Chicago's skyline from the docks.... A city which rebuilt itself after the fire; in the next decade doubled its size; and now has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San FranciscoChicago's skyline from the docks.... A city which rebuilt itself after the fire; in the next decade doubled its size; and now has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco
Stone (now general manager of the Associated Press) and Victor F. Lawson, who had together established the Chicago "Daily News," of which Mr. Lawson is the present editor and publisher. Field's column in the "News" was known as "Sharps and Flats." In it appeared his free translations of the Odes of Horace, and much of his best known verse. Also he printed gossip of the stage and of literary matters—the latter being gathered by him at the meetings of a little club, "The Bibliophiles," composed of prominent Chicagoans. This club used to meet in the famous old McClurg bookstore.
In 1890 George Ade came from Indiana, and after having been a reporter on the Chicago "Record" for one year, started his famous "Stories of the Street and Town," under which heading much of his best early work appeared. This department was illustrated by John T. McCutcheon, another Indiana boy. At about this time, Roswell Field, a brother of Eugene, was conducting a column called "Lights and Shadows" in the Chicago "Evening Post," in which paper Finley Peter Dunne was also beginning his "Dooleys." Dunne was born in Chicago and was a reporter on several Chicago papers before he found his level. He got the idea for "Dooley" from Jim McGarry, who had a saloon opposite the "Tribune" building, and employed a bartender named Casey, who was a foil for him. McGarry was described to me by a "Tribune" man who knew him, as "a crusty old cuss."
After some years Dunne left the "Post" and became editor of the Chicago "Journal," to which paper came (from Vermont by way of Duluth) Bert Leston Taylor. Taylor ran a department on the "Journal" which was called "A Little About Everything," and one of his "contribs" was a young insurance man, Franklin P. Adams. Later, when Taylor left the "Journal" to take a position on the "Tribune," Adams left the insurance business and went at "columning" in earnest, replacing Taylor on the "Journal." Some years since Adams migrated to the metropolis, where he now conducts a column called "The Conning Tower" in the New York "Tribune."
Taylor, in the meantime, had started his famous column known as "A Line-o'-Type or Two." This he ran for three years, after which he moved to New York and became editor of "Puck." Before Taylor left the "Tribune," Wilbur D. Nesbit, who had been running a column which he signed "Josh Wink," in the Baltimore "American," came to Chicago and started a column called "The Top o' the Morning," which, for a time, alternated with Taylor's "Line-o'-Type." Later Nesbit moved over to the "Post," where he conducted a department called "The Innocent Bystander," leaving the "Tribune," for a time, without a "column."
In the next few years two other "columns" started in Chicago, "Alternating Currents," conducted by S. E. Kiser, for the "Record-Herald," and "In the Wake of the News," which was started in the "Tribune" by thelate "Hughey" Keough, who is still remembered as an exceptionally gifted man. When Keough died, Hugh S. Fullerton ran the column for a time, after which it was taken up by R. W. Lardner, who, I believe, continues to conduct it, although he has recently written baseball stories which have been published in "The Saturday Evening Post," and have attracted much attention. Kiser also continues his column in the "Record-Herald." Another column, which started a year or so ago is "Breakfast Food" in the Chicago "Examiner," conducted by George Phair, formerly of Milwaukee.
The Chicago "Tribune" now has two "columns," for, five years since, it recaptured Bert Leston Taylor, and brought him back to revive his "Line-o'-Type." He has been there ever since, and, so far as I know "columns," his is the best in the United States. It has been widely imitated, as has also been the work of the "Tribune's" famous cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon. But something that a "Tribune" man said to me of McCutcheon, is no less true, I think, of Taylor: "They can imitate his style, but they cannot imitate his mind."
It is rather widely known, I think, that Chicago built the first steel-frame skyscraper—the Tacoma Building—but I do not believe that the world knows that Kohlsaat's in Chicago was the first quick-lunch place of its kind, or that the first "free lunch" in the country was established, many years since, in the basement saloon at the corner of State and Madison Streets. Considering the skyscrapers and quick lunches and free lunches that there are to-day, it is hard to realize that there ever was a first one anywhere. But the origin of things which have become national institutions, as these things have, seems to me to be worth recording here. It may be added that the loyal Chicagoan who told of these things seemed to be prouder of the "free lunch" and the quick lunch than of the skyscraper.
Of two things I mentioned to him he was not proud at all. One was the famous pair of First Ward aldermen who have attained a national fame under their nick-names, "Hinky Dink" and "Bathhouse John." The other was the stockyards.
