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Title: The Personality of American Cities
Author: Edward Hungerford
Illustrator: E. Horter
Release Date: October 1, 2012 [EBook #40884]
Language: English
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[Illustration: _From an etching by E. Horter_
MADISON SQUARE, NEW YORK]
THE PERSONALITY
OF
AMERICAN CITIES
BY
EDWARD HUNGERFORD
_Author of_ "_The Modern Railroad_,"
"_Gertrude_," _etc._
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
E. HORTER
NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1913
Copyright, 1913, by
MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.
Published November, 1913
TO
MY LITTLE DAUGHTER
ADRIENNE.
PREFACE
This book has been in preparation for nearly four years. In that time
the author has been in each of the cities that he has set forth to
describe herein. With the exception of Charleston, New Orleans and the
three cities of the North Pacific, he has been in each city two or three
or even four or five times.
The task that he has essayed--placing in a single chapter even something
of the flavor and personality of a typical American town--has not been
an easy one, but he hopes that he has given it a measure of fidelity and
accuracy if nothing more. Of course, he does not believe that he has
included within these covers all of the American cities of distinctive
personality. Such a list would include necessarily such clear-cut New
England towns as Portland, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford and New
Haven; it would give heed to the solid Dutch manors of Albany; the
wonderful development of Detroit, builded into a great city by the
development of the motor car; the distinctive features of Milwaukee; the
southern charm of Indianapolis and Cincinnati and Louisville; the breezy
western atmosphere of Omaha and of Kansas City. And in Canada, Winnipeg,
already proclaiming herself as the "Chicago of the Dominion," Vancouver
and Victoria demand attention. The author regrets that the lack of
personal acquaintance with the charms of some of these cities, as well
as the pressure of space, serves to prevent their being included within
the pages of his book. It is quite possible, however, that some or all
of them may be included within subsequent editions.
The author bespeaks his thanks to the magazine editors who were gracious
enough to permit him to include portions of his articles from their
pages. He wishes particularly to thank for their generous assistance in
the preparation of this book, R. C. Ellsworth, and Cromwell Childe of
New York; C. Armand Miller, D.D., of Philadelphia; Nat Olds, formerly of
Rochester; Edwin Baxter of Cleveland; and Victor Ross of Toronto.
Without their aid it is conceivable that the book would not have come
into its being. And having aided it, they must be content to be known as
its foster fathers.
E. H.
Brooklyn, New York, September, 1913.
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. OUR ANCIENT HUB 1
2. AMERICA'S NEW YORK 17
3. ACROSS THE EAST RIVER 61
4. WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN 76
5. THE MONUMENTAL CITY 95
6. THE AMERICAN MECCA 108
7. THE CITY OF THE SEVEN HILLS 127
8. WHERE ROMANCE AND COURTESY DO NOT FORGET 135
9. ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS 153
10. STEEL'S GREAT CAPITAL 171
11. THE SIXTH CITY 185
12. CHICAGO--AND THE CHICAGOANS 198
13. THE TWIN CITIES 212
14. THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTHWEST 225
15. THE OLD FRENCH LADY BY THE RIVERBANK 236
16. THE CITY OF THE LITTLE SQUARES 256
17. THE AMERICAN PARIS 266
18. TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC--AND A THIRD 280
19. SAN FRANCISCO--THE NEWEST PHOENIX 288
20. BELFAST IN AMERICA 307
21. WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET 318
22. THE CITY THAT NEVER GROWS YOUNG 332
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Madison Square, New York _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Tremont Street, Boston 2
Park Street, Boston 10
The Brooklyn Bridge 18
View of New York from a Skyscraper 30
Washington Square, New York 46
A Quiet Street on Brooklyn Heights 64
An old Brooklyn Homestead 72
City Hall Philadelphia 84
In Baltimore Harbor 96
Charles Street, Baltimore 102
The Union Station, Washington 114
The Capitol 122
St. Michael's Churchyard, Charleston 146
The Erie Canal, in Rochester 154
A Home in Rochester 160
Syracuse--the canal 168
The waterfront, Pittsburgh 180
One of Cleveland's broad avenues 192
Michigan Avenue and lake-front, Chicago 204
The River at St. Paul 220
Entrance to the University, St. Louis 226
A home in the newer St. Louis 232
Steamboat at the New Orleans levee 244
The big cathedral, San Antonio 256
San Juan Mission, San Antonio 262
The arch at 17th Street, Denver 270
Seattle, Puget Sound and the Olympics 282
Where the Pacific rolls up to San Francisco 294
The Mission Dolores, San Francisco 302
A Church parade in Montreal 320
Looking from the Terrace into Lower Quebec 334
Four Brethren upon the Terrace 340
THE PERSONALITY OF AMERICAN CITIES
1
OUR ANCIENT HUB
There are more things forbidden in Boston than in Berlin--and that is
saying much. You may be a citizen of a republic, but when you come to
the old Bay State town you suddenly realize that you are being ruled. At
each park entrance is posted a code of rules and regulations that would
take a quarter of an hour to read and digest; in the elevated and
trolley cars, in public institutions and churches, even in shops and
hotels, the canons laid down for your conduct are sharp in detail and
unvarying in command. You may not whistle in a public park, nor loiter
within a subway station, nor pray aloud upon the Charlesbank. And for
some reason, which seems delightfully unreasonable to a man without the
pale, you may not take an elevated ticket from an elevated railroad
station. It is to be immediately deposited within the chopping-box
before you board your train. As to what might happen to a hapless human
who emerged from a station with a ticket still in his possession, the
Boston code does not distinctly state.
And yet--like most tightly ruled principalities--Boston's attractiveness
is keen even to the unregulated mind. The effect of many rules and
sundry regulations seems to be law and order--to an extent hardly
reached in any other city within the United States. The Bostonian is
occasionally rude; these occasions are almost invariably upon his
overcrowded streets and in the public places--until the stranger may
begin to wonder if, after all, the street railroad employés have a
monopoly of good manners--but he is always just. His mind is judicial.
He treats you fairly. And if he knows you, knows your forbears as well,
he is courtesy of the highest sort. And there is no hospitality in the
land to be compared with Boston hospitality--once you have been admitted
to its portals.
[Illustration: Boston's _Via Sacre_--Tremont Street--and Park Street
church]
So we have come in this second decade of the twentieth century to speak
of the inner cult of the Boston folk as Brahmins. The term is not new.
But in the whole land there is not one better applied. For almost as the
high caste of mystic India hold themselves aloof from even the mere
sight of less favored humans, do these great, somber houses of Beacon
street and the rest of the Back Bay close their doors tightly to the
stranger. Make no mistake as to this very thing. You rarely read of
Boston society--her Brahmin caste--in the columns of her newspapers.
There are, of course, distinguished Boston folk whose names ring there
many times--a young girl who through her athletic triumphs and her sane
fashion of looking at life forms a good example for her sisters across
the land; a brilliant broker, with an itching for printer's ink, who
places small red devils upon his stationery; a society matron who must
always sit in the same balcony seat at the Symphony concerts, and who
houses in her eccentric Back Bay home perhaps the finest private art
gallery in America. These folk and many others of their sort head the
so-called "Society columns" of the Sunday newspapers. But the real
Bostonese do not run to _outre_ stationery or other eccentricities. They
live within the tight walls of their somber, simple, lovely old
red-brick houses, and thank God that there were days that had the names
of Winthrop or Cabot or Adams or Peabody spelled in tinted letters
along the horizon.
A. M. Howe, who knows his Boston thoroughly, once told of two old ladies
there who always quarreled as to which should have the first look at the
_Transcript_ each evening.
"I want to see if anybody nice has died in the _Transcript_ this
evening," the older sister would say as she would hear the thud of the
paper against the stout outer door,--and after that the battle was on.
We always had suspected Mr. Howe of going rather far in this, until we
came to the facts. It seems that there were two old ladies in Cambridge,
which--as every one ought to know, is a sort of scholastic annex to
Boston--and that they never quarreled--save on the matter of the first
possession of the _Transcript_. On that vexed question they never failed
to disagree. The matter was brought to the attention of the owners of
the newspaper--and they settled it by sending an extra copy of the
_Transcript_ each evening, with their compliments. And that could not
have happened anywhere else in this land save on the shores of
Massachusetts Bay.
Yet these old Bostonians the chance visitor to the city rarely, if ever,
sees. They are conspicuous by their very absence. He will not find them
lunching in the showy restaurants of the Touraine or in its newest
competitor farther up Boylston street. They shrink. He may sometime
catch a glimpse of a patrician New England countenance behind the
window-glass of a carriage-door, or even see the Brahmins quietly
walking home from church through the sacred streets of the Back Bay on a
Sunday morning, but that is all. The doors of the old houses upon those
streets are tightly closed upon him.
But if one of those doors will open ever and ever so tiny a crack to
him, it will open full-wide, with the generous width of New England
hospitality, and bid him enter. We remember dining in one of these
famous old houses two or three seasons ago. It was in the heart of
winter--a Boston winter--and the night was capriciously changing from
rain to sleet and sleet to rain again. The wind blew in from the sea
with that piercing sharpness, so characteristic of Boston. It bent the
bare branches of the old trees upon the Common, sent swinging overhead
signs to creaking and shrieking in their misery, played sad havoc with
unwary umbrellas, and shot the flares from the bracketed gas-lamps along
the streets into all manner of fanciful forms. In such a storm we made
our way through streets of solid brick houses up the hill to the famous
Bulfinch State House and then down again through Mount Vernon street and
Louisburg square--highways that once properly flattened might have been
taken from Mayfair or Belgravia. Finally our path led to a little
street, boasting but eight of the stolid brick houses and arranged in
the form of a capital T. The shank of the T gave that little colony its
sole access to the remainder of the world.
To one of these eight old houses--an austere fellow and the product of
an austere age--we were asked. When its solid door closed behind us, we
were in another Boston. Not that the interior of the house belied its
stolid front. It was as simple as yellow tintings and bare walls might
ever be. But the few pieces of furniture that were scattered through the
generous rooms were real furniture, mahogany of a sort that one rarely
ever sees in shops or auction-rooms, the canvases that occasionally
relieved those bare walls were paintings that would have graced even
sizeable public collections. The dinner was simple--compared with New
York standards--but the hospitality was generous, even still compared
with the standards of New York. To that informal dinner had been bidden
a group of Boston men and women fairly representative of the town, a
Harvard professor of real renown, the editor of an influential daily
newspaper, a barrister of national reputation, a sociologist whose heart
has gone toward her work and made that work successful. These folk,
exquisite in their poise because of their absolute simplicity, discussed
the issues of the moment--the city's progress in the playground
movement, the possibilities of minimum wage laws, the tragic devotion of
Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter to woman suffrage. In New York a similar
group of folk similarly gathered would have discussed the newest and
most elaborate of hotels or George M. Cohan's latest show.
It is this very quality that makes Boston so different--and so
delightful. She may look like a cleanly London, as she often
boasts--with her sober streets of red brick--and yet she still remains,
despite the great changes that have come to pass in the character of her
people within the past dozen years--a really American town. A few hours
of study of the faces upon the streets and in the public conveyances
will confirm this. And perhaps it is this very fact that makes a
certain, well-known resident of the Middle West come to Boston once or
twice each year without any purpose than his own announced one of
dwelling for a few days within a "really civilized community."
* * * * *
We well remember our first visit to Boston some--twenty years ago. We
came over the Boston & Albany railroad down into the old station in
Kneeland street. For it was before the day that those two mammoth and
barnlike terminals, the North and the South stations, had been built. In
those days the railroad stations of Boston expressed more than a little
of her personality--even the dingy ark of the Boston & Maine which
thrust itself out ahead of all its competitors along Causeway street
and reached into Haymarket square. The Providence station in Park square
and the Lowell and the Albany stations bespoke in pretentious
architecture something of the importance and elegance of those three
railroads, while as for the gray stone castellated station of the
Fitchburg railroad--that sublimated passenger-house made timid travelers
almost feel that they were gazing at the East portal of the Hoosic
tunnel itself. It originally held a great hall--superimposed above the
train-shed--and in that hall Jenny Lind sang when first she came to
Boston. Afterwards it was decided that a concert hall over a noisy
train-house was hardly a happy ingenuity and it was torn out. By that
time, however, the Fitchburg station had taken its place in the annals
of Boston.
But the Fitchburg railroad, even in its palmiest days, was never to be
compared with "the Albany." Even the railroad to Providence, with its
forty-five miles of well-nigh perfect roadbed, over which the trains
thundered in fifty-five minutes, even a half century ago, was not to be
mentioned in the same breath with the Boston & Albany. There _was_ a
railroad. And even if its charter did compel it to pay back to the
commonwealth of Massachusetts every penny that it earned in excess of
eight per cent. dividends upon its stock, that was not to be counted
against it. It had never the least difficulty in earning more than that
sum and, as far as we know, it never paid the state any money. But the
commonwealth of Massachusetts did not lose. It gained a high-grade
railroad--in the day when America hardly knew the meaning of such a
term. The stations along "the Albany" were rare bits of architecture
while the average railroad depot, even in good-sized towns, was a dingy,
barnlike hole. It ripped out wooden and iron bridges by the dozens along
its main line and branches and set the pace for the rest of the country
by building stout stone-arch bridges--of the sort that last the
centuries. These things, and many others, were typical of the road.
