The Ugly City
I
You are, perhaps, a traveler from the East. You find yourself, some gray afternoon, rounding that long blue tongue of lake that licks the sands of Indiana. Villages, farmhouses, ragged patches of woodland fly past the carwindows. Glimpses of the dunes, flashes of tossing water. Prairie.
Suddenly the country ends, and the gray meadows begin to be peopled by giants, silent but animate. They loom against the sky, swart and untidy. They push upward the snouts of chimneys. They wave black, misshapen arms; they put forth clumsy limbs, such as coal-chutes, levels of track, lifting-devices. Bursts of smoke, veils and cloaks of smoke, hover about these monsters. The soot is on their shoulders. They are whitened with dust; stained with acids. These giants have no time for toilet. It is the valley of factories.
The assemblage of them thickens as you go on. They stand in compact ranks, in whole regiments, amid the life exuded from them. They have given birth to hideous small houses, grouped roughly by streets. In these streets — alleys, rather — figures in drab, shapeless clothing, the figures of men, women, and children, pass slowly on the meagre errands of life. The architectural morass thickens — thickens and darkens. Street after street wheels past, below your train, revealing endless vistas of stores, saloons, street-cars, telegraph wires. You look out over miles of smutty roofs. Thick, thick, thick lie the houses, sticking elbows into each other, their battered stairways intermingled, back doors leering into other back doors. A cathedral spire, with a cross on it, rises haughtily above the welter; so does the foolishly carved tower of an amusement place. They blink at each other across the smoky vale.
And you plunge into the city itself. You are aware of wider streets, larger and solider buildings. You pass melancholy congeries of freight-cars, tumbledown cottages, or plethoric tenements full of whooping negroes. A great hotel, brown stone with dirty white facings, climbs fifteen stories above the roofs. Some of its windows are twinkling, for now an impatient twilight is beginning to fall. At last you glide into a smother of freight-houses, and into a cave, roaring, smoking, and sweating. You join the dark-clad, determined procession going out into tumult.
You have arrived.
You are in the Ugly City.
Cities, like people, may grow ugly for various reasons, such as age, disease, or neglect. I have my theory about Chicago; but let it wait.
In the meantime, behold the ‘loop.’
The ‘loop’ happened to us more than twenty years ago, when the masters of transportation built coils of elevated track around the central district. These tracks disfigure and overwhelm the heart of Chicago. Theirs is the diapason of an uproar that increases from year to year. But worse: theirs is the profoundest contribution to ugliness. Squarely in the centre of four major streets stand the soot-stained uprights, a forest of legs with feet sunken in the pavements. Overhead run the tracks and timbers, turning the space below into a level like a mine gallery. Overhead the trains thunder, jarring down showers of dirt, or casting into the wan light, where teams and cars proceed, baleful flashes. This foul and grim structure, all sweating iron, and gloomy platforms and dirty cars, monopolizes the four streets.
The four streets are discouraged. One of them, nearest the lake and parallel with it, tries to be gay with pianostores and furniture-stores and bookstores. But even this thoroughfare has the anxious, slightly damaged aspect of a middle-aged person anticipating decay. As for the three others, they have given up attempting to be cheerful or progressive. For whole blocks they exhibit little besides the driftwood of city life. They are prolific of stool-andcounter restaurants, fly-blown fruiteries, saloons with tatterdemalion customers in plain view, battered stairways ascending to sweatshops, lodging-houses and detective agencies, or the rudely carved relics of what were once fine business buildings. Here you may pass mercantile places whose names are famous, clinging to the ‘old location’ despite all. A few hotels, railroad offices, and the like, hang on too. But every year some of them give it up. Every year the ancient stone entrances admit a few more bucket-shops, laborunion offices, and ‘exhibition parlors’ for artificial limbs. It is getting to be an ill-odored jumble of mismated buildings. Here in the ‘loop’ — that is, within the windows opening upon the ‘L’ — there is breeding a forlornness born of racket, darkness, and the feeling that nobody cares.