"Why is it," he asked in a bored and irritated tone, "that every one who comes out here has to go to the stockyards?"
"Are you aware," I returned, "that half the bank clearings of Chicago are traceable to the stockyards?"
He answered with a noncommittal grunt.
His was not the attitude of the Detroit man who wants you to know that Detroit does something more than make automobiles, or of the Grand Rapids man who says: "We make lots of things here besides furniture." He was really ashamed of the stockyards, as a man may, perhaps, be ashamed of the fact that his father made his money in some business with a smell to it. And because he felt so deeply on the subject, I had the half idea of not touching on the stockyards in this chapter.
However the news that my companion and myself were there to "do" Chicago was printed in the papers, and presently the stockyards began to call us up. It didn't even ask if we were coming. It just askedwhen. And as I hesitated, it settled the whole matter then and there by saying it would call for us in its motor car, at once.
I may say at the outset that, to quote the phrase of Mr. Freer of Detroit, the stockyards "has no esthetic value." It is a place of mud, and railroad tracks, and cattle cars, and cattle pens, and overhead runways, and great ugly brick buildings, and men on ponies, and raucous grunts, and squeals, and smells—a place which causes the heart to sink with a sickening heaviness.
Our first call was at the Welfare Building, where we were shown some of the things which are being done tobenefit employees of the packing houses. It was noon-time. The enormous lunch room was well occupied. A girl was playing ragtime at a piano on a platform. The room was clean and airy. The women wore aprons and white caps. A good lunch cost six cents. There were iron lockers in the locker room—lockers such as one sees in an athletic club. There were marble shower baths for the men and for the women. There were two manicures who did nothing but see to the hands of the women working in the plant. There were notices of classes in housekeeping, cooking, washing, house furnishing, the preparation of food for the sick—signs printed in English, Russian, Slovak, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian, Italian, and Greek. Obviously, the company was doing things to help these people. Obviously it was proud of what it was doing. Obviously I should have rejoiced, saying to myself: "See how these poor, ignorant foreigners who come over here to our beautiful and somewhat free country are being elevated!" But all I could think of was: "What a horrible place the stockyards is! How I loathe it here!"
On the North Side of Chicago there is an old and exclusive club, dating from before the days of motor cars, which is known as the Saddle and Cycle Club. The lunch club for the various packing-house officials, at the stockyards, has a name bearing perhaps some satirical relation to that of the other club. It is called the Saddle and Sirloin Club, and in that club I ate apiece of sirloin the memory of which will always remain with me as something sacred.
After lunching and visiting the offices of a packing company where, we were told, an average daily business of $1,300,000 is done—and the place looks it—we visited the Stockyards Inn, which is really an astonishing establishment. The astonishing quality about it is that it is a thing of beauty which has grown up in a place as far removed from beauty as any that I ever looked upon outside a mining camp. A charming, low, half-timbered building, the Inn is like something at Stratford-on-Avon; and by some strange freak of chance the man who runs it has a taste for the antique in furniture and chinaware. Inside it is almost like a fine old country house—pleasant cretonnes, grate fires, old Chippendale chairs, mahogany tables, grandfather's clocks, pewter, and luster ware. All this for cattlemen who bring their flocks and herds into the yards! The only thing to spoil it is the all-pervasive smell of animals.
From there we went to the place of death.
Through a small door the fated pigs enter the final pen fifteen or twenty at a time. They are nervous, perhaps because of the smell coming from within, perhaps because of the sounds. A man in the pen loops a chain around the hind foot of each successive pig, and then slips the iron ring at the other end of the chain over a hook at the outer margin of a revolving drum, perhaps ten feet in diameter. As the drum revolves the hook rises, slowly, drawing the pig backwardby the leg, and finally lifting it bodily, head downward. When the hook reaches the top of its orbit it transfers the animal to a trolley, upon which it slides in due course to the waiting butcher, who dispatches it with a knife thrust in the neck, and turns to receive the next pig.
The manners of the pigs on their way to execution held me with a horrid fascination. Pigs look so much alike that we assume them to be minus individuality. That is not so. The French Revolution—of which the stockyards reminded Dr. George Brandes, the literary critic, who recently visited this country—scarcely could have brought out in its victims a wider range of characteristics than these pigs show. I have often noticed, of course, that some people are like pigs, but I had never before suspected that all pigs are so very much like people. Some of them come in yelling with fright. Others are silent. They shift about nervously, and sniff, as though scenting death. "It's the steam they smell," said a man in overalls beside me. Well, perhaps it is. But I could smell death there, and I still think the pigs can smell it, too. Some of the pigs lean against each other for companionship in their distress. Others merely wait with bowed heads, giving a curious effect of porcine resignation. When they feel the tug of the chain, and are dragged backward, some of them set up a new and frightful squealing; others go in silence, and with a sort of dignity, like martyrs dying for a cause.