The Boston & Albany was unique in the fact that each stockholder who
lived along its lines received as a yearly perquisite a pass to the
annual meeting in Boston. The annual meetings were always well attended.
Staid college professors, remembering the joys of Boston book shops, old
ladies wearing black bombazine, tiny bonnets and prim expressions--all
these and many others, too, looked forward to the annual meeting of
their railroad as a child looks forward to Christmas.
This is not the time or place to discuss the vexatious railroad
situation in New England, but it is worth while to note that when the
New York Central railroad leased the Boston & Albany--a little more than
a dozen years ago--and began blotting out the familiar name upon the
engines and the cars, a wave of sentimental anger swept over Boston that
it had hardly known since it had inflamed over slavery and laid the
foundations for the greatest internecine conflict that the world has
ever known. Boston held no quarrel with the owners of the New York
Central--if they would only not disturb the traditions of its great
railroad. But the owners of the New York Central did not understand. It
was not them. It was that word "New York" being blazoned before Boston
eyes that was making the trouble. The old town had seen the Boston &
Providence and then, horror of horrors, the New England disappear before
a railroad that called itself the New York, New Haven & Hartford. And
after these the offense was being created against its pet railroad--the
Boston & Albany.
The other day the New York Central saw a great light. And in that mental
brilliancy it gave back to Boston its old railroad. As this is being
written "Boston & Albany" is reappearing upon whole brigades of engines
and regiments of freight and passenger cars. A friendly sentiment,
reared in traditions, has not been slow to show its appreciation of the
act of the railroad in New York. And the men in charge of the great
consolidation of the other railroads east of the Hudson river have not
been slow to follow in their action. They have announced that they plan
to build their railroads into one great system called the "New England
Lines." It begins to look as if, after all these years, they have begun
to read the Boston mind.
* * * * *
We have strayed far from our text--from our long ago early visit to
Boston. Our first impression of the town then came from a policeman whom
we saw in the old Kneeland street station. The policeman had white
side-whiskers and he wore gold-bowed spectacles. We have never, either
before or after our first arrival in Boston, seen a policeman adorned,
either simultaneously or separately, with white "mutton-chops" or
gold-bowed spectacles, and so it was that this Bostonian made a distinct
impression. Boston, itself, made many impressions. Twenty years ago many
of the institutions of the town that have since disappeared, still
remained. True it is that the horse-cars were going from Tremont street,
for the first of the diminutive subways that have kept the city years
ahead of most American towns in the solution of her intra-urban
transportation problems had been completed and was a nine-days' marvel
to the land. The coldly gray "Christian Science Cathedral," with its
wonderful Sunday congregations, could hardly have existed then, even as
a dream in the mind of its founder. And the Boston Museum still existed.
To be sure, many of its glories in the days of William Warren and Annie
Clarke had disappeared and it was doomed a few months later to such
attractions as the booking syndicates might allot it, but its row of
exterior lamps still blazed in Tremont street: until in June, 1903, it
rang down its green baize curtains and closed its historic doors for the
last time.
And yet Boston has not changed greatly in twenty years--not in outward
appearance at least. When she builds anew she builds with reverent
regard for her ideals and her past traditions. Her architects must be
steeped in both. Nearly twenty years ago she builded her first
skyscraper--a modest and dignified affair of but twelve stories--and was
then so shocked at her own audacity that she promised to be very, very
good for ever after and never to do anything of that sort again. So when
she found that a new hotel going up near Copley Square had overstepped
her modest limit of seven stories--or is it eight?--she showed that she
could have firmness in her determination. She chopped the cornice and
the upper story boldly off the new hotel, and so it stands today, as if
someone had passed a giant slicing-knife cleanly over the structure.
So it is that Boston still holds to her attractive sky-line, the
exquisite composition of such distinctive thoroughfares as Park street
from the fine old church at Tremont street up the hill to Beacon street,
the pillared, yellow front of the old State House; still keeps her
meeting-houses with their delicate belfried spires standing guard upon
her many hilltops; maintains the rich traditions of her history in the
infinite detail of her architecture--in some bit of wall or section of
iron fence, in the paneling of a door, the set of a cupola, the thrust
of a street-lamp, and even in the chimney-pots that thrust themselves on
high to the attention of the man upon the pavement. She cherishes her
memories. And when she builds anew she does not forget her ideals.
She never forgets her ideals. And if at times they may lead her to
regard herself a bit too seriously, they make for the old town one of
the things that too many other American towns lack--a real and
distinctive personality. For instance, take her public houses, her
taverns and inns. They are notable in the fact that they are
distinctive--and something more. In a day and age when the famous
American hotels of other days and generations and the things for which
they stood, have been rather forgotten in the strife to imitate a
certain type of New York skyscraper hotel, the Boston hotels still stand
distinctive. Not that the New York type of skyscraper is not excellent.
It must have had its strong points to have been so copied across the
land. But if all the hotels in every town, big and little, are to be
fashioned in the essentials from the same mold what is to become of the
zest for travel? You travel for variety's sake, otherwise you might as
well go to the local skyscraper hotel in your own town and save railroad
fare and other transportation expenses.
But no matter what may be true of other towns, the Boston hotels are
different. "I like the Quincy House for its sea-fud," said an old
legislator from Sandisfield more than forty years ago, and as for the
Tremont House, turn the pages of your "American Notes" and recall the
praise that Charles Dickens gave that not-to-be-forgotten hostelry. It
was one of the very few things in the earlier America that did not seem
to excite his entire contempt.
[Illustration: Up Park Street, past the Common to Boston's famous State
House]
The Tremont House has gone--it disappeared under the advance of
modernity in the serpent-like guise of the first subway in America,
creeping down in front of it. But other hotels of the old Boston remain
a'plenty, the staid Revere House, Parker's, Young's, the Adams
House,--ages seem to have mellowed but not lessened their comforts to
the traveler. Where else can one find a catalogue of the hotel library
hanging beside his dresser when he retires to the privacy of his room,
not a library crammed with "best-sellers" like these itinerant
institutions on the limited trains, but filled with real books of a far
more solid sort--where else such wisdom on tap in a tavern--but Boston?
And if the traveler fails to be schooled to such possibilities, we might
ask where else in Christendom can he get boiled scrod, or Washington
pie, or fish balls, or cod tongues with bacon, or that magna charta of
the New England appetite, that Plymouth rock from which has come all the
virtues of its sturdy folk, baked beans with brown bread? Eating in
Boston is good. In these things it is superlative. And it is pleasing to
know that Boston's newest hotel--the Copley-Plaza--perhaps the finest
hotel in America, since it has discarded new-fashioned details for the
old--observes the traditions of the town in which it truly earns its
bread and butter.
And if the traveler have magic sesame, the clubs of the old town may
open to him, clubs with spotless integrity and matchless service, all
the way from the stately Somerset and the Algonquin through to the
democratic City Club--with its more than four thousand enthusiastic
members. This last is perhaps the most representative of Boston clubs.
Its old house--unfortunately soon to be vacated--stands in Beacon
street, within a stone's throw of King's Chapel and Tremont street. It
is a rare old house; two houses in fact, lending tenderly to the Boston
traditions of delicate bow fronts and severity of ornament. Its rooms
are broad and long and low, filled with hospitable tables and
comfortable Windsor chairs. In its great fireplace hickory logs crackle
and the New England tradition of an ash-bank is preserved to the
minutest detail. Its dun-colored walls are lined with rare prints and
old photographs--pictures for the most part of that old Boston which was
and which never again can be. The dishes that come out from its kitchen
are from the best of traditional New England recipes. And as your host
leads you out from the dining-room he delves deep into a barrel and
brings out two bright red apples. He hands you one.
"We New England folk think that most of the real virtues of life are
seated in red apples," he says--and there is something in his way of
saying it that makes you believe that he is right.
Another day and he may lead you to still another club--this one down
under the roof of one of those solid old stone warehouses with
steep-pitched roofs that thrust themselves abruptly out into the
harbor-line. It is a yacht club, and its fortress-like windows, shaped
like the port-holes of a ship, look direct to a brisk water highway to
the open sea. Underneath those very windows is the rush and turmoil of
one of the busiest fish markets in the land. There is nothing on either
coast, no, not even down in the picturesque Gulf that can compare with
this place, which reeks with the odors and where the fishermen handle
the cod with huge forks and paint the decks of their staunch little
vessels a distinctive color to show the nationality of the folk who man
it. We remember that the Portuguese have a whimsical fancy for painting
the decks of their little fishing schooners a most unusual blue.
Of Boston harbor an entire book might easily be written--of the quaint
craft that still tie to its wharves, the brave show of shipping that
passes in and out each day, of Boston Light and that other silent,
watchful sentinel which stands upon Minot's Ledge; of the Navy Yard over
in Charlestown at which the _Constitution_, most famous of all
fighting-ships, rusts out her fighting heart through the long years. And
looking down upon that old Navy Yard from Boston itself is Copp's Hill
burying-ground, a rich grubbing-place for the seekers of epitaphs and of
genealogical lore. We remember once winning the heart of the keeper of
the old cemetery and of being permitted to descend to the vault of one
of the oldest of Boston families. In the dark place there were three
little groups of bones and we knew that only three persons had been
buried there.
Above, the sunshine beat merrily down upon Copp's Hill, with its
headstones arranged in neat rows along the tidy paths and the elevated
trains in an encircling street fairly belying the bullets in the
stones--shot there from Bunker Hill a century and a quarter before....
There are many other such burying-grounds in Boston--in the very heart
of the city the Granary and King's Chapel burying-ground where a great
owl sometimes comes at dusk and opens his eyes wide at the traffic of a
great city encircling one of God's acres. And a soul that revels in
these things will, perchance, journey to Salem, seventeen miles distant,
and see the moldering seaport that once rivaled Boston in her prosperity
and that sent her clipper ships sailing around the wide world. There are
many delightful side-trips out from Boston--the sail across the tumbling
bay to Provincetown, which still boasts a town crier, down to Plymouth
or up to Gloucester, with its smart, seaside resorts nearby. And back
from Boston there are other moldering towns, filled with fascination and
romance. Some of them have hardly changed within the century.
Even Boston does not change rapidly. Thank God for that! She keeps well
to the old customs and the old traditions, holds tightly to her ideals.
Only in the folk who walk her awkward streets can the discerning man see
the new Boston. The old types of Brahmins are outclassed. Some of them
still do amazingly well in the professions but these are few. Long ago
the steady press of immigration at the port of Boston took political
power away from them. Yet the old guard stands resolute. And the
impress of its manners is not lost upon the Boston of to-day.
For instance, take the vernacular of the town. Boston has a rather
old-fashioned habit of speaking the English language. It came upon us
rather suddenly one day as we journeyed out Huntington avenue to the
smart new gray and red opera house. The very colorings of the _foyer_ of
that house--soft and simple--bespoke the refinement of the Boston
to-day.
In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every other one of the big
opera houses that are springing up mushroom-fashion across the land, our
ears would have been assailed by "Librettos! Get your librettos!" Not so
in Boston. At the Boston Opera House the young woman back of the _foyer_
stand calmly announced at clock-like intervals:
"Translations. Translations."
And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians grasped by the hand and
seemed to regard as a long-lost friend, did not sip out, "Checks,
please."
"Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the hand-grasps of the
socially elect.
"The nearer door for those stepping out," announces the guard upon the
elevated train and as for the surface trolley-cars, those wonderful
green perambulators laden down with more signs than nine ordinary
trolley-cars would carry at one time, they do not speak of the newest
type in Boston as "Pay-as-you-enter cars," after the fashion of less
cultured communities. In the Hub they are known as Prepayment cars--its
precision is unrelenting.
All of these things make for the furthering of the charm of Boston. They
are tangible assets and even folk from the newer parts of the land are
not slow to realize them as such--remember that man from the Middle West
who makes a journey once or twice each year to be in the very heart of
civilization. There was another Westerner--this man a resident of Omaha,
who sent his boy--already a graduate of a pretty well-known university
near Chicago--to do some post-graduate work at Harvard. A few weeks
later he had a letter from his son. It read something after this
fashion:
"It seems absurd, Dad, but Harvard does have some absurd regulations. In
fine, they won't let me go out in a shell or boat of any sort upon the
river without special written permission from you. Will you fix me up by
return mail and we will both try to forget this fool undergraduate
regulation, etc...."
That regulation struck Daddy about as it had hit Sonny. But he hastened
to comply with the request. When he had finished, he felt that he had
turned out quite a document, one that would be enjoyed in the faculty
and perhaps framed and hung up in some quiet nook. It read:
"To all whom it may concern:
This is to certify that my son, John Japson Jones, is hereby
authorized and permitted to row, swim, dive or otherwise disport
himself upon, above or under the waters of the Charles river,
Massachusetts bay and waters adjacent to them until especially
revoked. Given under my hand and seal at the city of Omaha in
the state of Nebraska, on the ....th day of October, 19....
(Signed)
JAMES JONES."
Then James Jones awaited the consequences. It was not long after that
the letter came from John Japson.
"--How could you do it, Dad?" he demanded. "You don't know these folks.
They're not our sort. They don't know humor. They're afraid of it. The
only man I dared to show that awful thing to was the janitor and he
stuck up his nose. 'Guess your pop must have been a little full,' was
his comment."
