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stick thing with bells he carries," June was saying.

"The peacock too?" Peter asked. "Yes, he'll be in the apple-tree." "Hurray-hurray, hurray-hur

ray!" Now Peter had gone to the other extreme and had hold of the bars of the foot of his crib and was bouncing up and down with his cheeks pink as apples and his fluffy little hair all on end.

"Have you the key to the linencloset, Mrs. Anthony?" Martha was at the door. "I have to be getting clean sheets for Peter." "No, I haven't it. June, did you do anything with it?"

"Yes, mother—I—I threw it down the bath-room."

key's thrown

"Yes-and the key's away and Jingle's well." "Jingle's well-Jingle's wellJingle's well-"

Gracious, how Petey and June were shouting-and it would be impossible to open the linen-closet without a locksmith. How utterly maddening! "You'll have to get sheets from the laundry, Martha. There are probably some that were ironed to-day. Children, there's father coming up the road, and I'm not dressed at all." Heavens, what a racket they were making! "It's not 'Jingle's well,'" she called above the uproar. How children did twist things! "It's 'Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the day. Oh, what

That was the last straw. "For fun it is to ride in a one-horse open heaven's sake, why?"

sleigh-" There, that tune had got

"You said I could lock up the the ridiculous "put down six and pirate."

"Oh, Juney!" How enormous Peter's eyes could get-and that could get and that enchanting deep blue. "Is the pirate locked up in the linen-closet?"

carry two" out of her head at last. And the children were happy as little larks. It all came from treating them with firmness and understanding.

CAMELS ON LEXINGTON

WINIFRED WELLES

Once, even on Lexington Avenue,

I seemed to hear the still dusk speaking-
It was a moment when all iron creaking,
All thrumming steel, all men and women too
Had passed. Amazingly on the empty street
There came two camels, stepping softly,
Stepping over the stone as deftly

As if it were sand that whispered under their feet.
Gaunt beasts with their bird-like necks and tall

tufted backs,

Out of a land where nightfall is full of lovely
Wavering horizontals; oh, how gravely
They passed these vertical buildings between the
straight steel tracks!

T

CHICAGO

Her Plans and Her Growing-Pains

HENRY JUSTIN SMITH

HE PICTURE of a city that a man carries in his mind-if he has been there only once-is a caricature. It is even more grotesque if he has never been there and depends upon what he reads and hears. No doubt there are plenty of people who think of New York as a phantasm in electricity and a continuous "style show"; of Philadelphia as a pattern of prim brick houses without front yards; of Boston as a labyrinth of alleys and some sort of bay; of Detroit as a traffic jam; of New Orleans as a collection of fine old houses with "galleries." The same sort of people, having passed through Chicago once, may remember it as a vale of switch-yards, a group of oil-tanks, and a canopy of smoke. Having read about it, in the customary terms, they are probably quite ignorant about its extent, its contrasts, its ambitions. They hear much about its crimes. They are frightened at the seething of its crater, and know nothing about its vineyards. To put it another way, there is a good deal to be told about the normal and characteristic development of Chicago. The city is going somewhere. Where, then?

21

A paragraph or two of history, if you don't object.

Ten years from now, Chicago will be a hundred years old, as a city. Before it was so chartered it passed through phases which changed it from a trading-station to a civilized community. In the middle of the nineteenth century it drew to itself great numbers of able and constructive people, largely from New England; between 1840 and 1871 its population grew from 4000 to about 300,000. In the latter year its one calamity of the first degree, the "great fire," wiped out a large part of the primitive city and at the same time cleared the way for the metropolitan adventure of the present. Twenty years later came the World's Columbian Exposition and another renaissance; not merely the "fair," with its perishable monuments, but a foreshadowing of the city which would some day take form; a vision, credited chiefly to Daniel H. Burnham, which was bound to emerge and find embodiment before the twentieth century was far advanced.

It is this embodiment which is now in process. This is the actual direction which the city's energy is taking.

Chicago is building.

It is a determined, lavish, and absorbing movement which, if it has not actually side-tracked other move

ments in this city, is certainly finding much greater emphasis than are they. This is the time predestined for planting deep in the earth, and outlining against the sky, the physical structure of the kind of metropolis that we want. Chicago has discarded all its small-city conservatism. It knows now that it will have many times the area the previous generation thought about, and that its population will be millions greater. Having once awakened to its future, having, as it were, become aware how large a family it is to have, the city is building its house accordingly. It is bound to have the right kind of foundation and walls and floor-space and yard. It is determined to have embellishments also; monuments, if you like. The city is not only planning this, but is doing it.

No one who will look about him in the ninetieth year of Chicago's history as a city can fail to see what is happening. In one spot he will see a river-bank, only a few years ago bordered for the most part by warehouses, old wharves, and the rear of tumble-down structures, adorned with a wide two-level boulevard. Elsewhere he will discover a block of dubious landmarks wiped out to make room for another tremendous hotel. He will observe new and lofty spires on all sides; and how they do gleam at night! He can be shown where a monster railway station has been completed, and where another will soon be begun. He may be most astonished, and perhaps mystified, by the desperate activity along the lake shore, out on the "made land" where until recently there was nothing except waterbut where now there is to be an