As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me as he wiped his long, thin blade. He was a rawboned Slav with a pale face, high cheek bones, and large brown eyes, holding within their somber depths an expression of thoughtful, dreamy abstraction. I have never seen such eyes. Without prejudice or pity they seemed to look alike on man and pig. Being upon the platform above him, right side up, and free to go when I should please, I felt safe for the moment. But suppose I were not so—suppose I were to come along to him, hanging by one leg from the trolley—what would he do then? Would he stop to ask why they had sent another sort of animal, I wondered? Or would he do his work impartially?
I should not wish to take the chance.
The progress of the pig is swift—if the transition from pig to pork may be termed "progress." The carcass travels presently through boiling water, and emerges pink and clean. And as it goes along upon its trolley, it passes one man after another, each with an active knife, until, thirty minutes later, when it has undergone the government inspection, it is headless and in halves—mere meat, which looks as though it never could have been alive.
From the slaughter-house we passed through the smoke-house, where ham and bacon were smoking over hardwood fires in rows of ovens big as blocks of houses. Then through the pickling room with its enormous hogs-heads, giving the appearance of a monkish wine cellar.Then through the curing room with its countless piles of dry salt pork, neatly arranged like giant bricks.
The enthusiastic gentleman who escorted us kept pointing out the beauties of the way this work was done: the cleanliness, the system by which the rooms are washed with steam, the gigantic scale of all the operations. I heard, I noticed, I agreed. But all the time my mind was full of thoughts of dying pigs. Indeed, I had forgotten for the moment that other animals are also killed to feed carnivorous man. However, I was reminded of that, presently, when we came upon another building, consecrated to the conversion of life into veal and beef.
The steers meet death in little pens. It descends upon them unexpectedly from above, dealt out by a man with a sledge, who cracks them between the horns with a sound like that of a woodman's ax upon a tree. The creatures quiver and quickly crumple.
It is swift. In half a minute the false bottom of the pen turns up and rolls them out upon the floor, inert as bags of meal. Only after death do these cattle find their way to an elevated trolley line, like that used for the pigs. And, as with the pigs, they move along speedily; shortly they are to be seen in the beef cooler, where they hang in tremendous rows, forming strange vistas—a forest of dead meat.
The scene where calves were being killed according to the Jewish law, for kosher meat, presented the most sanguinary spectacle with which my eyes have everburned. Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim, shiny blades. Literally they waded in a lake of gore. Even the walls were covered with it. Looking down upon them from above, we saw them silhouetted on a sheet of pigment utterly beyond comparison—for, without exaggeration, fire would look pale and cold beside the shrieking crimson of that blood—glistening, wet, and warm in the electric light.
I shall not attempt to conceal the fact that I was glad to leave the stockyards.
When, a short time later, the motor car was bearing us smoothly down the sunlit boulevard, the Advertising Gentleman who had conducted us through all the carnage put an abrupt question to me.
"Do you want to be original?" he demanded.
"I suppose all writers hope to be," I answered.
"Well," he replied, tapping me emphatically upon the knee, "I'll tell you how to do it. When you write about the Yards, don't mention the killing. Everybody's done that. There's nothing more to say. What you want to do is to dwell on the other side. That's the way to be original."
"The other side?" I murmured feebly.
"Sure!" he cried. "Look at this." As he spoke, he produced from a pocket some proofs of pen-and-ink drawings—pictures of sweet-faced girls, encased in spotless aprons, wearing upon their heads alluring caps, and upon their lips the smiles of angels, while, withtheir dainty rose-tipped fingers, they packed the luscious by-products of cattle-killing into tins—tins which shone as only the pen of the "commercial artist" can make tins shine.
"There's your story!" he exclaimed. "The poetic side of packing! Don't write about the slaughter-houses. Dwell on daintiness—pretty girls in white caps—everything shining and clean! Don't you see that's the way to make your story original?"
Of course I saw it at once. Original? Why, original is no name for it! I could never have conceived such originality! It isn't in me! I should no more have thought of writing only of pretty girls and pretty cans, after witnessing those bloody scenes, than of describing the battle at Liège in terms of polish used on soldiers' buttons.
