CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINER SIDE
Before making my transcontinental pilgrimage I used to wonder, sometimes, just where the line dividing East from West in the United States might be. When I lived in Chicago, and went out to St. Louis, I felt that I was going, not merely in a westerly direction, but that I was actually going out into the "West." I knew, of course, that there was a vast amount of "West" lying beyond St. Louis, but I had no real conception—and no one who has not seen it can have—of what a stupendous, endless, different kind of land it is. St. Louis west? It is not west at all. To be sure, it is the frontier, the jumping-off place, but it is no more western in its characteristics than the city of Boulogne is English because it faces England, just across the way. From every point of view except that of geography, Chicago is more western than St. Louis. For Chicago has more "wallop" than St. Louis, and "wallop" is essentially a western attribute. "Wallop" St. Louis has not. What she has is civilization and the eastern spirit of laissez-faire. And that of St. Louis which is not of the east is of the south. Her society has a strong southern flavor, many of her leading families having come originally from Kentucky and Virginia. The Southern "colonel" type is to be found there, too—black, broad-brimmed hat, frock coat, goatee, and all—and there is a negro population big enough to give him his customary background.
Much negro labor is employed for the rougher kind of work; colored waiters serve in the hotels, and many families employ colored servants. As is usual in cities where this is true, the accent of the people inclines somewhat to be southern. Or, perhaps, it is a blending of the accent of the south with the sharper drawl of the west. Then, too, I encountered there men bearing French names (which are pronounced in the French manner, although the city's name has been anglicized, being pronounced "Saint Louiss") who, if they did not speak with a real French accent, had, at least, slight mannerisms of speech which were unmistakably of French origin. I noted down a number of French family names I heard: Chauvenet, Papin, Vallé, Desloge, De Menil, Lucas, Pettus, Guion, Chopin, Janis, Benoist, Cabanné, and Chouteau—the latter family descended, I was told, from Laclede himself. And again, I heard such names as Busch, Lehmann, Faust, and Niedringhaus; and still again such other names as Kilpatrick, Farrell, and O'Fallon—for St. Louis, though a Southern city, and an Eastern city, and a French city, and a German city, by being also Irish, proves herself American.
It is in all that has to do with family life that St. Louis comes off best. She has miles upon miles of prosperous-looking, middle-class residence streets, and the system of residence "places" in her more fashionable districts is highly characteristic. These "places" are in reality long, narrow parkways, with double drives, parked down the center, and bordered with houses at their outer margins. The oldest of them is, I am told, Benton Place, on the South Side, but the more attractive ones are to the westward, near Forest Park. Of these the first was Vandeventer Place, which still contains some of the most pleasant and substantial residences of the city, and it may be added that while some of the newer "places" have more recent and elaborate houses than those on Vandeventer Place, the general average of recent domestic architecture in St. Louis is behind that of many other cities. Portland Place seemed, upon the whole, to have the best group of modern houses. Westmoreland and Kingsbury Places also have agreeable homes. But Washington Terrace is not so fortunate; its houses, though they plainly indicate liberal expenditure of money, are often of that "catch-as-catch-can" kind of architecture which one meets with but too frequently in the middle west. If St. Louis is western in one thing more than another it is the architecture of her houses. Not that they lack solidity but that on the average they are not to be compared, architecturally, with houses of corresponding modernness in such cities as Chicago or Detroit. The more I see of other cities the more, indeed, I appreciate the new domestic architecture of Detroit. And I cannot help feeling that it is curious that St. Louis should be behind Detroit in this particular when she is, as a city, so far superior in her evident understanding and love of art.
Nevertheless, St. Louis has one architect whom she cannot honor too highly—Mr. William B. Ittner, who, as a designer of schools, stands unsurpassed.
If ever I have seen a building perfect for its purpose, that building is the Frank Louis Soldan High School, designed by this man. It is the last word in schools; a building for the city of St. Louis to be proud of, and for the whole country to rejoice in. It has everything a school can have, including that quality rarest of all in schools—sheer beauty. It is worth a whole chapter in itself, from its great auditorium, which is like a very simple opera house, seating two thousand persons, to its tiled lunch rooms with their "cafeteria" service. An architect could build one school like that, it seems to me, and then lie down and die content, feeling that his work was done. But Mr. Ittner apparently is not satisfied so easily as I should be, for he goes gaily on building other schools. If there isn't one to be built in St. Louis at the moment (and the city has an extraordinary number of fine school buildings), he goes off to some other city and puts a school up there. And for every one he builds he ought to have a crown of gold.
Mr. John Rush Powell, the principal of the high school, was so good as to take my companion and me