James Jones decided to come to Boston forthwith. He wanted to see for
himself what sort of a community John Japson had strayed into. He did
see Boston, Cambridge too, to his heart's content. Boston was his
particular delight. Two of its citizens took the gentleman from Omaha
well in hand. They showed him the Frog Pond--it was just before the
season when they remove the Frog Pond for the season and put down the
boardwalks in the Common--and they showed him the crookedest streets of
any town upon the American continent. They filled him with beans and
with codfish, tickled his palate with the finest Medford rum. He mingled
and he browsed and before they were done with him his barbaric soul
became enraptured.
"Boston is great," he admitted, frankly. Then, in an afterthought, he
added:
"I think that I should like to call her the Omaha of the East."
* * * * *
The owl still comes on cloudy, troubled nights and sits in a high
tree-limb above the quiet graves in the graveyard of King's Chapel. When
he comes he sees the tardiest of the Boston men, carrying the green
bags, that their daddies and their granddaddies before them carried, as
they go slipping down the School street hill. He is a very old owl and
he loves the old town--loves each of its austere meeting-houses with
their belfried towers, loves the meeting places behind the rows of
chimney-pots, the open reaches of the Common and the adjoining Public
Gardens, where children paddle in the swan-boats all summer long. He
loves the tang and mist of the nearby sea, but best of all he likes the
tree-limb in the old graveyard, the part of Boston that stands
changeless through the years--that thrusts itself into the very face of
modernity with the grimy stone church at its corner and seems to say:
"I am the Past. To the Past, Reverence."
And in Boston Modernity halts many times to make obeisance to the Past.
2
AMERICA'S NEW YORK
I
Before the dawn, metropolitan New York is astir. As a matter of far more
accurate fact she never sleeps. You may call her the City of the
Sleepless Eye and hit right upon the mark. For at any time of the lonely
hours of the night she is still a busy place. Elevated and subway trains
and surface cars, although shortened and reduced in number, are upon
their ways and are remarkably well filled. Regiments of men are engaged
in getting out the morning papers--in a dozen different languages of the
sons of men--and another regiment is coming on duty to lay the
foundations of the earliest editions of the evening papers. There are
workers here and there and everywhere in the City of the Sleepless Eye.
But before the dawn, New York becomes actively astir. Lights flash into
dull radiance in the rows of side-street tenement and apartment houses
all the way from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is beginning to
dress. Other lights flash into short brilliancy before the coming of the
dawn. New York is beginning to eat its breakfast. And right afterwards
the stations of the elevated and the subway, the corners where the
speeding surface cars will sometimes hesitate, become the objects of
attack of an army that is marching upon the town. Workaday New York is
stretching its arms and settling down to business.
Nor is the awakening city to be confined to the narrow strip of island
between the North and East rivers. Over on Long island are Brooklyn,
Long Island City, Flushing, Jamaica and a score of other important
places now within the limits of Greater New York. Some folk find it more
economical to live in these places than in the cramped confines of
Manhattan, and so it is hardly dawn before the great bridges and the
tubes over and under the East river are doing the work for which they
were built--and doing it masterfully.
The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it has been bending
to its superhuman task for barely thirty years. In these thirty years it
has been constantly reconstructed--but the best devices of the
engineers, doubling and tripling the facilities of the original
structure, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the communities and
the traffic it has to serve. So within these thirty years other bridges
and two sets of tunnels have come to span the East river. But the work
of the first of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water highway
has hardly lessened. The oldest of the bridges, and the most beautiful
despite the ugliness of its approaches, still pours Brooklynites into
Park Row, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand to the hour.
[Illustration: The Brooklyn Bridge is the finest of transportation
structures]
The overloading of the Brooklyn bridge is repeated in the subway--that
hidden giant of New York, which is the real backbone of the island of
Manhattan. Built to carry four hundred thousand humans a day, that busy
railroad has begun to carry more than a million each working day. How it
is done, no one, not even the engineers of the company that operates it,
really knows. The riders in the great tube who have to use it during the
busiest of the rush hours are willing to hazard a guess, however. It is
probable that in no other railroad of the sort would jamming and
crowding of this sort be tolerated for more than a week. Yet the patrons
of the subway not only tolerate but, after a fashion, they like it.
You can ask a New Yorker about it half an hour after his trip down town,
sardine-fashion, and he will only say:
"The subway? It's the greatest ever. I can come down from Seventy-second
street to Wall street in sixteen minutes, and in the old days it used to
take me twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes by the elevated."
There is your real New Yorker. He would be perfectly willing to be bound
and gagged and shot through a pneumatic tube like a packet of letters,
if he thought that he could save twenty minutes between the Battery and
the Harlem river. No wonder then that he scorns a relatively greater
degree of comfort in elevated trains and surface cars and hurries to the
overcrowded subway.
But New York astir in the morning is more even than Manhattan, the Bronx
and the populous boroughs over on Long island. Upon its westerly edge
runs the Hudson river--New Yorkers will always persist in calling it the
North river--one of the masterly water highways of the land. The busy
East river had been spanned by man twice before any man was bold enough
to suggest a continuous railroad across the Hudson. Now there are
several--the wonderful double tubes of the Pennsylvania railroad leading
from its new terminal in the uptown heart of Manhattan--and two double
sets of tunnels of a rapid-transit railroad leading from New Jersey both
uptown and downtown in Manhattan. This rapid transit railroad--the
Hudson & Manhattan, to use its legal name, although most New Yorkers
speak of it as the McAdoo Tubes, because of the man who had the courage
to build it--links workaday New York with a group of great railroad
terminals that line the eastern rim of New Jersey all the way from
Communipaw through Jersey City to Hoboken. And the railroads reach with
more than twenty busy arms off across the Jersey marshes to rolling
hills and incipient mountains. Upon those hills and mountains live
nearly a hundred thousand New Yorkers--men whose business interests are
closely bound up in the metropolis of the New World but whose social and
home ties are laid in a neighboring state. These--together with their
fellows from Westchester county, the southwestern corner of Connecticut
and from the Long island suburban towns--measure a railroad journey of
from ten to thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at night,
as but an incident in their day's work. They form the great brigade of
commuters, as a rule the last of the working army of New York to come to
business.
The commuter has his own troubles--sometimes. By reason of his
self-chosen isolation he may suffer certain deprivations. The servant
question is not the least of these. And the extremes of a winter in New
York come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight-twenty-two
suddenly loses all that reputation for steadiness and sobriety that it
has taken half a year to achieve, days when sleepy schooners laden with
brick and claiming the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught in
the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness of a miniature
blizzard freezes terminal switches and signals and tangles traffic
inexplicably--days, and nights as well, when the streets of his suburban
village are well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremendous
minority. And even upon the worst of them he can put the rush and
turmoil of the city behind him--in the peace and silence of his country
place he can forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear--with the noisy
twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano right overhead.
* * * * *
For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work continues. You can
gauge it by a variety of conditions--even by the newspapers that are
being spread wide open the length of the cars. In the early morning the
popular penny papers--the _American_ and the _World_ predominating, with
a sprinkling of the _Press_ in between. Two hours later and while these
popular penny papers are still being read--they seem to have a
particular vogue with the little stenographers and the shopgirls--the
more staid journals show themselves. Men who like the solid reading of
the _Times_, with its law calendars and its market reports; men of the
town who frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of the _Sun_,
or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their youth enough to
carry them beyond the immensely personal tone of the _Herald_. And in
between these, men who sniff at the mere mention of the name of
Roosevelt, and who read the _Tribune_ because their daddies and their
grand-daddies in their turn read it before them, or frankly business
souls who are opening the day with a conscientious study of the _Journal
of Commerce_ or the Wall street sheets.
New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And before you have
finished a Day of Days in the biggest city of the land you might also
see that it goes to lunch with a newspaper in its hand, returns home
tired with the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably into
the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper.
Just as you stand at the portals of the business part of the town and
measure the incoming throng by its favorite papers so can you sieve out
the classes of the workers almost by the hours at which they report for
duty. In the early morning, in the winter still by artificial light,
come those patient souls who exist literally and almost bitterly by the
labor of their hands and the sweat of their brows. With them are the
cleaners and the elevator crews of the great office-buildings--those
tremendous commercial towers that New York has been sending skyward for
the past quarter of a century. On the heels of these the first of the
workers in the office-buildings, office-boys, young clerks, girl
stenographers whose wonderful attire is a reflection of the glories that
we shall see upon Fifth avenue later in this day. It is pinching
business, literally--the dressing of these young girls. But if their
faces are suspiciously pinky or suspiciously chalky, if their pumps and
thin silk stockings, their short skirts and their open-necked waists
atrocious upon a chill and nasty morning, we shall know that they are
but the reflection of their more comfortable sisters uptown. Not all of
this rapidly increasing army of women workers in business New York is
artificial. Not a bit of it. There are girls in downtown offices whose
refinement of dress and deportment, whose exquisite poise, whose
well-schooled voices might have come from the finest old New York
houses. And these are the girls who revel in their Saturday afternoons
uptown--all in the smartness of best bib and tucker--at the matinee or
fussing with tea at Sherry's or the Plaza.
An army of office workers pours itself into the business buildings that
line Broadway and its important parallel streets all the way from
Forty-second street to the Battery--that cluster with increasing
discomfort in the narrow tip of Manhattan south of the City Hall.
Clerks, stenographers, more clerks, more stenographers, now department
heads and junior partners--finally the big fellows themselves, coming
down democratically in the short-haul trains of the Sixth avenue
elevated that start from Fifty-eighth street or even enduring the
discomforts of the subway, for it takes a leisurely sort of a
millionaire indeed who can afford to come in his motor car all the way
downtown through the press and strain of Broadway traffic. After all
these, the Wall street men. For the exchange opens at the stroke of ten
of Trinity's clock and five brief and bitter hours of trading have
begun.
For four hours this flood of humans pouring out of the ferry-house and
the railroad terminals, up from the subway kiosks and out from the
narrow stairways of the elevated railroads. The narrow downtown streets
congest, again and again. The sidewalks overflow and traffic takes to
the middle of the streets. But the great office buildings absorb the
major portion of the crowds. Their vertical railroads--eight or ten or
twenty or thirty cars--are working to capacity and workaday New York is
sifting itself to its task. By ten o'clock the office buildings are
aglow with industry--the great machine of business starting below the
level of the street and reaching high within the great commercial
towers.
II
New York is the City of the Towers.
Sometimes a well-traveled soul will arise in the majesty of
contemplation and say that in the American metropolis he sees the
shadowy ghost of some foreign one. Along Madison square, where the
cabbies still stand in a long, gently-curving, expectant line he will
draw his breath through his teeth, point with his walking stick through
the tracery of spring-blossoming foliage at Diana on her tower-perch and
whisper reverently:
"It is Paris--Paris once again."
And there is a lower corner of Central Park that makes him think of
Berlin; a long row of red brick houses with white trimmings along the
north shore of Washington square that is a resemblance to blocks of a
similar sort in London.
But he is quite mistaken. New York does not aim to be a replica of any
foreign metropolis. She has her own personality, her own aggressive
individualism; she is the City of the Towers as well as the City of the
Sleepless Eye--and no mean city at that. Take some clever European
traveler, a man who can find his way around any of the foreign capitals
with his eyes shut, and let him come to New York for the first time;
approach our own imperial city through her most impressive gateway--that
narrow passage from the sea between the ramparts of the guarding
fortresses. This man, this traveler, has heard of the towers of the
great New World city--they have been baldly pictured to him as giant,
top-heavy barracks, meaningless compositions of ugly blank walls,
punctuated with an infinity of tiny windows. That is the typical libel
that has gone forth about New York.
He sees naught of such. He sees a great city, the height of its
buildings simply conveying the impression from afar that it is builded
upon a steep ridge. Here and there a building of still loftier height
gives accent to the whole, emphasis to what might otherwise be a
colorless mass; gives that mysterious tone and contrast which the artist
is pleased to call "composition." Four of these towers already rise
distinct from the giant skyscrapers of Manhattan. Each for this moment
proclaims a victory of the American architect and the American builder
over the most difficult problem ever placed before architect or builder.
The European traveler will give praise to the sky-line of New York as he
sees it from the steamer's deck.
"It is the City of the Towers," he will say.
* * * * *
In this, your Day of Days in New York, come with us and see the making
of a skyscraper. This skyscraper is the new Municipal Building. It is
just behind the tree-filled park in which stands New York's oldest bit
of successful architecture--its venerable City Hall. A long time before
New York dreamed that she might become the City of the Towers they
builded this old City Hall--upon what was then the northerly edge of the
town. So sure were those old fellows that New York would never grow
north of their fine town hall that they grew suddenly economical--the
spirit of their Dutch forbears still dominated them--and builded the
north wall of Virginia freestone instead of the white marble that was
used for the facings of the other walls.
"No one will ever see that side of the building," they argued. "We might
as well use cheap stone for that wall."
Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely
populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap
north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one
acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new--when the
gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban
residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect
Pond--where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of
old-fashioned winters--lapped its northerly edge. There was no ugly
Court House or even uglier Post Office to block the view from the
Mayor's office up and down Broadway. New Yorkers were proud of their
City Hall then--and good cause had they for their pride. It is one of
the best bits of architecture in all America. And an even century of
hard usage and countless "restorations" has only brought to it the charm
of serene old age.
