Chicago has the most extensive system of parks and boulevards of any city in the United States. Lincoln Park, lying upon the lake to the northward, contains 310 acres, and served, during the great fire, as a place of refuge for thousands of people driven thither by the raging element. The Lake Shore Drive, the great north side boulevard, extends from Pine street to Lake View, and is one of the finest drives in the world. Humboldt Park, Central Park and Douglas Park extend along the western boundaries of the city, are large, contain lakes, ponds, walks, drives, fountains and statuary, and are connected with each other by wide and elaborately ornamented boulevards. The great South Parks are approached on the north by Drexel and Grant Boulevards. Drexel Boulevard is devoted exclusively to pleasure, all traffic over it being forbidden. The most southerly of the two south parks extends upwards of a mile and a half along the shore of the lake. Union Park is located in the very centre of the residence portion of the west side.
Whatever Chicago accomplishes is on so gigantic a scale that strangers almost hold their breath in astonishment. Among the titanic achievements of this youthful giant are the waterworks, which supply pure drinking water to its six hundred thousand population. The water supply is by means of a tunnel sent out under Lake Michigan for a distance of two miles, the water being forced by numerous engines into an immense standpipe, 154 feet high. The works are situated at the foot of Chicago avenue. In tunneling under the lake, excavations went on simultaneously at the land end and two miles out in the lake; and so accurate were the calculations that when the two tunnels met in the centre, they were found to be but seven and one-half inches out of the line, and there was a variation of but three inches in the horizontal measurements. This tunnel, which is made of iron, protected by heavy masonry, is large enough for a canoe to pass through it when it is but partially filled with water, it being nine feet in diameter. The exit at the lake end of the tunnel is protected by a breakwater, and securely anchored to its place by means of heavy stones. Storms never affect it, save sometimes to produce a light tremor; and even large fields of ice, which grate by it with a fearful, crunching noise, have thus far failed to shake its foundations.
Chicago ships a considerable portion of her grain in the shape of flour, there being extensive flouring mills in the city. The present annual export of flour is probably not less than 3,000,000 barrels. Chicagoans have also found it possible to pack fifteen or twenty bushels of corn in a single barrel. "The corn crop," remarks Mr. Ruggles, "is condensed and reduced in bulk by feeding it into an animal form, more portable. The hog eats the corn, and Europe eats the hog. Corn thus becomes incarnate, for what is a hog but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?" The business of pork-packing has attained enormous proportions in Chicago. It has entirely superseded Cincinnati, the former "Porkopolis," in this branch of trade. Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Milwaukee do not together furnish a total number of head slaughtered equal to that of Chicago.
The stock yards, just outside the city limits on the southwest, are the largest in the world. They cover hundreds of acres, and constitute what has been styled "The Great Bovine City of the World." This bovine city is regularly laid out in streets and alleys crossing each other at right angles. The principal street is called Broadway, and it is a mile long and seventy-five feet wide. On either side are the cattle pens, and it is divided by a light fence into three paths, so that herds of cattle can pass one another without wrangling, and leave an unobstructed road for the drovers. These yards are connected with all the railroads in the west centering in Chicago. The company have twenty-five miles of track. A cattle train stops along the street of pens; the side of each car is removed, and the living freight pass over a declining bridge into clean, planked inclosures, where food and water is quickly furnished them. A large and comfortable hotel furnishes accommodation for their owners; there is a Cattle Exchange, a spacious and elegant edifice; a bank solely for the cattle-men's use; and a telegraph office, which reports the price of beef, pork and mutton from all parts of the world. The present capacity of the yards is 25,000 head of cattle, 100,000 hogs, 22,000 sheep, and 1,200 horses. A town of five thousand inhabitants has grown up in the immediate vicinity of these stock yards.
In some of the yards not less than five hundred beeves are slaughtered daily. Much of this beef is sent in refrigerator cars to the Atlantic cities, while enormous quantities are cooked and packed in cans and sent all over the world.
Suburban towns have spread out from Chicago, in every direction, over the prairie. South Chicago, one of the principal of these, is twelve miles to the southward, at the mouth of the Calumet river, and has a large amount of capital invested in iron and steel works. The sloughy morasses which still exist between the parent city and its thrifty offshoots are fast being filled up, and bridged over with pavements, so that the mud, which a generation ago was the chief distinguishing feature of Chicago and its vicinity, but which is now confined to outlying sections, will soon be a thing of the past. Chicago is itself extending rapidly in all directions, and numberless suburban streets are lined with pretty cottages, whose rural surroundings have given to the city its appropriate name of "The Garden City."
Taking its past as a criterion, who shall dare to predict the future of Chicago? It has by no means come to a stand-still, but is to-day increasing its population, developing its resources, and extending its commercial enterprises to a degree that is scarcely credible, save as one is faced by actual facts and figures. These miles of streets, filled with the incessant roar of business; these lofty temples, magnificent warehouses and elegant residences; these public institutions of learning; this gigantic commerce, this high degree of civilization; all of which have been attained by older cities after a prolonged struggle with adversity, are here the creations and accumulations of less than two generations. Up the Chicago River, where considerably less than a century ago the Indian paddled his solitary canoe, and John Jacob Astor annually sent his single small schooner to bring provisions to the garrison and to take away his furs, there swarms a fleet of vessels of all descriptions, bringing goods from, and sending them to, every quarter of the world. Where, no later than 1834, a grand wolf hunt was held, and one bear and forty wolf scalps were the trophies of the day, the bears of the Stock Exchange alone rage and howl, and the only wolves are human ones. Chicago is a great and a magnificent city, embodying more perfectly than any other in the world the possibilities of accomplishment of the Anglo-Saxon race, given its best conditions of freedom, independence and intelligence.