Many of these pioneers, so like the men and women of
my earliest childhood that I always felt comforted by their
presence in the house, were very much opposed to "foreigners,"
whom they held responsible for a depreciation of property and a
general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had
a chance for championship; I recall one old man, fiercely
American, who had reproached me because we had so many "foreign
views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope
that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants
in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest,
taken off his guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we
saw a Yankee notion from Down East,"--thereby formulating the dim
kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the
waves of a new development." The older settlers as well as their
children throughout the years have given genuine help to our
various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their
own memories of earlier hardships have made many shrewd
suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp
struggle with untoward conditions.
In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live
on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else.
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