But the City Hall long since was outgrown. The municipal government of
New York is a vast and somewhat unwieldy machine that can hardly be
housed within a dozen giant structures. To provide offices for the
greater part of the city's official machinery, this towering Municipal
Building has just been erected. And because it is so typical of the best
form of the so-called skyscraper architecture, let us stop and take a
look at it, listen to the story of its construction. In appearance the
new Municipal Building is a gray-stone tower twenty-five stories in
height and surmounted by a tower cupola an additional fifteen stories in
height. In plan the structure is a sort of semi-octagon--a very shallow
letter "U," if you please. But its most unusual feature comes from the
fact that it squarely spans one of the busiest crosstown highways in the
lower part of the city--Chambers street. The absorption of that busy
thoroughfare is recognized by a great depressed bay upon the west
front--the main _façade_ of the building. And incidentally that
depressed bay makes interior courts within the structure absolutely
unnecessary. So much for the architectural features, severe in its
detail, save for some ornate and not entirely pleasing sculptures. You
are interested in knowing how one of these giants--so typical of the new
New York--are fabricated.
This young man--hardly a dozen years out of a big technical school--can
tell you. He has supervised the job. Sometimes he has slept on it--in a
narrow cot in the temporary draughting-house. He knows its every detail,
as he knows the fingers of his hands.
"Just remember that we began by planning a railroad station in the
basement with eight platform tracks for loading and unloading
passengers."
"A railroad station?" you interrupt.
"Certainly," is his decisive reply. "Downstairs we will soon have the
most important terminal of a brand new subway system crossing the
Manhattan and the Williamsburgh bridges and reaching over Brooklyn like
a giant gridiron."
He goes on to the next matter--this one settled.
"There was something more than that. We had to plant on that cellar a
building towering forty stories in the air; its steel frame alone
weighing twenty-six thousand tons--more than half the weight of the
heaviest steel cantilever bridge in America--had to be firmly set."
The young engineer explains--in some detail. To find a foothold for this
building was no sinecure. Tests with the diamond drill had shown that
solid rock rested at a depth of 145 feet below street level at the south
end of the plat. At the north end, the rock sloped away rapidly and so
that part of the building rests upon compact sand. The rock topography
of Manhattan island is uncertain. There are broad areas where solid
gneiss crops close to the street level, others where it falls a hundred
feet or more below water level. There is a hidden valley at Broadway and
Reade street, a deep bowl farther up Broadway. Similarly, the north
extremity of the Municipal Building rests upon the edge of still another
granite bowl--the sub-surface of that same Collect Pond upon which the
New York boys used to skate a century or more ago.
"That bothered some folks at first," laughs the engineer, "but we met it
by sinking the caissons. We've more than a hundred piers down under this
structure hanging on to Mother Earth. You don't realize the holding
force of those piers," he continues. He turns quickly and points to a
fourteen story building off over the trees of City Hall park. Out in one
of the good-sized towns of the Middle West people would gasp a little at
sight of it--in New York it is no longer even a tower.
"Turn that fellow right upside down into the hole we dug for this
building," says the engineer, "and the rim of his uppermost cornice
would about reach the feet of our own little forest of buried concrete
piers."
That was one detail of the construction of the building. Here is
another; the first six stories of the new structure involved elaborate
masonry, giant stones, much carved. From the seventh story the plain
walls of the exterior developing into an elaborate cornice were of
simple construction. If the setting of these upper floors had waited
until the first six stories of elaborate stonework had been made ready
there would have been a delay of months in the construction work. So the
contractor began building the walls--which in the modern steel
skyscraper as you know form no part of the real structure but act rather
as a stone envelope to keep out hard weather--from the seventh story
upward. Eventually the masons working on the first six stories, working
upwards all the time, reached and joined the lower edge of the masonry
that had been set some weeks before. Time had been saved and you know
that time _does_ count in New York. Remember the Wall street man who
preferred to have his ribs crushed and his hat smashed down over his
nose in the subway rather than lose ten minutes each day in the
elevated.
Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the
tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before
you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway--but so lined with towering
buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes
the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier
highway--the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges--the
oldest of them landing at your very feet--and crawling things upon them,
which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and
automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. Beyond the East river
and its bridges--the last of these far to the north and barely
discernible--is Brooklyn, and beyond Brooklyn--this time to the
south--is a shimmering slender horizon of silver that the man beside you
tells you is the ocean.
You let your gaze come back to the wonderful view which the building
squarely faces. You look down upon the towers of New York--big towers
and little towers--and you lift your eyes over the dingy mansard of the
old Post Office and see the greatest of all the towers--the creamy white
structure that a man has builded from his profits in the business of
selling small articles at five and ten cents apiece. It is fifty-five
stories in height--exquisitely beautiful in detail--and the owner will
possess for a little time at least, the highest building in the world.
You can see the towers in every vista, puffing little clouds of white
smoke into the purest blue air that God ever gave a city in which to
spin her fabrications. To the north, the south, the west, they show
themselves in every infinite variety and here and there between them
emerge up-shouldering rivals, steel-naked in their gaunt frames. If your
ears are keen and the wind be favorable perhaps you can hear the clatter
of the riveters and you can see over there the housesmiths riding aloft
on the swinging girders with an utter and immensely professional
indifference, threading the slender, dizzy floor-girders as easily as a
cat might tread the narrow edge of a backyard fence.
Off with your gaze again. Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark
green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful
campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle
Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the
Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that
thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the
City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor
of New York--of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the
tribute that is rightfully hers.
Now let your vision drop into the near foreground--into the tracery of
trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in
the broad-paved street at your feet with the queer little openings
through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel;
others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black
molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways
of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks
grow a little blacker than before.
"It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer.
Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical
of the towers has not been ill-spent.
III
Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide
New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and
office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the
coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches.
[Illustration: The view of New York from the lunch club in the
skyscraper]
Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair--generally
a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost
an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining
rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their
ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan,
streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity
finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is
congestion upon the sidewalks--the favorite stools at the counters, the
better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At
twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at
the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing
verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers
are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go
uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors
with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with
the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been
fed. Order after pandemonium--readiness for the two hours of gorge upon
the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity
church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls
have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third
street--at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd
restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars.
* * * * *
You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys
and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street
between Park Row and Nassau--the real Grub street of New York--are
proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering for
sandwiches--"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them
in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for
a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger
restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown--and
that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations
of your taste--and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to
run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help
yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your
midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly
content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems
absurd--to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room
owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are
honest, as a general thing--particularly honest in little matters of
this sort.
"It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big
lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one
of his places--it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches
each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole
mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier--now I'm looking out
for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's
a lot of it."
"And you don't run many risks?" you venture.
"Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here
yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some
of the rules of the game here--how when a customer comes in and throws
his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee
counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My
Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my
neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the
uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the
biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but
before they can start they must buy a check--pay in advance, you
understand. They've tried the downtown way--and now they take no
chances."
The floor manager laughs nervously.
"It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet
lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's
places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we
wouldn't make good with them--but we're ready to start another within
the month. The business girls don't cheat--no matter what their uptown
sisters may try to do."
* * * * *
As a matter of fact downtown business girls in New York eat very
sensibly. Sweets are popular but not invariable. They prefer candy, with
fruit as a second choice, to be eaten some time during the afternoon.
In big offices, where many girls are employed, "candy pools" are often
made, each girl contributing five cents and getting her pro rata, one
member of the staff being delegated to make the purchases. Eaten in this
way the candy acts as a stimulant during the late afternoon hours, in
much the same way as the invariable tea of the business man in London.
The business girl in New York takes her full hour for luncheon. It is
seldom a minute more or a minute less. She is willing as a rule to stay
overtime at night but she feels that she must have her sixty minutes in
the middle of the day. A part of the lunch hour is always a
stroll--unless there be a downpour. Certain downtown streets from twelve
to one o'clock each day suggest the proximity of a nearby high school or
seminary. There is much pairing off and quiet flirtation. This noon-day
promenade of girls--for the most part astonishingly well-dressed girls
and invariably in twos and threes--is one of the sights of downtown New
York. Some of the girls gather in the old churchyards of Trinity and St.
Paul's--in lower Broadway--on pleasant days. They sit down among the
tombstones with their little packages of food and eat and chat and then
stroll. No one molests them and the church authorities, although a
little flustered when this first began, have seen that there is no harm
in it and let the girls have their own way. There is always great
decorousness and these big open-air spaces in the midst of the crowded
street canyons are enjoyed by the women who appreciate the grass and
winding paths after the hard pavements.
All the business girls downtown are not content with sitting after lunch
among the tombstones of St. Paul's churchyard or of Trinity. He was
indeed a canny lunch-man who took note of all the girls strolling in the
narrow streets of downtown Manhattan, who remembered that all New York,
rich or poor, loves to dance and who then fitted up an unrentable third
floor loft over his eating place as a dancing hall. Two violins and a
piano--a gray-bearded sandwich man to patrol the streets with "DANCING"
placarded fore and aft upon his boards--the trick was done. Mamie told
Sadie and Sadie told Elinor and Elinor told Flossie and the lunch-man
began to grow famous. He made further study of the psychology of his
patrons. There were the young fellows--shipping and file clerks and even
ambitious young office-boys to be considered. There were the after-lunch
smokes of these young captains of industry to come into the reckoning.
The lunch-man placed a row of chairs along one edge of his dancing-hall
and over them "Smoking Permitted at This End of the Room." After that
Mamie and Sadie and Elinor and Flossie had partners and the lunch-man
was on the highway to a six-cylinder motor car. He has his imitators. If
you were in business in lower New York and your stenographer began to
hum the "Blue Danube" along about half an hour before noon you would
very well know she was gathering steam for the blissful twenty minutes
of dancing that was going to help her digest her lunch.
* * * * *
You, yourself, are going to lunch in still another sort of restaurant.
It is characteristic of a type that has sprung up on the tip of
Manhattan island within the past dozen years. You reach this
grubbing-place by skirting the front doors of unspeakably dirty
eating-houses in a mean street of the Syrian quarter. Finally you turn
the corner of a dingy brick building, which was once the great house of
one of the contemporaries of the first of the Vanderbilts and which has
managed to escape destruction for three quarters of a century and
face--the only skyscraper in congested New York which stands in a
grass-platted yard--the whim of its wealthy owner. A fast elevator
whisks you thirty stories to the top of the building and you step into
the lobby of what looks, at first glance, to be the entrance hall of
some fine restaurant in uptown's Fifth avenue. But this is a
lunching-club--one of the newest in the town as well as one of the most
elaborate.
Elaborate did we say? This is the elaboration of perfect
taste--unobtrusive rugs, hangings, lighting fixtures and
furniture--great, broad rooms and from their windows there comes to you
another of the spectacular views that lay below the man-made peaks of
Manhattan. To the south--the smooth, blue surface of the upper bay--in
the foreground a nine hundred foot ship coming to the new land, her
funnels lazily breathing smoke at the first lull in her four-day race
across the Atlantic; to the east, a mighty river and its bridges,
Brooklyn again and on very clear days, visions of Long island; to the
north the most wonderful building construction that man has ever
attempted, Babylonic in its immensity; to the west the brisk waterway of
the North river and beyond it, Jersey City, sandwiched in between the
smoky spread of railroad yards. This is the sort of thing that Mr.
Downtown Luncher may have--if he is willing to pay the price. On torrid
summer days he may ascend to the roof-garden, may glance lazily below
him at the activities of the busiest city in the world and sip up the
cool breezes from the sea, while folk down in the bottom of the Broadway
chasm are sweltering from heat and humidity. And in winter he will find
a complete gymnasium in operation on another floor of the club, with a
competent instructor in charge. The "doctor," as they call him, will lay
out a course of work. And that course of work, calling for a half-hour
of exercise each day just before lunch will make dyspeptic and paunchy
old money-grubbers alike, keen as farmhands coming into dinner.
And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business
heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching
of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights
are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions;
while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to
assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable
restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its
compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers'
Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the
Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for
its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet
between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs--the
Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association,
the new Lawyers--many, many others; almost invariably occupying the
upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for
them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred
dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form
of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are
never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of
the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality--the
hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St.
Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses.
* * * * *
Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end--with the ending of
the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of _café noir_ he is tugging at
his watch.
"Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that
railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes."
That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his
hospitality--his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing
details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever
flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is
over--and you are dismissed, courteously--but none the less dismissed.
With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to
the subway--gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand--and plunges
back into the great and grinding machine of business.
Lunch in your Day of Days within the City of the Towers is over. Three
o'clock. Before the last echoes of Trinity's bell go ringing down
through Wall street to halt the busy Exchange--the multitude has been
fed. Miss Stenographer has had her salad and éclair, two waltzes and
perhaps a "turkey trot" into the bargain, and is back at the keys of her
typewriter. Mr. President has entertained that Certain Party at the club
and has made him promise to sign that mighty important contract. And the
certain Party and Mr. President rode for half an hour on the mechanical
horses in the gymnasium. What fun, too, for those old boys?
Three o'clock! The cashiers are totaling their receipts, the waiters and
the 'buses are upturning chairs and tables to make way for the
scrub-women, some are already beginning to don their overcoats to go
uptown; but the three-quarters of a million of hungry mouths have been
fed. New York has caught its breath in mid-day relaxation and once more
is hard at work--putting in the last of its hours of the business day
with renewed and feverish energy.
