Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes

by Peter Furtado

  1866 JOHN WALTER

  British newspaperman and Liberal MP John Walter (1818–1894) was managing editor of The Times. He travelled to the United States in 1866, and published his letters privately on his return.

  We left Detroit at 10 the next morning, and arrived here at 9 p.m.… Next morning we went up to the top of the courthouse, to get a bird’s-eye view of the town, which covers a vast area, bounded by the lake on one side, and by the prairie on the other. The streets, as in all other American towns, are laid out at right angles. Some of them are extremely handsome. Michigan Avenue, which runs along the shore of the lake, and Wabash Avenue, which runs parallel to it, are particularly striking. The latter is paved with wood and contains the principal churches. In a few years, when the wooden houses are replaced by stone ones, it will be one of the finest streets in the States.

  No town in America appears to have gone ahead like this. Forty years ago it was a poor village, inhabited chiefly by Indians, and the whole place might have been bought for a few thousand dollars; now it contains 200,000 inhabitants, and is one of the richest and most flourishing towns in the Union. Among other curious feats of engineering, the art of houselifting has been practised here to an extraordinary extent. After the town had been regularly laid out, and most of the houses built, it was discovered that the streets were on too low a level; so they had to be raised several feet, and, as a necessary consequence, the houses were raised too. The Tremont House, where we are staying, and which makes up 150 beds, was raised bodily four or five feet, without sustaining any damage. I am told that a printing office was treated in a similar manner, without having to suspend its business for a single day.

  The chief trade of Chicago is in corn and cattle; and in every direction along the quays you see huge, unsightly structures, called elevators, in which the grain which arrives from the country is received and transferred to the ships. They are mere loading machines – that is all – and are only used to economize time and labour. The grain is brought in on one side in the railway trucks, from which it is shovelled out into pits under the floor of the building, and thence is lifted by an endless web into a trough, down which it pours, in a continual stream, into the hold of the ship, which lies along the other side of the quay.…

  The next morning, Mr Bross, the Deputy Governor of the State, called upon us, and took us to see the principal establishments in the town. We first visited the Exchange Rooms, where all the corn jobbers carry on their operations. This is a grand field for gambling, and fortunes are made and lost here in no time. We next visited the Illinois Central Railway Depot, where we were shown specimens of the various productions of the State and samples of its soil, taken from different places. The company has still several hundred thousand acres of its original grant of land to dispose of; and a purchaser has no difficulty here in suiting himself, both as to quantity and quality. Some of the farms are on an enormous scale. Mr Sullivant, of Douglas County, farms 40,000 acres, and has farmed half as many more.… We next visited several private establishments, which almost rival those of New York in size and splendour. One of the most remarkable is that of Mr Bowen, a dry goods merchant, who told me that he began business twelve years ago without a dollar, and is now turning over $8,000,000 a year. He owns a good deal of real property in the town, and lives in one of the best houses in Michigan Avenue. Mr Griggs, the principal publisher and bookseller in this place, also possesses a first-rate establishment. One of the wealthiest inhabitants of the place is a man who began business as a waggon builder twenty-five years ago, when the town was in its infancy, and sold last year 5,000 waggons, and could have sold as many more if he could have supplied the demand. Such are the rewards of industry and perseverance in this extraordinary place.…

  On Sunday we attended morning service at Trinity Church – a large, handsome building, capable of accommodating 1,800 people. Dr Cummins, the bishop elect of Kentucky, preached his farewell sermon – a very effective one. At the conclusion he made a special appeal for a supply of cast-off clothing, to enable the poorer children of his flock to go to school. So that, in spite of social equality, &c., there are ragged children, it seems, even in Chicago.

  1884–85 MRS HOWARD VINCENT

  While still a hub for the meat industry, in the 1880s the city was already a centre for political conventions, as observed by Mrs Howard (Ethel) Vincent (1861–1952), wife of a British Conservative MP, who was struck by the different approaches to politics across the Atlantic. Her book Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water (1886) recounts a journey she undertook in the USA, New Zealand and East Asia in 1884–85.

