*****
Michigan Avenue and the wonderful lakefront—ChicagoMichigan 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 andpower 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 greatestrestauranteurs, 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 andthe 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, willreduce 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 oflese majesteto 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 theUnion 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 adistinct 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 dozenblocks 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, thehodge-podgeof the queerand thenouveauthat 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.
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 stationEupon the river level atthe 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.
ESince 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.
ESince 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—theWilliam 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 haslived 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 loftyinspiration 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.
But Hill did more. He took that earlier system—the Northern Pacific, so closely allied to his territory—and made it hardly second in efficiency to the Great Northern itself. Both of these great railroads of the Northwest have never reached farther east than St. Paul, which Hill, with that fine sentiment which is so important a part of his nature, has been pleased to maintain as the gateway city of his own part of the land. But, while he has been a most helpful citizen of St. Paul, he has not hesitated to dominate her. A few years ago when the Metropolitan company presenting grand opera came to St. Paul, it was Hill who headed the subscription list for a guarantee—headed it with a good round figure. Three days before the opening night of the opera he walked into the passenger office of the linking railroad that he owned between the Twin Cities and Chicago. The singers were scheduled to come from Chicago.
"Are you going to bring the troupe up in extra cars or in a special train?" he demanded, in his peremptory fashion.
There was confusion in that office, and finally it was explained to him that a rival line, the M——, had been given the haul of the special train, as a return courtesy for having placed its advertisement on the rear cover of the opera programmes. Hill's muscles tightened.
"If the troupe doesn't come up over our road," he said, "I will withdraw the opera subscription."
The M—— road lost the movement of that opera company.
*****
Hill is an advertiser, a patient, persistent and entirely consistent user of public print in every form. Of the really big men of the land he is perhaps the most accessible. His door swings quickly open to any resident of the Northwest. He is in demand at public dinners in the East and at every conceivable function in his own territory. And yet those folk of his own town who come to know Mr. Hill intimately know him rather as a great publicist, no poor musician, a painter of real ability, and a kind-hearted neighbor. His house in Summit avenue contains one of the finest art galleries west of Chicago. In this rare taste for good art he is not unlike the late Collis P. Huntington, or Sir William C. Van Horne, the dominating force of the Canadian Pacific.
Hill has a real faculty not only for judging, but for executing oil paintings. It is related on good authority that, having been a member of a committee to purchase a portrait of a distinguished western railroader, he found the picture as it hung in the artist's studio in Chicago far from his liking.
"He's missed W——'s expression entirely," said the Empire Builder. And so saying he grasped a palette that was resting on a table, dove his brush into the soft paints, and before the astonished artist could recover enough self-possession to protest, Hill was deftly at work upon the canvas. In five minutes he had convinced the little committee of which he was chairman, that the expression of the portrait had been lacking, for it was Hill who made that portrait so speaking a likeness that the artist received warm and undue praise for the fidelity of his work.
*****
There is in St. Paul—a city of wealthy men—a manwho is even wealthier than J. J. Hill. His name is Frederick Weyerheuser, and newspapers have a habit of speaking of him as the Lumber King. Mr. Weyerheuser does not court publicity, he shrinks from invitations to speak at public dinners. He has a press agent whose chief work it was for many years to keep his chief out of the columns of the newspapers. It is only within a comparatively short time that Weyerheuser consented to give his first interview to the press.
He is quite typical of the conservatism of St. Paul. Minneapolis snaps its fingers at conservatism, social and business, and signs of progress. But Minneapolis mortgages her downtown business property. St. Paul does not. The two towns are as different as if they were a thousand instead of but ten miles apart. And St. Paul believes that Minneapolis may do as she pleases. St. Paul has a reputation to preserve. She is the capital of the state of Minnesota and as capital her pride and her dignity are not slight.
Perhaps it was that pride that made her set forth to build a capitol that should stand through the long years as the Bulfinch State House in Boston has stood through the long years—a monument to good taste, restraint, real beauty in architecture. She summoned one of her native sons to do the work. He was unhampered in its details. And when he was done and had placed it upon a sightly knoll he must have been proud of his handiwork. In years to come the Capitol of Minnesota may become quite as famous as the capitols of older states, and the name of Cass Gilbert, its architect, may be placed alongside of that of Bulfinch.