IV
You had planned at first to walk up Broadway. You wanted to see once
again the church-yards around Trinity and St. Paul's, perhaps make a
side excursion down toward Fraunces' Tavern--just now come back into its
own again. Some of the old landmarks that are still hidden around
downtown New York seemed to appeal to you. But your host at luncheon
laughed at you.
"If you want to spend your time that way, all right," he said, "but the
only really old things you will find in New York are the faces of the
young men. You can find those anywhere in the town."
And there was another reckoning to be figured. Three o'clock means the
day well advanced and there is a _vis-à-vis_ awaiting you uptown. Of
course, there is a Her to enjoy your Day of Days with you. And just for
convenience alone we will call her Katherine. It is a pretty name for a
woman, and it will do here and now quite as well as any other.
Katherine is waiting for you in the Fourteenth street station of the
subway. She is prompt--after the fashion of most New York girls. And it
is a relief to come out of the overcrowded tube and find her there at
the entrance that leads up to sunshine and fresh air. She knows her New
York thoroughly and as a prelude to the trip uptown she leads you over
to Fifth avenue--to the upper deck of one of those big green
peregrinating omnibuses.
"It's a shame that we could not have started at Washington square," she
apologizes. "When you sweep around and north through the great arch it
almost seems as if you were passing through the portals of New York. It
is one of the few parts of the town that are not changing rapidly."
For Fifth avenue--only a few blocks north of that stately arch--has
begun to disintegrate and decay. Not in the ordinary sense of those
terms. But to those who remember the stately street of fifteen or twenty
years ago--lined with the simple and dignified homes of the town--its
change into a business thoroughfare brings keen regrets. Katherine
remembers that she read in a book that there are today more factory
workers employed in Fifth avenue or close to it, than in such great mill
cities as Lowell or Lawrence or Fall River, and when you ask her the
reason why she will tell you how these great buildings went soaring up
as office-buildings, without office tenants to fill them. They represent
speculation, and speculation is New Yorkish. But speculation in
wholesale cannot afford to lose, and that is why the garment
manufacturers and many others of their sort came flocking to the great
retail shopping district between Fourth and Seventh avenues and
Fourteenth and Thirty-fourth streets, and sent the shops soaring further
to the north. It has been expensive business throughout, doubly
expensive, because absolutely unnecessary. Some of the great retail
houses of New York built modern and elaborate structures south of
Thirty-fourth street within the past twenty years in the firm belief
that the retail shopping section had been fixed for the next half
century. But the new stores had hardly been opened before the deluge of
manufacturing came upon them. Shoppers simply would not mix with factory
hands upon lower Fifth avenue and the side streets leading from it. And
so the shop-keepers have had to move north and build anew. And just what
a tax such moving has been upon the consumer no one has ever had the
audacity to estimate.
"They should have known that nothing ever stays fixed in New York," says
Katherine. "We are a restless folk, who make a restless city. Stay
fixed? Did you notice the station at which you entered today?"
Of course you did. The new Grand Central, with its marvelous blue
ceiling capping a waiting-room so large that the New York City Hall,
cupola, wings and all could be set within it, can hardly escape the
attention of any traveler who passes within its portals.
"It is the greatest railroad station in the world," she continues, "and
yet I have read in the newspapers that Commodore Vanderbilt built on
that very plat of ground in 1871 the largest station in the world for
the accommodation of his railroads. He thought that it would last for
all time. In forty years the wreckers were pulling it down. It was
outgrown, utterly outgrown and they were carting it off piece by piece
to the rubbish heaps."
She turns suddenly upon you.
"That is typical of our restless, lovely city," she tells you. And you,
yourself, have heard that only two years ago they tore down a nineteen
story building at Wall and Nassau streets so that they might replace it
by another of the towers--this one thirty stories in height.
* * * * *
The conductor of the green omnibus thrusts his green fare-box under your
nose. You find two dimes and drop it into the contrivance.
"You can get more value for less money and less value for much money in
New York than in any other large city in the world," says Katherine.
She is right--and you know that she is right. You can have a glorious
ride up the street, that even in its days of social decadence is still
the finest highway in the land--a ride that continues across the town
and up its parked rim for long miles--for a mere ten cents of Uncle
Sam's currency and as for the reverse--well you are going to dinner in
a smart hotel with Katherine in a little while.
You swing across Broadway and up the west edge of Madison square, catch
a single, wondering close-at-hand glimpse of the white campanile of the
Metropolitan tower which dominates that open place and so all but
replaces Diana on her perch above Madison Square Garden--a landmark of
the New York of a quarter of a century ago and which is apt to come into
the hands of the wreckers almost any day now. Now you are at the south
edge of the new shopping district, although some of the ultra places
below Thirty-fourth street have begun to move into that portion of the
avenue just south of Central Park. In a little while they may be
stealing up the loveliest portion of the avenue--from Fifty-ninth street
north.
The great shops dominate the avenue. And if you look with sharp eyes as
the green bus bears you up this _via sacre_, you may see that one of the
greatest ones--a huge department store encased in architecturally superb
white marble--bears no sign or token of its ownership or trade. An
oversight, you think. Not a bit of it. Four blocks farther up the avenue
is another great store in white marble--a jewelry shop of international
reputation. You will have to scan its broad _façade_ closely indeed
before you find the name of the firm in tiny letters upon the face of
its clock. Oversight? Not a bit of it. It is the ultra of shop-keeping
in New York--the assumption that the shop is so well known that it need
not be placarded to the vulgar world. And if strangers from other points
fail to identify it--well that is because of their lack of knowledge and
the shopkeeper may secretly rejoice.
But, after all, it is the little shops that mark the character of Fifth
avenue--not its great emporiums. It is the little millinery shops where
an engaging creature in black and white simpers toward you and calls
you, if you are of the eternal feminine, "my dear;" the jewelry shops
where the lapidary rises from his lathe and offers a bit of
craftsmanship; the rare galleries that run from old masters to modern
etchers; specialty shops, filled top to bottom with toys or Persian
rugs, or women's sweaters, or foreign magazines and books, that render
to Fifth avenue its tremendous cosmopolitanism. These little shops make
for personality. There is something in the personal contact between the
proprietor and the customer that makes mere barter possess a real
fascination. And if you do pay two or three times the real value in the
little shop you have just so much more fun out of the shopping. And
there are times when real treasures may come out of their stores.
"Look at the cornices," interrupts Katherine. "Mr. Arnold Bennett says
that they are the most wonderful things in all New York."
Katherine may strain her neck, looking at cornices if she so wills. As
for you, the folk who promenade the broad sidewalks are more worth your
while. There are more of them upon the west walk than upon the east--for
some strange reason that has long since brought about a similar
phenomenon upon Broadway and sent west side rents high above those upon
the east. Fifth avenue thrusts its cosmopolitanism upon you, not alone
in her shops, with their wonderfully varied offerings, but in the very
humans who tread her pavements. The New York girl may not always be
beautiful but she is rarely anything but impeccable. And if in the one
instance she is extreme in her styles, in the next she is apt to be
severe in her simplicity of dress. And it is difficult to tell to which
ordinary preference should go. These girls--girls in a broad sense all
the way from trim children in charge of maid or governess to girls whose
pinkness of skin defies the graying of their locks--a sprinkling of
men, not always so faultless in dress or manner as their sisters--and
you have the Fifth avenue crowd. Then between these two quick moving
files of pedestrians--set at all times in the rapid _tempo_ of New
York--a quadruple file of carriages; the greater part of them motor
driven.
Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York
is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation
was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the
buildings--perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever
known--and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the
benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic
policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess
rare wit and diplomacy--while their fellows at such corners as
Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And
with all the _finesse_ of their work the traffic moves like molasses.
Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the
combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the
heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street
tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the
Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek
of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding
a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the
policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill
commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and
even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest--as
coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.
* * * * *
New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street--for Fifth
avenue can now be fairly said to have usurped Broadway as the main
highway of the upper city--tremendous. You begin to compute what must be
the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs
Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when
Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly
indeed.
"Do you notice that house?" she demands.
You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, upon the corner of
an inconsequential side street. Beside it on Fifth avenue is an open
lot--of perhaps fifty feet frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain
brown wooden fence.
"A corking building lot," you venture, "Why don't they--"
"I expected you to say that," she laughs. "They have wanted to build
upon that lot--time and time again. But when they approach the owner he
laughs at them and declines to consider any offer. 'My daughter has a
little dog,' he says politely, 'It must have a place for exercise.' We
New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. "You know that the Goelets kept
a cow in the lawn of their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street
until almost twenty years ago--until there was not a square foot of
grass outside of a park within five miles. And in New York the man who
can do the odd thing successfully is apt to be applauded. You could not
imagine such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, could you?"
You admit that your imagination would fall short of such heights and ask
Katherine if you are going up to the far end of the 'bus run--to that
great group of buildings--university, cathedral, hospital, divinity
school--that have been gathered just beyond the northwestern corner of
Central Park.
"No, I think not," she quickly decides, "You know that Columbia is not
to New York as Harvard is to Boston. Harvard dominates Boston, Columbia
is but a peg in the educational system of New York. The best families
here do not bow to its fetich. They are quite as apt to send their boys
to Yale or Princeton--even Harvard."
"Then there's the cathedral and the Drive," you venture.
"We have a cathedral right here on Fifth avenue that is finished and, in
its way, quite as beautiful. And as for the Drive--it is merely a rim of
top-heavy and expensive apartment houses. The West Side is no longer
extremely smart. The truth of the matter is that we must pause for
afternoon tea."
You ignore that horrifying truth for an instant.
"What has happened to the poor West Side?" you demand.
Katherine all but lowers her voice to a whisper.
"Twenty years ago and it had every promise of success. It looked as if
Riverside Drive would surpass the Avenue as a street of fine residences.
The side streets were preëminently nice. Then came the subway--and with
it the apartment houses. After that the very nice folk began moving to
the side streets in the upper Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies
between Park and Fifth avenues."
"Suppose that the apartment houses should begin to drift in there--in
any numbers?" you demand.
"Lord knows," says Katherine, and with due reverence adds: "There is the
last stand of the prosperous New Yorker with an old-fashioned notion
that he and his would like to live in a detached house. The Park binds
him in on the West, the tenement district and Lexington avenue on the
East--to the North Harlem and the equally impossible Bronx. The old
guard is standing together."
"There is Brooklyn?" you venture.
"No New Yorker," says Katherine, with withering scorn, "ever goes
publicly to Brooklyn unless he is being buried in Greenwood cemetery."
* * * * *
Tea for you is being served in a large mausoleum of a white
hotel--excessively white from a profuse use of porcelain tiles which can
be washed occasionally--of most extraordinary architecture. Some day
some one is going to attempt an analysis of hotel architecture in New
York and elsewhere in the U.S.A. but this is not the time and place.
Suffice it to say here and now that you finally found a door entering
the white porcelain mausoleum. What a feast awaited your eyes--as well
as your stomach--within. Rooms of rose pink and rooms of silver gray,
Persian rooms, Japanese rooms, French rooms in the several varieties of
Louis, Greek rooms--Europe, the ancients and the Orient, have been
ransacked for the furnishing of this tavern. And in the center of them
all is a great glass-enclosed garden, filled with giant palms and tiny
tables, tremendous waiters and infinitesimal chairs. A large bland-faced
employé--who is a sort of sublimated edition of the narrow lean hat-boys
who we shall find in the eating places of the Broadway theater
districts--divests you of your outer wraps. You elbow past a band and
arrive at the winter garden. A head waiter in an instant glance of
steel-blue eyes decides that you are fit and finds the tiniest of the
tiny tables for you. It is so far in the shade of the sheltering palm
that you have to bend almost double to drink your tea--and the orchestra
is rather uncomfortably near.
[Illustration: Washington Square and its lovely Arch--New York]
Katherine might have taken you to other tea dispensaries--an unusual
place in a converted stable in Thirty-fourth street, another stable loft
in West Twenty-eighth--dozens of little shops, generally feminine to
an intensified degree, which combine the serving of tea with the
vending of their wares. But she preferred the big white hotel.
"Tea at the Plaza is so satisfactory and so restful," she says, as you
dodge to permit two ladies--one in gray silk and the other in a cut of
blue cloth that gives her the contour of a magnified frog--to slip past
you without knocking your tea out of your untrained fingers. "We might
have gone to the Manhattan--but it's so filled with young girls and the
chappies from the schools--the Ritz is proper but dull, so is
Sherry's--all the rest more or less impossible."
She rattles on--the matter of restaurants is always dear to the New York
heart. You ignore the details.
"But why?" you demand.
"Why what?" she returns.
"Why tea?"
You explain that afternoon tea in its real lair--London--in a sort of
climatic necessity. The prevalence of fog, of raw damp days, makes a cup
of hot tea a real bracer--a stimulant that carries the human through
another two or three hours of hard existence until the late London
dinner. The bracing atmosphere of New York--with more clear days than
any other metropolitan city in the world--does not need tea. You say so
frankly.
"I suppose you are right," Katherine concedes, "but we have ceased in
this big city to rail at the English. We bow the knee to them. The most
fashionable of our newest hotels and shops run--absurdly many times--to
English ways. And afternoon tea has long since ceased to be a novelty in
our lives. Why, they are beginning to serve it at the offices
downtown--just as they do in dear old London."
You swallow hard--some one has recommended that to you as a method of
suppressing emotion--for polite society is never emotional.
