American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' by Julian Street
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page 50 of 607 (08%)
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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. The Fallsway is a brand-new boulevard of pleasing aspect, the peculiar feature of which is that it is nothing more or less than a cover over the top of Jones's Falls, which figured in the early history of Baltimore as a water course, but which later came to figure as a great, open, trunk sewer. Every one in Baltimore is proud of the Fallsway, but particularly so are the city engineers who carried the work through. While in Baltimore I had the pleasure of meeting one of these gentlemen, and I can assure you that no young head of a family was ever more delighted with his new cottage in a suburb, his wife, his children, his garden, and his collie puppy, than was this engineer with his boulevard sewer. Like a lover, he carried pictures of it in his pocket, and like a lover he would assure you that it was "not like other sewers." Nor could he speak of it without beginning to wish to take you out to see it--not merely for a motor ride along the top of it, either. No, his hospitality did not stop there. When _he_ invited you to a sewer he invited you _in_. And if you went in with him, no one could make you come out until you wanted to. As he told my companion and me of the three great tubes, the walks beside them, the conduits for gas and electricity, and all the other wonders of the place, I began to wish that we might go with him, for, though we have been to a good many places together, this was something new: it was the first time we had ever been invited to drop into a sewer and make ourselves as much at home as though we lived there. |
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