St. Paul is hardly less proud of her Auditorium. It is really a remarkable building and perhaps the first theater in the land to be operated by a municipality, although we have a distinct feeling that the small city of Northampton, Mass., has also accomplished somethingof the sort. But the St. Paul Auditorium is hardly to be placed in the same class as any mere theater. It is a huge building although so cunningly constructed that within ten hours it can be changed from a compact theater into a great hall with some 10,000 seats. And this change can be effected, if necessary, without the slightest disturbance to the audience.
To this great hall come grand opera, well-famed orators, conventions of state and national bodies, drama, concerts of every sort in great frequency and variety. Perhaps no entertainment that it houses, however, has keener interest for the entire city than the free concerts that are given each winter. Last year there were five of these concerts, and it was soon found that the small-sized auditorium with its three thousand seats was too small. It became necessary to utilize the entire capacity of the structure. The concerts were immensely popular from the beginning.
They were but typical of the high public spirit of the capital city of Minnesota, a spirit which showed itself in the early adoption of the commission form of city government, in the establishment of playgrounds and modern markets, in the buildings of the great public baths on Harriet island, in the development of a half hundred active and progressive forms of modern civic endeavor. St. Paul, with all her rare flavor of history and her great conservatism can well be reckoned in the list of the modern cities that form the gateways of what was once called the West and is today rapidly becoming an integral part of the nation.
*****
The first time that we ever came into Minneapolis was at dusk of a July night two years ago. That is, it might have been dusk in theory. For while the clocks of the town spelled "eight," the northern day hung wonderfully clear and wonderfully sharp—a twilight that washardly done until well towards ten of the evening. We came out of the somewhat barn-like Union station, found an unpretentious cab and drove up Nicollet avenue toward our hotel.
The initial impression that a city makes upon one is not easily forgotten. And the first impression that Nicollet avenue makes upon a first-comer to Minneapolis cannot easily be erased. It is with pleasure that a stranger notes that it has not been invaded by street railroad tracks. The chief shopping and show-street of the largest city of Minnesota thereby conveys a sense of breadth and roominess that the chief streets of some other fairly important American towns lack utterly. And we distinctly recall that upon that July night the cluster lights up and down Nicollet avenue each bore a great flower-box, warm and summerlike with the brightness of geraniums. In the windows of the large stores that lined the avenue were more window-boxes, up to their seventh and eighth floors. The entire effect was distinct and different from that of any other town that we have ever seen. It seemed as if Minneapolis at first sight typified the new America.
Nor was that impression lessened when a little later we drove out in the softness of the summer night to see the residence streets of the city—quiet, shady streets that seem to have been stolen from older eastern towns; drove into the parks, caught here and there the strains of bands, saw the canoes darting here and there and everywhere upon the surface of the park lakes. In other cities they have to build waterways within their parks and boast to you of the way in which they have done it. In Minneapolis they can have no such boast. For they have builded their parks around their lakes, and a man can have a sheet of water instead of greensward at the door of his home if he so choose. Where a modern canoe shoots across the waters of Lakes Calhoun or Harriet, the Indian once shot his birch-bark creation. There are some two hundred lakes in Hennepin county. But the lake of all lakes—the joy of the residents of the Twin Cities for a day's outing, Minnetonka—was the favored gathering spot for the council fires of the Indian tribes for many miles around. Do not forget that the Falls of St. Anthony were the making of Minneapolis—and you can go by trolley within the half-hour from the center of the city to the gentler Falls of Minnehaha and there recount once again the immortal romance of Hiawatha.
Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. Anthony—despite the fact that they were the very cause of her existence. They are hemmed in by great flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of industry with a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a day, and even if you steal your way to them across one of the roadway bridges over the turbulent Mississippi you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the great Falls of St. Anthony are the roar of the flouring-mills, their energy, the bread-stuff of the nation.
St. Paul is still a river townSt. Paul is still a river town
Minneapolis does not affect to forget entirely her mother river. For a long time it irritated her that St. Paul should be regarded as the head of navigation upon the Mississippi, and within the past twenty years she has put the Federal government to much trouble and incidentally the expenditure of something over a million dollars, to make herself a maritime city. A ship-channel has been dredged, locks put in, draws cut in the railroad bridges but all apparently without a very definite purpose in mind—save possible holding her own in the expenditure of the annual rivers and harbors appropriation. For one can hardly imagine water commerce coming in great volume to the docks of Minneapolis, the one exclusive glory of St. Paul—passed long ago by hergreatest rival in the commercial race of the Northwest—stolen from the older town. But one could hardly have driven out from the brisk little city of St. Paul forty years ago to the straggling mill village at the Falls of St. Anthony and imagined that in the second decade of the twentieth century it would have become a city of more than three hundred thousand souls. The men who are today active in the affairs of the city have seen her grow from a straggling town into a city of almost first rank.
