Lippincott's Magazine.
JANUARY, 1884.
PHILADELPHIA'S HÔTEL-DE-VILLE.
CITIES, viewed as works of art, need central points as pivots for the motive and effect. A long flat line, or series of lines, embracing some miles of rectangular buildings, is not a pleasing or exhilarating spectacle in itself. In only a few cases is anything gained by inequalities of the ground, hills of ordinary height being lost in such an expanse, and themselves requiring the emphasis of crowning structures. Modern cities especially, to be pictorial, demand the feature of which we speak. Military considerations, based on a state of continual warfare, do not drive them to the hills. Born of trade and the handicrafts, they take to the water-side and spread themselves freely over the plain. They become panoramas rather than landscapes, and must be lifted to the eye by some commanding object that swells from the vale and more than midway leaves the storm of traffic. What would the view of Rome be without the dome of St. Peter's, of Vienna without St. Stephen's, Antwerp without its cathedral spire, or London without the "huge dun canopy" of St. Paul's?
Each of these far-seen heralds of the coming and as yet undetected city is of religious origin. It represents only one of the great interests which actuate the multitudes below, and that, it must be added, not the controlling interest, for nobody will say that public worship brought together, or could keep together, without the aid of worldly motives, the people of either of these capitals. Much less could it be said of an American town, with its population of many creeds united in no cult but that of the almighty dollar.
It is fit everyway that the most conspicuous erection should express the political life of the city, the organism which makes it a unit. The city was the first free State, as the etymology of our word "politics" shows. The love and pride of the Flemish burghers, the champions of mediæval liberty, were lavished on the decorations of the townhalls which still proclaim the power of the civic virtues. Yet these buildings are rarely those which first greet the eye of the approaching traveller. The city does not, as it were, rise to welcome him in her own proper person. In her new city-hall, with its tower overtopping everything nearer than the instep of the Alleghanies, Philadelphia does herself and her visitor that honor. Not springing from the sea, it will not hail the mariner like the campanile of St. Mark's, but it will be a landmark far along a great river that bears a commerce comparable to that of Venice in her best
Copyright, 1883, by J. B. Lippincott & Co.
