Mexico City

“ We rattle on through miles of squalid suburbs, over level crossings where frowsy gatherings of half-naked Indian women and children watch, with animal apathy, the progress of the train, till as eight strikes we enter the city lying within a ring of volcanic hills.
Viewed from the car window there is nothing in the least impressive about Mexico City. A dreary stretch of commonplace Spanish houses, flat-roofed, unrelieved by cupola or minaret, by tower or spire. The station is as dull: a melancholy wooden structure, oval-roofed, somewhat like the biggest engine-house at Crewe or Swindon. ”

“ It has a singular effect, after travelling for some days through a wild country, seeing nothing but a solitary hacienda, or an Indian hut, to enter a fine city like Morelia, which seems to have started up as by magic in the midst of the wilderness, yet bearing all the traces of a venerable old age. By moonlight, it looked like a panorama of Mexico; with a fine square, portales, cathedral, broad streets, and good houses. ”

“ In the midst of this unrivalled territory, in the lap of the great plateau or table land, and far removed from unhealthy coasts, lies the beautiful city of Mexico, a natural focus of commerce, wealth and civilization. Such a picture of natural advantages cannot but strike us with admiration and hope. If ever there was a capital destined by nature to form the centre of a great nation, if not to grasp at least a large share of the North American, European, South American and Oriental trade, it unquestionably is the city of Mexico. ”

“ There is scarcely a block that has not an unfinished building in it; and as to the streets, they seem to be maintaining a perpetual and running fight with the streams that plough them on their way down from the hills. Aside from deep gutters that cross the main thoroughfares, heaps of filth and refuse obstruct the way, making the city, as it appeals to at least two senses, the sight and smell, more objectionable even than the city of Mexico. The houses are low and massive, of the style of architecture that prevails in all Spanish cities in Mexico, with walls of stone and grated windows. ”

“ The City of Mexico makes many bright promises for the future. As a winter resort, as a summer resort, a city for men to accumulate fortunes; a paradise for students, for artists; a rich field for the hunter of the curious, the beautiful, and the rare. ”

“ Athens has mountains and sea, but scanty plains; Rome, plains, but no water, and low-browed hills; Jerusalem, mountains, but no plains nor sea. . . . The city lies all about us, its limits being equidistant in every direction. Its flat roofs extend for a mile, domed with spacious churches."
Says a celebrated French traveller: "Mexico is a grand city, in the Spanish style, with an air more inspiring, more majestic, more metropolitan, than any city of Spain except Madrid, crowned by numerous towers, and surrounded by a vast plain bounded by mountains. Mexico reminds one somewhat of Rome. ”

“ So does the magnificent horsemanship, as the riders fly over the open country. Inside the city streets, long colonnades of rude Moorish arches outside the houses, offer grateful shelter from the mid-day sun; the outer walls are frescoed in bright blue, yellow, or red; there is a mosque-life effect about the great central domes of the churches. Broad stone seats with high backs, like those in Alma-Tadema's pictures, line the principal streets under soft shadows of fanlike trees; clumps of Mexican aloe and prickly cactus hedge the roadways. ”

“ Francisco, of Tacuba, of Monnaie, of Monterilla, all arteries of the great city, pour into the Plaza Mayor a flood of human beings, which is always changing, and ever in motion, and you have only to mix in this crowd for a few moments to get acquainted with Mexican life in all its diversified phases of vice and virtue, of splendor and misery.
When the hour of the Angelus approaches especially, horsemen, foot-passengers, and carriages are packed together in disorderly confusion, and gold, silk, and rags, mingled here and there, give to the crowd a grotesque and startling appearance. ”

“ In Mexico City every vista of every street is terminated by a hill or mountain, blue and hazy in the distance, perhaps, but still there, to remind one of the works of nature while contemplating the works of man; in Puebla every vista is cut short by a church, or chapel, or some religious edifice. You are confronted at every turn by men begging for the Church, beggars with flaunting rags and tin cash-boxes, which they display before your eyes, and, what is worse, under your noses. Priests, wrapped in great black cloaks, form a goodly proportion of the pedestrians ”

