Western City

“ The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind—for such was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every capital of Western Europe—drew to its site artists, adventurers, and speculators from all lands. ”

“ As explaining this difference between western and southern cities, business is active and progressive in western cities, producing high business values,while residences are scattered by the trolley and are not held together by the old-establshed residence sections, whereas in southern cities the scale of business operations is less, partly owing to the diminished purchasing power of the negroes, resulting in low business values, while residence values are raised by the greater importance attached to social considerations and the greater age of the cities. ”

“ The western portion of the city rises very gradually until it reaches an elevation of about seventy-five feet, when it spreads out into a level plain, extending a considerable distance to the southwest. ”

“ The West repeats the cities, the institutions, and the cultivation of the East, and their course is rapid and safe. First you see in the wilderness some loghouses, then neat frame and small stone houses, then elegant villas and cottages, and before many years are over, there stands, as if by magic, a city with its capitol or state's-house, its handsome churches, splendid hotels, academies, and institutions of all kinds ”

“ It is still sorting itself out from the plain which its elevators, business blocks and delightful residential districts are yet occupied in thrusting back. It is a characteristic town on the uplift. It snubs and encroaches upon the illimitable fields with its fine American architecture, and its stone university buildings. It has new suburbs full of houses of symmetrical Western comeliness in a tract wearing the air of Buffalo Bill.
It grows so fast that you can almost see it doing it. It has grown so fast that it has outstripped the guide-book makers. ”

“ The west side, the largest section, and containing more population than the other two divisions combined, stretching out over the prairie to a horizon fringed with villages, expanding in three directions, is more mediocre in buildings, but impressive in its vastness; and the stranger driving out the stately avenue of Washington some four miles to Garfield Park will be astonished by the evidences of wealth and the vigor of the city expansion. ”

“ To one who has never visited the public wharves of the great cities of the West, it is no trivial task to convey an adequate idea of the spectacle they present. The commerce of the Eastern seaports and that of the Western Valley are utterly dissimilar ”

“ Who that remembers Western New-York thirty-five years ago, can look upon the change without amazement? Instead of the every day, gradual progress which industry and enterprise, guided by intelligence, accomplishes, it seems as if some Fairy had passed through the wilderness, converting, by a touch of its wand, tangled forests into waving fields, log-cabins into splendid mansions, Indian wigwams into Christian Temples, and blind foot-paths into Railroads and Canals. ”

“ Fashion seems to hesitate between the east side and the west side, but the east or lake side seems to have the advantage in situation, certainly in views, and contains a greater proportion of the American population than the other. Indeed, it is not easy to recall a quarter of any busy city which combines more comfort, evidences of wealth and taste and refinement, and a certain domestic character, than this portion of the town on the bluffs, Prospect avenue and the adjacent streets. ”

“ He will then feel a love for New York equal to the Chicagoan’s love for his city, and when he sees across the New Jersey flats the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of the cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when they “come into town,” at being back again in the only place where one can both hear the Tough Girl of the East Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of the Country Club’s coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue.
The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out-of-doors portion of our country, and a most delightful place [243] to visit. ”

“ They realize perhaps more faithfully than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and North. Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns, with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life. ”

“ In the Middle West you will find farmers of Kansas and Illinois who regard New York City as an annexe to hell, and who care nothing for world politics so long as their pigs get safe to Chicago and their wheat to Minneapolis. Further west again, cut off from their fellow-countrymen by trackless deserts and impassable mountains, you will find isolated communities, like Denver and Salt Lake City, each with its own activities, traditions, and public opinion. ”

“ Going to West Point would give me the opportunity of visiting the two great cities of the continent, Philadelphia and New York. This was enough. When these places were visited I would have been glad to have had a steamboat or railroad collision, or any other accident happen, by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy. Nothing of the kind occurred, and I had to face the music.
Georgetown has a remarkable record for a western village. It is, and has been from its earliest existence, a democratic town. ”

“ Although of New York, I am still a citizen of the Northwest. The Northwest extends eastward to the base of the Alleghany Mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward of the Alleghany Mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices over all these plains? ”

“ All New England was now astir with the movement westward, and again we have chronicles of migration and early settlement, as in the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. Quaint and beautiful are the details which exist of these movements. The plans were drawn in Boston, and at Providence in Rhode Island, of great cities to be erected on the banks of rivers flowing as yet through the wilderness; the intending emigrants met to draw lots for their future homes in these cities, each “town-lot to be ninety feet front and 180 feet in depth;” the centre street of the city to be 150 feet wide. ”

“ He has begun to dream himself in the West, and lo! there rises up a great city. "But is not this the West?" will ask the new-comer from the Atlantic states. "Upon your own showing we are here 1000 miles from New York, by water 1500 miles to Quebec; surely this must be the West?" No; for in this New World the West is ever on the move. Twenty years ago Chicago was West; ten years ago it was Omaha; then it was Salt Lake City, and now it is San Francisco on the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of the brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional men of the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and the traditions of culture that belong to older communities, they may justly claim a far higher percentage of college-bred men and of families of cultivated tastes than belong to Eastern towns of like population. The intense pressure of business and absorption of private pursuits are, for the present, seeming obstacles to the progress of Western communities in the highest things ”

