Knoxville daily chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1882, 1881-09-02
ST. PETERSBURG.
Peters Designs in Building 1t, and How
T. 1t Looks In Summer,

refers Designs IN Building 1t, and HOW
T. 1t Looks In Summer
ST. Petersburg Letter to the London Times.
A traveller should always make it point,
when he finds it possible, to visit a country
when it is in what is called its own element
Russia is the land of snow and ice, and
may probably be seen to advantage in skating
and sledge-driving weather. All provisions
are here made against the discomforts of
hard winter. But against the scourge of
the summer dust which sweeps day and
night over st. Petersburg, all the pumps
drawing water from all the four branches of
the Neva are inefficient. There is nothing
for it but to Turn ones back upon it; and
that is what every man does who can man
age it. The city is left to a few priests, the
police. officers of her Britannia Majesty's
squadron who are off a weeks holiday and
to myself; and the Hotel d'Europe, the
best in the town, is being swept, scraped
and painted like London club in mid
September, for this is the dead season in ST.
Petersburg, and the place is really too
much of thing for man to have 1t all to
himself.
What town it is How large, how dis
mally empty How it squats like an I'M
mense alligator half in and half out of a
swamp, modelled on Amsterdam, and re-
minding one of Venice! What miles and
miles of prospects, Or, as the French
would say boulevards " what endless
succession of wide, open spaces and mag
nificent distances, of long straight lines OF
walls and rows of trees and interminable
avenues, contrived, as it were, to allow the
town ample room to run out of town! A
city of churches, converts and palaces, OF
steeples and ornaments of gold, bronze,
granite and marble, of buildings in al
STYLES, European and Asiatic, quaint orig
mails or Indifferent copies, many of them
grand and massive, yet strewn over space
at haphazard on a perfectly flat surface
grouping nowhere; nowhere laid out with
effect or with an eye to the picturesque.
town of princes, to all appearances, or OF
wealthy bankers or traders, with nothing
mean, no back slums, no rag fair the
homes of the poor, if at all existing, care
fully hidden out of sight; the whole cover
ing scores of miles of ground, maze OF
isles and islets, of bridges and embellishments,
of river and branches of river and canals.
1t is town made by one man, made on q
plan and for purpose, and when that is
said, all is said. 1t was not one of the
cities of Gods own building consequently
it may be feared, not one of those that
abide. Its foundation was suggested by q
great thought, and it turns out now tc
have been mistake. 1t is questionable in
deed, whether Peter the Great ever meant
st. Petersburg for permanent court resi-
dence and capital. AS late as 1924, seven
months before his death, it was not here
but at Moscow, that he celebrated the coro
nation of his wife Catherine, and if he
X p,yIoh Of hiC fi,,,a tl,ic ~
chiefly because work of such magnitude
as he had undertaken required the masters
incessant presence. For the rest, all that
Peter wanted here was port, and he could
under the circumstances find no better. He
built it on conquered ground out of all
the boundaries of Old Russia, amid Fin
nish population, the former subjects O.
Sweden. He drafted his workmen among
the serfs of all his Provinces and wasted
100, 900 human lives in the achievement,
labor being as cheap for him as it ever was
for the kingly builder of the Egyptian pyra-
mids.
The site was swamp-an unsafe and ull-
healthy swamp; SO unsafe that some of its
finest monuments-the monolith column of
Alexander [. and the Isaac Church-show
in their deep crevices the rapid decay to
which the treacherous ground underneath is
booming them; SO unsafe, besides, as to be
subject to inundation, like the ground of
ancient Rome; for the city has already
been destructively flooded eight times since
1903, the date of it's foundation, and even
last year the waters rose more than ten feet
above the ordinary level, driving people
from their cellars and basement floors, as
well as from the villas and gardens of the
lower islands. There were even for many
years ominous speculations as to the posi-
biity of the whole town being submerged
1.-The Gulf of Finland" Peter reasoned,
''runs westward from st. Petersburg, in
the directions whence the heaviest storms
| always blow. Imagine storm to set in
from the west in April or May when the ice
is breaking up and suppose that this should
happen just when the water in the river is
at the highest. The masses of ice blown in
from the sea would meet those that float
down from the land side, and the collision
between the two opposite masses could not
fail to overwhelm the whole city, with its
proud palaces, when princes and beggars
would be drowned promiscuously, like Pha-
rob and his host in the Red Sea-" The
| town, however, has already stood 179 years,
and the catastrophe seems indefinitely ad,
journed. As no such combination of storm,
high water and great thaw as croakers con-
jured up has yet occurred, sanguine peo-
pie have become perfectly skeptical as to the
possibility of the dreaded contingency.
Notico tn Stock h Id ers of East Tenn 4, X =