has given but little
thought to pleasing effects. Broadway was not broad, and Fifth Avenue
was not striking. Of late, however, the city has become imperial, houses
parks and driveways being among the finest in the world. New Orleans
has survived at least a dozen great yellow-fever crises since 1812,
population meanwhile increasing twentyfold. After the enforced
construction of the levee, the idea came to some one that the top of
it would make a fine driveway, which in due time was extended from the
river and bayous to the lake, thus becoming the most attractive feature
of the place. Though not without natural attractions, Chicago was not
made by or for her things of beauty. Beginning with low wooden houses
along dirty streets, transformations were continued until systems of
parks and boulevards with elegant edifices came into view,--which
shows that, however material the beginning of American towns may be, if
prosperity comes the aesthetical is sure to come with it. A contrast to
Chicago may be found in St. Louis, for a long time trading-post town
and city, which would be of more importance now were her people of a
different quality. Even her chronic calamities, tornadoes, floods, and
epidemics, fail to rouse her energies, so that Chicago, starting
later and under more adverse circumstances, outstripped her in every
particular. Cleveland was laid out for a fine city, so that as she grew
little alteration was found necessary. The streets are wide, 80 to 120
feet--Superior Street 132 feet--and so abundant is the foliage, largely
maple, that it is called the Forest city.

As an instance of modern aesthetic town construction one might cite
Denver, a western Yankee metropolis of ultrarefined men and women from
down Boston way, breathing a nomenclature never so freely used before
among mid-continent mountains, streets, schoolhouses, parks, and
gardens--all alive with the names of New England poets, philosophers,
and statesmen. Scarcely yet turned the half century in age, few such
charming cities as Denver have been made with fewer mistakes.

San Francisco at her birth and christening had for godfather neither
prince nor priest, nor any cultured coterie. The sandy peninsula, on
whose inner edge, at the cove called Yerba Buena, stood some hide and
tallow stores and fur depots which drew to them the stragglers that
passed that way, was about as ill-omened a spot as the one designated
by the snake-devouring eagle perched upon a