Emerald City

“ I want you to march this army through an underground tunnel, which I am going to bore, to the Emerald City of Oz. When you get there I want you to conquer the Oz people, destroy them and their city, and bring all their gold and silver and precious stones back to my cavern. ”

“ In one place, where a busy little city with banks and newspapers and fire companies and a mayor and aldermen had been, was nothing but a wide expanse of emerald turf, with not even the faintest sign that human life had ever been present there. ”

“ The Scarecrow was now the ruler of the Emerald City, and although he was not a Wizard the people were proud of him. "For," they said, "there is not another city in all the world that is ruled by a stuffed man." And, so far as they knew, they were quite right. ”

“ The country surrounding the Emerald City was thickly settled, and for a while our friends rode over nicely paved roads which wound through a fertile country dotted with beautiful houses, all built in the quaint Oz fashion. ”

“ But my people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City, and it certainly is a beautiful place, abounding in jewels and precious metals, and every good thing that is needed to make one happy. ”

“ There they liberated our slaves from Ev and stole King Roquat's Magic Belt, which they carried away with them. So now our King is making a tunnel under the deadly desert, so we can march through it to the Emerald City. When we get there we mean to conquer and destroy all the land and recapture the Magic Belt. ”

“ At the east, which part lies nearest the Emerald City, there are beautiful farmhouses and roads, but as you travel west, you first come to a branch of the Winkie River, beyond which there is a rough country where few people live, and some of these are quite unknown to the rest of the world. ”

“ From the top of the high bridge they could see far away the magnificent spires and splendid domes of the superb city, sparkling like brilliant jewels as they towered above the emerald walls. The shaggy man drew a deep breath of awe and amazement, for never had he dreamed that such a grand and beautiful place could exist—even in the fairyland of Oz. ”

“ We were to publish a directory of the city of Elmira. How we came to select that city I have forgotten, but the upshot of that latest of my business ventures I am not likely to forget soon. Our plan was to boom the advertising end of the enterprise by a nightly street display in the interest of our patrons. We had barely got into town when the railroad strikes of that memorable summer reached Elmira. There had been dreadful trouble, fire and bloodshed, in Pennsylvania, and the citizens took steps at once to preserve the peace. ”

“ Day, who gives us a very full and exhaustive account of all the social surroundings of the ‘Empire City,’ with its huge Babel-like hotels, its swarm of restaurants and eating-houses, necessary to a people who live out of their own homes, and its varied modes of locomotion, likens this huge hive to ‘a combination of London, Berlin, and Paris.’ The city is laid out in parallelograms, and the streets are numerically named. The practice—widely prevalent—of hanging out clothes to dry on the house-tops must be sadly detrimental to the appearance of respectable neighbourhoods. ”

“ These were the hotels, billiard-saloons, bars, and gambling-houses.
"It's a place bound to advance, sir," said Mr. Beck proudly. "Empire City, when I first saw it, which is two years ago, was only two years old. It is only in our country that a great city springs up in a day. Empire City will be the Chicago of the West."
"I see a city," said Captain Ladds; "can't see the people." ”

“ In its sea-view the Empire City is unfortunate, presenting scarce a point worthy of being remembered. There is no salient feature like the great dome of Saint Paul’s, in London, the Arc de Triomphe, of Paris, or even the Saint Charles Hotel, as you sweep round the English Turn, in sight of New Orleans. In approaching New York City, your eye rests on two or three sharp spires, more befitting the architecture of a village church, and a mean-looking cupola, that may be the roof either of a circus or gasworks! ”

“ The cities are more mature than the citizens. New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington—all have an air of permanence and age. The buildings, even the most fantastic, suggest indigenousness, or at least stability; nor would the presence of more ancient structures increase this effect. To the eye of the ordinary Englishman accustomed to work in what we call the City, in Fleet Street, in the Strand, in Piccadilly, or in Oxford Street, New York would not appear to be a younger place than London, and Boston might easily strike him as older. ”

“ Ernie answered. "Dad see em too."
But Alf only sniggered.
At that time Old Town hung, as it were, between the Past and the Future. It had not shaken off the one, and yet could not resist the other. Beneath it was New Town, a growing industrial city, absorbing workers of every kind from every quarter; stretching back from the sea to Rodmill and overrunning the marshes at an incredible speed; with the slums, the Sunday agitators, the Salvationists and reformers, the rumble of discontent, that mark the cities of our day. ”

“ Then there grow up slums which are inhabited by great numbers of the poorer classes who are unable to defend themselves from association with the derelict and vicious. In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants. Each separate part of the city is inevitably stained with the peculiar sentiments of its population. The effect of this is to convert what was at first a mere geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to say, a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own. ”

“ Old cities require reconstruction to make them what modern taste and intelligence demand; settlements in their incipiency are dominated by their sturdy founders, who usually have other things to think about than beauty and adornment.
In this day of great wealth and wonderful inventions we realize more and more the value of the city to mankind, and the quality of the city as a means of culture. Cities are not merely marts of commerce; they stand for civility; they are civilization itself. No untried naked Adam in Eden might ever pass for a civilized man. ”

“ Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction! But in Brooklyn the ways are narrow, and they lead to the Heavenly City of content. Central Park: there you are—the centre of things, hemmed in by walls of pride. ”

