"About twenty years ago, at the time of the Crerar foundation, the boards of the three libraries met and formed a gentleman's agreement, dividing the field of knowledge. It was then arranged that the Chicago Public Library should take care of the majority of the people, and that the Newberry and the Crerar should specialize, the former in what is called the 'Humanities'—philosophy, religion, history, literature, and the fine arts; the latter in science, pure and applied. At that time the Newberry Library turned over to the Crerar, at cost, all books it possessed which properly belonged in the scientific category. And since that time there has been practically no duplication among Chicago libraries. That is what comes of having public-spirited business men on library boards. They run these public institutions as they would run their own commercial enterprises. The Harvester Company, for example, wouldn't duplicate its own plant right in the same territory. That would be waste. But in many cities possessing more than one library, duplication of an exactly parallel kind goes on, because the libraries do not work together. Boston affords a good example. Between the Boston Public Library, the Athenæum, and the library of Harvard University, there is much duplication. Of course a university library is obliged to stand more or less alone, but it is possible even for such a library to coöperate to some extent with others, and, wherever it is possible to do so, the library of the University of Chicago does work with others in Chicago. Even the Art Institute is in the combination."
I do not quote this information because the arrangement between the libraries of Chicago strikes me as a thing particularly startling, but for precisely the opposite reason: it is one of those unstartling examples of uncommon common sense which one might easily overlook in considering the Plan of Chicago, in gazing at great buildings wreathed in whirling smoke, or in contemplating that allegory of infinity which confronts one who looks eastward from the bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant Park.
The automobile, which has been such an agency for the promotion of suburban and country life, seems to have the habit of invading, for its own commercial purposes, those former residence districts, in cities, which it has been the means of depopulating. I noticed that in Cleveland. There the automobile offered the residents of Euclid Avenue a swift and agreeable means of transportation to a pleasanter environment. Then, having lured them away, it proceeded to seize upon their former lands for showrooms, garages, and automobile accessory shops. The same thing has happened in Chicago on Michigan Avenue, where an "automobile row" extends for blocks beyond the uptown extremity of Grant Park, through a region which but a few years since was one of fashionable residences.
I do not like to make the admission, because of loyal memories of the old South Side, but—there is no denying it—the South Side has run down. In its struggle with the North Side, for leadership, it has come off a sorry second. In point of social prestige, as in the matter of beauty, it is unqualifiedly whipped. Cottage Grove Avenue, never a pleasant street, has deteriorated now into something which, along certain reaches, has a painful resemblance to a slum.
It hurt me to see that, for I remember when the little dummy line ran out from Thirty-ninth Street to Hyde Park, most of the way between fields and woods and little farms. I had forgotten the dummy line until I saw the place from which it used to start. Then, back through twenty-eight or thirty years, I heard again its shrill whistle and saw the conductor, little "Mister Dodge," as he used to come around for fares, when we were going out to Fifty-fifth Street to pick violets. There are no violets now at Fifty-fifth Street. I saw nothing there but rows of sordid-looking buildings, jammed against the street.
Everywhere, as I journeyed about the city how many memories assailed me. When I lived in Chicago the Masonic Temple was the great show building of the town: the highest building in the world, it was, then. The Art Institute was in the brown stone pile now occupied by the Chicago Club. The turreted stone house of Potter Palmer, on the Lake Shore Drive was the city's most admired residence—a would-be baronial structure which, standing there to-day, is a humorous thing: a grandiose attempt, falling far short of being a good castle, and going far beyond the architectural bounds of a good house. Then there was the old Palmer House hotel, with its great billiard and poolroom, and its once-famous barbershop, with a silver dollar set at the corner of each marble tile in its floor, to amaze the rural visitor. The Palmer House is still there, looking no older than it used to look. And most familiar of all, the toy suburban trains of the Illinois Central Railroad continue to puff, importantly, along the lake front, their locomotives issuing great clouds of steam and smoke, which are snatched by the lake wind, and hurled like giant snowballs—dirty snowballs, full of cinders—at the imperturbable stone front of Michigan Avenue.
As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me.... I have never seen such eyes
Chicago has talked, for years, of causing the Illinois Central Railroad to run its trains by electricity. No doubt they should be run in that way. No doubt the decline of the South Side and the ascendancy of the North Side has been caused largely by the fact that the South Side lakefront is taken up with tracks and trains, while the North Side lakefront is taken up with parks and boulevards. Still, I love the Chicago smoke. In some other city I should not love it, but in Chicago it is part of the old picture, and for sentimental reasons, I had rather pay the larger laundry bills, than see it go.
One day I went down to the station at Van Buren Street, and took the funny little train to Oakland, where I used to live. One after the other, I passed the old, dilapidated stations, looking more run down than ever. Even the Oakland Station was unchanged, and its surroundings were as I remembered them, except for signs of a sad, indefinite decay.