The city is fearfully busy at all of its downtown corners. New Yorkers shudder at Thirty-fourth street and Broadway. Inside the Chicago loop are several dozen Thirty-fourth streets and Broadways. There you have it--the Chicago loop, designed to afford magnificent relief to the town and in effect having tightly drawn a belt about its waist. The loop is a belt-line terminal, slightly less than a mile in diameter, designed to serve the elevated railroads that stretch their caterpillar-like structures over three directions of the widespread town. Within it are the theaters, the hotels, the department stores, the retail district, and the wholesale and the railroad terminals. Just without it is an arid belt and then somewhere to the north, the west and the south, the great residential districts. So it is a mistake. For, with the exception of a little way along Michigan avenue to the south, the loop has acted against the growth of the city, has kept it tightly girdled within itself. "Within the loop," is a meaningful phrase in Chicago. It means congestion in every form and the very worst forms to the fore. It means that what was originally intended to be an adequate terminal to the various elevated railroads has become a transportation abomination and a matter of local contempt. For you cannot exaggerate the condition that it has created. It is fearful on ordinary days, and when you come to extraordinary days, like the memorable summer when the Knights Templar held their triennial conclave there, the newspapers print "boxed" summaries of the persons killed and injured by congestion conditions "within the loop." That takes it out of being a mere laughing matter.