CORRESPONDENCE.
THE WHITE CITY OF CHICAGO.
" GOING to Chicago ! How I pity you!" Such was the exclamation which never failed to greet the announcement of our intended departure ; and it was always speedily followed by "Don't drink the water there,—you will die if you do. The noise will kill you, if the water doesn't ! The town is so dirty that whatever you wear will be spoilt in one day !" Thus speeded by our friends, and with a haunting fear besides of being put at the very top of a fifteen-storied hotel on our arrival, and burnt to death with American promptitude, we depart. In due time we reach our destination, and the last- named fear being the most acute, we go to no hotel, bat look for what Americans call a "rooming house,"—i.e., a house which lets furnished apartments.' Hard by Jackson Park we find one, which has been taken as a pure speculation for the occasion. Every room which it contains is fitted up as a bed-room at a rent of £1 a day,—the house is now, the furniture new, and both therefore fresh and clean. We engage the dining-room, which, to the feminine mind, has the attraction of a large upright sideboard fitted with many drawers and cupboards, and this done, all dread of fire leaves us, for not even in the kitchen, where the attendants engaged to wait on us abide, is that element to be found. They, as well as "the roomers," must take their meals elsewhere. In a year when rain is all but unknown, this arrangement pre- sents no difficulty. There is an excellent hotel within three minutes' walk, and we are at the same distance from one of the entrances to the World's Fair. As yet we have expe- rienced none of the disoomforts (to use a mild word) pre- dicted, though there is undoubtedly a consciousness of being girt about, and encompassed on every side by lines of cable-oars and railways, which shriek and puff and pant with a vigour and persistence that are happily unknown at home. They jangle loud warning-bells as they go, as trains which moan you to understand that you must take care of yourself, for they have not the slightest intention of taking any care of you. Our errand, however, is not with them,—we are bound to the Fair. Even to enter the grounds, we have to pass beneath the "Intra-mural," which flies round the Park in a series of daring curves, stopping here and there to deposit• its passengers on the second-floor of one of the buildings. The "Intra-mural " is an elevated railway, and the authori- ties have used its framework as a shelter for the ticket-takers. One of its arrangements, by-the-way, might, with advantage, be adopted on the District and Metropolitan railways. The driver, from where he stands, controls the doors of the oar- riages,—i.e., opens them by machinery when it is safe to get in or out, and shuts them when it is not, which prevents all the foolhardy clambering in at the last moment that takes place in England.
Once in the grounds, we see a park lying by the side of a lake, which is practically a great inland sea. Its waves leap on the shore,—its breezes bring refreshment even on those warmest and worst of all days, when the air is languid and heavy, and charged almost to extinc- tion with the heat which it has gathered while passing over vast tracts of prairie-land. There are well-estab- lished trees on all sides, and well-watered green lawns, and great lagoons, by the side of which rise the Exhibition buildings. One or two of these may perhaps be somewhat overladen with ornament, and architects will, no doubt, find fault with certain details, but the general effect is most picturesque and delightful, and many of them bring to our• minds pleasant memories of famous buildings in ancient and renowned cities. It was perhaps unnecessary to have two choragic monuments of Lysierates, but such is the liberal allowance. There is a Taj Mahal, with its proportions slightly altered, and its use still more perverted. At Chicago it is the Administration Building, and furnished with elevators in each of its four corners, up which weary men, and w omen, too. ascend to struggle with the powers that be,—powers which, it is hinted, combine American recklessness with Continental red-tapeism, and want of ability to wield authority with sweetness and light.