Within the square of tracks work thousands of people. Do they care? No, they escape. They work all day practically in twilight, sometimes in complete darkness, and you might think, to see them bending over desks or hurrying about amid the mess of tracks, teams, signboards, wires, that they are as forlorn as the buildings. But they escape. They do not care. The ugliness, the fact that hardly anybody cares — those are two keynotes of Chicago.
There is a river, two branches of which help to confine the business district, while another fork threads its way northward into regions that few visit or consider.
What a river!
To thousands of our people it may be a bright and glowing thing. Sometimes they stand and gaze at it. Sometimes an artist paints it. But the river is never beautiful save as some wistful glow may come upon it at evening. It is really a wretched little waterway that reflects, on its best days, mainly dreary, abandoned docks, or the back doors of rotting buildings, or ramparts of watertanks. Hardly anybody cares. Under one of the principal bridges a shattered platform rises from the waters, black and unsightly. It has been there for years. Near that same spot there is a huge shapeless structure into which teams labor all day, carrying dumpings; and the dumpings are vomited into scows; and the scows float away drearily down the dreary stream. A little farther south, where a building has been razed, there is a hole. The hole is occupied by red and yellow posters of last month’s plays, by piles of broken brick, by shaggy timbers. The hole has been there for years. A saloon next door to the ruin had to go out of business. Nobody could drink enough to be cheerful there.
All this graces one of Chicago’s main streets. The multitude — rich and poor — pass such nightmares daily, unconscious of them. The people are used to our streets, which tend toward a certain fixed development. They begin, some of them, in the country, where birds and insects sing cheerful godspeed to the traveler. They march toward the city, gradually changing for the worse. Begin to appear the characteristic buildings, very likely to be made of tarnished red brick, having saloons below and ‘rooms for rent ’ above; or of frame, extending to two or three stories, with tipsy steps and twisted iron railings. Begin to appear the mere skeletons of buildings, uninhabited, insulted by every Ishmael of the neighborhood, ghostly. They have a long story to tell, usually of their tenancy by a procession of races: first, thrifty beings from Northern Europe, then people of less and less stable sort, until they fall into the hands of races inherently transitory and destructive — and the buildings are doomed. They stand shamefacedly in the company of decent and thriving structures. Nobody will repair them. They become signboards for the landlords who will not repair them, and for the politicians who fatten on the landlords.
Continuing along one of these streets, you will observe that the builders have simply shoved themselves in, frantic with haste, and regardless of proportion or decency. It is a ‘ gold rush ’ for rentals. The better buildings are infected by the poorer, and dirt, the dirt of commerce and neglect, paints all the same color. No building restrictions — none at least that cannot be evaded by the powerful. That is one reason why it is the Ugly City. And hardly anybody cares.
West Madison Street is an endless immoral, cluttered lane that runs westward for miles; here defaced by cheap lodging-houses, there blazing with the lights of cheap theatres, and emerging into beauty only where the city ends.
Halsted Street is a whole history of civilization, a gathering-place for all nations, a torrent boiling between hide ous cliffs of houses and stores.
Milwaukee Avenue is another Halsted Street, but longer, crookeder, and uglier.
Cottage Grove Avenue winds its smutted, discouraged length at the edge of the lake, bordered by relics of happier days.
Washington Boulevard — another reminder of years when the city was more winsome — is fronted by whole blocks of stone buildings, once cheerful dwellings, now chipped, smeared, and ‘for rent cheap.’
Ashland Avenue, 63rd Street, Belmont Avenue, 31st Street — name fifty others at random, and not one will evoke any picture except dreary utility, linear monotony. You can travel a whole day on some of our ‘through lines,’ and never have a glimpse of anything well-favored. You may walk miles, and not find a clean sidewalk or a green thing growing.
‘Well,’ say you, ‘there must be another side to this. It can’t be possible —
But it is.
