Chicago

“ What, then, is tolerable in Chicago? Lincoln Park, which the smoke and fog of the city have not obscured, and the grandiose lake, whose fresh splendour no villainy of man can ever deface. And at one moment of the day, when a dark cloud hung over the lake, and the sun set in a red glory behind the sky-scrapers, each black, and blacker for its encircling smoke, Chicago rose superior to herself and her surroundings.
After ugliness, the worst foe of Chicago is dirt. A thick, black, sooty dust lies upon everything. It is at the peril of hands begrimed that you attempt to open a window. ”

“ The prominent characteristics of Chicago are an overhanging pall of smoke; streets crowded with quick-moving, busy people; a vast aggregation of railways, vessels, elevators and traffic of all kinds; a polyglot population drawn from almost all races; and an earnest devotion to the almighty dollar. Its name came from the river, and is of Indian origin, regarded as probably a corruption of "Cheecagua," the title of a dynasty of chiefs who controlled the country west and south of Lake Michigan. ”

“ Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.
The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets. ”

“ Charley and Mae, on the seat in front, amuse each other and call us to the special sights.
Chicago! We leisurely arrive and traverse silently, street after street, sadly impressed that the continuous magnificence in equality of buildings, found nowhere else, was dearly bought.
Citizens are crowding our path; obstructing our progress by their progressive ardor, for some one has telegraphed them of our intended exploration; to our unexpected aspirations, unheeding our desires, they hurrah lustily for our success. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes in itself. No other city believes in itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago does, and I expect Chicago will be the world center of literature, music and art. There is nothing to stop it, unless indeed Chicago itself gives up the idea and chooses to be something else instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem and I shall humbly sue to be admitted as a citizen. ”

“ Chicago is carving her destiny and in no small degree moulding the future of America by these laborious processes brought to bear upon humanity itself. Perhaps the seeker in quest of the spirit of Chicago better serves himself by sitting for an hour in a community centre, in a field-house, in the juvenile court, in one of the hundreds of places where the human problem is met and dealt with hourly than in perusing tables of statistics. ”

“ Chicago may, to be sure, be dismissed in a few brilliant phrases as the black pit of perdition, the jumping-off place of the world; but to the serious-minded American the effort making there for the common uplift is too searching, too intelligent, too sincere, for sneers. ”

“ Did any one then, with all the boasting and bragging, imagine that in half a century Chicago would spring into wonderful prominence, outstripping older towns with a vivid maturity, be burned to ashes, rise again and lift itself not only out of ashes but out of the slough, and if it could not be a city set on a hill, still become marvellous in its advancement of all kinds? I thought then that Eagle fleet of vessels was simply astonishing with the freights they carried across the lake. Men were fighting then for a canal, a clear waterway to the Mississippi without any portage. ”

“ What a wonderful city Chicago will be when the commandment is honestly enforced which declares, "Thou shalt consume thine own smoke!"
What a wonderful city Chicago will be! That is the ever-recurring burden of one's cogitations. For Chicago is awake, and intelligently awake, to her destinies; so much one perceives even in the reiterated complaints that she is asleep. Discontent is the condition of progress, and Chicago is not in the slightest danger of relapsing into a condition of inert self-complacency. ”

“ This last development, however, is sporadic; hence as a whole the first impression Chicago gives is that of a huge garment made of heterogeneous materials,—here a square of faded cotton, next door a patch let in of fine silk. For the order of life is first existence, then comfort, then luxury, and last—when the human mind begins to suffer ennui—a little beauty for a plaything.
The complex quality of this wonderful city is best seen as the stranger shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after layer of the folds. ”

“ A special interest in Chicago at the moment is because it is forming—full of contrasts and of promise, palaces and shanties side by side. Its forces are gathered and accumulating, but not assimilated. What a mass of crude, undigested material it has! In one region on the west side are twenty thousand Bohemians and Poles; the street signs are all foreign and of unpronounceable names—a physically strong, but mentally and morally brutal, people for the most part; the adults generally do not speak English, and claning as they do, they probably never will. ”

“ I came away with the belief that out of Chicago would come help for the idealists of our future civilization, out of Chicago, whatever men may say of its Pit, and its slaughter-yards, and its jungle of industry and life. For on the walls of the Cliff-dwellers were paintings of men who have beauty in their hearts, and in the eyes of the men I met was a look of gravity and thoughtfulness in face of the world's agonies and conflict. ”

“ Chicago is a city of detached houses, in the humbler quarters as well as in the magnificent avenues, and the effect is home-like and beautiful at the same time. There is great variety—stone, brick, and wood intermingled, plain and ornamental; but drive where you will in the favorite residence parts of the vast city, you will be continually surprised with the sight of noble and artistic houses and homes displaying taste as well as luxury. ”

“ For many years now Chicago has been known as the ‘pork-packing town.’ Every visitor who comes from overseas insists upon being shown through the ‘Yards.’ English poets have celebrated Chicago for its stockyards odor, and missed the fresh spiritual fragrance of youth and a zest for life that simply exudes from the city through its smoke and its dirt and its city smells. ”

