These matters are not mentioned in the way of criticism:  I have only admiration for the devastated cities and for those who built them up again.  I call attention to lost opportunities with something like reluctance, and only in the wish to emphasize the fact that our crippled or destroyed cities do invariably rise again, and that if the next American city to sustain disaster shall but have this simple lesson learned in advance, it may thereby register a new high mark in municipal intelligence and a new record among the rebuilt cities, by making more sweet than any other city ever made them, the uses of adversity.

The fire of 1904 found Baltimore a town of narrow highways, old buildings, bad pavements, and open gutter drains.  The streets were laid in what is known as “southern cobble,” which is the next thing to no pavement at all, being made of irregular stones, large and small, laid in the dirt and tamped down.  For bumps and ruts there is no pavement in the world to be compared with it.  There were no city sewers.  Outside a few affluent neighborhoods, the citizens of which clubbed together to build private sewers, the cesspool was in general use, while domestic drainage emptied into the roadside gutters.  These were made passable, at crossings, by stepping stones, about the bases of which passed interesting armadas of potato peelings, floating, upon wash days, in water having the fine Mediterranean hue which comes from diluted blueing.  Everybody seemed to find the entire system adequate; for, it was argued, the hilly contours of the city caused the drainage quickly to be carried off, while as for typhoid and mosquitoes—­well, there had always been typhoid and mosquitoes, just as there had always been these open gutters.  It was all quite good enough.

Then the fire.

And then the upbuilding of the city—­not only of the acres and acres comprising the burned section, in which streets were widened and skyscrapers arose where fire-traps had been—­but outside the fire zone, where sewers were put down and pavements laid.  Nor was the change merely physical.  With the old buildings, the old spirit of laissez faire went up in smoke, and in the embers a municipal conscience was born.  Almost as though by the light of the flames which engulfed it, the city began to see itself as it had never seen itself before:  to take account of stock, to plan broadly for the future.

Nor has the new-born spirit died.  Only last year an extensive red-light district was closed effectively and once for all.  Baltimore is to-day free from flagrant commercialized vice.  And if not quite all the old cobble pavements and open-gutter drains have been eliminated, there are but few of them left—­left almost as though for purposes of contrast—­and the Baltimorean who takes you to the Ghetto and shows you these ancient remnants may immediately thereafter escort you to the Fallsway, where the other side of the picture is presented.