In considering the domestic architecture of Chicago it is necessary to recur to the topographical conditions, for these have had as marked an influence upon it as they have had upon the commercial quarter, although this influence operates in almost the opposite direction. The commercial centre--the quarter of wholesale traffic and of “high finance”--is huddled into the space between the lake and the river. But when this limit is once passed there is no natural limit. No longer pent up, the whole boundless continent is Chicago’s, and the instinct of expansion is at liberty to assert itself in every direction but the east, where it is confronted by Lake Michigan. There is thus no east side in Chicago to supplement the north and the west and the south sides, among which the dwellings of the people are divided, but there is no natural obstacle whatsoever to the development of the city in these three directions, and no natural reason why it should expand in one rather than in another except what is again furnished by the lake. To the minority of people, who live where they will and not where they must, this is a considerable exception, and one would suppose that the fashionable quarter would be that quarter from which the lake is most accessible. This is distinctly enough the north side, which a stranger, without the slightest interest, present or prospective, in Chicago real estate, may be pardoned for inferring to be the most desirable for residence. For it happens that the dwellers upon the south side are cut off from any practical or picturesque use of the lake by the fact that the shore to the south of the city is occupied by railroad tracks, and the nearest houses of any pretensions are turned away from the water, of which only the horses stabled in the rear are in a position to enjoy the view. The inference that the north is the most eligible of the sides one finds to be violently combated by the residents of the south and the west, and he finds also that, instead of one admittedly fashionable quarter, as in every other city, Chicago has three claimants for that distinction. Each of these quarters has its centre and its dependencies, and between each two there is a large area either unoccupied, or occupied with dwellings very much humbler than those that line the avenues that are severally the boasts of the competing sides. The three appear to have received nearly equal shares of municipal attention, for there is a park for each--nay, there are three parks for the west side, though these are thus far well beyond the limit of fashion if not of population, and nominally two for the south side, though even these bear more the relation to the quarter for which they were provided that the Central Park bore to New York in 1870 than that which it bears in 1891. They are still, that is to say, rather outlying pleasure-grounds accessible to excursionists than parks in actual public use. Lincoln Park, the park of