was only a few years ago that it was bragging about that wonderful
conception of the engineer--who had finally spanned the lordly
Mississippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have come,
two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north and a public bridge
to the south--that is, it will be a public bridge if the voters of St.
Louis ever cease quarreling about it. At the present time it is hardly a
bridge, only a great span over the water and for long months absolutely
unprovided with approaches because the taxpayers of St. Louis refuse to
vote the funds for its completion. So it is that the Eads bridge is
today but a single agency out of three or four for the spanning of the
river; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the railroad
travelers who come across through its lower deck only remember that from
it there leads under the heart of the city of St. Louis one of the
smokiest railroad tunnels in existence--and that is saying much.
But the fact remains that it was the first structure to span the river,
and to end the importunities of the unspeakable ferry. And today it is,
with all of its grime, the one impressive feature of downtown St. Louis.
It is the only wagonway that leads from the sovereign state of Illinois
into the sovereign city of St. Louis. Across its upper deck passes at
all hours of the day and far into the night a silent parade of trolley
cars, mule teams, automobiles, farm trucks, folk of every sort and
description, on foot. It is as interesting as London bridge and a far
finer piece of architecture. But the modern St. Louis has all but
forgotten it, save when it chooses to take a motor run across the
Illinois prairies.
* * * * *
The casual traveler finally turns his back upon the river and its
oldest bridge, although not without some regret if any real sentiment
dwells within him. He threads his way through the narrow streets of
downtown St. Louis and finally he enters the oldest residential part,
the streets still narrow but the houses of rather a fine sort, many of
them transformed into small shops or given these days to lodgers. They
are of a type somewhat peculiar to the town. They were built high and
rather narrow and as a rule set upon a terrace and detached. Builded of
brick, the fancy of those old-time architects seemed to turn almost
invariably to a façade of marble, an unblushing and unashamed veneer to
the street, with the side walls humble and honest in dark red brick.
Steps and lintels were of marble or what must have been marble in the
beginning. A Philadelphia housewife would quail beneath the steady bath
of smoke and cinders that falls upon St. Louis.
There are many thousands of these red-brick and white-marble houses,
finally important cross streets, such as Jefferson and Grand, and then
you come into the newer St. Louis--a residential district of which any
city might well be proud. In the newer St. Louis the houses are more
modern and more attractive perhaps, due partly to the fact that they are
farther away from the river and the great factories and railroad yards
that line it. You can trace the varying fads in American house
architecture in layers as you go back street by street in the new St.
Louis--Norman, Italian Renaissance, American Colonial, Elizabethan--all
like the slices in a fat layer-cake. Some of the more pretentious of
these houses are grouped in great parks or reservations which give to
the public streets by entrance gates and are known as Westminster place,
or Vandeventer place, or the like. They form a most charming feature of
the planning of St. Louis, and one almost as distinctive as the tidy
alleys which act as serviceways to all the houses. The houses
themselves are almost invariably set in lawns, although there are many
fine apartments and apartment hotels. The fearful monotony of the side
street of New York or Philadelphia does not exist within the town.
At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. Louis stands the
chief park of the town, not very distinctive and famed chiefly as the
site of the biggest World's Fair that was ever held, "considerably
larger than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell you. Our
individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical
Gardens just adjoining it. Tower Grove is in no very attractive section
of St. Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is rather
lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old Southern Hotel, which
was burned many years ago and was a fearful tragedy, being set here and
there. But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard by
is the Botanical Gardens that Henry Shaw gave to the city in which he
was for so many years a dominating figure. And for even a casual
traveler to go to St. Louis and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost
inconceivable.
In the first place, it is an excellent collection of plants and of trees
and of exceeding interest to those folk who let their tastes carry them
that way. And in the second place, Henry Shaw was so typical of the old
St. Louis that you must stop for a moment and remember him. You must
think of the steady purpose of the man visiting all the great gardens of
Europe and then seeking to create one that should outrank all of them,
in the mud-bog of St. Louis. For the St. Louis of war-times, the St.
Louis to which Shaw gave his benefaction was little more than a bog. And
Americans of those days laughed at parks. True there was Fairmount Park
in Philadelphia, but the Fairmount Park of those days was a fantastic
idea and hardly to be compared with the Fairmount Park of today. Henry
Shaw went much farther than the banks of the Schuylkill, although he
must have known and appreciated John Bartram's historic gardens there.
