But for the moment--and it turned out to be a brief moment--the devastation caused by the fire was inescapable. There were ruins everywhere. After the first shock wore off, the post-holocaust cityscape quickly came to possess a double fascination, both in itself and because of its association with what it suggested about the past and future of Chicago. The blocks and blocks of ruins became a popular subject for photographers and illustrators. "The town is beginning to fill with aesthetic sight-seers," the New York Tribune  reported three days after the fire went out. "The artists of the illustrated papers are seated at every coign of vantage, sketching for dear life against the closing of the mail." Both the quantity and the quality of the ruins seemed to some to endow the young city with a place in history. "No city can equal now the ruins of Chicago, not even Pompeii, much less Paris," E.J. Goodspeed bragged in his history of the fire.