Driving along the
Lake Shore to Lincoln Park in the flush of sunset, you wonder that the
dwellers in this street of palaces should trouble their heads about
Naples or Venice, when they have before their very windows the
innumerable laughter, the ever-shifting opalescence, of their
fascinating inland sea. Plunging in the electric cars through the river
subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of
Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London,
are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism.
Chicago, more than any other city of my acquaintance, suggests that
antique conception of the underworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus
not only on the same plane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each
other.
As the elephant (or rather the megatherium) to the giraffe, so is the
colossal business block of Chicago to the sky-scraper of New York. There
is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth buildings of Chicago which is
lacking in most of those which form the jagged sky-line of Manhattan
Island. For one reason or another--no doubt some difference in the
system of land tenure is at the root of the matter--the Chicago
architect has usually a larger plot of ground to operate on than his New
York colleague, and can consequently give his building breadth and depth
as well as height.
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