“ The little nasty town of Oregon City was the scene of a self-immolation as great as any of which we read in history, and there were not three persons there who appreciated it. The accursed town is, we hear, still nastier than ever, and the intelligent jury—no man of whom dared to have a word of pity or admiration for those poor Indians—with the spectators of that horrid scene, are either dead and damned, or they are sunk in the oblivion that is the fate of those who are born without souls. ”

“ Every large city has its occupational suburbs like the Stockyards in Chicago, and its residence suburbs like Brookline in Boston, each of which has the size and the character of a complete separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of 2,000,000 laborers. ”

“ Let us sum up. “The Anglo-Saxon race, the Norman blood:” a colony made of this: a city into whose hands wealth and its power is suddenly phenomenally cast: a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power. This, I say, is Melbourne—Melbourne with its fine public buildings and tendency towards banality, with its hideous houses and tendency towards anarchy. And Melbourne is, after all, the Melbournians. Alas, then, how will this city and its civilization stand the test of a really fine city and fine civilization? how far will they answer the requirements of such a civilization? ”

“ The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things, where filthy men and women live on penn'orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed. ”

“ Paul, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis: something like a little two-thousand-mile tour “in the neighborhood of Chicago,” to be done in about one week.
When I confided my troubles to my American friends, I got little sympathy from them.
“That’s quite right,” they would say; “we call the neighborhood of a city any place which, by starting after dinner, you can reach at about breakfast time the 206 next day. You dine, you go on board the car, you have a smoke, you go to bed, you sleep, you wake up, you dress—and there you are. Do you see?” ”

“ If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a bad place in which to live. ”

“ Here was the city of great beginnings, the city of experiment—experiment with life; hence its incompleteness—an incompleteness not dissimilar to that of life itself. Chicago lived; it was the pulse of the great Middle West.
Orme watched the procession with clear eyes. He had been strolling southward from the Masonic Temple, into the shopping district. The clangor, the smoke and dust, the hurrying crowds, all worked into his mood. The expectation of adventure was far from him. ”

“ But the genius of Boston is seen in her real independence, productive power and northern acuteness of mind,—which is in nature hostile to oppression. It is a good city as cities go; Nature is good. The climate is electric, good for wit and good for character. ”

“ It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights, feel that it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. ”

“ With all its Scotch thrift and neatness, there yet remains the ill-conditioned and once filthy quarter, beside which rise the old-time ten-story houses built into the hillside, while in the modern part of the city in sharp contrast are broad streets and open squares and fine buildings.
In America the birth of towns is quite different. Here are no plantings of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering, forecasting agriculture and commerce ”

“ All these boroughs where you were born, and hope to lay your bones, shall be reinstated in their ancient magnificence,—Hammersmith, Kensington, Bayswater, Chelsea, Battersea, Clapham, Balham, and a hundred others. Each shall immediately build a city wall with gates to be closed at sunset. Each shall have a city guard, armed to the teeth. Each shall have a banner, a coat-of-arms, and, if convenient, a gathering cry. ”

“ Suddenly, within a few hours, the whole nature of the great city is changed—your city and mine, New York or Chicago, or Boston or Buffalo or Philadelphia.
Though nobody seems to say much about it afterward. Just sort of take the thing for granted.
It is just like Armistice Night, every once in awhile. Total strangers suddenly begin to call each other "Neighbor." Voices everywhere become jollier. Numerous passersby begin to whistle and sing. People go with a skip and a jump. Catcalls are heard. Groups may be seen all around going arm in arm, and here and there with arms about necks. ”

“ Just below Plutoria Avenue, and parallel with it, the trees die out and the brick and stone of the City begins in earnest. Even from the Avenue you see the tops of the sky-scraping buildings in the big commercial streets, and can hear or almost hear the roar of the elevated railway, earning dividends. And beyond that again the City sinks lower, and is choked and crowded with the tangled streets and little houses of the slums.
In fact, if you were to mount to the roof of the Mausoleum Club itself on Plutoria Avenue you could almost see the slums from there. But why should you? ”

“ Thus in a few years, stretching from Washington to Boston, a distance of five hundred miles, there promises to be a continuous chain of urban communities with practically no rural districts between them. In a sense, this will constitute one great city with a population of twenty millions or upwards. ”

“ It is an undesirable thing to have other people bulging over one's houses, standing in one's open spaces, and, in extreme cases, knocking down and even treading on one's citizens. It leads at times to explanations that are afterwards regretted.
We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city with two wards, Red End and Blue End ”

“ With such a beginning, with the growth and development already achieved, with an invincible position and natural advantages which cannot be reversed or diminished, Portland is entitled to be called the "City of Destiny"—a destiny assured to be the greatest city of the Pacific coast of North America. ”

“ A short distance north of the city of the living is the city of the dead. It is a pleasant suburb,—one which is adding week by week to its population. It is laid out in beautiful avenues, grass bordered, and shaded by grand old forest-trees. It is the resting-place of the dust of Henry Clay. The monument to his memory is not yet finished. It is a tall, round column upon a broad base, with a capital, such as the Greeks never saw or dreamed of, surmounted by a figure intended to represent the great statesman as he stood when enchaining vast audiences by his matchless oratory. ”