Edward Hungerford

“ Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever. Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings than the old ever had. It does not lack color—by day, the treasures of its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs through Grant avenue—its chief thoroughfare—the swinging lanterns above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted and mysterious rooms along the way—the new Chinatown of San Francisco. ”

“ 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 Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride—and read riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the saddle of some cranky broncho—they can build fires, cook and live in the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her khakias as about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all the tourists. ”

“ They live their lives and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her movements toward social reform, not even in her parks—although Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion—nor does it reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics—her glory is in her homes. ”

“ In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to divine the real character of the city. You see it, a great crucible into which the people of all nations and all the corners of one of the greatest of the nations are being poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a window that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, overshadowed by the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, is the bent figure of a hatless peasant woman from the south of Europe—seeing her America for the first time and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of fear and of amazement. ”

“ They are merely gazing at you—and inquiring—inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But if you do possess these things they will open—with as warm and friendly a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market, smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the north. ”

“ The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other. This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a British institution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.
To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh ineffaceable. ”

“ Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston—well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. ”

“ In all that time the carnival has progressed until it today is the outward expression of the joyousness of a joyous city. In all that time did we say? There was an interregnum—the Four Years. In the Four Years the little French restaurants were closed, the lights at the Opera extinguished—there could be no Carnival, for Tragedy sat upon the Southland. And in a great house in Lafayette square there sat a man from Massachusetts who ruled with more zeal than kindness. And that man New Orleans has not forgotten—not even in the half-century that has all but healed the sores of the Four Years. ”

“ You rarely read of Boston society—her Brahmin caste—in the columns of her newspapers. There are, of course, distinguished Boston folk whose names ring there many times—a young girl who through her athletic triumphs and her sane fashion of looking at life forms a good example for her sisters across the land; a brilliant broker, with an itching for printer's ink, who places small red devils upon his stationery; a society matron who must always sit in the same balcony seat at the Symphony concerts, and who houses in her eccentric Back Bay home perhaps the finest private art gallery in America. ”

“ Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway—but so lined with towering buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier highway—the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges—the oldest of them landing at your very feet—and crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. ”

“ In fact El Paso feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are first-rate advertising attractions for the town—quite discounting mere Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill. But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows angry. ”

“ Indeed Cleveland has "bobbed up." And her growth within the last quarter of a century has been more than physical, more than that recorded by emotionless census-takers. For beneath those grimy old houses on Euclid avenue and the down town residence streets, beneath the roofs of those gray and grimy story-and-a-half wooden houses which line far less pretentious streets for long miles, lies as restless and as hopeful a civic spirit as any town in America can boast. It makes itself manifest in many ways—as we shall see. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have grown up and over the old walls—exquisite bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said, stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston does not parade herself. ”

“ When we come to visit the neighboring port of Cleveland we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the inland seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as something more than a railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a melting-pot for the fusing of as large and as difficult a foreign element as is given to any American town to fuse. Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The dull roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of power, is within hearing. ”