Peculiarities of American Cities. Glazier Willard W.

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СКАЧАТЬ and its Avondale, which are as much superior to Fifth Avenue as the country is superior to the city, and as space is preferable to narrowness. As far as the eye can reach, on these billowed outlines of hills and valleys, elegant cottages, tasteful villas, and substantial mansions, surrounded by a paradise of grass, gardens, lawns, and tree-shaded roads, are clustered. Each little suburb has its own corporation, and its own municipal government, while even its mayor and aldermen may do daily business in the large city below it.

      In the city itself Pearl street is noted for its wholesale trade, and for the uniform elegance of its buildings. Third street, between Main and Vine, contains the banking, brokering, and insurance offices. Fourth street is the fashionable promenade and business street. Freeman street, in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, is also a favorite promenade. Both the East and West Ends contain many fine residences. Along Front street, at the foot of Main, is the public landing, an open space one thousand feet long and four hundred and twenty-five feet wide. The city has a frontage of ten miles on the river, and extends back three miles.

      The United States Government building, occupying the square bounded by Main and Walnut, and Fifth and Sixth streets, and accommodating the Custom House, Post Office, and United States Courts; the County Court House, in Main street, near Canal street; the City buildings occupying an entire square on Plum street, between Eighth and Ninth; the Chamber of Commerce, on Fourth street between Main and Walnut; and the Masonic Temple, at the corner of Third and Walnut streets, are among the most imposing buildings of the city. The Exposition buildings, in Elm street, fronting Washington Park, cover three and one-half acres of ground, and have seven acres of space for exhibiting. The Exhibition opens annually, during the first week in September, and closes the first week in October. The Springer Music Hall will seat 5,000 persons, and contains one of the largest organs in the world, having more pipes, but fewer speaking stops, than the famous Boston organ. Pike's Opera House, in Fourth street, between Vine and Walnut, is a very handsome building. Cincinnati is noted for its appreciation and encouragement of fine music. The Emery Arcade, said to be the largest in America, extends from Vine to Race street, between Fourth and Fifth. The roof is of glass, and in it are shops of various kinds, and the Hotel Emery.

      The late Henry Probasco, on Clifton Heights, and Joseph Longworth, on Walnut Hills, each had very fine private art galleries, to which visitors were courteously admitted, and the city itself occupies a high standard in art matters. The Tyler-Davidson fountain, in Fifth street, between Vine and Walnut, the gift of Mr. Probasco, exhibits a series of basins, one above another, the shaft ornamented by figures, and the whole surmounted by a gigantic female figure, from whose outstretched hands the water rains down in fine spray. The fountain was cast in Munich, and cost nearly $200,000.

      The Burnet House has been, for more than a quarter of a century, the principal hotel in Cincinnati. The Grand Hotel is newer and more elegant. The Gibson House is large and centrally located. There are various opera houses, theatres, variety and concert halls, a gymnasium, a Floating Bath, and Zoölogical Gardens, with a collection of birds and animals, among the best in the country.

      St. Peter's Cathedral (Roman Catholic), in Plum street, between Seventh and Eighth, is the finest religious edifice in the city. Its altar of Carrara marble was carved in Genoa, and its altar-piece, "St. Peter Delivered," by Murillo, a work of art of world-wide reputation. Many of the Protestant churches are elegant, and some of them actually magnificent. The Hebrew Synagogue on Plum street, opposite the Cathedral, and the Hebrew Temple, at the corner of Eighth and Mound streets, both handsome edifices, one in Moorish and the other in Gothic style, have each of them brilliant interiors.

      Among the educational institutions of Cincinnati are the University of Cincinnati, having in connection with it a School of Design and a Law School, St. Xavier's College (Jesuit); Wesleyan Female College; Seminary of Mount St. Mary's, a famous Roman Catholic College; Lane Theological Seminary, of which Dr. Lyman Beecher was once president, and where Henry Ward Beecher once studied theology for three years; several medical colleges, and scientific, classical and mechanical institutes.