Of course, Chicago has its rarely glimpsed beauties. It has a few natural charms, like the curve of the lake northward from Lincoln Park. It has Michigan Avenue on a summer night — that pageant of lights under the skyscrapers. It has the wooded island in Jackson Park. It has boulevards and suburbs. But these scattered and incidental beauties contend unsuccessfully against the awful whole. Isolated as they are, and provided usually with an offsetting ugliness near at hand, — such as that celebrated offset to Michigan Avenue, the Illinois Central Railroad, — they no more redeem the city than a few bright buttons, sewn haphazard upon a homely gown, beautify the gown. The areas of gloom are too enormous. The unclean, disordered excretions of a life desperately lived are piled too thickly.
I can take you for a ride of four miles, reaching from the last green traces of suburb clear to the ‘ loop,’ and you will be amazed that people can live in that district contentedly. You will be astonished that they do not rise up and declare war on the factories, the gastanks, the breweries, which frown upon this region from all sides; which squat complacently among dwellings and ‘flats.’ Why are such enormities permitted? Because life is too short to struggle against them. And not only is there one such region, but there are scores. Two million people have rushed here to win bread, and in the turmoil of doing so have sought shelter, and no more. After the day’s work they have not enough time or energy left for revolt. So they go on, year after year, poisoned by their environment, but scarcely aware of it. It is ‘somebody’s’ business to cure these things. There ought not to be a factory over there, smoking away between a school and a two-flat building; but who is to take it away? The people are too busy to do anything except look to the authorities; and the authorities are too busy doing something less useful. So nothing gets done.
In other words, of the causes of ugliness I mentioned, — age, disease, and neglect, — it is neglect that is the trouble here.
That is what maddens one about Chicago’s desolation: the casualness of it, the knowledge that Chicago could do better if it would. Chicago is the idiot child of cities. Most of the time its civic brains are dormant; the rest, they are uncoördinated. It has been from the first a genetic mistake; nature never intended to have a city here in the swamp. And its upbringing has been in the hands, very largely, of hurried, greedy, unfastidious folk, who will continue, perhaps for many years, to ignore the fact that its face is caked with dirt, its clothes filthy and torn. It is tremendously vital, but it is an idiot. And the form of its idiocy is that caused by deprivation of one or more of the senses. To mention one: the sense of beauty.
II
What does it mean to be born in Chicago — let us say, near the intersection of Western Avenue and West Madison Street? There are worse places than that to be born in, but the locality mentioned is fairly typical.
It means that, from the time of his first consciousness, up to the years when he is able to join skylarking gangs that roam the city in a heart-breaking search for ‘something different,’ the child sees scarcely anything that will tell him that beauty exists. His home is a ‘flat’ over a store. His front yard is the sidewalk. His world beyond — the world he sees from his ‘little window’ of the poem — is a plain on which has been piled a chaos of foundries, lumber-heaps, trackage, varied by rows of wretched little houses, whose cottage type has been repeated so often that it has become an established symbol of Chicago’s poverty of imagination.
The child adapts himself to this forlornness. He has his pleasures, his adventures, among the slag-heaps. He is a being full of ambitions — such as they are. He grows up here, finds a job in one of the foundries, and raises a family of his own. They are all congenitally blind, like himself. They are ‘used to it’ — used to this terrible negation of beauty. Perhaps they revolt, some of them, from living like guineapigs in a cage. They undergo the tremendous exertion and anxiety of making a home in a new subdivision, where real-estate speculators promise ‘a house in the country; your own backyard; your own trees.’ What is this paradise? Well, it often turns out to be only a collection of oblong boxes, floating in a morass of weeds, and with twig-like trees planted in stiff ranks. It is the end of the world. But the poor creatures from the region of factories think it the beginning of heaven. They are blind.