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More specifically, but not at too great length, one may define some of the symptoms of the renaissance. They include, besides development of the lake front, a great number of things such as street, park, and boulevard improvements; new bridges; straightening of an eccentric embarrassing river branch; expansion of transportation service; a track elevation program; new university buildings, especially for medical science; and a tremendous array of industrial and commercial structures, hotels, theaters, and so on. The latest published estimates of costs are hardly adequate, but besides the millions already spent there are about $1,500,000,000 going into improvements described as "under construction," and another billion group represents plans for the near future. At the center of this effort operates the spirit of the "Chicago Plan," which not only contributes certain definite features of progress, but serves as a framework into which individual ambitions may fit, and maintains an ideal. This Plan is remembered as an outgrowth of the World's Fair and of the "Burnham dream." People do not always realize that it really had little chance until 1909, when the Commercial

Club indorsed it, published it, and presented it to the city, accompanying the gift not only with hopes but with funds. Not thirty years, then, but only eighteen have elapsed since the Plan went on paper in due form; yet the transformation it has wrought seems like the work of a whole generation.

Over that slim river which we once used to cross on a rickety bridge, to find ourselves twisting among narrow and darksome streets, we may now ride on a bascule structure ninety feet wide and two hundred feet long. We go up a gentle slope, past glittering shops and offices, and upon reaching the river find a blaze of light playing upon the faces of a group of titanic buildings, which are but the first comers in a line that is to extend from the river's fork to its mouth. If we pause at the brink and look westward, we discover the Wacker Drive about where South Water Street, that beloved but ugly home of the produce merchant, used to run its length. We like to say that this locality will outrival the Thames Embankment. If we continue over the river, we enter a district where virtually a new city has gone up within a few years; an "exterior galaxy" of a city whose character is not fully expressed when we cite the $100,000,000 increase in property values which is said to have come about.

Driving north, we see Lincoln Park being extended over vast acres of "made land," and the outline of new playgrounds, drives, and gardens being laid down. If we go south, we can discern amid a muddle of earth and machinery the anatomy of that archipelago reaching from the harbor

to Jackson Park, an island paradise "to be spanned by numerous stately bridges," says the prophet. Where the Field Museum and the stadium of Soldier Field already stand, a boulevard is to be brought east to the lake, this boulevard having been recently smashed through miles of forlorn and neglected districts to the westward, cutting a huge path from the very prairies to the lake. Surveying the situation on the sunset side of the river-that West Side which for years seemed hopelessly neglected, which mocked at the brave gestures on the lake front— we note the beginning of a system of through streets, running in rectangles and diagonals, which are counted on to reclaim the worst of the "bad lands." Those tenements, those awful rows of toppling cottages, erected with the haste and greed that followed the fire of 1871, are to go.

And "we don't mean maybe." This is only a five-minute glimpse of the things actual and to come. To it may be added just a "flash" of what is encircling this new Chicago; namely, a system of natural parks in the low-lying but charming fringes of forest which border the geologic bowl of the city. This is our "forest preserve" area, comprising now some 30,000 acres, and to be enlarged, they say, by 10,000. Cook County has provided camp-grounds for the multitude-and Henry Ford has done the rest.

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more than ninety miles of building frontage was erected during 1924, need not long detain our attention. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that during three years, 1921 to 1924, the number of "single-family dwellings" increased from 4608 to 8579. Although there has also been an increase in the construction of apartment buildings, the establishment of separate homes—which any sociologist will admit implies ambition to live most normally-has kept up a rate certainly as high as any large American city can show. Furthermore the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that residential building in Chicago exceeds that of the rest of the country, such construction, for the United States, being (in 1924) at the rate of 112 per 10,000 population, while in Chicago the rate was 122. The "boom" continued during 1925. And for the first six months of 1926 permits were issued for more than 5000 residential buildings.

Thus it is clear that the ninety miles of building frontage are not going preponderantly into sky-scrapers, hotels, or theaters. Mr. Chicago -variously depicted as a murderer, a bootlegger, or a "hotel lizard"-is building places to live in.

And Mr. Chicago is moving into the suburbs. Those regions, many of them charming, which encircle the great mass of masonry, the noisy thoroughfares, of the city proper, are growing three times as fast as "actual Chicago." I hate to be statistical, but there is no better way to tell the story than to cite, from the Association of Commerce survey again, the figures which show that the "metropolitan area" in

creased its population 76.3 per cent during the last census period, as against 23.6 per cent within the city limits. During the same time the "fringe" of New York became only 27.2 per cent greater in population, and that of Philadelphia only 34.3 per cent greater. Put these figures into pictures, and you can show on your cinematograph a relatively large and rapid exodus of Chicagoans from urban conditions into places where good Illinois soil. becomes the plaything of the householder, where the vine and the figtree shall flourish, where children remain human, and where ordinarily

explosions of our well known automatic pistols are unknown.

Within the city limits, too, there is a situation which is remarkably interesting, and which harmonizes ill with the theory of Chicago as the worst city on earth. This is the "mushroom growth" of several score communities, as distinct from each other, as well populated, as many of the small towns that dot the map of Illinois. I don't know what a sociologist would call them, but I call them "little Chicagos." They retain many of the characteristics of suburbs, but they are, physically speaking, miniature cities. Such a place begins with-well, one can hardly trace the actual beginning. But soon there sprouts a number of stores, then a movie theater, then a hotel or two, concurrently a group of apartments-and sometimes a library. Ordinarily there remain many of the features of an older time, including shade-trees, or big lots surrounding old houses too good to pull down; and there may hang on, to modify the incoming "bright

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