Philadelphia, formerly the capital of the United States, is a city of eight or nine hundred thousand inhabitants, and is built like New York, in parallelograms. Its Town Hall is, next to the Capitol at Washington, the finest edifice in America. I do not know anything to compare to its splendid park, unless it be the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The alleys of this park, if put together, would cover about sixty miles in length—so said a Philadelphian who added: "therefore it is the biggest park in the world." Seen after New York or the busy western cities, Philadelphia strikes one as monotonous. It is full of all kinds of manufactories, however, this Quaker city of quiet streets and sober people.
On the shores of Lake Michigan there stood a rather insignificant town, built of wood, and peopled by a few thousand inhabitants. This town was called Chicago.
On the evening of the 8th of October, 1871, a cow, that an old woman was milking in a barn, kicked over a lamp and set fire to the structure. The flames spread, and on the morrow of that terrible night the whole city was level with the ground. The Chicago people of to-day show, as a curiosity to the visitor, the only house which escaped the flames.
At the present time, this city, like the phœnix of which she is the living and gigantic emblem, stands, rebuilt in hewn stone, and holding 800,000 inhabitants.
Such is America.
In less than twenty years, Omaha, Kansas, Denver, Minneapolis, will be so many Chicagos. Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville will rival her in five.
Chicago is, in my eyes, the very type of the American city—the most striking example of what Jonathan calls go-a-headism.
The streets are twice as wide as the Parisian boulevards, the houses of business are eight, ten, twelve stories high. Michigan Avenue is seven miles long: the numbers of the houses run up to three thousand and something. The city has parks, lovely drives by the Lake Shore; statues, including a splendid one of Abraham Lincoln; public buildings imposing in their massiveness, fine theatres and churches; luxurious clubs, hotels inside which four good sized Parisian ones could dance a quadrille, etc., etc.
Michigan Avenue and Prairie Avenue are extremely handsome. Picture to yourself the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne prolonged for seven miles in a straight line, and imagine the effect, the beautiful vista, when this is lit up at night, or when the trees, with which both these grand roads are planted, are in all their fresh spring beauty.