But original as the idea is, you perceive I have not used it. I could not bear to. He thought of it first. It belonged to him. If I used it, the originality would not be mine, but his. So I have deliberately written the story in my own hackneyed way.
Has it ever struck you that our mental attitude toward famous men varies in this respect: that while we think of some of them as human beings with whom we might conceivably shake hands and have a chat, we think of others as legendary creatures, strange and remote—beings hardly to be looked upon by human eyes?
Some years since, in the courtyard of a hotel in Paris, I met a friend of mine. He was hurrying in the direction of the bar.
"Come on," he beckoned. "There are some people here you'll want to meet."
I followed him in and to a table at which two men were seated. One proved to be Alfred Sutro; the other Maurice Maeterlinck.
To meet Mr. Sutro was delightful, but it was conceivable. Not so Maeterlinck. To shake hands with him, to sit at the same table, to see that he wore a black coat, a stiff collar (it was too large for him), a black string tie, a square-crowned derby hat; to see him seated in a bar sipping beer like any man—that was not conceivable.
I sat there speechless, trying to convince myself of what I saw.
"That man over there is actually Maeterlinck!" I kept assuring myself. "I am looking at Maeterlinck! Now he nods the head in which 'The Bluebird' was conceived. Now he lifts his beer glass in the hand which indited 'Monna Vanna!'"
Nor was my amazement due entirely to the surprise of meeting a much-admired man. It was due, most of all, to a feeling which I must have had—although I was never before conscious of it—a feeling that no such man as Maeterlinck existed in reality; that he was a purely legendary being; a figure in white robes and sandals, harping and singing in some Elysian temple.
I experienced a somewhat similar emotion in Chicago on being introduced to Hinky Dink. In saying that, I do not mean to be irreverent. I only mean that I had always thought of Hinky Dink as a fictitious personage. He and his colleague, Bathhouse John, have figured in my mind as a pair of absurd, imaginary figures, such as might have been invented by some whimsical son of a comic supplement like Winsor McCay.
Now, as I soon discovered, the Hinky Dink of the newspapers is, as a matter of fact, to a large extent fictitious. He is a legend, built up out of countless comic stories and newspaper cartoons. The real Hinky Dink—otherwise Alderman Michael Kenna—is a very different person, for whatever may be said against him—and much is—he is a very real human being.
I clip this brief summary of his life from the Chicago "Record-Herald."
Born on the West Side, August 18, 1858.Started life as a newsboy."Crowned" as Alderman of the First Ward in 1897.Reëlected biennially ever since.Owner in fief of various privileges in the First Ward.Lord of the Workingmen's Exchange.Overlord of floaters, voters, and other liege subjects.
Born on the West Side, August 18, 1858.Started life as a newsboy."Crowned" as Alderman of the First Ward in 1897.Reëlected biennially ever since.Owner in fief of various privileges in the First Ward.Lord of the Workingmen's Exchange.Overlord of floaters, voters, and other liege subjects.
The Workingmen's Exchange, referred to above, is one of two saloons operated by the Alderman, on South Clark Street, and it is a show place for those who wish to look upon the darker side of things. It is a very large saloon, having one of the longest bars I ever saw; also one of the busiest. Hardly anything but beer is served there; beer in schooners little smaller than a man's head. These are known locally as "babies," and, by a curious custom, the man who removes his fingers from his glass forfeits it to any one who takes it up. Nor are takers lacking.
"I'll tell you a funny thing about this place," said my friend the veteran police reporter, who was somewhat apologetically doing the honors. (Police reporters are always apologetic when they show you over a town that has been "cleaned up.")
"What?" I asked.
"No one has ever been killed in here," he said.
I had to admit that it was a funny thing. After looking at the faces lined up at the bar I should nothave imagined it possible. Presently we crossed the street to the Alderman's other saloon; a very different sort of place, shining with mirrors, mahogany, and brass, and frequented by a better class of men. Here we met Hinky Dink.
He is a slight man, so short of stature that when he leans a little, resting his elbow on the bar, his arm runs out horizontally from the shoulder. He wore an extremely neat brown suit (there was even a white collarette inside the vest!) a round black felt hat, and a heavy watch chain, from which hung a large circular charm with a star and crescent set in diamonds. Though it was late at night, he looked as if he had just been washed and brushed.