Shaw was only forty years of age when he retired from business. He had
saved through his keen business acumen and a decent sense of thrift, a
quarter of a million dollars--a tremendous fortune for those days. He
was quite frank in saying that he thought that $250,000 was all that a
man could honestly earn or honestly possess, and he retired to enjoy his
fortune as best it might please him to do. He traveled far and wide
through Europe, and upon one of the earliest of those trips he visited
the World's Fair of 1851, at the Crystal Palace, London; one of the very
first of these international exhibitions. He was impressed not so much
by the exhibits as by the fine park in which the Crystal Palace stood. A
little later he was a guest at Chatsworth House, that splendid English
home given by William the Conqueror to his natural son, William Peveril,
and he became a frequent visitor at Kew Gardens. It was at that time he
decided to make a botanical garden out of the place which he had just
purchased outside of St. Louis.
[Illustration: A luxurious home in the newer St. Louis]
Henry Shaw must have remembered his boyhood days in St. Louis and the
wonderful garden of Madame Rosalie Saugrain. In those earlier days St.
Louis was small enough in population but large enough in the material
for social enjoyment. The French element was still dominant, although
Madame Saugrain was comparatively a newcomer, an accomplished lady who
had brought the manners and tastes of Paris into the wilds of western
America. Her garden, which was then in open country beyond the
struggling town, was close to what is today Seventh street, St. Louis.
Great skyscrapers and solid warehouses have sprung up where formerly
Madame's roses and hollyhocks bloomed, and one would have to go weary
blocks to find a spear of grass, unless within some public park.
But Shaw's Gardens still exist, although their founder lived to a ripe
old age and has now been dead a quarter of a century. Older folk of St.
Louis remember him distinctly, a vigorous and seemingly lonely man,
unmarried, but who seemed to be content to live alone in his great house
in the Gardens, giving a loving and a personal care to his flowers and
then, as dusk came on, invariably sitting in his room and reading far
into the night. They will show you his will when you go to the museum in
the Gardens, a curious old document, keenly prepared and devising to the
remaining members of his family, servants and intimates, everything from
immensely valuable real estate in the very heart of St. Louis down to
the port and sherry from his cellars. But the part that interested St.
Louis most was that part which gave the Gardens to the town, although
not without restrictions. And the old Missouri town made Shaw's Gardens
quite as much a part of its existence as its County Fair.
The St. Louis Fair was a real institution. There have been far greater
shows of the kind in our land, but perhaps none that ever entered more
thoroughly into the hearts of the folk to whom it catered. Every one in
St. Louis used to go to the Fair. It had a social status quite its own.
When, after the hot and gruelling summer which causes all St. Louis folk
who possibly can to flee to the ocean or to the mountains, they came
home again in the joys of Indian summer there was the Fair--up under the
trees of Grand avenue in the north part of the town--to serve for a
getting together once again. It had served that way since long before
wartime. And with it ran that mighty social bulwark of St. Louis, the
Procession of the Veiled Prophet. One night in "Fair Week"--locally
known as "Big Thursday"--was annually given to this pageant, frankly
modeled upon the Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans. Through the
streets of the town the pageant rolled its triumphal course, all St.
Louis came out to see it, and afterwards there was a ball. To be bidden
to that ball was the social recognition that the city gave you.
But in 1904 there came that greater fair--the Louisiana Purchase
Exposition, to which the world was bidden. It was a really great fair
and it has left a permanent impress upon the town in the form of a fine
Art Gallery and the splendid group of buildings at the west edge of the
city which are being devoted to the uses of Washington University. But
the big fair spelled the doom of the smaller. The town had grown out
around its grounds and they were no longer in the country. So the career
of the old St. Louis Fair ended--brilliantly in that not-to-be-forgotten
exposition. Although some attempts have recently been made to
reëstablish it in another part of the town, the older folk of St. Louis
shake their heads. They very well know that you cannot bring the old
days back by the mere waving of a wand.
Upon a crisp October evening, the Veiled Prophet still makes his way
through the narrow streets of the town. The preparations for his coming
are hedged about with greatest secrecy, and the young girls of St. Louis
grow expectant just as their mothers and their grandmothers before them
used to grow expectant when October came close at hand. At last,
expectancy rewarded--out of the unknown an engraved summons to attend
the court of a single night--with the engraved summons some souvenir of
no slight worth; the prophet's favor is a generous one.
Absurd, you say? Not a bit of it. It is a pity that we do not have more
of it in our land. We have been rather busy grubbing; given ourselves
rather too much to utility and efficiency, to the sordid business of
merely making money. A Veiled Prophet is a good thing for a town, a
Mardi Gras a tonic. It is an idea that is spreading across America, and
America is profiting by it.