Because our children grow up in this way, learning nothing at home, and very little elsewhere, of the immense difference it makes to be in charming surroundings, we have a constantly increasing population of those who do not care. You cannot convince them that they should.
It does not help the situation that only a part — and probably a small part — of those who now make up our two millions and more were born here.
No statistician, I think, has computed the number of people who are natives of Chicago; but it is a fact which everyone knows that more people move to it than grow up in it. Chicago becomes every year more conspicuously the boarding-house of the midland. Ambitious, transient folk from a dozen states are drawn to it. Many of them frankly confess that they do not expect to stay; nay, they hope that they will not stay. (Nothing is more common than the remark, ‘Well, I hope I shan’t have to live here always.’) Some of them count upon going back to Peoria, or Keokuk, or Kalamazoo, after their ‘pile’ has been made. Others look forward to New York, with ten thousand a year. They are dwelling from month to month in apartments, or in rented houses, or in hotels. They are a fugitive and half-alien population. They are quite as alien as the immigrants, and more fugitive. Fewer of the immigrants leave us; more of them settle down and acquire civic pride than of the money-makers from the small towns.
Being a boarding-house, Chicago cannot expect much. If the house needs paint, and the front walk is slovenly, and the furniture is falling to pieces, Chicago need not look to these transient residents to feel any direct responsibility. They will stand it as long as they can, and then go elsewhere. What is it to them, who have come to Chicago only for what they can get out of it, if ill-smelling factories are built in residence districts, or if grass-plots are defaced by bill-boards? They do not feel it their duty to lynch the vandals.
Add to this element the extraordinary number of people who have fled to the suburbs, and there really are not enough good voters left. These suburbanites have escaped. In their new homes they are ardent believers in improvement; there they insist upon beauty and cleanliness. They have left Chicago behind, save as a place in which to work or shop.
Not enough good voters left — that is a fundamental reason for bad city government, which in turn is largely responsible for ugliness. By ‘good voters’ one, of course, means men and women who vote with their eyes open, their senses alert, and their understanding of the common welfare educated. The boarders do not vote that way. They know little about the significance of measures, or the past records of candidates. So they vote somewhat at random, snatching a hasty glance at the newspapers before they go to the polls, acquiescent in whatever issue they find served out to them, and never starting anything themselves. Between elections they rarely think about the City Hall or what the City Council is doing. Beyond an occasional growl at the dirt or the gloom, they do not ponder their surroundings at all. When it comes time for them to vote, their ballots are too often cast with those of the imbeciles, the prejudiced, and the purchased. This is enough to turn the scale for bad government.
And bad government is what we have had.
Better not go into details about this. Let us say merely that our political history is a history of ignoble partisanship governing movements that should be nonpartisan, of a steady decrease in economic common sense, and of selfishness and sloth in high places. Faced with taxation burdens both monstrous and ridiculous; unable to keep in office men whom it esteemed, and unable to get rid of those whom it despised; watching the city grow darker and drearier, and knowing neither the causes nor the cure, Chicago — that is, the Chicago of the great masses who carry elections — has reached its ‘don’t-care’ stage by natural process. It is too much discouraged, besides being too busy, to do much more than admire, or acquiesce in, the efforts of an organization like the Chicago Plan Commission.
Of this commission let no depreciative word be said. It represents the consummation of attempts, dating back almost to the World’s Fair, to reshape our crazy-quilt city into a beautiful, symmetrical design. With powerful backing, and growing enthusiasm, the commission is striking some telling blows. It has overcome the apathy of the crowd so far as to obtain assent to several important bond issues; and at this moment an army of workmen is hammering a vital part of the plan into reality. No question, the commission is a brilliant gleam of idealism in the Ugly City. The names of D. H. Burnham, Charles H. Wacker, and others deserve the lustre they have. The commission is one reason why I say that ‘hardly anybody’ cares, instead of ‘nobody.’ But my point is — and the commission itself will scarcely contest it — that the real awakening lies ahead. Is it not true that the masses, the floundering, discontented majority, are still blind to the promise of a ‘city beautiful’? And what will awaken them? Not appeals at election time, not newspaper editorials, not even illustrated lectures.