His face is exceedingly interesting. His lips are thin; his nose is sharp, coming to a rather pronounced point, and his eyes are remarkable for what they see and what they do not tell. They are poker eyes—gray-blue, cold, penetrating, unrevealing. My companion and I felt that while we were "getting" Hinky Dink, he was not failing to "get" us.
Far from being tough or vicious in his manner or conversation, the little Alderman is very quiet. There is, indeed, a kind of gentleness about him. His English is, I should say, quite as good as that of the average man, while his thinking is much above the average as to quickness and clearness. As between himself and Bathhouse John, the other First Ward fixture on the Board of Aldermen, it is generally conceded that Hinky Dink is the more able and intelligent. On this point, however, I was unable to draw my own conclusions. The Bathhouse was ill when I was in Chicago.
Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim, shiny bladesTwo rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim, shiny blades
In the ordinary conversation of the Honorable Hinky Dink there is no trace of brogue, but a faint touch of brogue manifests itself when he speaks with unwonted vehemence—as, for example, when he told us about the injustices which he alleged were perpetrated upon the poor voters who live in lodging houses in his ward.
The little Alderman is famous for his reticence.
"Small wonder!" said my friend the police reporter. "Look at what the papers have handed him! I'll tell you what happens: some city editor sends a kid reporter to get a story about Hinky Dink. The kid comes and sees Kenna, and doesn't get anything out of him but monosyllables. He goes back to the office without any story, but that doesn't make any difference. Hinky Dink is fair game. The kid sits down to his typewriter and fakes a story, making out that the Alderman didn't only talk, but that he talked a kind of tough-guy dialect—'deze-here tings'—'doze dere tings'—all that kind of stuff. Can you blame the little fellow for not talking?"
I could not.
But he talked to us, and freely. The police reporter told him we were "right." That was enough.
As the "red-light district" of Chicago used to be largely in the First Ward before it was broken up, I asked the Alderman for his views on the segregation ofvice versus the other thing, whatever it may be. (Is it dissemination?)
"I'll tell you what I think about it," he replied, "but you can't print it."
"Why not?" I asked, disappointed.
"Well," he returned, "I believe in a segregated district, but if I'm quoted as saying so, why the woman reformers and everybody on the other side will take it up and say I'm for it just because I want vice back in the First Ward again. I don't. It doesn't make any difference to me where you have it. Put it out by the Drainage Canal or anywheres you like. But I believe you can't stamp vice out; not the way people are made to-day. They never have been able to stamp it out in all these thousands of years. And, as long as they can't, it looks to me like it was better to get it together all in one bunch than to scatter it all over town.
"Now I know there's a whole lot of good people that think segregation is a bad thing. Well, itisa bad thing.Viceis a bad thing. But there it is, all the same. A lot of these good people don't understand conditions. They don't understand what lots of other men and women are really like. You got to take people as they are and do what you can.
"One thing that shocks a lot of these high-minded folks that live in comfortable homes and never have any trouble except when they have to get a new cook, is the idea of commercialized vice that goes with segregation. Of course it shocks them. But show me someway to stop it. Napoleon believed in segregation and regulation, and a lot of other wise people have, too.
"Here's the way I think they ought to handle it: they ought to have a district regulated by the Police Department and the Health Department. Then there ought to be restrictions. No bright lights for one thing. No music. No booze. Cut out those things and you kill the place for sightseers. Then there ought to be a law that no woman can be an inmate without going and registering with the police, having her record looked up, and saying she wants to enter the house. That would prevent any possibility of white slavery. Personally, I think there's a lot of bunk about this white-slave talk. But this plan would fix it so a girl couldn't be kept in a house against her will. Any keeper of a house who let in a girl that wasn't registered would be put out of business for good and all. Men ought not to be allowed to have any interest, directly or indirectly, in the management of these places.
"Now, of course, there's objections to any way at all of handling this question. The minute you say 'cut out the booze' that opens a way to police graft. But is that any worse than the chance for graft when the women are just chased around from place to place by the police? Segregation gives them some rights, anyhow.
"Some people say 'segregation doesn't segregate,' Well, that's true, too. But segregation keeps the worst of it from being scattered all over town, doesn't it? When you scatter these women you have them living in buildings alongside of respectable families, or, worse yet, you run them onto the streets. That's persecution, and they're bad enough off without that.
"Say, do you think Chicago is really any more moral this minute because the old red-light district is shut down? A few of the resort keepers left town, and maybe a hundred inmates, but most of them stuck. They're around in the residence districts now, running what they call 'buffet flats.'"
