Peculiarities of American Cities. Glazier Willard W.
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and places of amusement. The beer gardens will especially recall Germany to the mind of the tourist. The Grand Arbeiter and Turner Halls are distinctive features of this quarter of the city, and specially worthy of a visit.
The Jews also constitute a proportion of the inhabitants, respectable both as to numbers and character; and, what is worthy of remark, there is an unwonted harmony between Christians and Hebrews, so that an exchange of pulpits between them has been among the actual facts of the past. Dr. Max Lilienthal, one of the most eloquent and learned rabbis of the country, presides over one of the Jewish congregations, and has preached to Christian audiences; and Mr. Mayo, the Unitarian clergyman, has spoken by invitation in the synagogues. The Jews of the city are noted for their intelligence, public spirit and liberality, and are represented in the municipal government, and on the boards of public and charitable institutions. Quite as worthy of note is the fact that the Young Men's Christian Association of Cincinnati is not influenced by that spirit of narrow bigotry which in certain other cities of the Union excludes Unitarians from fellowship.
The venerable Archbishop Purcell, who for half a century had been at the head of the Roman Catholic Church in this diocese, was a man of genial manners, sincerely beloved by all. But the closing days of his life were sadly clouded by a gigantic financial failure, amounting to several millions of dollars, with which he was connected. As heavily as the blow has fallen upon many of his flock, the only blame they impute to the dead prelate is that of most faulty judgment and general incapacity in financial affairs. The most singular part of it all was that the difficulties should have remained so long undiscovered, until such an immense amount of property was involved.
Cincinnati's commerce is very extended, and so are her manufacturing interests. Steamboats from all points on the Mississippi and the Ohio lay up at her levee, which extends five or six miles around the bank of the river in front of the city. The traveler may take his ticket for St. Paul, New Orleans, Pittsburg, high up the Red River, or any intervening point. The staple article of trade is pork, though she exports wine, flour, iron, machinery, whisky, paper and books. In addition to the water ways, a large number of railways, connecting the city with every section of the country, centres here.
The stock yards of Cincinnati are on an extended scale, though not equaling those of Chicago. The Union Railroad's Stock Yards, comprising fifty acres on Spring Grove avenue, have accommodations for 25,000 hogs, 10,000 sheep, and 5,000 cattle. In the pork packing establishments, thousands of hogs from the farms of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, are slaughtered daily. In a single establishment fifty men will slaughter and dispose of 1,500 hogs a day. Each man has his own special line of work, the labor being divided among pen-men, knockers-down, stickers, scalders, bristle-snatchers, scrapers, shavers, hangers or "gamble-men," gutters, hose-boys, slide-boys, splitters, cutters with their attendants, weighers, cleavers, knife-men, ham-trimmers, shoulder-trimmers, packers, salters, weighers and branders, lard-men, bookkeepers, porters and laborers, of whom fifty will unitedly dispose of a hog once in every twenty seconds. The old saying is that it takes nine tailors to make a man, but it takes fifty men, belonging to all the professions named above, to make one complete butcher. The work is accomplished so rapidly that the creature has no time to realize what has happened to him, before the different portions of his dissected body are slipping down wooden pipes, each to its appropriate apartment below, to be finally disposed of.
Nowhere east of the Rocky Mountains are grapes cultivated to such an extent, and such quantities of wine manufactured, as on the southern slopes of the hills which hem in the city of Cincinnati. This business is mostly engaged in by Germans, who make excellent wine, which has acquired a world-wide celebrity. But the grape-rot, which has especially affected the Catawbas, from which the best wine is produced, has of late years rather checked the industry. Some of the wine cellars of Cincinnati are famous, not only for the quantity of native wine which they contain, but for its quality as well.
Looking across the river, which at low water is, perhaps, a third of a mile wide, to the Kentucky side, one sees, on the right bank of the Licking River, the city of Covington, a mass of black factories and tall chimneys, from which dense smoke is always ascending, and spreading out over the valley. On the left or opposite bank of the Licking is Newport, the two towns connected by a suspension bridge. Covington is also connected with Cincinnati by a suspension bridge, 1,057 feet long from tower to tower, its entire length 2,252 feet, and elevated by two iron cables above the river, at low water, one hundred feet. Its weight is 600 tons, but it is estimated that it will sustain a weight of 16,000 tons, and is one of the finest structures of its kind in the world. This bridge was nine years in construction, and cost nearly two millions of dollars. There are also two pier railroad bridges across the Ohio at Cincinnati.
Along the summit of the steep levee, close to the line of stores, there is a row of massive posts, three feet thick and twenty feet high, and forty or fifty feet above the usual low water mark. The stranger will be puzzled to imagine their use. But let him visit the city during the spring freshet, and he will speedily discover their purpose. The swelling of the river at that period brings the steamboats face to face with the warehouses on the levee, and they are secured to these huge posts by means of strong cables, to prevent them being swept down the stream by the mighty rush of waters. The usual difference between the high and low water mark of the Ohio River at Cincinnati is about forty feet, though a flood has been known to mark a much higher figure than that. When this occurs, which it does once or twice in a generation, the overflowing water carries desolation to all the lower parts of the city. The ground floors of houses are submerged, cellars filled, merchandise damaged or destroyed. People betake themselves to the upper stories, and make their way about the streets in boats.
The latest and most disastrous flood on record was that of 1883, when, on February fifteenth, the river indicated sixty-six feet and four inches above low water mark. Furious rain storms throughout the Ohio Valley had swollen all the streams to an unprecedented height, and caused terrible disaster to all the towns and cities on the shores of the Ohio River. For seven miles along the water front of Cincinnati the water overflowed valuable property, reaching from two to eight blocks into the city, so that the great suspension bridge, entrance to which is from the top of the decline, could not be reached except in boats. A thousand firms were washed out. In Mill Creek Valley are the large manufacturing establishments, which employ over thirty thousand men, women, and children, and these were all cut off by water. Twelve wards in the city, and seven townships in the country, were more or less affected by the flood. The entire population of the flooded city districts is nearly 130,000, and one quarter of these, exclusive of business interests, were sufferers by the flood, their houses being either under water or totally destroyed. The waterworks were stopped, and the city was left in darkness by the submergence of the gasworks.
On Tuesday, February thirteenth, although the flood had not yet reached its height, the freight depot of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad was undermined by the bursting of a culvert under it, and fell into the surrounding water, carrying with it, to certain death, several people. More than twenty railroad tracks were submerged, some of them to a depth of twelve feet, so that nearly all communication was cut off. Policemen patrolled the streets in boats. The churches were thrown open to receive the homeless, and nearly every organization in the city, from the Chamber of Commerce to the ladies' sewing societies, entered upon the work of relieving the sufferers. Contributions poured in most liberally from abroad, the Free Masons of Cleveland alone shipping twelve large boats, with a generous supply of stores. Before relief could come to them, many persons suffered severely, from both cold and hunger. They were rescued from their flooded homes by the aid of skiffs, some of them with barely enough clothing to conceal their nakedness.
It is estimated that eight square miles of Cincinnati were under water, five of which were in the Mill Creek Valley. Provisions became scarce, and commanded high prices. Newport, on the Kentucky shore, was in even a more deplorable condition than Cincinnati. Supplies became entirely exhausted, and on the night of the fourteenth, fifteen thousand people there were without fuel or provisions.
On the sixteenth of February the waters had begun to subside, and gradually regained their normal level, making more apparent, as the flood decreased, the ruin and desolation which had attended it. A vast deposit of mud was left upon the streets, many premises had been undermined by the sucking currents, malaria haunted the wet cellars, the destruction of merchandise was found to be very heavy indeed, while