V
Dinner is New York's real function of the day. And dinner in New York
means five million hungry stomachs demanding to be filled. The New York
dinner is as cosmopolitan as the folk who dwell on the narrow island of
Manhattan and the two other islands that press closely to it. The
restaurant and hotel dinners are as cosmopolitan as the others. Of
course, for the sake of brevity, if for no other reason, you must
eliminate the home dinners--and read "home" as quickly into the cold and
heavy great houses of the avenue as into the little clusters of rooms in
crowded East Side tenements where poverty is never far away and next
week's meals a real problem. And remember, that to dine even in a
reasonably complete list of New York's famous eating places--a new one
every night--would take you more than a year. At the best your vision of
them must be desultory.
Six o'clock sees the New York business army well on its way toward
home--the seething crowds at the Brooklyn bridge terminal in Park Row,
the overloaded subway straining to move its fearful burden, the ferry
and the railroad terminals focal points of great attractiveness. To make
a single instance: take that division of the army that dwells in
Brooklyn. It begins its march dinnerward a little after four o'clock,
becomes a pushing, jostling mob a little later and shows no sign of
abatement until long after six. Within that time the railroad folk at
the Park Row terminal of the old bridge have received, classified and
despatched Brooklynward, more than one hundred and fifty thousand
persons--the population of a city almost the size of Syracuse. And the
famous old bridge is but one of four direct paths from Manhattan to
Brooklyn.
Six o'clock sees restaurants and cafés alight and ready for the two or
three hours of their really brisk traffic of the day. There are even
dinner restaurants downtown, remarkably good places withal and making
especial appeal to those overworked souls who are forced to stay at the
office at night. There are bright lights in Chinatown where innumerable
"Tuxedos" and "Port Arthurs" are beginning to prepare the chop-suey in
immaculate Mongolian kitchens. But the real restaurant district for the
diner-out hardly begins south of Madison square. There are still a very
few old hotels in Broadway south of that point--a lessening company each
year--one or two in close proximity to Washington square. Two of these
last make a specialty of French cooking--their _table d'hôtes_ are
really famous--and perhaps you may fairly say when you are done at them
that you have eaten at the best restaurants in all New York. From them
Fifth avenue runs a straight course to the newer hotels far to the
north--a silent brilliantly lighted street as night comes "with the
double row of steel-blue electric lamps resembling torch-bearing monks"
one brilliant New York writer has put it. But before the newest of the
new an intermediate era of hotels, the Holland, the nearby Imperial and
the Waldorf-Astoria chief among these. The Waldorf has been from the day
it first opened its doors--more than twenty years ago--New York's really
representative hotel. Newer hostelries have tried to wrest that honor
from it--but in vain. It has clung jealously to its reputation. The
great dinners of the town are held in its wonderful banqueting halls,
the well-known men of New York are constantly in its corridors. It is
club and more than club--it is a clearing-house for all of the best
clubs. It is the focal center for the hotel life of the town.
There is an important group of hotels in the rather spectacular
neighborhood of Times square--the Astor, with its distinctly German
flavor, and the Knickerbocker which whimsically likes to call itself
"the country club on Forty-second street" distinctive among them. And
ranging upon upper Fifth avenue, or close to it, are other important
houses, the Belmont, the aristocratic Manhattan, the ultra-British
Ritz-Carlton, the St. Regis, the Savoy, the Netherland, the Plaza, and
the Gotham. In between these are those two impeccable restaurants--so
distinctive of New York and so long wrapped up in its history--Sherry's
and Delmonico's.
Over in the theatrical brilliancy of Broadway up and down from Times
square are other restaurants--Shanley's, Churchill's, Murray's--the list
is constantly changing. A fashionable restaurant in New York is either
tremendously successful--or else, as we shall later see, they are
telephoning for the sheriff. And the last outcome is apt more to follow
than the first. For it is a tremendous undertaking to launch a
restaurant in these days. The decorations of the great dining-rooms must
rival those of a Versailles palace while the so-called minor
appointments--silver, linen, china and the rest must be as faultless as
in any great house upon Fifth avenue. The first cost is staggering, the
upkeep a steady drain. There is but one opportunity for the
proprietor--and that opportunity is in his charges. And when you come to
dine in one of these showy uptown places you will find that he has not
missed his opportunity.
All New York that dines out does not make for these great places or
their fellows. There are little restaurants that cast a glamour over
their poor food by thrusting out hints of a magic folk named Bohemians
who dine night after night at their dirty tables. There are others who
with a Persian name seek to allure the ill-informed, some stout German
places giving the substantial cheer of the Fatherland, beyond them
restaurants phrasing themselves in the national dishes and the cooking
of every land in the world, save our own. For a real American restaurant
is hard to find in New York--real American dishes treats of increasing
rarity. A great hotel recently banished steaks from its bills-of-fare,
another has placed the ban on pie; and as for strawberry
short-cake--just ask for strawberry short-cake. The concoction that the
waiter will set before you will leave you hesitating between tears and
laughter--ridicule for the pitiful attempts of a French cook and tears
for your thoughts of the tragedy that has overwhelmed an American
institution. Some day some one is going to build a hotel with the
American idea standing back of it right in the heart of New York. He is
going to have the bravery or the patriotism to call it the American
House or the United States Hotel or Congress Hall or some other title
that means something quite removed from the aristocratic nomenclature
that our modern generation of tavern-keepers have borrowed from Europe
without the slightest sense of fitness; and to that man shall be given
more than mere riches--the satisfaction that will come to him from
having accomplished a real work.
The truth of the matter is that we have borrowed more than nomenclature
from Europe. We have taken the so-called "European plan" with all of its
disadvantages and none of its advantages. We have done away with the
stuffy over-eating "American plan" and have made a rule of
"pay-as-you-go" that is quite all right--and is not. For to the simple
"European plan" has recently been added many complications. In other
days the generosity of the portions in a New York hotel was famous. A
single portion of any important dish was ample for two. Your smiling
old-fashioned waiter told you that. The waiter in a New York restaurant
today does not smile. He merely tells you that the food is served "per
portion" which generally means that an unnecessary amount of food is
prepared in the kitchen and sent from the table, uneaten, as waste. And
a smart New York _restauranteur_ recently made a "cover charge" of
twenty-five cents for bread and butter and ice-water. Others followed.
It will not be long before a smarter _restauranteur_ will make the
"cover charge" fifty cents, and then folk will begin streaming into his
place. They don't complain. That's not the New York way.
They do not even complain of the hat-boys--bloodthirsty little brigands
who snatch your hat and other wraps before you enter a restaurant. The
brigands are skillfully chosen--lean, hungry little boys every time,
never fat, sleek, well-fed looking little boys. They are employed by a
trust, which rents the "hat-checking privilege" from the proprietor of
the hotel or restaurant. The owner of the trust pays well for these
privileges and the little boys must work hard to bring him back his
rental fees and a fair profit beside.
Leave that to them. Emerge from a restaurant, well-fed and at peace with
the world and deny that lean-looking, swarthy-faced, black-eyed boy a
quarter if you can--or dare. A dime is out of the question. He might
insult you, probably would. But a quarter buys your self-respect and the
head of the trust a share in his new motor car. The lean-looking boy
buys no motor cars. He works on a salary and there are no pockets in his
uniform. There is a stern-visaged cicerone in the background and to the
cicerone roll all the quarters, but the New Yorker does not
complain--save when he reaches Los Angeles or Atlanta or some other
fairly distant place and finds the same sort of highway brigandage in
effect there.
VI
After the dinner and the hat-boy--the theater. You suggest the theater
to Katherine. She is enthusiastic. You pick the theater. It is close at
hand and you quickly find your way to it. A gentleman, whose politeness
is of a variety, somewhat _frappé_, awaits you in the box-office. A line
of hopeful mortals is shuffling toward him, to disperse with hope left
behind. But this anticipates.
You inquire of the man in the box-office for two seats--two particularly
good seats. You remember going to the theater in Indianapolis once upon
a time, a stranger, and having been seated behind the fattest theater
pillar that you could have ever possibly imagined. But you need not
worry about the pillars in this New York playhouse. The box-office
gentleman, whose thoughts seem to be a thousand miles away, blandly
replies that the house is sold out.
"So good?" you brashly venture. You had not fancied this production so
successful. He does not even assume to hear your comment. You decide
that you will see this particular play at a later time. You suggest as
much to the indifferent creature behind the wicket. He replies by
telling you that he can only give you tickets for a Monday or Tuesday
three weeks hence--and then nothing ahead of the seventeenth row. Can he
not do better than that? He cannot. He is positive that he cannot. And
his positiveness is Gibraltarian in its immobility. A faint sign of
irritation covers his bland face. He wants you to see that you are
taking too much of his time.
Katherine saves the situation. She whispers to you that she noticed a
little shop nearby with a sign "Tickets for all Theaters" displayed upon
it.
"You know they abolished the speculators two years ago," she explains.
You move on to the little shop with the inviting sign. The gentleman
behind its counters has manners at least. He greets you with the smile
of the professional shopkeeper.
"Have you tickets for 'The Giddiest Girl'?" you inquire.
He smiles ingratiatingly. Of course he has, for any night and anywhere
you wish them.
"What is the price of them?"
You are not coldly commercial but, despite that smile, merely
apprehensive. And you are beginning to understand New York.
"Four dollars."
Not so bad at that--just the box-office price. You bring out four greasy
one-dollar bills. His eyes fixed upon them, he places a ticket down upon
the counter.
"There--there are two of us," you stammer.
He does not stammer.
"Do you think that they are four dollars a dozen?" he sallies.
You give him a ten dollar bill this time. You do not kick. Even though
the show is perfectly rotten and the usherette charges you ten cents for
a poorly printed program and scowls because you take the change from her
itching palm, do not complain. You would not complain even if you knew
that the man in the chair next to you paid only the regular prices,
because he happened to belong to the same lodge as the cousin of the
treasurer of the theater, while the man in the chair next to Katherine
paid nothing at all for his seat--having a relative who advertises in
the theater programs. You do not kick. Complaint has long since been
eliminated from the New York code and you have begun to realize that.
* * * * *
After the theater, another restaurant--this time for supper--more
hat-boys, more brigandage but it is the thing to do and you must do it.
And you must do it well. Splendor costs and you pay--your full
proportion. If up in your home town you know a nice little place where
you can drop in after the show at the local playhouse and have a glass
of beer and a rarebit--dismiss that as a prevailing idea in the
neighborhood of Long Acre square. The White Light district of Broadway
can buy no motor cars on the beer and rarebit trade. Louey's trade in
his modest little place up home is sufficient to keep him in moderate
living year in and year out, but Louey does not have to pay Broadway
ground rent, or Broadway prices for food-stuffs or Broadway salaries--to
say nothing of having a thirst for a bigger and faster automobile than
his neighbor. And as we have said, the opportunity for bankruptcy in the
so-called "lobster palaces" of Broadway runs high. As this is being
written, one of the most famous of them has collapsed.
Its proprietor--he was a smart caterer come east from Chicago where he
had made his place fashionable and himself fairly rich--for a dozen
years ran a prosperous restaurant within a stone-throw of the tall white
shaft of the _Times_ building. And even if the heels were the highest,
the gowns the lowest, the food was impeccable and if you knew New York
at all you knew who went there. It was gay and beautiful and
high-priced. It was immensely popular. Then the proprietor listened to
sirens. They commanded him to tear down the simple structure of his
restaurant and there build a towering hotel. He obeyed orders. With the
magic of New York builders the new building was ready within the
twelvemonth. It represented all that might be desired--or that upper
Broadway at least might desire--in modern hotel construction.
But it could not succeed. A salacious play which made a considerable
commercial success took its title from the new hotel and called itself
"The Girl from R----'s." That was the last straw. It might have been
good fun for the man from Baraboo or the man from Jefferson City to come
to New York and dine quietly and elegantly at R----'s, but to stop at
R----'s hotel, to have his mail sent there, to have the local paper
report that he was registered at that really splendid hostelry--ah, that
was a different matter, indeed. Your Baraboo citizen had some fairly
conservative connections--church and business--and he took no risks. The
new hotel went bankrupt.[A]
[A] Another hotel man has just taken the property. His first
step has been to change its name and, if possible, its
reputation. E. H.
Beer and rarebits, indeed. Sam Blythe tells of the little group of four
who went into a hotel grillroom not far from Forty-second street and
Broadway, who mildly asked for beer and rabbits.
"We have fine partridges," said the head-waiter, insinuatingly.
"We asked for beer and rabbits," insisted the host of the little group.
He really did not know his New York.
"We have fine partridges," reiterated the head-waiter, then yawned
slightly behind his hand. That yawn settled it. The head of the party
was bellicose. He lost his temper completely. In a few minutes an
ambulance and a patrol wagon came racing up Broadway. But the hotel had
won. It always does.
* * * * *
One thing more--the _cabaret_. We think that if you are really fond of
Katherine, and Katherine's reputation, you will avoid the restaurants
that make a specialty of the so-called _cabarets_. Really good
restaurants manage to get along without them. And the very best that can
be said of them is that they are invariably indifferently poor--a
_mélange_ contributed by broken-down actors or actresses, or boys or
girls stolen from the possibilities of a really decent way of earning a
living. As for the worst, it is enough to say that the familiarity that
begins by breeding contempt follows in the wake of the _cabaret_. It may
be very jolly for you, of a lonely summer evening in New York and
forgetting all the real pleasures of a lonely summer night in the big
town--wonderful orchestral concerts in Central Park, dining on open-air
terraces and cool quiet roofs, motoring off to wonderful shore dinners
in queer old taverns--to hunt out these great gay places in the heart of
the town. Easy _camaraderie_ is part and parcel of them. But you will
not want such comrades to meet any of the Katherines of your family. And
therein lies a more than subtle distinction.
