The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the intervening century’s experience. With its avenues that encompassed swamps and wildernesses, with its future growth forecast for at least a hundred years, the complete city plan captivated the imagination. Scarcely any American town was so mean that it did not attempt to grow faster than its neighbor, faster perhaps than New York. Only by the accumulation of more and more people could its colossal city plan and its inflated land values be realized. If the older cities of the seaboard were limited in their attempts to become metropolises by the fact that their downtown sections were originally laid out for villages, the villages of the middle west labored under just the opposite handicap; they had frequently acquired the framework of a metropolis before they had passed out of the physical state of a village. The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which the juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. That a city had any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values, and to grow is something that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city stands _is_ the place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, and nothing else. IV With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with land continually changing hands, what encouragement was there for the stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front. If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a Masonic Hall “somewhat in the Gothic style”; and we can characterize all the buildings of the period by saying that they were “somewhat” like architecture--a little more than scenery, a little less than solids.