Listening to the little Alderman I was convinced of two things. First, I felt sure that, without thought of self-interest, he was telling me what he really believed. Second, as he is undeniably a man of broad experience among unfortunates of various kinds, his views are interesting.
"I wish you'd let me print what you have said," I urged as we were leaving his saloon.
He shook his head.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," I persisted. "I'll write it out. Perhaps I can put it in such a way that people will see that you were playing square. Then I'll send it to you, and, if it doesn't misrepresent you, perhaps you'll let me print it after all."
"All right," he agreed as we shook hands.
In city planning, as in other things, Chicago has thought and plotted on an Olympian scale, and it is characteristic of Chicago that her plan for her own beautification should be so much greater than the plan of any other city in the country, as to make comparisons unkind. For that reason I have eliminated Chicago from consideration, when discussing the various group plans, park and boulevard systems, and "civic centers," upon which other American cities are at work.
The Chicago plan is, indeed, too immense a thing to be properly dealt with here. It is comparable with nothing less than the Haussman plan for Paris, and it is being carried forward, through the years, with the same foresight, the same patience and the same indomitable aspiration. Indeed, I think greater patience has been required in Chicago, for the French people were in sympathy with beauty at a time when the broad meaning of the word was actually not understood in this country. Here it has been necessary to educate the masses, to cultivate their city pride, and to direct that pride into creative channels. It is hardly too much to say that the minds of American city-dwellers (and half our race inhabits cities) have had to be remade, in order to prepare them to receive such plans as the Chicago plan.
The World's Columbian Exposition, at Chicago, exerted a greater influence upon the United States than any other fair has ever exerted upon a country. It came at a critical moment in our esthetic history—a moment when the sense of beauty of form and color, which had hitherto been dormant in Americans, was ready to be aroused.
Fortunately for us, the Chicago Fair was worthy of the opportunity; and that it was worthy of the opportunity was due to the late Daniel Hudson Burnham, the distinguished architect, who was director of works for the Exposition. In the perspective of the twenty-one years which have passed since the Chicago Fair, the figure of Mr. Burnham, and the importance of the work done by him, grows larger. When the history of the American Renaissance comes to be written, Daniel H. Burnham and the men by whom he was surrounded at the time the Chicago Fair was being made, will be listed among the founders of the movement.
The Fair awoke the American sense of beauty. And before its course was run, a group of Chicago business men, some of whom were directors of the exposition, determined to have a plan for the entire city which should so far as possible reflect the lessons of the Fair in the arrangement of streets, parks and plazas, and the grouping of buildings.
After the Fair, the Chicago Commercial Club commissioned Mr. Burnham to proceed to re-plan the city. Eight years were consumed in this work. The best architects available were called in consultation. After having spent more than $200,000, the Commercial Club presented the plan to the city, together with an elaborate report.
To carry out the plan, the Chicago City Council, in 1909, created a Plan Commission, composed of more than 300 men, representing every element of citizenship under the permanent chairmanship of Mr. Charles H. Wacker, who had previously been most active in the work. Under Mr. Wacker's direction, and with the aid of continued subscriptions from the Commercial Club, the work of the Commission has gone on steadily, and vast improvements have already been made.
The Plan itself has to do entirely with the physical rearrangement of the city. It is designed to relieve congestion, facilitate traffic, and safeguard health.
Instead of routing out the Illinois Central Railroad which disfigures the lake front of the whole South Side, the plan provides for the making of a parkway half a mile wide and five miles long, beyond the tracks, where the lake now is. This parkway will extend from Grant Park, at the center of the city, all the way to Jackson Park, where the World's Fair grounds were. Arrangements have also been made for immense forest areas, to encircle the city outside its limits, occupying somewhat the relation to it that the Bois de Boulogne and the Boisde Vincennes do to Paris. New parks are also to be created within the city.
It is impossible to go into further details here as to these parks, but it should be said that, when the lake front parkway system, above mentioned, is completed, practically the whole front of Chicago along Lake Michigan will be occupied by parks and lagoons, and that Chicago expects—and not without reason—to have the finest waterfront of any city in the world.
Michigan Avenue, the city's superb central street which already bears very heavy traffic, now has a width of 130 feet at the heart of the city, excepting to the north, near the river, where it becomes a narrow, squalid street, for all that it is the principal highway between the North and South Sides. This portion of the street is not only to be widened, but will be made into a two-level thoroughfare (the lower level for heavy vehicles and the upper for light) crossing the river on a double-deck bridge.