VII
It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine as you ride home
with her in the taxicab--space forbids a description of the horrors and
the indignities of the taxicab trust.
"Is it like this--every night?" you feebly ask.
"Every night of the year," she replies. "And typical New Yorkers like
it."
That puts a brand-new thought into your mind.
"What is a typical New Yorker?" you demand.
"We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs.
It is a foolish answer--of course. But the strange part of the whole
thing is that Katherine is right. Either there are no typical New
Yorkers--as many sane folk solemnly aver--or else every one who tarries
in the city through the passing of even a single night is a typical New
Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still growing like a girl in
her teens, who adds to herself each year in permanent population 135,000
human beings, whose transient population is nightly estimated at over a
hundred thousand? They are all typical New Yorkers.
Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived through Ellis Island,
scared and forlorn, with his scared and forlorn little family trailing
on behind, Solomon Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless
home-sickness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his
heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker than the scion of
this fine old family which for sixty years lived and died in a red-brick
mansion close by Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strunsky
will be keeping his own little store in the East Side, in another year
he will be moving his brood up to a fine new house in Harlem, an even
dozen years from the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the
proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard upon one of the
great new commercial barracks, which, not content with remaining
downtown, began the despoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail
district. Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of typical New
Yorkers? We think not.
We think that you cannot exclude the man who through some stroke of
fortune has accumulated money in a smaller city, and who has come to New
York to live and to spend it. There are many thousands of him dwelling
upon the island of Manhattan; with his families they make a considerable
community by itself. They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that
they never complain while the strings of their purses are never tightly
tied. They live in smart apartments uptown, at tremendously high
rentals, keep at least one car in service at all seasons of the year,
dine luxuriously in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a
week or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the showy side
of New York. They are typical New Yorkers. In an apartment a little
further down the street--which rents at half the figure and comes
dangerously near being called a flat--is another family. This family
also attends the new plays, although it is far more apt to go a floor or
even two aloft, than to meet the speculator's prices for orchestra
seats. It also goes to the opera, and the young woman of the house is in
deadly earnest when she says that she does not mind standing through the
four or five long acts of a Wagnerian matinee, because the nice young
ushers let you sit on the floor in the intermissions. But this family
goes farther than the drama--spoken or sung. It is conversant with the
new books and the new pictures. That same young woman swings the Phi
Beta Kappa key of the most difficult institution of learning on this
continent. And she knows more about the trend of modern art than half of
the artists themselves. And yet she "goes to business"--is the capable
secretary of a very capable man downtown.
These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over in the next
block--theirs is frankly a flat in every sense of that despised word.
They have not been in the theater in a dozen years, never in one of the
big modern restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a man
whose name is known and spoken reverently through little homes all the
way across America. He is a worker in the church, although not a
clergyman, a militant friend of education, although not an educator, and
he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and benevolent city in
the world. And if you attempt to argue with him, he will prove easily
and smilingly, that he is right and you--are just mistaken. He and his
know their New York--a New York of high Christian force and precept--and
they, too, are New Yorkers.
So, too, is Bliffkins and the little Bliffkins--although Bliffkins holds
property in a bustling Ohio city and votes within its precincts. To tell
the truth baldly, the Bliffkinses descend upon New York once each year
and never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop at a great hotel
and they are great spenders. Floor-walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers
know them. Annually, and for a few golden days they are part of New
York--typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when they are gone other
Bliffkinses, from almost every town across the land, big and little,
come to replace them. And all these are typical New Yorkers.
What is the typical New Yorker?
Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not exist? We do not
think so. We think that Katherine in all her flippancy was right. They
are all typical New Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a
time, within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You might almost
say that all Americans are typical New Yorkers. For New York is, in no
small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her,
down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her
fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her
white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her--down in their
hearts they secretly adore her.
3
ACROSS THE EAST RIVER
Physically only the East river separates Brooklyn from Manhattan island.
The island of Manhattan was and still is to many folk the city of New
York. Across that narrow wale of the East river--one of the busiest
water-highways in all the world--men have thrust several great bridges
and tunnels. Politically Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the
most important boroughs of that which has for the past fifteen years
been known as Greater New York.
But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brooklyn are nearly a
thousand miles apart. In social customs, in many of the details of
living they are vastly different, and this despite the fact that the
greater part of the male population of Brooklyn daily travels to
Manhattan island to work in its offices and shops and you can all but
toss a stone from one community into the other. The very fact that
Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New York--professional funny-men long
ago called it a "bed-chamber"--has done much, as we shall see, toward
building up the peculiar characteristics of the town that stands just
across the East river from the tip of the busiest little island in the
world.
Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. It fills almost the
entire west end of Long island--a slightly rolling tract of land between
a narrow and unspeakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown
creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This entire tract has for
many years been known as Kings county--its name a slight proof of its
antiquity. Many years ago there were various villages in the old
county--among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, Canarsie,
Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They were Dutch towns, and you can
still see some evidences of this in their old houses, although these are
disappearing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most
rapidly--from almost the very day of the establishment of the republic.
Robert Fulton developed his steam-ferry and the East river ceased to be
the bugaboo it had always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was
popular from the first. With the use of steam its importance waxed and
soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry came, another and another--many,
many others. They were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close
rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along the bank of the
East river from the Navy Yard at the sharp crook of the river that the
Dutch called the Wallabout, south to the marshy Gowanus bay. Upon the
river shore, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, which was also
growing and which had been incorporated into a city. But when the
horse-cars came and men were no longer forced to walk to and from the
ferries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh
became physically one. Williamsburgh then gave up its charter and its
identity and became lost in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was
repeated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. Within
comparatively recent years there came the elevated railroad--at almost
the same time the great miracle of the Brooklyn bridge--and all the
previous growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it grew as
rapidly as ever grew a "boom-town" in the West. The coming of electric
city transportation, the multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first
East river tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairy web
of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the busiest part of the
East river marked the transformation of Brooklyn--a transformation that
did not end when Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part
and parcel of New York. That transformation is still in progress.
We have slipped into history because we have wanted you to understand
why Brooklyn today is just what she is. The submerging of these little
Dutch villages with their individual customs and traditions has done its
part in the making of the customs and traditions of the Brooklyn of
today. For Brooklyn today remains a congregation of separate
communities. You may slip from one to the other without realizing that
you have done more than pass down a compactly built block of houses or
crossed a crowded street.
And so it has come to pass that Brooklyn has no main street--in the
sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little,
has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the
historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and
far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit
that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow,
inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated
railroad almost its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you
will find two department-stores unusually complete and unusually well
operated. New Yorkers come to them frequently to shop. The two stores
seem lost in the dreariness of Fulton street--a very contradiction to
that highway.
Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here we have called
Fulton street a possible main street of Brooklyn, and yet there is a
street in the town, for the most part miles removed from it, that is
quite as brisk by day and the only street in the borough which has any
real activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Manhattan it is
called Broadway, and it is a wider and more pretentious street than
Fulton, although in its turn also encumbered with an elevated railroad.
But up and down Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in
automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own department-stores,
some of them sizable, many hundreds of small shops, cheap theaters--and
some better--by the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet we
will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the many transients
who come to New York at regular intervals and who know the Great White
Way as well as four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within
it. We will go further. Of the two million humans who go to make the
population of Brooklyn; a large part, probably half, certainly a third,
have never seen its own Broadway.
This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great community across
the East river from Manhattan. Remember all this while that it is a
community of communities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the
problem of getting back and forth between its homes and Manhattan than
on any other one thing in the world. As a rule, people live in Brooklyn
because it is less expensive than residence upon the island of
Manhattan, more accessible and far more comfortable than the Bronx or
the larger cities of New Jersey that range themselves close to the shore
of the Hudson river. It is in reality a larger and a better Jersey City
or a Hoboken or a Long Island City.
[Illustration: A quiet street on Brooklyn Heights]
And yet, like each of these three, it is something more than a mere
housing place for folk who work within congested Manhattan. It, too, is
a manufacturing center of no small importance. Despite the
transportation obstacles of being divided by one or two rivers from most
of the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port of New York,
hundreds of factory chimneys, large and small, proclaim its industrial
importance. Its output of manufactures reaches high into the millions
each year. And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an
impressive figure.
The fact remains, however, that it is a community of communities, each
pulling very largely for itself. A smart western town of twenty-five
thousand population can center more energy and secure for itself
precisely what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than can this
great borough of nearly two million population. Brooklyn has not yet
learned the lesson of concentrated effort.
Now consider these communities of old Kings county once again. We have
touched upon their location and their growth; let us see the manner of
folk who made them grow. About the second decade of the last century a
virtual hegira of New England folk began to move toward New York City.
The New England states were the first portion of the land to show
anything like congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hudson
was beginning to come into its own--opportunity loomed large in the eyes
of the shrewd New Englanders. They began picking up and moving toward
New York. And they are still coming, although, of course, in no such
volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century.
These New England folk found New York already aping
metropolitanism--with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of
houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different.
There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle
shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that
made the New Englanders think of the pretty Massachusetts and
Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came--a
steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the days of the
Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They
crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social
foundations of the Brooklyn of today.
It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small
colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of
wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational
churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage
and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the
Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever
known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn
Heights--with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper
harbor of New York--the finest residential locality in the land. It was
New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of
the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning--New
England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in
Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans
religiously each Sabbath eve.
The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights,
but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on
Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses--many of
them--have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their
glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread
apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered
degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold
the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is
too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days
there is another steady hegira across the East river--the first
families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper
Manhattan.
There is another reason for this. We have told how Brooklyn sold her
birthright when she threw off her political individuality and made
herself a borough of an enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true
to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour when the
Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the fullness of its mighty work. In
the weaving of that bridge is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies
of Brooklyn--the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer and its
builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and who died a lingering
death before it was completed. Roebling's apartments were upon a high
crest of Brooklyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked down
upon the workmen who were weaving the steel web of the bridge. In the
last hours of his life he could see the creation of his mind, the
structure that was about to be known as one of the eight modern wonders
of the world, being made ready for its task of the long years.
The coming of that first bridge began the transformation of Brooklyn;
although for a long time Brooklyn did not realize it. The New England
element within her population did not even realize it when she gave up
her political identity as a city. Then something else happened. Two
miles to the north of the first bridge another was built--this with its
one arm touching the East Side of Manhattan--the most crowded residence
district in the new world--while its other hand reached that portion of
Brooklyn, formerly known as Williamsburgh. We have already spoken of
Williamsburgh--in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now
part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty years it hung
tenaciously to its personality. Back of it was a great area of regular
streets and small houses known as the Eastern District. The folk who
lived there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh was
different. Its folk were glad to give themselves the name of the old
town, although the pattern of its streets ran closely into the pattern
of the streets of the community which had engulfed it. They held
themselves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, their own
theater, their own clubs, their own churches, their own schools. They
also had the opportunity of seeing the social and the business changes
that the development of the first bridge had wrought in old Brooklyn;
how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to the ferry-house had
lost its gayety and was entering upon decadence.
The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the Brooklyn bridge--only
in sharper measure. It was like a tube lancing the overcrowded mass of
the East Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed before it had
its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded tenements of Rivington and Allen
and Essex and all the other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery
began moving over the new bridge and out to a distant section of
Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had preëmpted Brownsville for their
own. For a time that was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old
race began asking themselves "why go to Brownsville, eight or nine miles
distant, when at the other end of the bridge is a fair land for
settlement?"
So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For a little while it
sought to oppose the change, but an ox might as well pull against the
mighty power of a locomotive, as a community try to defy the working of
economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has been "moving out," her
houses, her churches, many of her pet institutions--going the most part
farther out upon Long island and there rebuilding under many protective
restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly gone. Strange tongues and
strange creeds are heard within her churches. And some of them have been
pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red-brick houses, to
give way to cheap apartments, wrought wondrously and fearfully and
echoing with the babbling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the
transformation stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is
still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, transforming quiet
house-lined streets into noisy ways lined with crowded apartments.
It is only within a comparatively little time that the older Brooklyn
has realized the change that is coming upon her. She has known for years
of the presence of many thousands of Irish and German within her
boundaries. They have been useful citizens in her development and have
done much for her in both a generous and an intelligent fashion. She
holds today great colonies of Norse and of the Swedish--down close to
the waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and her Italian
citizens, taken by themselves, would make the greatest Italian city in
the world. She has the largest single colony of Syrians in the New World
and more than half a million Jews. According to reliable estimates,
three-quarters of her adult population today are foreign-born.
Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a
transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be
recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a
town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily
awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institutions changing, its
future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant
churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years--and some of
these merely new edifices for old congregations which have been forced
to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that
finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time.
Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has
been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is
dying.
* * * * *
Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, although in Greenwood
she has what is deservedly the most famous cemetery in America. Hold on,
Brooklyn may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town-hall
that is worthy of mention here. They do not call it the town-hall or the
opera-house, but it is known as the Academy of Music and it is an
institution well worth the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy
of Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that stands for good
within the community that we must see how it has come into being.
