Part 18

Nor was that impression lessened when a little later we drove out in the softness of the summer night to see the residence streets of the city--quiet, shady streets that seem to have been stolen from older eastern towns; drove into the parks, caught here and there the strains of bands, saw the canoes darting here and there and everywhere upon the surface of the park lakes. In other cities they have to build waterways within their parks and boast to you of the way in which they have done it. In Minneapolis they can have no such boast. For they have builded their parks around their lakes, and a man can have a sheet of water instead of greensward at the door of his home if he so choose. Where a modern canoe shoots across the waters of Lakes Calhoun or Harriet, the Indian once shot his birch-bark creation. There are some two hundred lakes in Hennepin county. But the lake of all lakes--the joy of the residents of the Twin Cities for a day's outing, Minnetonka--was the favored gathering spot for the council fires of the Indian tribes for many miles around. Do not forget that the Falls of St. Anthony were the making of Minneapolis--and you can go by trolley within the half-hour from the center of the city to the gentler Falls of Minnehaha and there recount once again the immortal romance of Hiawatha.

Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. Anthony--despite the fact that they were the very cause of her existence. They are hemmed in by great flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of industry with a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a day, and even if you steal your way to them across one of the roadway bridges over the turbulent Mississippi you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the great Falls of St. Anthony are the roar of the flouring-mills, their energy, the bread-stuff of the nation.

Minneapolis does not affect to forget entirely her mother river. For a long time it irritated her that St. Paul should be regarded as the head of navigation upon the Mississippi, and within the past twenty years she has put the Federal government to much trouble and incidentally the expenditure of something over a million dollars, to make herself a maritime city. A ship-channel has been dredged, locks put in, draws cut in the railroad bridges but all apparently without a very definite purpose in mind--save possible holding her own in the expenditure of the annual rivers and harbors appropriation. For one can hardly imagine water commerce coming in great volume to the docks of Minneapolis, the one exclusive glory of St. Paul--passed long ago by her greatest rival in the commercial race of the Northwest--stolen from the older town. But one could hardly have driven out from the brisk little city of St. Paul forty years ago to the straggling mill village at the Falls of St. Anthony and imagined that in the second decade of the twentieth century it would have become a city of more than three hundred thousand souls. The men who are today active in the affairs of the city have seen her grow from a straggling town into a city of almost first rank.

Here was one of them who sat the other day in the well-ordered elegance of the Minneapolis Club--a structure instantly comparable with the finest club-houses of New York or Boston or Philadelphia--who admitted that he had seen the town grow from eight thousand to over three hundred thousand population, the receipts of his own fine business increase from eighty-eight to twenty-two thousand dollars a day. But he was a modest man, far more modest than many of these western captains of industry, and he quickly turned the talk from himself and to the commercial importance of the town with which he was pressing forward. Still he delighted in statistics and the fact that Minneapolis "was doing a wholesale business of $300,000,000 a year" seemed to give him an immense and personal pride.

But do not believe that Minneapolis is all commercial--and nothing else. A quick ride through those shaded streets and lake-filled parks will convince you that she is a home-city; a cursory glance of the University of Minnesota, so cleverly located that she may share it with her rival twin, together with an inspection of her schools, large and small, would make you believe that she is a city that prides herself upon being well educated. The dominant strain of Norse blood that the Swedish immigrants have been bringing her for more than half a century is a strain that calls for education--and makes the call in no uncertain fashion. And when you come to delve into the details of her living you will make sure that she is a well-governed city. She has not gone deeply into what she calls "the fads of municipal government" but she is a town which offers security and comfort, as well as pretty broad measure of opportunity, to her residents. And in no better way can you gauge the sensible way in which she takes care of her residents than in the one item of the street railroad system. It has never been necessary for either St. Paul or Minneapolis to assume control, actual or subtle, over the street railroad property which they share. And yet each has a street railroad service far superior to that of most American towns--with the possible exception of Washington. The traction company seems to have assimilated much of the breadth of spirit that dominates the Twin Cities of the Northwest.

