XVI.
THE PRAIRIE CITY.
First Impressions of Chicago—A Bitter Winter—Great Storms—Thirty Degrees below Zero—On the Shores of Lake Michigan—Street Architecture—Pullman City—Western Journalism—Chicago Criticism—Notable Entertainments—At the Press Club—The Club Life of America—What America has done—Unfair Comparisons between the Great New World and the Older Civilizations of Europe—Mistaking Notoriety for Fame—A Speech of Thanks—Facts, Figures, and Tests of Popularity, Past and to Come.
I.
Through piles of lumber, into back streets filled with liquor bars, “side shows,” and decorated with flaming posters, into fine, stately thoroughfares, crowded with people, past imposing buildings marked with architectural dignity, to the Grand Pacific Hotel.
“It is as if Manchester had given Greenwich Fair a blow in the face,” said Irving,—“that is my first impression of Chicago. ‘The Living Skeleton,’ ‘The Tattooed Man,’ ‘The Heaviest Woman in the World,’ ‘The Museum of Wonders,’ with the painted show-pictures of our youth; public houses, old-clothes shops, picturesque squalor. And then great warehouses, handsome shops, and magnificent civic buildings,—what a change! There is something of the ‘go’ of Liverpool and Manchester about it. If I was ever afraid of Chicago, I am afraid no longer. A people that have rebuilt this city within a comparatively few years must be great, broad-minded, and ready in appreciating what is good. We have something to show them in the way of dramatic art,—they will ‘catch on,’ as they say on this side of the Atlantic, I am sure of it.”
The city was more or less snow-bound. Little or no effort had been made to remove the white downfall, either from street or sidewalk. The sun was shining. The air was, nevertheless, very cold. Within a few days of our arrival the thermometer had fallen to twenty and thirty degrees below zero. We had selected for our visit to America what was destined to be the bitterest winter that had been known in the United States for over twenty years. There were storms on sea and land; storms of rain, and snow, and wind, followed by frosts that closed the great rivers, and made even Lake Michigan solid for ice-boats a dozen or twenty miles out. The South Jersey coast was strewn with wreckage. Railway tracks were swept away. At Cape May the principal pier was destroyed. The sea demolished the piles of Coney Island’s iron piers. At Long Branch cottages were undermined by the water, and their contents carried out to sea. The well-known dancing platform and piazza of the Grand Union Hotel, on Rockaway Beach, were washed away. Terrific winds blew over Boston and New England. A little fleet of schooners were driven ashore at Portland. Vessels broke from their moorings in the adjacent harbors. Atlantic City had boarding-houses, stores, and dwellings carried away by high tides.
The mails were delayed for hours, and in some cases for days, on the principal railroads. Where the obstacles were not rain and flood they were wind and snow. Lockport, New York, reported that the snow on that day was four feet on the level, and still falling. Bradford, telegraphing for Pennsylvania generally, announced that fourteen inches of snow had fallen within a few hours, the weight of it crushing in many roofs and awnings. “The narrow-gauge railways,” ran the despatch, “five in number, have been closed all day; the trains are stalled a few miles from the city.” Even at Louisville, in Kentucky, navigation was suspended, and floating ice-blocks were battering in the sides of steamers lying at the wharves of Baltimore. On the Rappahannock river, in Virginia, a ship laden with corn was cut down and sunk by floating ice. These and kindred incidents occurred on or about the day of our arrival in Chicago. The record of the few previous days, judged from the official reports of Washington, and the ordinary chronicles of the times, was a very remarkable one, even for the coldest States of America. In some places the weather had been the coldest known for more than fifty years. Canada had had the most extreme experiences in this respect. At Winnipeg, Manitoba, the thermometer had fallen as low as forty-five degrees below zero.