* * * * *
This is a personality sketch of St. Louis and not a guide-book. If it
were the latter, it would recount the superb commercial position of the
city, each of the bulwarks of its financial fortresses. The river-trade
is dead indeed; even the most optimistic of those who are most anxious
to see it revived doubt, in their heart of hearts, if ever it can be
revived. But commerce is not dead at St. Louis. As St. Paul and
Minneapolis are gateways to the Northwest remember that she is one of
the great gateways to the Southwest. To the man in Arkansas or Oklahoma
or Texas she is another New York; she stands to him as London stands to
the folk of the English counties. And this relation she capitalizes and
so grows rich. She is solid and substantial--the old French town of the
yesterdays has taken her permanent place among the leading cities of
America.
15
THE OLD FRENCH LADY OF THE RIVERBANK
At the bend of the river she stands--this drowsy old French lady of the
long ago. They have called her the Crescent City. But the Mississippi
makes more than a single turn around the wide-spreading town. And the
results are most puzzling, even to those steadyminded folk who assert
that they are direction-wise. In New Orleans, east seems west and north
seems south. It must almost be that the Father of Rivers reverses all
the laws of Mother Nature and runs his course up-stream.
New Orleans is upon the east bank of the Mississippi. All the
guide-books will tell you that. But in the morning the sun arises from
over across the river, and in the cool of evening his reddish radiance
is dying over Lake Ponchartrain, directly east from the river--at least,
so your direction-wise intelligence seems to tell you. But east is east
and west is west and Old Sol has made such a habit of rising and setting
these many thousand years that his reliability is not to be trusted. As
to the reliability of the Father of Waters--there is quite another
matter.
Truth to tell, the Mississippi river is probably the most utterly
unreliable thing within the North American continent. He has shifted his
course so many times within the brief century that the white-skinned men
have known him, that the oldest of them have lost all trace of his
original course. And so to steer a vessel up and down the stream is a
doubly difficult art. The pilot does not merely have to know his
steering-marks--the range between that point and this, the thrust of
some hidden and fearfully dangerous reef, the advantage to be gained
between eddies and currents for easy running--he has to learn the entire
thing anew each time he brings a craft up or down the river. Mark Twain
has long since immortalized the ample genius of the Mississippi pilots.
The stories of the river's unreliability, of its constant tendency to
change its channel are apocryphal--almost as old as the oldest of the
houses of old New Orleans. And this is not the story of the river.
Yet it must not be forgotten that the river almost is New Orleans, that
from the beginning it has been the source of the French lady's strength
and prosperity. Before there was even thought of a city the river was
there--pouring its yellow flood down from an unknown land to the great
gulf. Bienville, the real founder of New Orleans, saw with the prophetic
sight of a really great thinker what even a river that came to the sea
from an unexplored land might mean in years to come to the city of his
creation. His prophecy was right. When the river, with the traffic upon
its bosom, has prospered, New Orleans has prospered. And in the lean
years when the river traffic has dwindled, New Orleans has felt the loss
in her every fiber. There are old-timers in the city who shake their
heads when they tell you of the fat river-boats crowding in at the
levee, of the clipper-ships and the newer steam-propelled craft at the
deeper docks, of the crowds around the old St. Louis and the St. Charles
Hotels, the congested narrow streets, the halcyon days when the markets
of the two greatest nations in the world halted on the cotton news from
Factors Row. And New Orleans awaits the opening of the Panama canal with
something like feverish anticipation, for she feels that this mighty
nick finally cut into the thin neck of the American continents, her
wharves will again be crowded with shipping--this time with a variety of
craft plying to and from the strange ports of the Pacific. So much does
her river still mean to her.
Factors Row still stands, rusty and somewhat grimed. No longer is it
consequential in the markets of the world. In fact, to put a bald truth
baldly, no longer is New Orleans of supreme consequence in the cotton
problem of all nations. A great cotton shipping port she still is and
will long remain. But the multiplication of railroad points and the
rapid development of such newer cotton ports as Galveston, to make a
single instance, have all worked against her preëminence.
This is not a story of the commercial importance of New Orleans, either.
There are plenty who are willing to tell that story, with all of its
romantic traditions of the past and its brilliant prophecies for the
future. This is the story of the New Orleans of today, the city who with
an almost reverential respect for the Past and its monuments still holds
her doors open to the Present and its wonders.
Of the Past one may know at every turn. North of Canal street--that
broad thoroughfare which ranks as a dividing path with Market street in
San Francisco--the city has changed but little since the Civil War.
South of Canal--still called the "new" part of the city--there has been
some really modern development. Prosperous looking skyscrapers have
lifted their lordly heads above the narrow streets and the compactly
built "squares" which they encompass; there are several modern hotels
with all the momentary glory of artificial marbles and chromatic
frescoes, department stores with show windows as brave and gay as any of
those in New York or Chicago or Boston. But even if the narrow streets
were to be widened, New Orleans would never look like Indianapolis or
Kansas City or St. Paul--any of the typical cities of the so-called
Middle West. Too many of her stout old structures of the fifties and the
sixties still remain. And hung upon these, uncompromising and
triumphant, are the galleries.
