The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
You will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After
all the other memories of San Antonio are gone you will revert to
these--gay open places, filled with palms and other tropical growths,
and flanked by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the
newer constructions of today. You will like to think of those squares in
the sunny daytime with the deep shadows running aslant across the faces,
there is delight in the memory of them at eventide, when the cluster
lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are filled with gaily
dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall Texans down from the ranches for
a really good time in "old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan
town, tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the hour when
the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its noisy clocks speaking midnight
hours to mere emptiness--San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the
days when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, and then looks
forward to the morrow. She believes that her golden age is not yet come.
Her plans for the future are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come.
In so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old in San Antonio
and the coming of the new, God grant that they will never come true.
17
THE AMERICAN PARIS
A great bronze arch spans Seventeenth street and bids you welcome to
Denver. For the capital of Colorado seems only second to the Federal
capital as a mecca for American tourists. She has advertised her charms,
her climate, her super-marvelous scenery cleverly and generously. The
response must be all that she could possibly wish. All summer and late
into the autumn her long stone station is crowded with travelers--she is
the focal point of those who come to Colorado and who find it the ideal
summer playground of America.
To that great section known as the Middle West, beginning at an
imaginary line drawn from Chicago south through St. Louis and so to the
Gulf, there is hardly a resort that can even rival Colorado in popular
favor. Take Kansas, for a single instance. Kansas comes scurrying up
into the Colorado mountains every blessed summer. It grows fretfully hot
down in the Missouri bottoms by the latter part of July, and the Kansans
begin to take advantage of the low rates up to Denver and Colorado
Springs and Pueblo. And with the Kansans come a pretty good smattering
of the folk of the rest of the Middle West. They crowd the trains out of
Omaha and Kansas City night after night; at dawn they come trooping out
through the portal of the Denver Union station and pass underneath that
bronze arch of welcome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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