“ I want to see the West. I hate New York, I hate it. It's crowded, cruel, horrible. I want to get out on the broad plains, where there's enough of God's air for all. But I never will. I'll just have to go on reading—and reading—and maybe talking about it now and then. Say—what is the West like—anyhow?”
Bob Garwood, the stranger, lighted a match and held it for a second so that its light shone into the pinched, city-pale face of William Parker. Then he applied it to his cigaret and tossed it to the grass. ”

“ And the reason why the outlandish and outré so much predominate in the names of western towns and cities, must be sought in the fact referred [Pg 137] to above, that the western man is not essentially a town-projector, and that, consequently, comparatively few of the towns were “laid out” by the legitimate pioneer. We shall have more to say of town-building under another head; and, in the meantime, having said that the pioneer is not gregarious, let us look at the manner of his emigration. ”

“ Many of us Westerners sincerely admire the East and do reverence to Eastern gods when we can sneak unobserved into the temples. We dispose of our crops and merchandise as quickly as possible, that we may be seen of men in New York. Western school-teachers pour into New England every summer on pious pilgrimages to Concord and Lexington. And yet we feel ourselves, the great body of us, a peculiar people. “Ten days [6] of New York, and it’s me for my home town” in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, or Colorado. ”

“ In these respects, and in a hundred refinements of living, the town, which has so largely drawn its young, enterprising population from the extreme East, has little the appearance of a frontier place; it is the push, the public spirit, the mixture of fashion and slouching negligence in street attire, the mingling of Eastern smartness with border emancipation in manner, and the general restlessness of movement, that proclaim the newness. ”

“ Eastward and northward was the city of manual toil, with the rumbling and the smoke of its factories. Southward, beyond the river, was the city of study, of intellectual labour, so calm, so perfectly serene. And on all sides the passion of trade ascended from the central districts, where the crowds rolled and scrambled amidst an everlasting uproar of wheels; while westward, the city of the happy and powerful ones, those who fought for sovereignty and wealth, spread out its piles of palaces amidst the slowly reddening flare of the declining planet. ”

“ Travel for forty hours to the westward, and everything is in a transition state: there are rough roads and unfinished railroads; foundations of cities laid in soil scarcely cleared from the forest; splendid hotels within sound of the hunter's rifle and the lumberer's axe; while the elements of society are more chaotic than the features of the country. Every year a tide of emigration rolls westward, not from Europe only, but from the crowded eastern cities, forming a tangled web of races, manners, and religions which the hasty observer cannot attempt to disentangle. ”

“ The small man is in office, but the big man, his master, is outside. The mischief is brought prominently forward in connection with the sale of public lands in the North-West, which have been claimed as the heritage of the people, and indeed of all the nations of the world. The government land attracted the hardy labour of all countries, covering the western west with thriving towns and populous counties. ”

“ Approaching a town the motorist finds himself courteously welcomed and politely requested to respect the local speed law, and as he departs a sign at the postern thanks him and urges his return. The Western town is distinguished as much by its generous hospitality as by its enterprise, its firm purpose to develop new territory and widen its commercial influence. ”

“ A safeguard for the West is the conversion of our great ranches and vast tracts of unoccupied land into small farms and then such a management of suburban schools and traveling libraries and the refinements of culture as to surround these country homes with the advantages of the city. Is it not a problem for sociology to work out? ”

“ The East is old, pretty fully peopled, and small. The West is new, vast, and thinly peopled. Our rivers can be measured; yours cannot. We are bounded; you are boundless. The West was, therefore, most deeply interested in this system, though certainly not alone interested, even in such works as had a Western locality. To clear her rivers was to open them for the commerce of the whole country; to construct harbors, and clear entrances to existing harbors, whether on the Gulf of Mexico or on the Lakes, was for the advantage of that whole commerce. ”

“ Washington Heights is a crowning wilderness looking down upon the city from Fort George, while the Sound and a glimpse of the village beyond seen through the faint blue haze of distance lend a touch of fairylike enchantment. The Jersey shore and the Palisades are one long drawn out joy, so that, turn where you will, you find New York beautiful. ”

“ I know that I am here in this singularly prosperous and powerful section of the United States, Western New York, and I know the character of the men who inhabit Western New York. I know they are sons of liberty, one and all; that they sucked in liberty with their mothers' milk; inherited it with their blood; that it is the subject of their daily contemplation and watchful thought. They are men of unusual equality of condition, for a million and a half of people. There are thousands of men around us, and here before us, who till their own soil with their own hands ”

“ Chicago bears on its arms the name of “the City in the Garden.” And when the prairie-land around it becomes garden, there will be reason for its poetical appellation.
I have seen here, also, light and lofty school-rooms, and have heard the scholars in them, under the direction of an excellent master, sing quartetts in such a manner as affected me to tears. And the children, how eager, how glad to learn they were! Hurrah! The West builds light school-rooms where the young may learn joyfully, and sing correctly and sweetly! The West must progress nobly. ”