Nor can you assume that Minneapolis is content to be merely commercially alive, well educated or efficiently governed. Down on one of the quiet business streets of the city is a printing-shop, so unique and so very distinctive that it deserves a paragraph here and now. In that printing shop is published a trade paper of the milling industry which has to make no apologies for its existence, and a weekly newspaper called the _Bellman_. Some one is yet to write an appreciation of the new weekly press of America, the weekly press outside of New York, if you please, such publications as the _Argonaut_ of San Francisco; the _Mirror_ of St. Louis, the _Dial_ of Chicago and the _Minneapolis Bellman_. The part that these papers are playing in the making of a broad and cultured America will perhaps never be known; but that it is a large part no one who reads them faithfully will ever doubt. The _Bellman_ holds its own among this distinguished coterie. Its house is a fit temple for its soul, and you may gain a little insight into that soul when you are bidden to join its staff at one of its Thursday luncheons at the dining-board of the printing-house--a fashion quickly and easily brought from _London Punch_ halfway across the continent and into Minneapolis.

No American of taste or appreciation would ever go to Minneapolis and miss one wonderful shop there--no huge box-like structure rearing itself from sidewalk edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a shadowy structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but unmistakable hints of the real treasures that it holds. For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a revelation to folk from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior of the land is an intellectual desolation.

It may have been one of these who dined a little time ago at a house in one of these shaded streets of Minneapolis. After dinner the talk drifted without apparent reason to painting, and the man from the seaboard found his host in sharp touch with many of the new pictures. Definitely the talk turned to Walter Graves, London's newest sensation among the portrait painters, and the possibilities of his succeeding Whistler.

The Minneapolis man beckoned the guest into the hall, and pointed silently to a picture hung there. It was a splendid portrait of Whistler,[F] painted by Walter Graves.

"I never expected to find a picture like that--out here," frankly stammered the man from the seaboard.

"You will find many things here that you do not expect," was all that the man from Minneapolis said.

[F] Since writing the above we have been led to believe, by a gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by Graves is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by the dozen at a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit as an art critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts are here. You may choose for yourself. E. H.

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If a town that is scarce forty years old can accomplish these things, how long will it be before the older cities of the land will have to look sharply as to their laurels? The new cities of America are to be a force in her intellectual progress not to be under-estimated or despised.

14

THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTHWEST

There are three great cities, or rather three groups of great cities, along the course of the Mississippi. To the north are St. Paul and Minneapolis, while far to the south is New Orleans, to which we will come in the due order of things. Between these St. Louis stands, close to the business center of the land. For nearly twenty miles she sprawls herself along the west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout her central portion she extends for a dozen miles straight back from her once busy levee. She is a great city, a very great city, in wealth, in industry, in resource. And yet she is a rather unimpressive city to the eye, at first sight and at last.

It takes even a seasoned traveler some time to get used to that. If he dreams of St. Louis as a French city and preserving something of the French atmosphere, as do New Orleans and Quebec, he is doomed to utter disappointment. Save for a few tatterdemalion cottages down in Carondolet, at the south tip of the town, there is no trace of the builders of the city to which they gave the name of one of their kings. And if he has heard of the great German population and dreams of great summer-gardens, of winter-gardens, too, with huge bands and huge steins, he is doomed to no less disappointment. For that sort of thing you go to Milwaukee. St. Louis has as many Germans as that brisk Wisconsin city, and the largest brewery in the world, but she has never specialized in beer-gardens. She is old and yet you could hardly call her quaint. There are rows of small houses in her older streets, their green blinds tightly closed as if seemingly to escape the almost endless bath of soot and cinders that falls upon them, and the flat-bottomed steamboats still are fastened at the wharf-boats along the levee. But these make a pitiful showing nowadays when your mind compares them with the tales of ante-bellum days when there were so many of them that they could only put the noses of their bows against the levees. But tradition still rules the hearts of the rivermen, and the Mississippi steamboat has lost none of those fantastics of naval architecture that has endeared it to every writer from Mark Twain down to the present day.