The effect of this vast succession of dazzlingly white build- ings under a sky more lofty and fiery in its strength of blueness• than any we have ever yet seen, is most beautiful but startling. We stand in admiration, and wonder how structures, many of which we know, and in some places can see, to be made of nothing more than wood, with a thin covering of white plaster and cement, should be able to give us so much artistic pleasure. That they do give it, is doubtless due to the fact that the• architect who planned the whole, and who died, alas ! before seeing the fruit of his labour, must have had a perfect genius. for making use of the accidents of the situation ; and that his. conceptions have been realised with a grace and freedom from vulgarity which has never yet been met with when exhibi- tions have been held in an old country, and could scarcely have been hoped for in a new one. The Art Gallery is a very fine edifice,—it is lamentable that it cannot per- manently occupy its present site. Those who examine the• mouldings at the base of the columns by the principal entrance, and see the holes in the thin coat of plaster, will understand why that is impossible. The peristyle is another feature which distinctly makes its mark. The New York Building is handsome ; the State Building of Massachusetts, with its white walls and tender-grey roof and wood-work- down even to the strip of garden it is a faithful copy of John Hancock's house—is a delicious bit of Puritanism ; the Cali- fornian, for which an old convent supplied the design, gives, us the other side of the picture ; but wheresoever we look, we are filled with regret that these bright, happy-looking buildings are but the butterflies of a season, and doomed to be converted into " old chunk " when winter comes. Almost the only build- ings which will be left on the ground when that time comes, will be Victoria House, which—as befits a house that represents the Mother-country—is solidly constructed, the Japanese houses. on the Wooded Island, and—odd as it may seem to include it among the buildings—the great American ironclad, which will continue to lie where it now is for the simple reason that it is unable to go away. Formidable as the ' Illinois' looks, it like so much else that we see, is a mere sham. To let an American man-of-war approach so near to the Canadian frontier would be to violate a treaty with Great Britain ; so piles were driven into the Lake at this corner, and a model of a man-of-war was built on that foundation with wood and bricks. It is plated with iron, equipped with wooden guns,. manned with able-bodied seamen—it lies so close to Victoria House that the clang of its bells as they sound the sea-watches can. easily be heard—its aspect is most formidable, and the interest it excites equally great. Other structures may be flpared at the last moment, and some will doubtless go to the Mid-Winter Californian Exhibition ; but it would be im- possible to gratify the townspeople by keeping the Chicago Exhibition open another year, for the buildings are absolutely unequal to the task of preserving the exhibits which they eon- fain from snow and stress of weather. Even last winter, when empty, they caused their guardians great anxiety, What would that anxiety be if they were filled, as they are now, with treasures of all kinds P The cleanliness of the buildings and grounds is surprising. we can see the state in which they would be kept by the natural man, if uncontrolled, by looking at the roads and grass-plots just outside the gates. There, cigarette-boxes, newspapers, advertisements, and battered bits of paper of all kinds toss about and retoss day after day ; and if ever they are removed at all, it is but by the agency of Nature. In the grounds, however, though hundreds—nay, thousands—of country-people go in every day with cardboard boxes containing their dinners, and though they fling these boxes about, together with banana and orange-peelings, peach- stones, and papers, and any food which they may not care to eat, nothing remains long to offend the eye—bands of men with covered barrows go about, and in a few minutes all is as clean as it was before—it would be hard to find even a spent match on the roads. Another thing which strikes us is the entire absence of the rowdyism which never fails to crop rip among any large assemblage of people who are bent on .enjoying themselves, in England. The visitors to the World's Pair are, to a large extent, plain country-folk of the better working class, who have given themselves a short holiday. Their wives and daughters are attired in. antiquated fashion ; but they are usually intelligent, and take an interest in what they see. If they have babies, they " cheek them,"—i.e., de. posit them in the creche within the grounds, where for quarter" they are nursed, fed, and amused all day while their parents are able to go about with a light check in their pockets instead of a heavy child in their arms. When they want rest, they go to the verandah or news-rooms of their own State Building, where they meet fellow-Statesmen, and enjoy the pride of partial ownership. The Pennsylvania State Building is perhaps the one which people seem most proud to claim as their own, for at its entrance is the Liberty Bell." " You are English, and may perhaps not like to look at it," said a woman to us ; " but I must say that .I do, and that I am proud of belonging to the Keystone-State." Then she explained to us why Pennsylvania is called the "Keystone-State "; and we explained to her that we did not mind seeing the Liberty Bell, or lament the fact that America had freed herself from British control ; but