I do not quote this information because the arrangement between the libraries of Chicago strikes me as a thing particularly startling, but for precisely the opposite reason: it is one of those unstartling examples of uncommon common sense which one might easily overlook in considering the Plan of Chicago, in gazing at great buildings wreathed in whirling smoke, or in contemplating that allegory of infinity which confronts one who looks eastward from the bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant Park. The automobile, which has been such an agency for the promotion of suburban and country life, seems to have the habit of invading, for its own commercial purposes, those former residence districts, in cities, which it has been the means of depopulating. I noticed that in Cleveland. There the automobile offered the residents of Euclid Avenue a swift and agreeable means of transportation to a pleasanter environment. Then, having lured them away, it proceeded to seize upon their former lands for showrooms, garages, and automobile accessory shops. The same thing has happened in Chicago on Michigan Avenue, where an "automobile row" extends for blocks beyond the uptown extremity of Grant Park, through a region which but a few years since was one of fashionable residences. I do not like to make the admission, because of loyal memories of the old South Side, but--there is no denying it--the South Side has run down. In its struggle with the North Side, for leadership, it has come off a sorry second. In point of social prestige, as in the matter of beauty, it is unqualifiedly whipped. Cottage Grove Avenue, never a pleasant street, has deteriorated now into something which, along certain reaches, has a painful resemblance to a slum. It hurt me to see that, for I remember when the little dummy line ran out from Thirty-ninth Street to Hyde Park, most of the way between fields and woods and little farms. I had forgotten the dummy line until I saw the place from which it used to start. Then, back through twenty-eight or thirty years, I heard again its shrill whistle and saw the conductor, little "Mister Dodge," as he used to come around for fares, when we were going out to Fifty-fifth Street to pick violets. There are no violets now at Fifty-fifth Street. I saw nothing there but rows of sordid-looking buildings, jammed against the street.