John R. Stilgoe, in The

Were Pretty Journal of American Studies (Apr. 1982),
Cambridge University Press, 32 East 57th
St., New York, N.Y. 10022.
In 1912, the English writer Arnold Bennett described "one of the finest and most poetical views" he had ever seen. It was Toledo, Ohio's "misty brown river flanked a jungle of dark reddish and yellow chimneys and furnaces that covered it with shifting canopies of white steam and smoke."
Bennett was not alone in his admiration f...