The commission labors on, year after year, with most admirable optimism. No less hopefully, and with a sympathy for common folk not always laid to the credit of their profession, the architects labor, too. To the sagacious plans of the Illinois Chapter of the American Institute, headed by George W. Maher, I should like to give more than a paragraph. But if I gave them numberless paragraphs I should still insist that to the factory-worker, the shopkeeper in a small way, unquestionably to poor creatures lower in the scale, the Chicago Plan, indeed, all the pretty pictures and costly diagrams of a better city, must be like a mirage. To that sullen and toilworn swarm, would you dare offer a view of a Garden of the Gods, and expect them to believe they would ever live there? ‘Not for us,’ they sigh; ‘these kind gentlemen don’t mean it.’
Such improvements as are afoot resemble confections proffered to the many by the few. The process should and will be reversed: the many will be found offering progress to the few. It will take an æsthetic revolution to accomplish this reversal. Such a revolution will come.
The writer of these somewhat depressing impressions feels safe in making the prediction, for the same reason that he feels justified in recording the impressions — the reason that he is no mere casual observer of Chicago, but a native of it. After forty years of going about without realizing what was wrong with his home, he became suddenly enlightened — the city was ugly. But his eyes were opened to what it might be, and will be.
It happened one day that the writer had occasion to visit a home in one of the humbler residence districts. Not a slum this, but a place where respectable, hard-working people have lived for more than two generations. So shapeless, or so monotonous of shape, were the houses, so pitiful the little frontyards with their starveling plants, so dour and unsightly the background, where a smoking brewery rose like an affront and a threat, that life there suddenly seemed terrible. It was infuriating to realize that society, wealthy and resourceful, permitted stalwart workers, and plucky housewives, and gay children, to exist under such conditions.
Then came the thought: ‘Why! Life is going on here. Despite all, life is going on, perhaps with as much light and shade as in most other places. There are pleasures — even ecstasies. Neglect has n’t killed these people; they have it in them to survive.’
So one might speak, not merely of this humble neighborhood, but of the city as a whole. That people can exist and develop under such skies, and amid such a clutter, is thrilling. That they can also be good and happy — as at least half of them are — is more thrilling still. There is an illimitable future for such people as this. They are fighters. They will win.
To get the same impression in another way, go ‘down town’ on a Sunday afternoon, when some great musician is performing to ‘capacity’ at Orchestra Hall. See the throng that has been drawn there by a yearning for beauty. These devotees have paid for their seats; they are safe from the political stupidities and inhibitions that cheat them of beauty elsewhere. There, while the maestro plays, one sees boiling up into the keen and tragic faces of these Chicagoans a poetry, a delight, that show of what our people are really made. They go out into the twilight, radiant, and merge with a human stream from the Art Institute. A passion they do not understand has been satisfied. And they return to ugly homes in ugly streets.
That there exists this deep-seated yearning for music and pictures is not inconsistent with what I maintained above — that the city’s sense of beauty is still dormant. Discrimination, taste, the will to live better, we have not yet reached. We have only the beginnings of a vision. Something mighty is stirring under our complex surfaces. Hands are beginning to grope through the gloom and clamor. And Chicago, whose magnificent spirit is proved by its gayety, its wit, its flair in the face of cheerlessness and slovenliness, will some day flame out in revolt against niggardly property-owners, shiftless aldermen, and drowsy or venal municipal bureaus. Sooner or later, perhaps through the processes of education, perhaps through some event as profoundly moving as the war, it will be revealed to our people that they live in an ugly city, and that there is no need of it. They will make a clean sweep.
It is this prospect that makes life in Chicago not only interesting, but captivating. I would rather live in Chicago, where this is about to happen, than dwell among the perfected glories of Lake Leman.