spell the end, but is oftentimes another name for opportunity?

Always, after disaster to a city, come improvements, but because
disaster not only cleans the slate but simultaneously stuns the mind, a
portion of the opportunity is invariably lost. The task of rebuilding,
of widening a few streets, looks large enough to him who stands amidst
destruction--and there, consequently, improvement usually stops. That is
why the downtown boulevard system of Chicago has yet to be completed, in
spite of the fact that it might with little difficulty have been
completed after the Chicago fire (although it is only just to add that
city planning was almost an unknown art in America at that time); and
that also is why the hills of San Francisco are not terraced, as it was
suggested they should be after the fire, but remain to-day inaccessible
to frontal attack by even the maddest mountain goat of a taxi driver.

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