Willard W. Glazier

“ To the eastward, four miles distant, beyond its barrier of islands, the Atlantic keeps up the never-ending music of its waves. To the southward is the city, with the harbor and the shipping beyond. Far away to the northeast is Mount Washington, faintly outlined upon the horizon, prominent in the distant range of mountains. Adjoining the Observatory is the Congress street Methodist Episcopal Church, a beautiful edifice, its slender, graceful spire being a most conspicuous object from the harbor and the sea, and rising to the greatest height of any in the city. ”

“ State street is the principal business thoroughfare.
The Erie Cemetery, on the south side, is one of the most beautiful in the country. It is on a bluff overlooking the city and the lake, and comprises seventy-five acres, in which tree-shaded walks, elegant drives, velvet turf, running water, masses of shrubbery and brilliant flowers, together with the plain white headstones and the elaborate monuments which mark the resting-places of the dead, are united in a harmonious effect, which is most satisfactory to the beholder. ”

“ From the airy outlook of the City Hall Tower, Detroit appears like a vast wheel, many of whose streets diverge like spokes from this common centre, reaching outward until they touch, or seem to touch, the wooded rim of the distant horizon. The hub of this immense wheel is the triangular open space called the Campus Martius, and the Soldiers' Monument, occupying the centre of the Campus Martius, is also the centre of this imaginary hub. ”

“ The traveler will be pleasantly surprised, as he enters the city, at the extent and excellence of its public edifices, the number of its churches, and its general handsome and well-to-do aspect. Many of the houses and business structures are built of light-colored brick, having a soft and cheerful appearance. The streets are laid out regularly, crossing each other at right angles, and, as a general thing, are well paved. In the winter time they are filled with sleighs, and the air is alive with the music of sleigh-bells. ”

“ Up the Chicago River, where considerably less than a century ago the Indian paddled his solitary canoe, and John Jacob Astor annually sent his single small schooner to bring provisions to the garrison and to take away his furs, there swarms a fleet of vessels of all descriptions, bringing goods from, and sending them to, every quarter of the world. Where, no later than 1834, a grand wolf hunt was held, and one bear and forty wolf scalps were the trophies of the day, the bears of the Stock Exchange alone rage and howl, and the only wolves are human ones. ”

“ Backed by a State whose resources are second to none in the Union, emerging from an early history of bloody struggle and battle, rising like the fabled Phœnix, from the ashes of an apparent ruin, contributing her best blood and treasure to the war for liberty and union, she may well be proud of her past record, her present progress, her advancement toward a high civilization and her assured position. ”

“ The whole valley shows a black background, lit up with a thousand points of light from factories, foundries and steamboats, which are multiplied into two thousand as they are reflected in the waters of the Cuyahoga, which looks like a silver ribbon flowing through the blackness.
Cleveland is acknowledged to be the most beautiful city of the many which are found upon the shores of the great lakes. It stands on a high bluff overlooking Lake Erie. ”

“ When Penn visited Philadelphia, in its infant days, he wished to preserve the bluff overlooking the Delaware, to be forever used as a public park and promenade. But the traffic of Front street now rattles where he would have had green trees and grass. Philadelphia has no pleasant outlook upon the river, to correspond with the Battery of New York. The wharves are lined with craft of every description, and the flags of many nations are to be seen in her harbor; but commerce creeps down to the very shores, and Delaware avenue, which faces the river, is dirty and crowded with traffic. ”

“ Fort Pulaski stands like a sentinel guarding the entrance to the harbor, the lighthouse upon the point keeping a bright eye out to seaward. As he glides up the river, which winds in countless lagoons around low sea islands covered with salt marshes, at last he will see in the distance the lights of the city set on a hill, and of the shipping at her feet. A distant city is always beautiful at night, though it may be hideous by daylight. Night veils all its ugliness in charitable shadows ”

