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
Another building saved from the World's Fair is the superb central hall
of Washington University, a red granite structure in the English
collegiate style, designed by Cope & Stewardson. The dozen or more
buildings of this university are very fine in their harmony, and are
pronounced by Baedeker "certainly the most successful and appropriate
group of collegiate buildings in the New World."
It is curious to note in this connection that there are eight colleges
or universities in the United States in which the name of "Washington"
appears; among them, Washington University at St. Louis; Washington
College at Chestertown, Md.; George Washington University at Washington,
D. C.; Washington State College at Pullman, Wash., and the University of
Washington at Seattle.
[Illustration: The skins are handled in the raw state ... with the
result that the floor of the exchange is made slippery by animal fats,
and that the olfactory organs encounter smells not to be matched in any
zoo]
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINER SIDE
Before making my transcontinental pilgrimage I used to wonder,
sometimes, just where the line dividing East from West in the United
States might be. When I lived in Chicago, and went out to St. Louis, I
felt that I was going, not merely in a westerly direction, but that I
was actually going out into the "West." I knew, of course, that there
was a vast amount of "West" lying beyond St. Louis, but I had no real
conception--and no one who has not seen it can have--of what a
stupendous, endless, different kind of land it is. St. Louis west? It is
not west at all. To be sure, it is the frontier, the jumping-off place,
but it is no more western in its characteristics than the city of
Boulogne is English because it faces England, just across the way. From
every point of view except that of geography, Chicago is more western
than St. Louis. For Chicago has more "wallop" than St. Louis, and
"wallop" is essentially a western attribute. "Wallop" St. Louis has not.
What she has is civilization and the eastern spirit of laissez-faire.
And that of St. Louis which is not of the east is of the south. Her
society has a strong southern flavor, many of her leading families
having come originally from Kentucky and Virginia. The Southern
"colonel" type is to be found there, too--black, broad-brimmed hat,
frock coat, goatee, and all--and there is a negro population big enough
to give him his customary background.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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