Thereafter I roamed the city and its environs, and to my delight found it to be one of the most curious and fascinating places I had ever seen. From a stationery store I first secured a map and figured out the lay of the town. At a glance I saw that the greater part of it stretched eastward along the tongue of land that was between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, and that this was Pittsburgh proper. Across the Allegheny, on the north side, was the city of Allegheny, an individual municipality but so completely connected with Pittsburgh as to be identical with it, and connected with it by many bridges. Across the Monongahela, on the south side, were various towns: Mt. Washington, Duquesne, Homestead. I was interested especially in Homestead because of the long and bitter contest between the steel-workers and the Carnegie Company, which for six months and more in 1892 had occupied space on the front page of every newspaper in America. Having studied my map I explored, going first across the river into Allegheny. Here I found a city built about the base of high granite hills or between ridges in hollows called “gaps” or “runs” with a street or car-line clambering and twisting directly over them. A charming park and boulevard system had been laid out, with the city hall, a public market and a Carnegie public library as a center. The place had large dry-goods and business houses. On another day I crossed to the south side and ascended by an inclined plane, such as later I discovered to be one of the transportation features of Pittsburgh, the hill called Mt. Washington, from the top of which, walking along an avenue called Grand View Boulevard which skirted the brow of the hill, I had the finest view of a city I have ever seen. In later years I looked down upon New York from the heights of the Palisades and the hills of Staten Island; on Rome from the Pincian Gardens; on Florence from San Miniato; and on Pasadena and Los Angeles from the slopes of Mt. Lowe; but never anywhere have I seen a scene which impressed me more than this: the rugged beauty of the mountains, which encircle the city, the three rivers that run as threads of bright metal, dividing it into three parts, the several cities joined as one, their clambering streets presenting a checkered pattern emphasized here and there by the soot-darkened spires of churches and the walls of the taller and newer and cleaner office buildings. As in most American cities of any size, the skyscraper was just being introduced and being welcomed as full proof of the growth and wealth and force of the city. No city was complete without at least one: the more, of course, the grander.