  After the great fire of October, 1871, Chicago rose like a phoenix from its ashes. A curious calculation resulted in the discovery that in the period of six months one building, from four to six storeys high, was completed each hour in a day of eight working hours. It certainly presents an unprecedentedly rapid growth, and the population entirely keeps pace with it.

  Chicago is just settling down after the intense excitement of the Convention, held here only the other day, when Blaine was chosen as the Republican candidate, and Cleveland by the Democrats. Every four years the whole country is convulsed with these Presidential elections, a tenure of office far too short to allow of any settled policy to attain to maturity. The country is blazoned with portraits of the rival candidates; debased often to the use of advertisements, as when Mr Blaine (who is dyspeptic) is seen standing by a bottle as big as himself of ‘Tippecande’. The newspapers resound throughout the country with their mutual vituperations. ‘Blaine is corrupt!’ cry the Democrats; ‘Cleveland is immoral!’ retort the Republicans.

  Party warfare descends even to the shape of the hat. In New York we had several times noticed the predominating number of tall white hats. It was explained they were Blaine’s followers; whereas Cleveland’s wore a wider brim in a brown felt. In America, where every adult male, be he householder or not, has a vote, politics have a wider range, and are discussed eagerly among all classes. We got at last to have quite a ‘national’ interest, and should like to have been in America during the final struggle coming in November.…

  It was five miles to the stockyards, which really constitute the great sight of Chicago. The cable cars, running so swiftly and silently as if by magic, by means of invisible underground machinery, down State Street, conveyed us thither and back for the modest sum of 5d. The yards, with their well-filled pens on either side, presented a wild appearance. Droves of cattle were being driven by men on horseback, galloping and cracking their long whips, with the curious wooden stirrups and peaked saddle of old Spanish Mexican make.

  We threaded our way through them to Armour & Co.’s, one of the largest establishments, where daily many thousands of pigs, sheep and oxen are purchased, killed, cut up, cooked, salted and packed in the shortest possible space of time. We were allowed to wander about the reeking, blood-stained floors, and thoroughly sickened, and fearful that every turn would reveal more bloody horrors, I stopped opposite a gory pile of horns being carted away, while C. went to see the oxen killed. He described how they are driven in single file through a narrow passage into separate pens, over the top of which runs a broad plank, on which the ‘gentleman who does the shooting’ stands with a small rifle. The poor beast looks up a second after his admission to the pen, and the rifle bullet fells him instantly stone dead. The further door is opened, and the carcase dragged away by cords to the cutting-up room. There could be no more merciful mode of killing without any unnecessary brutality.

  1889 RUDYARD KIPLING

  The brash commercialism of Chicago in the late 19th century struck many visitors from Britain; journalist and novelist Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) – who toured America in 1889 after living several years in India – was outspoken in his criticisms, though he later settled in New England.

  I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago.

  The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure resort as well as a ci
ty, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.

  This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the ‘boss’ town of America.

  I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was ‘the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty’s earth’. By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next country or state, he says, ‘God Almighty’s earth’. This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.

  Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable vistas banked with nine, ten and fifteen-storeyed houses, and crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a great horror.

  Except in London – and I have forgotten what London was like – I had never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no colour in the street and no beauty – only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.

  A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.

  He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations, and bade me watch the stream of traffic across the bridges.…

  Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks, gay with signs and studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door howling: ‘For the sake of money, employ or buy of me, and me only!’

  Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The other makes me ill.…

  Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all – a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design.

  To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction room he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond) and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the Judgment, and ran: ‘No! I tell you God doesn’t do business that way.’ He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it as daily life – his own and the life of his friends.

  1939 HENRY MILLER

  Interwar Chicago was infamous both for its gang warfare and for the poverty of its segregated districts and ghettos, despite major public works instituted under the New Deal and other schemes during the Depression. American novelist Henry Miller (1891–1980) described the wretchedness in his memoir (published 1945) of a long road-trip around the United States undertaken in 1939, after nine years living in Paris.