“ Boston cannot straighten her originally crooked streets, but her thought and spirit are entirely of the nineteenth century. New York is intensely modern, the few relics of the past which still remain contrasting and emphasizing still more strongly the life and bustle and business of to-day. Philadelphia is a quiet city. Its people do not rush hither and thither, as though but one day remained in which to accomplish a life work. They take time to walk, to eat, to sleep, and to attend to their business. ”

“ Taking its past as a criterion, who shall dare to predict the future of Chicago? It has by no means come to a stand-still, but is to-day increasing its population, developing its resources, and extending its commercial enterprises to a degree that is scarcely credible, save as one is faced by actual facts and figures. These miles of streets, filled with the incessant roar of business; these lofty temples, magnificent warehouses and elegant residences; these public institutions of learning; this gigantic commerce, this high degree of civilization ”

“ It is astonishing to see the number of colored men it takes to load and set afloat a steamship; and one of the last sights which meets the eye of the traveler and lingers in his memory, as he leaves the city by means of the river, is the long row of upturned black faces, most of them beaming with good humor and jollity, on the wharf, as the vessel casts off her lines and turns her head down stream. ”

“ In ten years the number of inhabitants had increased fifty thousand. With the continuance of peace, and the spirit of improvement and progress remaining unchecked, it may reasonably be predicted and confidently anticipated, that the close of the Nineteenth Century will find the Capital City of this great Republic approaching in splendor and importance the realization of the proudest hope and dream of magnificence ever cherished in the hearts of its worthy founders, and in itself a monument worthy of the immortal name of Washington. ”

“ It has, like New York, its Battery, occupying the extreme point of the peninsula, its outlook commanding the entire harbor, bristling with fortifications, so harmless in time of peace, so terrible in war. The Battery contains plots of thin clover, neatly fenced and shelled promenades, a long, solid stone quay, which forms the finest sea-walk in the United States, and has a background of the finest residences in the city, three storied, and faced with verandahs. ”

“ While the city has gained much, the true lover of nature has lost something, by the conversion of this tract of land into a park. While it was still private property, nature was at her loveliest. Wild flowers blossomed in the dells, and little streams gurgled and tumbled over stones down the ravines, while vines and foliage softened the rugged outlines of the rocky hillsides. But the landscape gardener has been there. The dells are converted into gentle slopes ”

“ He lies buried at Gettysburg.
The view from the State House dome is exceptionally grand. I stood on that eminence one bright morning, during the early part of my sojourn at Harrisburg, in the spring of 1877. To eastward is a picturesque, rolling country, varied by hill and dale, field and woodland, with villages or isolated farmhouses nestling here and there in their midst, the brilliant green tint of the foreground melting imperceptibly away into the soft purple haze of the far distance. ”

“ Philadelphia may have less elegant public and business edifices than New York, but her dwelling houses stand as far more desirable monuments to the prosperity of a people than the splendor united with the squalor of the metropolis. ”

“ At Twenty-third street, Broadway runs diagonally across Fifth avenue, touching the southwestern corner of Madison Square—not so very long since the most genteel locality in New York, but now, like Union Square, becoming occupied by hotels and business houses.
Fifth Avenue, the most splendid avenue in America, makes a beginning at Washington Square, a lovely public park embowered in trees, which was once Potters' Field, the pauper burying ground, and where one hundred thousand bodies lie buried. New York University and Dr. Hutton's Church face the square on the east. ”

“ Erie is an intermediate point between Buffalo and Cleveland, and having a most excellent harbor, would seem destined to take rank among the first cities of America. But by that inscrutable law which, seemingly beyond reason, governs and controls the foundation and growth of cities and towns, natural advantages do not always seem to count; and as a large fish swallows a smaller one, so has Erie been dwarfed by her older rivals, who, getting an earlier foothold upon the shore of the lake, have absorbed its trade, and continued to maintain the advantage they at first secured. ”

“ The special pride of Brooklyn is Prospect Park, one of the finest in America, where art and the landscape gardener have assisted rather than thwarted nature in her efforts to produce beauty. It is situated on an elevated ridge on the southeastern borders of the city, and from certain localities commands broad views of Brooklyn, New York, the inner and outer harbor, and the Jersey shore. It contains five hundred and fifty acres, which embrace broad, green lawns, grassy slopes, groves, wooded hills, beautiful with ferns and wild flowers, lakes and rocky dells. ”