It is a notorious fact that the business and shopping district of Chicago is at present strangled by the elevated railroad loop, which bounds the center of the city, and it is essential for the welfare of the city that this area be extended and made more spacious. The City Plan provides for a "quadrangle" to cover three square miles at the heart of Chicago, to be bounded on the east by Michigan Avenue, on the north by Chicago Avenue, on the west by Halsted Street, and on the south by Twelfth Street. When this work is done these streetswill have been turned into wide boulevards, and other streets, running through the quadrangle, will also have been widened and improved, principal among these being Congress Street, which though not at present cut through, will ultimately form a great central artery, leading back from the lake, through the center of the quadrangle, forming the axis of the plan, and centering on a "civic center," which is to be built at the junction of Congress and Halsted Streets and from which diagonal streets will radiate in all directions.
Nor does the plan end here. A complete system of exterior roadways will some day encircle the city; the water front along the river will be improved and new bridges built; also two outer harbors will be developed.
By an agreement with the city, no major public work of any description is inaugurated until the Plan Commission has passed upon its harmonious relationship with the general scheme. The Commission further considers the comprehensive development of the city's steam railway and street transportation systems; very recently it successfully opposed a railroad union depot project which was inimical to the Plan of Chicago, and it has generally succeeded in persuading the railroads to work in harmony with the plan, when making immediate improvements.
One of the most interesting and intelligently conducted departments under the Commission has to do with the education of the people of Chicago with regard to the Plan. A great deal of money and energy has beenexpended in this work, with the result that city-wide misapprehension concerning the Plan has given place to city-wide comprehension. Lectures are given before schools and clubs with the idea of teaching Chicago what the plan is, why it is needed, and what great European cities have accomplished in similar directions. Books on the subject have been published and widely circulated, and one of these, "Wacker's Manual," has been adopted as a textbook by the Chicago Public Schools, with the idea of fitting the coming generations to carry on the work.
If the plan as it stands at present has been accomplished within a long lifetime, Chicago will have maintained her reputation for swift action. Two or three lifetimes would be time enough in any other city. However, Chicago desires the fulfillment of the prophecy she has on paper. Work is going on, and the extent to which it will go on in future depends entirely upon the ability of the city to finance Plan projects. And when a thing depends upon the ability of the city of Chicago, it depends upon a very solid and a very splendid thing.
The Chicago Club is the rich, substantial club of the city, an organization which may perhaps be compared with the Union Club of New York, although the inner atmosphere of the Chicago Club seems somehow less formal than that of its New York prototype. However, that is true in general where Chicago clubs and New York clubs are compared.
The University Club of Chicago has a very large and handsome building in the Gothic style, with a dining room said to be the handsomest club dining room in the world: a Gothic hall with fine stained-glass windows. Between this club-house and the great Gothic piles of the Chicago University there exists an agreeable, though perhaps quite accidental, architectural harmony.
Excepting Washington University, in St. Louis, Chicago University is the one great American college I have seen which seems fully to have anticipated its own vastness, and prepared for it with comprehensive plans for the grouping of its buildings. Architecturally it is already exceedingly harmonious and effective, for its great halls, all of gray Bedford stone, are beginning tobe toned by the Chicago smoke into what will some day be Oxonian mellowness. Even now, by virtue of its ancient architecture, its great size and massiveness, it is not without an effect of age—an effect which is, however, violently disputed by the young trees of the campus. Though these trees have grown as fast as they could, they have not been able to keep up with the growth of the great institution of learning, fertilized, as it has been, by Mr. Rockefeller's millions. Instead of shading the university, the campus trees are shaded by it.
The South Shore Country Club is an astonishing resort: a huge pavilion, by the lake, on the site of the old World's Fair grounds. It is a pleasant place to which to motor for meals, and is much used, especially for dining, in the summer time. The building of this club made me think of Atlantic City; I felt that I was not in a club at all, but in the rotunda of some vast hotel by the sea.
I had no opportunity to visit The Little Room, a small club reported to be Chicago's artistic holy of holies, but I did have luncheon at the Cliff Dwellers, which is the larger and, I believe, more active organization. The Cliff Dwellers is a fine club, made up of writers and artists and their friends and allies. I know of no single club in New York where one may meet at luncheon a group of men more alive, more interesting, or of more varied pursuits, and I may add that I absorbed while there a very definite impression that between men following the arts, and those following business, the line is not so sharply drawn in Chicago as in New York.
