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
Much negro labor is employed for the rougher kind of work; colored
waiters serve in the hotels, and many families employ colored servants.
As is usual in cities where this is true, the accent of the people
inclines somewhat to be southern. Or, perhaps, it is a blending of the
accent of the south with the sharper drawl of the west. Then, too, I
encountered there men bearing French names (which are pronounced in the
French manner, although the city's name has been anglicized, being
pronounced "Saint Louiss") who, if they did not speak with a real French
accent, had, at least, slight mannerisms of speech which were
unmistakably of French origin. I noted down a number of French family
names I heard: Chauvenet, Papin, Vallé, Desloge, De Menil, Lucas,
Pettus, Guion, Chopin, Janis, Benoist, Cabanné, and Chouteau--the latter
family descended, I was told, from Laclede himself. And again, I heard
such names as Busch, Lehmann, Faust, and Niedringhaus; and still again
such other names as Kilpatrick, Farrell, and O'Fallon--for St. Louis,
though a Southern city, and an Eastern city, and a French city, and a
German city, by being also Irish, proves herself American.
It is in all that has to do with family life that St. Louis comes off
best. She has miles upon miles of prosperous-looking, middle-class
residence streets, and the system of residence "places" in her more
fashionable districts is highly characteristic. These "places" are in
reality long, narrow parkways, with double drives, parked down the
center, and bordered with houses at their outer margins. The oldest of
them is, I am told, Benton Place, on the South Side, but the more
attractive ones are to the westward, near Forest Park. Of these the
first was Vandeventer Place, which still contains some of the most
pleasant and substantial residences of the city, and it may be added
that while some of the newer "places" have more recent and elaborate
houses than those on Vandeventer Place, the general average of recent
domestic architecture in St. Louis is behind that of many other cities.
Portland Place seemed, upon the whole, to have the best group of modern
houses. Westmoreland and Kingsbury Places also have agreeable homes. But
Washington Terrace is not so fortunate; its houses, though they plainly
indicate liberal expenditure of money, are often of that
"catch-as-catch-can" kind of architecture which one meets with but too
frequently in the middle west. If St. Louis is western in one thing more
than another it is the architecture of her houses. Not that they lack
solidity but that on the average they are not to be compared,
architecturally, with houses of corresponding modernness in such cities
as Chicago or Detroit. The more I see of other cities the more, indeed,
I appreciate the new domestic architecture of Detroit. And I cannot help
feeling that it is curious that St. Louis should be behind Detroit in
this particular when she is, as a city, so far superior in her evident
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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