“ One may walk, of a summer's day, along the smooth and winding road between the river and the canal, for two miles or more, and encounter nothing save the tasteful cottage-like offices, done in Gothic architecture, of the merchant princes in this trade, sandwiched between huge piles of lumber, rising white and high in the sun, and giving out resinous, piney odors. ”

“ Wall street then became what it has since remained, the monetary centre of the city, only that now it is more than that; it is the great monetary centre of the entire country. On it and the blocks leading from it, all embraced in comparatively a few acres, are probably stored more gold and silver than in all the rest of the United States put together, while the business interests represented extend to every section, not only of the continent, but of the world.
Nowhere else in America are there such and so many magnificent buildings as in this section of the city. ”

“ When soldiers who suffered so much at each other's hands, who were stirred by all the evil passions which war develops, and who bore the brunt of the conflict, offering all, if need be, as a sacrifice on the altar of the cause they had espoused, can so forget the past, and shaking hands over the chasm which divided them, look forward to a happy and concordant future, surely civilians should be willing to bury the hatred and prejudice which has so embittered the past, and live only for a common country, made of many parts whose interests are identical. ”

“ Retracing our steps to near the foot of Bowery, we come to Chatham street, where the Jews reign supreme, and which is the vestibule of the worst quarter of the city. Passing along a pavement festooned with cheap, ready-made clothing, one comes to Baxter street, and from thence to the Five Points, once the most infamous locality of New York. Here, a generation ago, a respectable man took his life in his hands, who attempted to pass through this quarter, even in broad daylight. ”

“ To the west is Black River Point, with its rocky promontories, and on the north stretches out an unbroken expanse of water, with here and there the long black trail of a steamer floating in the air, its wake like a white line upon the water ”

“ Yet our system of government is adapted to the successful management of such immigration. It cannot, perhaps, do so much with the immigrants themselves. Many of them intelligent, but more of them ignorant and stupid, they remain foreign in their habits and ideas to the end of their lives. But it makes citizens of their sons, trains them up with an understanding of democratic institutions, gives them an education, for the most part, forces them to acquire our language, and instead of making them a separate class, recognizes them as an undivided part of the whole population. ”

“ It is one of the most prosperous cities of the Commonwealth; situated in a fertile valley, in view of some of the grandest scenery in America, with railroads, canals and macadamized roads, diverging in all directions, and connecting it with every section of the country; with important business interests, and an intelligent, industrious and prosperous population; the political centre of one of the chief States of the Union; it has much to congratulate itself upon in the present, and more to hope for from the future. ”

“ The tranquil Monongahela comes up from the south, alive with barges and tug boats; while the swifter current of the Allegheny bears from the oil regions, at the north, slight-built barges with their freights of crude petroleum. Oil is not infrequently poured upon the troubled waters, when one of these barges sinks, and its freight, liberated from the open tanks, refuses to sink with it, and spreads itself out on the surface of the stream.
The oil fever was sorely felt in Pittsburg, and it was a form of malaria against which the smoke-laden atmosphere was no protection. ”

“ The Training-place is now Military Park, on the east side of Broad street, near its centre; and the Market-place is now Washington Park. These and several others in various parts of this favored city, form delightful retreats from the sun's rays—shaded by majestic elms—a veritable rus in urbe. The suburbs also are passing beautiful, extending to Orange on the west, and to within a mile of Elizabeth on the south—both busy towns.
Like Brooklyn, Newark may be called a city of churches, and its enlightened and industrious citizens are a church-going people. ”

“ But let him imagine, if he can, a vast girdle of far-off, misty, blue hills, faintly defined by the horizon; against them to the north and west jut rows of towering but withal gently sloping mountains, purple, black, or darkly blue, just as each drifting cloud shadows them; within these encircling hills and mountains scatter the loveliest landscape features of which the human mind can conceive ”