  Meanwhile I have good news for you – I’m going to take you to Chicago, to the Mecca Apartments on the South Side. It’s a Sunday morning and my cicerone has borrowed a car to take me around. We stop at a flea market on the way. My friend explains to me that he was raised here in the ghetto; he tries to find the spot where his home used to be. It’s a vacant lot now. There are acres and acres of vacant lots here on the South Side. It looks like Belgium did after the World War. Worse, if anything. Reminds me of a diseased jawbone, some of it smashed and pulverized, some of it charred and ulcerated. The flea market is more reminiscent of Cracow than of Clignancourt, but the effect is the same. We are at the back door of civilization, amid the dregs and debris of the disinherited. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Americans, are still poor enough to rummage through this offal in search of some sorely needed object. Nothing is too dilapidated or rust-bitten or disease-laden to discourage the hungry buyer. You would think the five-and-ten cent store could satisfy the humblest wants, but the five-and-ten cent store is really expensive in the long run, as one soon learns. The congestion is terrific – we have to elbow our way through the throng. It’s like the banks of the Ganges except that there is no odor of sanctity about. As we push our way through the crowd my feet are arrested by a strange sight. There in the middle of the street, dressed in full regalia, is an American Indian. He’s selling a snake oil. Instantly the thought of the other miserable derelicts stewing around in this filth and vermin is gone. A World I Never Made, wrote James Farrell. Well, there stands the real author of the book – an outcast, a freak, a hawker of snake oil. On that same spot the buffaloes once roamed; now it is covered with broken pots and pans, with worn-out watches, with dismantled chandeliers, with busted shoes which even an Igorote would spurn. Of course if you walk on a few blocks you can see the other side of the picture – the grand facade of Michigan Avenue where it seems as if the whole world were composed of millionaires. At night you can see the great monument to chewing gum lit up by floodlights and marvel that such a monstrosity of architecture should be singled out for special attention.…

  We dig further into the South Side, getting out now and then to stretch our legs. Interesting evolution going on here. Rows of old mansions flanked by vacant lots. A dingy hotel sticking up like a Mayan ruin in the midst of yellow fangs and chalk teeth. Once respectable dwelling places given up now to the dark-skinned people we ‘liberated’. No heat, no gas, no plumbing, no water, no nothing – sometimes not even a windowpane. Who owns these houses? Better not inquire too closely. What do they do with them when the darkies move out? Tear them down, of course. Federal housing projects. Model tenement houses…. I think of old Genoa, one of the last ports I stopped at on my way back to America. Very old, this section. Nothing much to brag about in the way of conveniences. But what a difference between the slums of Genoa and the slums of Chicago! Even the Armenian section of Athens is preferable to this. For twenty years the Armenian refugees of Athens have lived like goats in the little quarter which they made their own. There were no old mansions to take over – not even an abandoned factory. There was just a plot of land on which they erected their homes out of whatever
came to hand. Men like Henry Ford and Rockefeller contributed unwittingly to the creation of this paradise which was entirely built of remnants and discarded objects. I think of this Armenian quarter because as we were walking through the slums of Chicago my friend called my attention to a flowerpot on the windowsill of a wretched hovel. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘even the poorest among them have their flowers.’ But in Athens I saw dovecotes, solariums, verandahs floating without support, rabbits sunning themselves on the roofs, goats kneeling before ikons, turkeys tied to the door-knobs. Everybody had flowers – not just flowerpots. A door might be made of Ford fenders and look inviting. A chair might be made of gasoline tins and be pleasant to sit on. There were bookshops where you could read about Buffalo Bill or Jules Verne or Hermes Trismegistus. There was a spirit here which a thousand years of misery had not squelched. Chicago’s South Side, on the other hand, is like a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum. Nothing can flourish here but vice and disease. I wonder what the great Emancipator would say if he could see the glorious freedom in which the black man moves now. We made them free, yes – free as rats in a dark cellar.

  DAMASCUS

  Perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, occupied since about 9000 BC, Damascus has been a major cultural, religious and trading centre since ancient times. Part of the Hellenistic and then the Roman Empire (when it was the site of the crucial conversion of Paul to Christianity in the 30s AD), the city was fully Christianized in the 4th century; in AD 635 it was conquered by the Arabs, and the Great Mosque was built by Caliph al-Walid in the 8th century. From 1516 it was held by the Ottomans until 1918 when it became the capital of Syria. The city grew quickly in the 20th century, and survived the Syrian Civil War of the 2010s relatively unscathed.