Peoria By Gaslight . . . Well, Almost

The 99th Anniversary is upon us. Friends, Hansoms, countrymen -- lend me your eyes. Just one year short of a century ago, on this very date, John Clayton took his legendary ride down Regent Street, his cab being chased by Sherlock Holmes himself. His passenger was also the great detective Sherlock Holmes (or so he thought), so it is possible that no other cab ride in history was more truly Sherlockian. To commemorate this most hansom occasion, let's take a step back in time ... back ninety-nine years to that day of John Clayton, his hansom, and dual Holmeses.

The place: London, England. The time: September 26, 1888.

If you've been practicing your Clayton Ritual, you should know that date by heart. Unfortunately, our time machine for tonight is an old model, and has a broken lateral transfixer -- we've stepped back ninety-nine years, but we're still in Peoria. Sure, it's a tad disappointing, but a good Sherlockian knows how to make do. So let's take a look around the Peoria of John Clayton's day. Soon, you'll realize just why it is called "London on the Illinois River."

Surely, you've heard it called that before, haven't you?

Oh, well. On with our tour. Victorian Peoria-Sherlock Holmes would have loved it. But as we are in America, it can't really be called Victorian Peoria ... more like Clevelandian Peoria. Grover Cleveland was our reigning monarch at the time, and most Peorians were pleased with that fact. Grover Cleveland, like Peoria, was heavily Democratic.

Peoria had its monarch, and it also had its own Waterloo Station. The Union Depot was fairly new then, and Peoria began to bustle with train traffic. At the time, Peoria, like London, was also a port city, where riverboats docked to load and unload their cargoes along an American Thames. Jonathan Small could have still led Holmes a merry chase up the Illinois River, just as he did on the Thames, and Holmes could have just al likely backtracked orange pips along Mississippi River ports ot call in an American "Five Orange Pips" as well. Who needs an ocean?

Rouse's Opera Hall and the Grand Opera served Peoria in the stead of the Lyceum and Halle's Concert. Instead of Turkish baths, a bath at the Central Park Sulfur Springs could be had. And if a Peoria Sherlock Holmes were to first meet a Peoria Dr. Watson, the site would not have been Bart's, but Cottage Hospital, the fifteen room frame house that later became Proctor Hospital.

As a metropolis of about 40,000 people, Peoria even had some advantages over London in 1888. When, in London, Vincent Starrett's famed "ghostly gaslamps" were failing at twenty feet, Peoria already had electric streetlights. Instead of a smoke-choked Underground, Peoria’s streetcar system was converting from horses to electricity at about that time. There are, of course, those wet blankets who will claim that the lack of gaslamps and hansoms cabs detracts from Peoria's true Shetlockian atmosphere in 1888. In bringing up atmosphere, however, these nay-sayers are providing for their own ultimate undoing.

In the London of Sherlock Holmes and John Clayton, any reminiscence is likely to include one thing -- the "opalescent London reek." The fogs in London were like nowhere else: yellow at times, foul-smelling at others. And while Peoria's atmosphere may not have always been "opalescent," I think we can say, without a doubt, that the word "reek" suited it perfectly. What else could you call the night air of a city with twelve distilleries and a healthy stockyard? During those times when the reek was hanging heavily over Peoria, crime had to have run rampant. Ordinarily law-abiding citizens could be driven to the most ingenious of crimes simply to obtain the cash for train fare out of town. Sherlock Holmes would have been right at home.

So as we return to the present day, to the banquet at which we yearly celebrate John Clayton's famous ride, perhaps we should remember that old Sherlockian saying: "Holmes is where the heart is."

Be it in London ... or Peoria.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, Banquet Special 1987)