrogance than for any other one feature of
its being. Somewhere in the late eighties J. J. Hill took a trip over
that railroad. He saw Seattle for the first time and found it a mere
lumber-shipping town of but a few thousand population and with but
little apparent future. He saw great stretches of open country--whole
counties the size of the majestic states of New York and of Pennsylvania
and still all but unknown. He also saw unbridled streams, high-seated
mountain ranges and because J. J. Hill was a dreamer he saw promise in
these things.
From that trip he returned to the budding city of St. Paul, enthused
beyond ordinary measure, and determined that in the coming development
of the half-dozen territories at the northwestern corner of the country
he would share no ordinary part. He turned his back on the navigation of
the Mississippi--already beginning to wane--and gave his attention to
railroading. Purchasing an inconsequential lumber railroad in Minnesota,
he laid the foundations for his Great Northern system. There was a
something about Jim Hill in those earlier days by which he could give
his enthusiasm and his lofty inspiration to those with whom he came in
contact. That rare faculty was his salvation. Men listened to the
confident talker from St. Paul and then placed their modest savings at
his disposal. They have not regretted their steps. The Great Northern,
through Hill's careful leadership has, despite much of the sparse
territory through which it passes, become one of the great conservative
railroad properties of the United States.