Taylor Avenue (then almost the city's edge, and which now is a girdle
worn high about its gigantic middle) petered out into violently muddy
and unmade streets and great patches of unimproved vacant lots that in
winter were gaunt with husks.
A pantechnicon procession of the more daring, shot with the growing
pains, was grading and building into the vast clayey seas west of
Kings-highway, but for the most part St. Louis contained herself
gregariously enough within her limits, content in those years when the
country rang hollowly to the cracked ring of free silver to huddle under
the same blanket with her smoke-belching industries.
A picture postcard of a brewery, piled high like a castle and with
stables of Augean collosity, rose from the south tip of the city to the
sour-malt supremacy of the world; boots, shoes, tobacco, and street cars
bringing up by a nose, Eads Bridge, across the strong breast of the
Mississippi, flinging roads of commerce westward ho.
For one rapidly transitional moment street-car traffic in St. Louis
stood in three simultaneous stages of its lepidopterous development: a
caterpillar horse-car system crawled north and south along Jefferson
Avenue, glass coin box and the backward glance of the driver, in lieu of
conductor.
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