s ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not
altogether, of course, but not much of it was left.

The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased
in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The
dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep,
trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of
reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the
sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads;
the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as
dusty-looking as ever.

Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly,
with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying
street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas
crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode.

Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad,
general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the
cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far-seeing,
and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is
true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine
enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like
a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America
may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe,
has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck--to have had no great
fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case,
I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical
improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this
in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace
before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city
in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty,
elegance, and tastefulness.

However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When
completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful
building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams
or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will
be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has
been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate
eye and taste; a SUGGESTER, so to speak.