At the Cliff Dwellers I met a gentleman, a librarian, who gave me some interesting information about the management of libraries in Chicago.
"Chicago is a business city, dominated by business men," he said. "We have three large public libraries, one the Chicago Public Library, belonging to the city, and two others, the Newberry and the Crerar, established by rich men who left money for the purpose.
"The system of interlocking directorates, elsewhere pronounced pernicious, has worked very beautifully in affecting coöperation instead of competition between these institutions.
"About twenty years ago, at the time of the Crerar foundation, the boards of the three libraries met and formed a gentleman's agreement, dividing the field of knowledge. It was then arranged that the Chicago Public Library should take care of the majority of the people, and that the Newberry and the Crerar should specialize, the former in what is called the 'Humanities'—philosophy, religion, history, literature, and the fine arts; the latter in science, pure and applied. At that time the Newberry Library turned over to the Crerar, at cost, all books it possessed which properly belonged in the scientific category. And since that time therehas been practically no duplication among Chicago libraries. That is what comes of having public-spirited business men on library boards. They run these public institutions as they would run their own commercial enterprises. The Harvester Company, for example, wouldn't duplicate its own plant right in the same territory. That would be waste. But in many cities possessing more than one library, duplication of an exactly parallel kind goes on, because the libraries do not work together. Boston affords a good example. Between the Boston Public Library, the Athenæum, and the library of Harvard University, there is much duplication. Of course a university library is obliged to stand more or less alone, but it is possible even for such a library to coöperate to some extent with others, and, wherever it is possible to do so, the library of the University of Chicago does work with others in Chicago. Even the Art Institute is in the combination."
I do not quote this information because the arrangement between the libraries of Chicago strikes me as a thing particularly startling, but for precisely the opposite reason: it is one of those unstartling examples of uncommon common sense which one might easily overlook in considering the Plan of Chicago, in gazing at great buildings wreathed in whirling smoke, or in contemplating that allegory of infinity which confronts one who looks eastward from the bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant Park.
The automobile, which has been such an agency for the promotion of suburban and country life, seems to have the habit of invading, for its own commercial purposes, those former residence districts, in cities, which it has been the means of depopulating. I noticed that in Cleveland. There the automobile offered the residents of Euclid Avenue a swift and agreeable means of transportation to a pleasanter environment. Then, having lured them away, it proceeded to seize upon their former lands for showrooms, garages, and automobile accessory shops. The same thing has happened in Chicago on Michigan Avenue, where an "automobile row" extends for blocks beyond the uptown extremity of Grant Park, through a region which but a few years since was one of fashionable residences.
I do not like to make the admission, because of loyal memories of the old South Side, but—there is no denying it—the South Side has run down. In its struggle with the North Side, for leadership, it has come off a sorry second. In point of social prestige, as in the matter of beauty, it is unqualifiedly whipped. Cottage Grove Avenue, never a pleasant street, has deteriorated now into something which, along certain reaches, has a painful resemblance to a slum.
It hurt me to see that, for I remember when the little dummy line ran out from Thirty-ninth Street to Hyde Park, most of the way between fields and woods and little farms. I had forgotten the dummy line until I saw the place from which it used to start. Then, backthrough twenty-eight or thirty years, I heard again its shrill whistle and saw the conductor, little "Mister Dodge," as he used to come around for fares, when we were going out to Fifty-fifth Street to pick violets. There are no violets now at Fifty-fifth Street. I saw nothing there but rows of sordid-looking buildings, jammed against the street.
Everywhere, as I journeyed about the city how many memories assailed me. When I lived in Chicago the Masonic Temple was the great show building of the town: the highest building in the world, it was, then. The Art Institute was in the brown stone pile now occupied by the Chicago Club. The turreted stone house of Potter Palmer, on the Lake Shore Drive was the city's most admired residence—a would-be baronial structure which, standing there to-day, is a humorous thing: a grandiose attempt, falling far short of being a good castle, and going far beyond the architectural bounds of a good house. Then there was the old Palmer House hotel, with its great billiard and poolroom, and its once-famous barbershop, with a silver dollar set at the corner of each marble tile in its floor, to amaze the rural visitor. The Palmer House is still there, looking no older than it used to look. And most familiar of all, the toy suburban trains of the Illinois Central Railroad continue to puff, importantly, along the lake front, their locomotives issuing great clouds of steam and smoke, which are snatched by the lake wind, and hurled like giant snowballs—dirty snowballs, full ofcinders—at the imperturbable stone front of Michigan Avenue.