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You would also notice certain startling juxtapositions, of dwellings
and businesses, and of rich and poor. In the North Division there was
little separation between the homes of the Yankee elite and those of the
German workers who far outnumbered them. Just across the river in the
West Division, homes and factories were in particularly close proximity.
Here laborer Patrick O'Leary, his wife Catherine, and their five children lived
in what was an extremely crowded but fairly common arrangement, in the rear
rooms of a small wooden cottage. Behind their dwelling on the same lot, less
than a mile from the center of town, was a barn from which Mrs.O'Leary conducted
her neighborhood milk business. The O'Learys were hardly the worst off. Across the river right by the gas works was "Conley's Patch," one of the most squalid and vice-ridden of several slum districts in this city of sharp and often distressing contrasts.
If you were particularly observant, you would notice two more things.
The first would be the amount of wood all about you, whether it was the
endless stacks of raw lumber in river-side yards along the South Branch,
the inventory of wood products being turned out by all the mills and
factories, the fifty-seven miles of wood-paved streets (out of a total
of eighty-eight miles of paved streets in all, leaving almost 450 miles
unpaved altogether) and 561 miles of wooden sidewalks, and the tens of
thousands of wooden or wood-trimmed structures, including some faced
with brick and stone. And, if you took your bird's-eye view
from the watchman's walk in the first days of October of 1871, your
appreciation of the Indian Summer weather would be disturbed by your
worrisome awareness that barely an inch-and-a-half of rain had fallen
since Independence Day, and that it was dry--very dry.
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