“ You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could not have understood how a man like this—head of a giant corporation employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and influences—would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are beginning to understand the man—the man who is typical of Chicago. ”

“ The deep hollow roar of the locomotive, and the shrill scream from the steamboat, are heard here all day; a continuous stream of life ever bustles through the city, and, standing as it does on the very verge of western civilisation, Chicago is a vast emporium of the trade of the districts east and west of the Mississippi. ”

“ I have looked with the deepest interest on the portraits of the men who have wrought all these marvels, and I only wish that I could promise myself the delight of beholding Chicago as she will appear in her more than royal robes when the world is flocking to look at her, the Empress City of the West ”

“ But Chicago may not be comprehended in the usual scamper of the tourist; for the interesting thing about this city is the people, and they require [136] time. I do not, of course, mean that they are all worthy of individual scrutiny, but rather that the very fact of so many human beings collecting there, living cheerfully and harmoniously, laboring and aspiring and illustrating the pressing, changing problems of our democracy awakens at once the beholder’s sympathetic interest. Chicago is not New York, nor is it London or Paris: Chicago is different. ”

“ To him, however, they represented not ladders to prosperity but a social condition of a passing generation, the Chicago of the seventies, a city distinctively American in population and in ideals, a youthful city of a single standard of endeavor, a pleasant place that had been swallowed by the Chicago of the present, that many-tentacled monster of heterogeneous races, that affected him as it did so many of the older residents, with an overwhelming sensation of revolt against its sprawling lack of cohesion. ”

“ No mother, no father, who kisses a daughter goodbye as she leaves the fireside to plunge into the foaming sea of Chicago life, can be certain that the child of his or her flesh and blood will return to the fireside undefiled, pure of body and clean of heart, as long as those cancers fester and flourish in the city of Chicago. ”

“ May I not hope that the life and youth and moral power of Chicago will join hand in hand in making this vast city great, not only in dimensions and numbers and wealth, but great in that kind of greatness which alone shall exalt a nation and give it memory. ”

“ I believe Chicago has a great heart as well as a great head. I always mistrust people who make the most noise. Beware of men and women who are out for themselves. That’s what keeps us all back—that awful self. Yet these people very often frighten politicians. I am told not to mention this or that subject in Chicago, especially the League of Nations. Now, if there is one city in America where one should talk of the League of Nations—surely it’s Chicago. Look at your population. It’s a City of Nations in itself. When you welcome other nationalities here, you want them to be good citizens. ”

“ The nation was prosperous. Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. ”

“ In the audience were some of the men who had created Chicago,—Marshall Field, John Crerar, Charles Farwell, Wirt{219} Dexter, Franklin MacVeagh, Potter Palmer, and scions of the powerful Pullman, Deering, and McCormick clans. The generation to which these men belonged loved their city as other men love a favorite child, with a passionate devotion and a pride I have never known equaled. That is the secret of Chicago’s strength; it is founded upon love, the strongest thing in the world. ”

“ Though that part of Chicago which is built up, stands on more elevated ground, the anticipated limits of the city extend into this wet prairie. We saw the lots staked out as we passed, which I suppose have been sold at a very high price. I could not but think of the remark of a fellow traveller, who, in speaking of this and several other places, said, "If each of these places do not become as large as Pekin in China, these city lots cannot all be built upon."
Chicago is truly an interesting place. It has sprung up here in three or four years—a city—as by the wand of enchantment. ”

“ Chicago is becoming modest. Perhaps the inhabitants may still be able to conceal their modesty, but nevertheless they feel it. The explanation is simple. The city has grown not only beyond the most sanguine expectations of those who indulged in the most inflated hope of its future, but it has grown beyond what they said they expected. This gives the citizens pause—as it might an eagle that laid a roc’s egg. ”

“ She turned her face for the moment to the north; there was great Chicago, where men fought for wealth and power, Chicago, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the arrogance of youthful success, with all the strength of youthful muscle, all the power and possibility of young brain and heart. ”

“ The panoramas of Chicago have become justly celebrated. They are patterned after the famous panoramas of Europe, being contained in huge circular buildings. There are at present three panoramas—the Battle of Gettysburg and the Falls of Niagara, on Panorama Place, a mile south of Madison street on Wabash avenue, and Chicago on Fire—the latter being a splendid representation of Chicago as it looked at the time of the awful conflagration that drew the eyes of the civilized world upon the suffering city. ”

“ This book, unlike the Bible, is all written in Chicago. The twenty disciples come from twenty different places. They, endeavoring to lose their identity in the whirl of racy life and excitement, seek the phantom happiness in this great city. For a time all goes well. Gaiety and mirth mingle, and fortune conspires with pleasure to mislead the novice; then the scenes grow old; happiness eludes the grasp ”

“ Chicago is situated upon the most impossible and unlovely of all places of human habitation. She is simply a city of transportation, and is no better than her rails and boats, though by her rails and boats she lives in every Western state and territory. ”

“ It was predicted then that Chicago would live, and live to be so mighty and so vast that the great fire would be but an incident in its history. The city was to live because beyond it were the giant forces, the teeming millions, the imperial area of the mighty West, which, having made Chicago the gateway to the East, would recreate it under the same natural necessities. ”