The streets aroundabout the levee are mean and dirty, and nowadays as silent as the Sabbath. Those convivial resorts, the Widow's Vow and the Boatman's Thirst have long since ceased to exist. As this is being written the Southern Hotel has closed its doors. Cobwebs are growing through its wonderful office, and the glorious marble stair up which a regiment might have marched is silent, save for the occasional halting steps of a watchman. The old Planters'--than which there was no more famous hostelry in the Mississippi valley, unless we choose to except the St. Charles down at New Orleans--is long since gone, torn away twenty years ago to make room for a new Planters', which has already begun to get grimy and aged. The Lindell went its way a dozen years ago. The St. Louis of the riverman is dead. They are tearing away the old warehouses from the levees, and no one looks at the Mississippi any more save when it gets upon one of its annual rampages and makes itself a yellow sea.

But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself is dead. There are other hotels, and far finer than those of the war-times and the river-trade. And you have only to walk a few squares back from the levee to find industry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each representing commerce. St. Louis is still the very center of the world to the great Southwest and to her it pays its tribute, in demands for merchandise of every sort. That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores and wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable sort, and builds them for eight or ten or twelve stories in height, closely huddled together, even through unimportant side streets. That is her reason for existence today--when the river-trade, her first reason for growth and expansion, is dead. But the railroad is a living, vital force, when the rivers are frozen and dead, and railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible direction. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there at the city from whence they radiate Commerce sits enthroned.

For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and today, as essentially a commercial city. She is not a cultured city, although she has an excellent press, including a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary distinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all her many miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads or cults of any sort; but she measures the percentage which a business dollar will earn with a delightful accuracy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is to the casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we think that her lack of a dignified main street in her business section is responsible for much of this impression. In other years Broadway--Fifth street upon her city plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running parallel to the river--ranked almost as a main street and had some dignity, if little beauty. But today St. Louis, like so many other of our American towns, is restless and she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted and herself without a single great business thoroughfare--such as Market street, San Francisco or State street, Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as much alike as peas in a pod.

And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St. Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot--and who shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days, is ever anything less than capable--could send the boat spinning like a top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty water.

If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves, and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its ancient stones, you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge.

St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge these days. Yet it was only a few years ago that it was bragging about that wonderful conception of the engineer--who had finally spanned the lordly Mississippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have come, two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north and a public bridge to the south--that is, it will be a public bridge if the voters of St. Louis ever cease quarreling about it. At the present time it is hardly a bridge, only a great span over the water and for long months absolutely unprovided with approaches because the taxpayers of St. Louis refuse to vote the funds for its completion. So it is that the Eads bridge is today but a single agency out of three or four for the spanning of the river; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the railroad travelers who come across through its lower deck only remember that from it there leads under the heart of the city of St. Louis one of the smokiest railroad tunnels in existence--and that is saying much.

But the fact remains that it was the first structure to span the river, and to end the importunities of the unspeakable ferry. And today it is, with all of its grime, the one impressive feature of downtown St. Louis. It is the only wagonway that leads from the sovereign state of Illinois into the sovereign city of St. Louis. Across its upper deck passes at all hours of the day and far into the night a silent parade of trolley cars, mule teams, automobiles, farm trucks, folk of every sort and description, on foot. It is as interesting as London bridge and a far finer piece of architecture. But the modern St. Louis has all but forgotten it, save when it chooses to take a motor run across the Illinois prairies.

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The casual traveler finally turns his back upon the river and its oldest bridge, although not without some regret if any real sentiment dwells within him. He threads his way through the narrow streets of downtown St. Louis and finally he enters the oldest residential part, the streets still narrow but the houses of rather a fine sort, many of them transformed into small shops or given these days to lodgers. They are of a type somewhat peculiar to the town. They were built high and rather narrow and as a rule set upon a terrace and detached. Builded of brick, the fancy of those old-time architects seemed to turn almost invariably to a façade of marble, an unblushing and unashamed veneer to the street, with the side walls humble and honest in dark red brick. Steps and lintels were of marble or what must have been marble in the beginning. A Philadelphia housewife would quail beneath the steady bath of smoke and cinders that falls upon St. Louis.

