Our guest has long since
married the struggling young lawyer to whom she was then engaged,
and he is now leading his profession in an eastern city. She
recalls that month's experience always with a sense of amusement
over the fact that the succession of visitors who came to see the
new Settlement invariably questioned her most minutely concerning
"these people" without once suspecting that they were talking to
one who had been identified with the neighborhood from childhood.
I at least was able to draw a lesson from the incident, and I
never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the
Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go
with me, that I might curb any hasty generalization by the
consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more
intimately than I could hope to do.
Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of
residence that it is difficult to recall its gradual changes,--the
withdrawal of the more prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow
substitution of Russian Jews, Italians, and Greeks. A description
of the street such as I gave in those early addresses still stands
in my mind as sympathetic and correct.
Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the
great thoroughfares of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it
midway between the stockyards to the south and the
shipbuilding yards on the north branch of the Chicago
River.
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