The galleries of New Orleans! They are perhaps the most typical of the
outward expressions of a town whose personality is as distinct as that
of Boston or Charleston or San Francisco. They must have been master
workmen whose fingers and whose ancient forges worked those delicate and
lacelike traceries. And it has been many thankful generations who have
praised the practical side of their handicraft. For in the long hot
summer months of New Orleans these galleries furnish a shade that is a
delight and a comfort. On rainy days they are arcades keeping dry the
sidewalks of the heart of the town. And from the offices within, the
galleries, their rails lined with growing things, are veritable
triumphs. Once in a great while some one will rise up and suggest that
they be abolished--that they are old-fashioned and have long since
served their full purpose. That some one is generally a smart shopkeeper
who has drifted down from one of these upstart cities from the North or
East. But New Orleans is smarter still. She well knows the commercial
value of her personality. There are newer cities and showier within the
radius of a single night's ride upon a fast train. But where one man
comes to one of these, a dozen alight at the old French town by the bend
of the yellow river.
"Give J---- a few French restaurants, some fame for its cocktails or its
gin-fizzes--just as New Orleans has--and I will bring a dozen big new
factories here within the next three years," said the secretary of the
Chamber of Commerce of a thriving Texas town the other day. He knew
whereof he spake. And now, we shall know whereof we speak. We shall
give a moment of attention to the little restaurants and the gin-fizzes.
Let the gin-fizzes come first, for they are nearly as characteristic of
the old town as her galleries! You will find their chief habitat just
across a narrow alley from the St. Charles Hotel. There is a long bar on
the one side of the room, upon which stand great piles of ice-bound
southern oysters--twelve months of the year, for New Orleans never reads
an "R" in or out of her oyster-eating calendar. But any bar may bring
forth oysters, and only one bar in the world brings forth the real New
Orleans gin-fizz. Two enterprising young men stand behind the
bar-keepers in a perpetual shaking of the fizzes. If it is tantalizing
to shake that whereof you do not taste, they show it not. And in the
hours of rush traffic there are six of the non-bar-keeping bartenders
who give the correct amount of ague to New Orleans' most delectable
beverage. A hustler from North or East would put in electric shakers
instanter--a thousand or is it ten thousand revolutions to the minute?
He would brag of his electric shakers and the New Orleans gin-fizz would
be dead--forever. Romance and an electric shaker cannot go hand in hand.
"The ingredients?" you breathlessly interrupt. "The manner of the
mixing?"
Bless your heart, if the Gin Fizz House published its close-held secret
to the world, it would lose its chief excuse for existence and then
become an ordinary drinking-place. As it is, it holds its head above the
real variety of saloons, even above the polished mahogany bar of the
aristocratic hotel across the narrow street. For its product, if
delightful, is still gentle, although insidious, perhaps. It is largely
milk and barely gin. You can drink it by the barrel without the
slightest jarring of your faculties. And it is rumored that some of the
men of New Orleans use it as a breakfast-food.
From the Gin Fizz House to the Absinthe House is a long way,--in more
meanings than one. The Absinthe House is hardly less famed, but in these
days when drinking has largely gone out of fashion and wormwood is under
the particular ban of the United States statutes, it is largely a relic
of the past. It stands in the heart of the old French town and before we
come to its broad portal, let us study the fascinating quarter in which
we are to find it.
We have already spoken of Canal street, so broad in contradistinction to
the very narrow streets of the rest of the older parts of the town, that
one can almost see the narrow water-filled ditch that once traversed it,
as the dividing line of the city. South of Canal street, the so-called
American portion of the city, with many affectations of modernity--north
of that thoroughfare--curiously enough the down-stream side--the French
quarter, architecturally and romantically the most fascinating section
of any large city of the United States. The very names of its
streets--Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Burgundy, Dauphine, St.
Louis--quicken anticipation. And anticipation is not dulled when one
comes to see the great somber houses with their mysterious and
moth-eaten courtyards and the interesting folk who dwell within them.
We choose Royal street, heading straight away from Canal street as if in
shrinking horror of electric signs and moving-picture theaters. In a
single square they are behind and forgotten and, if it were not for the
trolley cars and the smartly dressed French girls, we might be walking
in Yesterday. The side streets groan under the same ugly, heavy patterns
of Belgian block pavement that have done service for nearly a century.
Originally the blocks--brought long years ago as ballast in the ships
from Europe--were in a pretty pattern, laid diagonally. But heavy
traffic and the soft sub-strata of the river-bank town have long since
worked sad havoc with the old pavements. And a new city administration
has finally begun to replace them with the very comfortable but utterly
unsentimental asphalt.