Here was one of them who sat the other day in the well-ordered elegance of the Minneapolis Club—a structure instantly comparable with the finest club-houses of New York or Boston or Philadelphia—who admitted that he had seen the town grow from eight thousand to over three hundred thousand population, the receipts of his own fine business increase from eighty-eight to twenty-two thousand dollars a day. But he was a modest man, far more modest than many of these western captains of industry, and he quickly turned the talk from himself and to the commercial importance of the town with which he was pressing forward. Still he delighted in statistics and the fact that Minneapolis "was doing a wholesale business of $300,000,000 a year" seemed to give him an immense and personal pride.
But do not believe that Minneapolis is all commercial—and nothing else. A quick ride through those shaded streets and lake-filled parks will convince you that she is a home-city; a cursory glance of the University of Minnesota, so cleverly located that she may share it with her rival twin, together with an inspection of her schools, large and small, would make you believe that she is a city that prides herself upon being well educated. The dominant strain of Norse blood that the Swedish immigrants have been bringing her for more than half a century is a strain that calls for education—and makes thecall in no uncertain fashion. And when you come to delve into the details of her living you will make sure that she is a well-governed city. She has not gone deeply into what she calls "the fads of municipal government" but she is a town which offers security and comfort, as well as pretty broad measure of opportunity, to her residents. And in no better way can you gauge the sensible way in which she takes care of her residents than in the one item of the street railroad system. It has never been necessary for either St. Paul or Minneapolis to assume control, actual or subtle, over the street railroad property which they share. And yet each has a street railroad service far superior to that of most American towns—with the possible exception of Washington. The traction company seems to have assimilated much of the breadth of spirit that dominates the Twin Cities of the Northwest.
Nor can you assume that Minneapolis is content to be merely commercially alive, well educated or efficiently governed. Down on one of the quiet business streets of the city is a printing-shop, so unique and so very distinctive that it deserves a paragraph here and now. In that printing shop is published a trade paper of the milling industry which has to make no apologies for its existence, and a weekly newspaper called theBellman. Some one is yet to write an appreciation of the new weekly press of America, the weekly press outside of New York, if you please, such publications as theArgonautof San Francisco; theMirrorof St. Louis, theDialof Chicago and theMinneapolis Bellman. The part that these papers are playing in the making of a broad and cultured America will perhaps never be known; but that it is a large part no one who reads them faithfully will ever doubt. TheBellmanholds its own among this distinguished coterie. Its house is a fit temple for its soul, and you may gain a little insight into that soulwhen you are bidden to join its staff at one of its Thursday luncheons at the dining-board of the printing-house—a fashion quickly and easily brought fromLondon Punchhalfway across the continent and into Minneapolis.
No American of taste or appreciation would ever go to Minneapolis and miss one wonderful shop there—no huge box-like structure rearing itself from sidewalk edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a shadowy structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but unmistakable hints of the real treasures that it holds. For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a revelation to folk from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior of the land is an intellectual desolation.
It may have been one of these who dined a little time ago at a house in one of these shaded streets of Minneapolis. After dinner the talk drifted without apparent reason to painting, and the man from the seaboard found his host in sharp touch with many of the new pictures. Definitely the talk turned to Walter Graves, London's newest sensation among the portrait painters, and the possibilities of his succeeding Whistler.
The Minneapolis man beckoned the guest into the hall, and pointed silently to a picture hung there. It was a splendid portrait of Whistler,Fpainted by Walter Graves.
"I never expected to find a picture like that—out here," frankly stammered the man from the seaboard.
"You will find many things here that you do not expect," was all that the man from Minneapolis said.
FSince writing the above we have been led to believe, by a gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by Graves is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by the dozen at a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit as an art critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts are here. You may choose for yourself. E. H.
