Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian StreetStreet, Julian
General
Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Street, Julian
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Everywhere, as I journeyed about the city how many memories assailed me.
When I lived in Chicago the Masonic Temple was the great show building
of the town: the highest building in the world, it was, then. The Art
Institute was in the brown stone pile now occupied by the Chicago Club.
The turreted stone house of Potter Palmer, on the Lake Shore Drive was
the city's most admired residence--a would-be baronial structure which,
standing there to-day, is a humorous thing: a grandiose attempt, falling
far short of being a good castle, and going far beyond the architectural
bounds of a good house. Then there was the old Palmer House hotel, with
its great billiard and poolroom, and its once-famous barbershop, with a
silver dollar set at the corner of each marble tile in its floor, to
amaze the rural visitor. The Palmer House is still there, looking no
older than it used to look. And most familiar of all, the toy suburban
trains of the Illinois Central Railroad continue to puff, importantly,
along the lake front, their locomotives issuing great clouds of steam
and smoke, which are snatched by the lake wind, and hurled like giant
snowballs--dirty snowballs, full of cinders--at the imperturbable stone
front of Michigan Avenue.
[Illustration: As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw
the butcher looking up at me.... I have never seen such eyes]
Chicago has talked, for years, of causing the Illinois Central Railroad
to run its trains by electricity. No doubt they should be run in that
way. No doubt the decline of the South Side and the ascendancy of the
North Side has been caused largely by the fact that the South Side
lakefront is taken up with tracks and trains, while the North Side
lakefront is taken up with parks and boulevards. Still, I love the
Chicago smoke. In some other city I should not love it, but in Chicago
it is part of the old picture, and for sentimental reasons, I had rather
pay the larger laundry bills, than see it go.
One day I went down to the station at Van Buren Street, and took the
funny little train to Oakland, where I used to live. One after the
other, I passed the old, dilapidated stations, looking more run down
than ever. Even the Oakland Station was unchanged, and its surroundings
were as I remembered them, except for signs of a sad, indefinite decay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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