      A number of parks surround the city, furnishing fine pleasure grounds, and containing magnificent views of the river and its shores.

      More than a third of the residents of Cincinnati are of German birth or descent. Besides being scattered all through the city, they also occupy a quarter exclusively their own, on the north of the Miami Canal, which they have named "the Rhine." "Over the Rhine," one seems to have left America entirely, and to have entered, as by magic, the Fatherland. The German tongue is the only one spoken, and all signs and placards are in German. There are German schools, churches and places of amusement. The beer gardens will especially recall Germany to the mind of the tourist. The Grand Arbeiter and Turner Halls are distinctive features of this quarter of the city, and specially worthy of a visit.

      The Jews also constitute a proportion of the inhabitants, respectable both as to numbers and character; and, what is worthy of remark, there is an unwonted harmony between Christians and Hebrews, so that an exchange of pulpits between them has been among the actual facts of the past. Dr. Max Lilienthal, one of the most eloquent and learned rabbis of the country, presides over one of the Jewish congregations, and has preached to Christian audiences; and Mr. Mayo, the Unitarian clergyman, has spoken by invitation in the synagogues. The Jews of the city are noted for their intelligence, public spirit and liberality, and are represented in the municipal government, and on the boards of public and charitable institutions. Quite as worthy of note is the fact that the Young Men's Christian Association of Cincinnati is not influenced by that spirit of narrow bigotry which in certain other cities of the Union excludes Unitarians from fellowship.

      The venerable Archbishop Purcell, who for half a century had been at the head of the Roman Catholic Church in this diocese, was a man of genial manners, sincerely beloved by all. But the closing days of his life were sadly clouded by a gigantic financial failure, amounting to several millions of dollars, with which he was connected. As heavily as the blow has fallen upon many of his flock, the only blame they impute to the dead prelate is that of most faulty judgment and general incapacity in financial affairs. The most singular part of it all was that the difficulties should have remained so long undiscovered, until such an immense amount of property was involved.

      Cincinnati's commerce is very extended, and so are her manufacturing interests. Steamboats from all points on the Mississippi and the Ohio lay up at her levee, which extends five or six miles around the bank of the river in front of the city. The traveler may take his ticket for St. Paul, New Orleans, Pittsburg, high up the Red River, or any intervening point. The staple article of trade is pork, though she exports wine, flour, iron, machinery, whisky, paper and books. In addition to the water ways, a large number of railways, connecting the city with every section of the country, centres here.

      The stock yards of Cincinnati are on an extended scale, though not equaling those of Chicago. The Union Railroad's Stock Yards, comprising fifty acres on Spring Grove avenue, have accommodations for 25,000 hogs, 10,000 sheep, and 5,000 cattle. In the pork packing establishments, thousands of hogs from the farms of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, are slaughtered daily. In a single establishment fifty men will slaughter and dispose of 1,500 hogs a day. Each man has his own special line of work, the labor being divided among pen-men, knockers-down, stickers, scalders, bristle-snatchers, scrapers, shavers, hangers or "gamble-men," gutters, hose-boys, slide-boys, splitters, cutters with their attendants, weighers, cleavers, knife-men, ham-trimmers, shoulder-trimmers, packers, salters, weighers and branders, lard-men, bookkeepers, porters and laborers, of whom fifty will unitedly dispose of a hog once in every twenty seconds. The old saying is that it takes nine tailors to make a man, but it takes fifty men, belonging to all the professions named above, to make one complete butcher. The work is accomplished so rapidly that the creature has no time to realize what has happened to him, before the different portions of his dissected body are slipping down wooden pipes, each to its appropriate apartment below, to be finally disposed of.

      Nowhere east of the Rocky Mountains are grapes cultivated to such an extent, and such quantities of wine manufactured, as on the southern slopes of the hills which hem in the СКАЧАТЬ