FSince writing the above we have been led to believe, by a gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by Graves is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by the dozen at a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit as an art critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts are here. You may choose for yourself. E. H.
*****
If a town that is scarce forty years old can accomplishthese things, how long will it be before the older cities of the land will have to look sharply as to their laurels? The new cities of America are to be a force in her intellectual progress not to be under-estimated or despised.
There are three great cities, or rather three groups of great cities, along the course of the Mississippi. To the north are St. Paul and Minneapolis, while far to the south is New Orleans, to which we will come in the due order of things. Between these St. Louis stands, close to the business center of the land. For nearly twenty miles she sprawls herself along the west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout her central portion she extends for a dozen miles straight back from her once busy levee. She is a great city, a very great city, in wealth, in industry, in resource. And yet she is a rather unimpressive city to the eye, at first sight and at last.
It takes even a seasoned traveler some time to get used to that. If he dreams of St. Louis as a French city and preserving something of the French atmosphere, as do New Orleans and Quebec, he is doomed to utter disappointment. Save for a few tatterdemalion cottages down in Carondolet, at the south tip of the town, there is no trace of the builders of the city to which they gave the name of one of their kings. And if he has heard of the great German population and dreams of great summer-gardens, of winter-gardens, too, with huge bands and huge steins, he is doomed to no less disappointment. For that sort of thing you go to Milwaukee. St. Louis has as many Germans as that brisk Wisconsin city, and the largest brewery in the world, but she has never specialized in beer-gardens. She is old and yet you couldhardly call her quaint. There are rows of small houses in her older streets, their green blinds tightly closed as if seemingly to escape the almost endless bath of soot and cinders that falls upon them, and the flat-bottomed steamboats still are fastened at the wharf-boats along the levee. But these make a pitiful showing nowadays when your mind compares them with the tales of ante-bellum days when there were so many of them that they could only put the noses of their bows against the levees. But tradition still rules the hearts of the rivermen, and the Mississippi steamboat has lost none of those fantastics of naval architecture that has endeared it to every writer from Mark Twain down to the present day.
The streets aroundabout the levee are mean and dirty, and nowadays as silent as the Sabbath. Those convivial resorts, the Widow's Vow and the Boatman's Thirst have long since ceased to exist. As this is being written the Southern Hotel has closed its doors. Cobwebs are growing through its wonderful office, and the glorious marble stair up which a regiment might have marched is silent, save for the occasional halting steps of a watchman. The old Planters'—than which there was no more famous hostelry in the Mississippi valley, unless we choose to except the St. Charles down at New Orleans—is long since gone, torn away twenty years ago to make room for a new Planters', which has already begun to get grimy and aged. The Lindell went its way a dozen years ago. The St. Louis of the riverman is dead. They are tearing away the old warehouses from the levees, and no one looks at the Mississippi any more save when it gets upon one of its annual rampages and makes itself a yellow sea.
The entrance to the University—St. LouisThe entrance to the University—St. Louis
But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself is dead. There are other hotels, and far finer than those of the war-times and the river-trade. And you have only to walk a few squares back from the levee to findindustry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each representing commerce. St. Louis is still the very center of the world to the great Southwest and to her it pays its tribute, in demands for merchandise of every sort. That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores and wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable sort, and builds them for eight or ten or twelve stories in height, closely huddled together, even through unimportant side streets. That is her reason for existence today—when the river-trade, her first reason for growth and expansion, is dead. But the railroad is a living, vital force, when the rivers are frozen and dead, and railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible direction. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there at the city from whence they radiate Commerce sits enthroned.
For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and today, as essentially a commercial city. She is not a cultured city, although she has an excellent press, including a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary distinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all her many miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads or cults of any sort; but she measures the percentage which a business dollar will earn with a delightful accuracy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is to the casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we think that her lack of a dignified main street in her business section is responsible for much of this impression. In other years Broadway—Fifth street upon her city plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running parallel to the river—ranked almost as a main street and had some dignity, if little beauty. But today St. Louis, like so many other of our American towns, is restless and she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted andherself without a single great business thoroughfare—such as Market street, San Francisco or State street, Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as much alike as peas in a pod.
And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St. Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot—and who shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days, is ever anything less than capable—could send the boat spinning like a top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty water.
If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves, and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its ancient stones,you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge.
St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge these days. Yet it 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.