what did cause us concern was that we had not parted in a pleasanter manner, and with more sense on our side of having behaved well.. While we are thinking of this, and of that day long ago when, for perhaps the only time in America's existence, she put enough tea into the water to make a good bilew, our Pennsylvanian began to tell us that her father had been born near Glasgow, and her husband's father in Yorkshire. And thus was it nearly always. Rarely did we enter into conversation with any one without eliciting some such fact. Everybody's father, grandfather, or at extreme most, great-grandfather, had come from Great Britain,—every one had an interest in the Old Country and a wish to see it, together with an underlying affection, not to say something very like loyalty, to Queen Victoria. This being the ease, where are the Americans ? We often wondered, and it was always an effort to remember, that we were not at home. There was the speech of our towns to persuade us that we were ; there was even some of the dialect which can now only be heard in country places beyond the reach of railways. "By their speech ye shall know them ; " and when we heard a lady —"a real lady," as children have it—say to a poor child at the fireworks, Come and stand by my chair, honey, and you will see better," we knew that Yorkshire parents had trans- mitted both the word of endearment and the disposition to use it. Large was our acquaintance, but we never found any one who had not some ties over the water. Two ticket-takers, fine soldierlike men—one of whom holds the record in sharp-shooting ; the other, whose father (a Scotch- man) came to America with a pedigree which ran back without a flaw for four hundred years—relieved each other at the gate by which we usually entered, Their duty was to write "England" on our cards. " I'd like to go there," said one ; " my father was an Englishman." " I mean to go there," said the other ; " I want to see some of the places I read about. I have Hume's 'History of England' and Macaulay's, and read them for hours together."—" And your father?" we asked, "`does he read them ?"—" No; but he is in his glory when he has the Scottish Chiefs' in his hand."
If we have a complaint to make of the conversation of the people with whom we came in brief contact, it is revealed in the saying which, before we came to Chicago, we believed to be only a saying :—" In New York they ask, ' How much money have you got ? in Philadelphia, ' Who was your grand- father ? ' in Boston, What do you know?' and in Chicago, Where do you come from p " It is a fact that no Chicagoan —as, in defiance of analogy, the resident will call himself—. ever says five words to a stranger without putting the ques- tion. He cares nothing about your grandfather or your knowledge, but he must know where you come from. As for your money, it would, however large in quantity, not dazzle him. Under a plain exterior, he possibly, to use what would be his own way of putting it, " handles twelve thousand hogs daily," and " a lively jump in pork" would enable him to buy his wife the great Tiffany diamond without missing what he had paid for it.
Thus far with the White City; now for the Black one,—the city which was to steal away our lives and, most feminine climax, ruin our clothing in one day. Both of these evil deeds are abundantly in its power. Never was a dirtier, grimier, more smoke-infested city than Chicago, in the business quarter. Volumes of black smoke rise up in the air and descend down upon the earth. Virulent bits of cinder force their way into your eyes,—and if ever your eyes were wanted, it is here, where about four hundred miles of street-railway- tracks "gridiron" the city, crossing and recrossing at the street-corners until there are sometimes six or eight of them to traverse before you can reach the other side. Besides this, Chicago is practically (so it says) the terminal point of all the trunk-lines of railway—North, South, East, or West-a and as these lines, as a rule, enter the city by level crossings, it is not surprising that an average of three deaths daily is the result. Electric-cars, cable-cars, elevated railways, and great lines with level crossings, are some of the enemies of the house of your life. The engines shriek and snort, and jangle bells night and day,—day is made dangerous by them, and night hideous. These bells are monstrous creatures attached to the engine, which lie on their backs and kick when the train comes in sight of town or station. They are a relic of barbarism, and instead of adding to "the sweet security" of Chicago streets, only add to the confusion.
No city in the world can well be more horrible than Chicago proper. Its houses are higher than those of any other town, its streets dirtier, its river an abomination, which can be smelt but not described. As for its common lodging and tenement houses, we were told by an official, dispatched by a European Government to various great towns in Europe and America to see how the problem of housing the poor was dealt with, that all the dirt, squalor, and misery of such buildings in all the great cities of the world was as nothing compared with the dirt and misery of those in Chicago, for such houses are there made of wood, which sucks in the dirt and infection, and never parts with either. Many miles, however, lie between the White City and the Black one. The White City may have its lurking dangers, but we are unconscious of them. The dangers of the Black City stalk the streets at noontide, and should cholera reach it, we tremble to think how it would tell on the population.
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