“ The City of Mexico, like most centres of human habitation in whatever part of the world, is most beautiful when seen from afar, and in conjunction with Nature's environment. But the old Aztec city, the dark, romantic seat of the viceroys, the theatre of revolutionary struggle, and the modern centre of this important Mexican civilisation, is a really handsome and attractive city. ”

“ Pretty gardens are scattered lavishly around them, and smiling villages and haciendas peep out in every direction from the groves in which they are imbosomed. But, conspicuous above all, is the city of Mexico, — containing a population of two hundred thousand souls — the most ancient, as it is the most splendid capital on the Western Continent! ”

“ To sum up a mental impression of Mexico City, there rise before us the old and the new on the threshold of change; the antique, the quaint, and the refined, pressed close by the modern, the commercial, and the cheap: the hand of a haughty Castilian hidalgo-spirit held forth to the "cute" and business Yankee. But there is a great breach yet between the Chicago "drummer," or the American land-shark; and the Mexican gentleman. Here is a rich and developing soil, with—perhaps—some benefit for the masses: a new civilisation in the making; a new people being fashioned from an old ”

“ A prominent characteristic of Mexican commerce . continues to be the degree to which the capital is its center, in spite of the facilities introduced by the railroads for its decentralization. Mexico City, the metropolis of the country, by a wide margin is the center of Mexican commerce to an even greater degree than Paris is the center of French trade. ”

“ The United States has, naturally, no place which may compare with it, and in happier times Mexico City has been a tourist centre for Americans, who, escaping from the more materialistic and commercial atmosphere of their own busy towns, and the extremes of heat or cold which alternate therein, have sought the equable and healthful condition of the Mexican upland capital—an easy journey comparatively, of a few days in a Pullman car, amid landscapes attractive from their novelty. ”

“ The Mexico City of to-day is not the Mexico City of six years ago. At that time, the people looked better, the streets were cleaner, the pavements were in good condition, the foreigners were all busy and provided employment for all the Mexican people who wanted to work. ”

“ Mexico city is a combination of Spanish squalor and Paris-cum-New-York civilisation—very lightly veneered over in some places. It is some five miles across, but its business life centres in a square mile. The busiest streets are narrow—such as the Calle San Francisco, which is as narrow as Cheapside and just as full of traffic. ”

“ It is not always that one so easily effects an entrance into a strange city in a new country. The room assigned me was one after my own heart, a walled-off corner of a house-top, commanding a wide-spread view of stone-walls and roofs, and of the entire valley of Mexico. Moreover there was, right within a stone's throw, the grand cathedral, and the plaza that had been once adorned with the more ancient temple of the Aztecs. I was landed right in the centre of historic Mexico, in a position most favorable for studying and enjoying it, without previous care or wearisome house-hunting. ”

“ The costume of Mexican gentlemen is the usual European dress worn by the same class among northern nations. But, in addition, the broad folds of a massive cloak are always thrown over their shoulders upon the slightest pretext or provocation of the weather, whilst their nostrils are constantly refreshed by the fragrant fumes of a cigar or cigaritto.
The city of Mexico possesses two magnificent Passeos and an Alameda in which all classes of the people habitually recreate themselves. The city is supplied with water by splendid aqueducts, bringing the limpid streams from the neighboring hills. ”

“ He will be apt to fancy at first, from the quietude, that his hotel is not on a principal street; but it is in the most central part of the city—on the street which, with three others running parallel for say half a mile, and the included cross-streets, contain the principal retail traffic.
It is an early discovery that Mexico is a grave and not a gay city. There are no crowds on the sidewalks, no eating of ices in public, no cafés chantants, nothing Parisian. By nine or ten o'clock the people seem to have retired, perhaps to be up betimes in the morning fur the work of the day. ”

