Toward noon, the pall of smoke and fog which had blanketed the city, vanished on a fresh breeze from the prairies, and my companion and I, much inspirited, set forth on foot to see what the downtown streets of Kansas City had to offer. We had gone hardly a block before we realized that our earlier impressions of the place had been ill-founded. We had arrived in the least agreeable portion of the city, and had not, hitherto, seen any of the built-up, well-paved streets. "Petticoat Lane"--the fashionable shopping district on Eleventh Street between Main Street and Grand Avenue--has a metropolitan appearance, and the wider avenues, with their well-built skyscrapers, tell a story of substantiality and progress. But the most striking thing to us, upon that walk, lay not in the great buildings already standing, but in the embryonic structures everywhere. All over Kansas City old buildings are coming down to make place for new ones; hills of clay are being gouged away and foundations dug; steel frames are shooting up. Never, before or since, have I sensed, as I sensed that day, a city's growth. It seemed to me that I could feel expansion in the very ground beneath my feet. Looking upon these multifarious activities was like looking through an enormous magnifying glass at some gigantic ant hill, where thousands upon thousands of workers were rushing about, digging, carrying, constructing, all in breathless haste. Nor was the incidental music lacking; the air was ringing with the symphony of work--the music of brick walls falling, of drills digging at the earth, and of automatic riveters clattering their swift, metallic song, high up among the tall, steel frames, where presently would stand desks, and filing cabinets, and typewriter machines.
"Did you ever feel a city growing so?" I asked of my companion.
"Grow!" he repeated. "Why it has grown so fast they haven't had time to name their streets."
The statement appeared true. We had looked for street signs at all corners, but had seen none. Later, however, we discovered that the streets did have names. But as there are no signs, I conclude that the present names are only tentative, and that when Kansas City gets through building, she will name her streets in sober earnest, and mark them in order that strangers may more readily find their way.