There are many thousands of these red-brick and white-marble houses, finally important cross streets, such as Jefferson and Grand, and then you come into the newer St. Louis--a residential district of which any city might well be proud. In the newer St. Louis the houses are more modern and more attractive perhaps, due partly to the fact that they are farther away from the river and the great factories and railroad yards that line it. You can trace the varying fads in American house architecture in layers as you go back street by street in the new St. Louis--Norman, Italian Renaissance, American Colonial, Elizabethan--all like the slices in a fat layer-cake. Some of the more pretentious of these houses are grouped in great parks or reservations which give to the public streets by entrance gates and are known as Westminster place, or Vandeventer place, or the like. They form a most charming feature of the planning of St. Louis, and one almost as distinctive as the tidy alleys which act as serviceways to all the houses. The houses themselves are almost invariably set in lawns, although there are many fine apartments and apartment hotels. The fearful monotony of the side street of New York or Philadelphia does not exist within the town.

At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. Louis stands the chief park of the town, not very distinctive and famed chiefly as the site of the biggest World's Fair that was ever held, "considerably larger than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell you. Our individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical Gardens just adjoining it. Tower Grove is in no very attractive section of St. Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is rather lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old Southern Hotel, which was burned many years ago and was a fearful tragedy, being set here and there. But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard by is the Botanical Gardens that Henry Shaw gave to the city in which he was for so many years a dominating figure. And for even a casual traveler to go to St. Louis and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost inconceivable.

In the first place, it is an excellent collection of plants and of trees and of exceeding interest to those folk who let their tastes carry them that way. And in the second place, Henry Shaw was so typical of the old St. Louis that you must stop for a moment and remember him. You must think of the steady purpose of the man visiting all the great gardens of Europe and then seeking to create one that should outrank all of them, in the mud-bog of St. Louis. For the St. Louis of war-times, the St. Louis to which Shaw gave his benefaction was little more than a bog. And Americans of those days laughed at parks. True there was Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, but the Fairmount Park of those days was a fantastic idea and hardly to be compared with the Fairmount Park of today. Henry Shaw went much farther than the banks of the Schuylkill, although he must have known and appreciated John Bartram's historic gardens there.

Shaw was only forty years of age when he retired from business. He had saved through his keen business acumen and a decent sense of thrift, a quarter of a million dollars--a tremendous fortune for those days. He was quite frank in saying that he thought that $250,000 was all that a man could honestly earn or honestly possess, and he retired to enjoy his fortune as best it might please him to do. He traveled far and wide through Europe, and upon one of the earliest of those trips he visited the World's Fair of 1851, at the Crystal Palace, London; one of the very first of these international exhibitions. He was impressed not so much by the exhibits as by the fine park in which the Crystal Palace stood. A little later he was a guest at Chatsworth House, that splendid English home given by William the Conqueror to his natural son, William Peveril, and he became a frequent visitor at Kew Gardens. It was at that time he decided to make a botanical garden out of the place which he had just purchased outside of St. Louis.

Henry Shaw must have remembered his boyhood days in St. Louis and the wonderful garden of Madame Rosalie Saugrain. In those earlier days St. Louis was small enough in population but large enough in the material for social enjoyment. The French element was still dominant, although Madame Saugrain was comparatively a newcomer, an accomplished lady who had brought the manners and tastes of Paris into the wilds of western America. Her garden, which was then in open country beyond the struggling town, was close to what is today Seventh street, St. Louis. Great skyscrapers and solid warehouses have sprung up where formerly Madame's roses and hollyhocks bloomed, and one would have to go weary blocks to find a spear of grass, unless within some public park.