“ It is the capital of the populous province of Jalisco, famed for its wealth, and only second in importance to the city of Mexico itself. The crowds of well-dressed pedestrians that thronged the streets and squares, the well-appointed troops, elegance of the buildings, and smart appearance of equipages and dashing horsemen, all gave the air, even at a rapid glance, of great ease and opulence. ”

“ There are city parks and squares in other countries, but in none do they play the same intimate and important part in the national domestic life that they do in Mexico. To one accustomed to associate the “breathing spaces” with red-nosed tramps and collarless, unemployed men dejectedly reading wilted newspapers on shabby benches, it would be impossible to give an idea of what the plaza means to the people of Mexico—of how it is used by them. It strikes me always as a kind of open-air drawing-room, not only, as are our own public squares, free to all, but, unlike them, frequented by all. ”

“ Mexico City is lighted from Necaxa, nearly a hundred miles away, and one of the loveliest spots in the world. In a day one drops down from the plateau into the hot [158] country; the train seems to follow the river, which flows through a wild and beautiful barranca, and at Necaxa are the great falls supplying the power for this wonderful feat of engineering. ”

“ It is fair to say, however, that there are those who think the future metropolis may be farther to the north, as at San Luis Potosi.
If Mexico, then, is to be a great city, whither is it to spread? It is compactly built within, and much of the land about it is low, traversed by causeways. There is no better place to think about it, nor to look down upon the capital as a whole, than Chapultepec.
My first visit there was made on the tramway, where I fell in with a Mexican colonel, who told me that he liked the Americans very well. ”

“ Taking up the grand suggestion of the late Emperor, it remains for Americans to realize his dream. The insecurity of the suburbs of the city has been the greatest objection to building there, but that is now removed. Quick transit is now afforded to all parts of the city; while, keeping pace with the growth of the colony, the immense trunk lines of Mexico will bring passengers from the North, and land them at the very doors of their winter homes. ”

“ All these interests centre in the City of Mexico. Railroads are not very numerous until you approach the Valley of Mexico where they converge from all directions. The hum of industry is apparent here as nowhere else in the whole republic. The Mexicans boast of their capital, but they often forget the debt they owe to foreigners, for all the modern improvements have been installed by alien races and outside capital. It is another foreign invasion but with a pacific mission. The American colony alone in that city numbers more than six thousand persons, and the number is constantly increasing. ”

“ The railway leaves the city on the east side, curves to the north, and circles around the northern suburbs, until it begins to climb toward the southwest.
As we rise—a four per cent. grade—the fertile and beautiful valley of Anahuac, in which Mexico City is situated, spreads out before me. The big white city, its red and black-tiled roofs, its many domed and towered churches; the numerous lesser towns and villages scattering out into the bowl-like valley; the shimmering surfaces of lakes Tezcoco, Xochimilco, and Chalco, and bordering ponds; the plantations of dark maguey ”

“ Then he thought it would be well to beautify the capital, one of the results of which was the alameda, for centuries the favorite resort of all classes in search of relaxation and recreation, and remaining such to-day, a beautiful certificate to the taste and liberality of this ruler. [3] The city now contained about three thousand Spanish families, besides a numerous Indian and mixed population. During the successive decades it had slowly unfolded into magnificent proportions from the ruins of old Tenochtitlan. ”

“ Mexico City belongs in some respects to the present century; the life of the provinces does not. Time seems to have stood still there for two or three hundred years. The printing is certainly of the sixteenth century ”

“ The city is regularly built; has wide and clean streets–in some of them quite handsome and convenient houses; plenty of water from the Chihuahua creek, and from an aqueduct; fine gardens around the town, and a delightful public walk, (Alameda,) shaded with cotton trees. The finest place of the city, as usual in Mexico, is the Plaza, or public square. It is very spacious; has a public fountain in the middle, and foot walks on the side, with benches and pillars of a white porphyry, which is found in the neighborhood. ”