It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of today were Brooklyn boys
and girls there stood down on Montague street in the oldest part of the
town an elder Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain
great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic-lantern pictures,
the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even real drama or real opera,
although play-acting was frowned upon in the early days of that
barn-like structure. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely.
Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the great actors and
the great singers of yesterday upon the stage of its old Academy; from
that stage it heard its own preachers, heard such orators as Edward
Everett and John B. Gough; crowded into the spacious auditorium at the
Commencement exercises and the amateur dramatics of its boys and girls.
The old Academy was a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn.
There comes an end to all temporal things and a winter's morning a full
decade ago saw the historic opera house go up in a truly theatrical puff
of smoke and flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost an
institution by which it was as well known as the Navy Yard or Plymouth
church--where Beecher had once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague
street were cool there were demands that the Academy be rebuilt.
Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel that the old Brooklyn was
beginning to pass. Beecher was dead; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles
was burned and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a second
Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the Academy was a popular
measure, a test as to Brooklyn's ability to preserve at least a vestige
of civic unity unto herself.
It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was a time when it seemed
as if Brooklyn must give up and become the Cinderella of all the
boroughs of the new New York. But it seems that there were other
institutions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and still is,
the Institute of Arts and Sciences. This is a sort of civic Chautauqua.
Toward it several thousand men and women each pay five dollars a year
for the opportunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same time.
They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, recitals and the like and
this institute has so fat a purse that the impresario or prima donna is
yet to be found who is strong enough to withstand its pleadings.
This institute came valiantly to the aid of the Academy project and
saved the day. While it has no proprietary interest in the new
structure, it is its chief tenant, and the new Academy was planned in
detail to meet the needs of this popular educational institution. So,
while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new has a half-dozen
big and comfortable meeting-places. On a single night Brooklyn can snap
its fingers at the Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East
river, and can gather within its own Temple of Song--a spacious and
elegant theater which receives the Metropolitan company once a week
during the season--can place another great audience in the adjoining
Music Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another hall
hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell of distant climes
and strange peoples; in a lofty ballroom, hold formal reception and
dance; and gather in a still smaller hall to hear Professor
Something-or-other discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like.
In this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, can be
assembled in this big and passing handsome structure and yet be
completely independent of each other. The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought
after a hard fight, is no tiny toy.
The building was largely a labor of love to those who succeeded in
getting the subscriptions for it. Its maintenance is today almost a
labor of love for its stockholders are not alone the wealthy bankers and
the merchants of the town. Its stock-list is as catholic as its
endeavors--and they are legion. It is designed to be eventually a
gathering-place for the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker; all
the sturdy folk who have their homes from Greenpoint to Coney island.
* * * * *
[Illustration: An early Brooklyn Citizen]
"One thing more," you demand. "How about Coney island?"
Coney island is a part of Brooklyn. It is also the most advertised and
the most over-rated show place in the whole land. While the older
Brooklyn used to drive down to that sand-spit facing the sea for clams
and for fish-dinner in the summer days, it is only within the past few
years that it has been commercialized and an attempt made to place it
upon a business basis. We are inclined to think that the attempt,
measured in the long run, has been a failure. It began about ten
years ago, when the standard of entertainment at the famous beach had
fallen low. A young man, with a gift for the show business, created a
great amusement park there by the side of the sea.
"People do not come to Coney island to see the ocean," he said. "They
come down here for a good time."
It looked as if he was right. His amusement park was a great novelty and
for a time a tremendous success. It had splendid imitators almost within
a stone-throw--its name and its purpose were being copied all the way
across the land. Perhaps people did not go to Coney island, after all,
to see the cool and lovely ocean.
But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New York seemed to
change. New Yorkers did not seem to care quite as much for the gay
creations of paint and tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each
night in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney
island--again and again. It scoured the paint and tinsel cities, thrust
the highest of their towers, a blackened ruin, to the ground. Pious folk
said that God was scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws.
And the fact remains that it has not regained the preëminence of its
position ten years ago.
We think that a man who had been out of Brooklyn for twenty years and
whose recollections of the wonderful beach that forms her southern
outpost were recollections of great gardens; of Patrick Gilmore playing
inimitable marches in front of one giant hotel and of the incomparable
Siedl leading his orchestra beside another, would do better than to
return to Coney island. Siedl is dead; so is Gilmore and even the huge
wooden hotel that looked down upon him was pulled apart last year to
make room for the encroaching streets and houses of a growing Brooklyn.
The paint and the tinsel of Coney island grows tarnished--and that
twenty-year exile could find little else than the sea to hold his
interest. And the folk who go to Coney island today seem to care very
little for the sea--save perhaps as a giant bath-tub.
We think that the absentee of twenty years' standing would do far better
to go to Prospect Park. That really superb pleasure-ground, planned
through the foresight of a Brooklyn man of half a century ago, remains
practically unchanged through the years. It remains one of the great
parks, not only of America, but of the entire world. It is the real lion
of Brooklyn. It is incomparably finer than its rival, the somewhat
neglected Central Park of Manhattan. And alas, Manhattan seems to think
so, too, for to Prospect Park it sends each bright summer Sunday not the
best but the roughest of its hordes. And Brooklyn sighs when it sees its
lovely playground stolen from it.
It is more than playground--Prospect Park. It is history. There are no
historic buildings in Brooklyn--unless we except the Dutch Reformed
church out in Flatbush--but all of Prospect Park was once a
battlefield--the theater of that bitter and bloody conflict of July,
1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy and forced to
retire from the city that he needed most of all to hold. Through its
great meadows Continental and Briton and Hessian once marched with
murder in their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys and girls
of the Brooklyn of today play tennis; the older men, after the fashion
of the Brooklyn of other days, their croquet. And annually down the
greensward the little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time
pageant.
The Sunday-school parade of Brooklyn is one of the older institutions of
the town that still survives. Annually and upon the first Thursday
afternoon of June the children of all the Sabbath-schools of the borough
march out upon its streets. There is not room even in Prospect Park for
all of these--for sometimes there are 150,000 of them marching of an
afternoon; and the great distances within Brooklyn must also be brought
into consideration. But the largest of the individual parades always
marches in the park--marches like trained troopers up past the
dignitaries in the reviewing stand, and the mayor, and the other city
officers, the Governor of the State, not infrequently the President of
the United States. There is much music, great excitement--and ice-cream
afterwards. Sharp denominational bars are let down and the ice-cream
goes to all. And the boys and girls who are to be the men and women of
the Brooklyn of tomorrow and who are to face its great problems march
proudly by, knowing that the loving eye of father or of mother must be
upon them.
The problems of the Brooklyn of tomorrow are not to be carelessly
dismissed. Nor is the problem of Brooklyn's future in any way hopeless.
The changing of conditions, the changing of habits, the changing of
institutions does not of necessity spell utter ruin. Cosmopolitanism
does not mean the end of all things. We have called her dull and
emotionless and provincial, and yet many of her residents are quick and
appreciative--well-traveled and well-read--anxious to meet the new
conditions, to solve the problems that have been entailed. And we have
not the slightest doubt that in the long run they will be solved, that
Brooklyn will be ready and willing to undertake the great problem that
has been thrust upon her--the fusing of her hundreds of thousands of
foreign-born into first-rate Americans.
4
WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN
To approach Philadelphia in a humble spirit of absolute appreciation,
you must come to her by one of the historic pikes that spread from her
like cart-wheel spokes from their hub. You will find one of those old
roads easily enough, for they radiate from her in every direction. And
when you have found your pike you will discover that it is a fine road,
even in these days when there is a "good-roads movement" abroad in the
land. You can traverse it into town as best suits your fancy--and your
purse. If you are fortunate enough to own an automobile you will find
motoring one of the greatest of many joys in the southeastern corner of
Pennsylvania. If your purse is thin you can have joyous health out of
walking the long miles such as is denied to your proud motorist. And if
you have neither money nor robust health for hard walking, you will find
a trolley line along each of the important pikes. Philadelphia does not
close her most gracious avenues of approach to you--no matter who you
are or what you are.
* * * * *
Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a September morning
waiting to tramp our way, at least to the outskirts of the closely built
part of the city. And before we are away from the tavern which has kept
us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single parting
glance. It has been standing there at the cross-roads of two of the busy
pikes of Montgomery county for a full century and a half. In all those
years it has not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter
or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and fifty years of
hospitality for which it does not have to make apologies.
Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort along the roadsides
of New England, but we do not know where else you will find them without
crossing the Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the Sussex
of the older England. Yet around Philadelphia they are plentiful--with
their yellow plastered walls, tight green shutters hung against them,
their low-ceilinged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone
out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the highway. Some of
them have quite wonderful signs and all of them have a wonderful
hospitality--heritage from the Quaker manner of living.
So from the William Penn Inn one may start after breakfast as one might
have started a century ago--to walk his way into the busy town. The four
corners where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge--a smooth white
house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, and the tavern occupying
three of them. The fourth gives to a view of distant fields--and such a
view! Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the rich lands
down in the valleys, the shrewder genius required to make the more
sterile ridge acres yield. And, as you trudge down the pike, the view
stays with you for a long while.
At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevitable toll-gate
that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from every side. But your payment to
the toll-keeper upon the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His
smile is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if you
would tarry for a little time within the living-room of the toll-house
he would tell you stories of the pike--stories that would make it worth
the waiting. But--Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and
dusty. You pick up your way and off you go.
Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one
into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky
chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the
tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long grass
roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a
long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows
of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of
its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern--it only dates back to
1823--and yet it is typical. Two masses of benches on a slightly
inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women.
Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a
pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do
not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to
the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty
folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here
on the morning of First Day.
Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial
farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash
and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and
holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is
farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even
thought that this is _dilettante_ agriculture. It is merely evidence
that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks
have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives
his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he
prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern
transportation methods bring his products to the consumer.
Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, this one, like the
meeting-house of the Friends back the pike a way, is cursed with
modernity. It can only claim sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine
host can tell no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept
beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after no less a
personage. Instead he relates mournfully how a tavern over on the
Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap-room telling of the memorable night
that the members of the Continental Congress moving from New York to
Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anecdotes and a corking
name almost make a wayside inn. But the anecdotes are not always easy to
find.
After lunch and a good rest the last stages of the journey. The little
towns grow more closely together; there are more houses, more
intersecting cross-roads. It will be worth your while not to miss the
signs upon these. The very names on the sign-posts--Plymouth Meeting,
Wheel Pump, Spring House, Bird-in-hand--seem to proclaim that this is a
venerable country indeed. More closely do the houses grow together, the
farms disappear, an ancient mile-post thrusts itself into your vision.
It is stone, but, after the fashion of these Pennsylvania Dutch,
white-washed and readable. It tells you:
P
10-1/2
C.H.
1 M.
But Philadelphia in reality is no ten miles away. For here is Chestnut
Hill, the houses numbered, city-fashion and the yellow trolley cars
multiplied within the busy highway which has become a city street
without you having realized the transition. The smart looking policeman
at the corner will tell you that Chestnut Hill is today one of the wards
of Philadelphia.
The city at last! You may turn at the top of a long hill and for a final
instant confront the country beyond, rolling, fertile, prosperous, the
gentle wooded hills giving soft undulation to the horizon. Then look
forward and face the busy town. For a long time yet your way shall be
down what seems to be the main street of a prosperous village, with its
great homes set away back in green lawns from the noisy pavement and the
public sidewalk. There are shops but they are distinctly local shops and
the churches bear the names of the brisk towns that were submerged in
the making of a larger Philadelphia--Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy,
Germantown.
And down this same busy street history has marched before you. Some of
it has been recorded here and there in bronze tablets along the street.
In front of one old house, one learns that General Washington conferred
with his officers at the eve of the battle of Germantown and on the
door-steps of another--set even today in its own deep grounds--Redcoat
and Buff struggled in a memorable conflict. For this was the mansion of
Judge Chew, transformed in an instant of an autumn day from
country-house to fortress. It was from the windows of this old house
that six companies of Colonel Musgrave's Fortieth regiment poured down a
deadly fire upon Mad Anthony Wayne and his men even as they attempted to
set fire to it. The house stood and so stood the Fortieth regiment.
General Washington lost his chance to enter Philadelphia that autumn,
and Valley Forge was so writ into the pages of history.
History! It is spread up and down this main street of Germantown, it
slips down the side-streets and up the alleys, into the hospitable
front-doors of stout stonehouses. Here it shows its teeth in the
bullet-holes of the aged wooden fence back of the Johnson house and
here is the Logan house, the Morris house, the Wend house, the Concord
school and the burying-ground. Any resident of Germantown will tell you
what these old houses mean to it, the part they have played in its
making.
After Germantown--Philadelphia itself. The road dips down a sudden hill,
loses itself in a short tunnel under a black maze of railroad tracks.
Beyond the railroad track the city is solidly built, row upon row of
narrow streets lined with small flat-roofed brick houses, the monotony
only accentuated by an occasional church-spire or towering factory. In
the distance a group of higher buildings--downtown Philadelphia--rising
above the tallest of them Father Penn poised on the great tower of the
City Hall. No need now for more tramping. The fascination of the open
country is gone and a trolley car will take you through tedious city
blocks--in Philadelphia they call them squares--almost to the door of
that City Hall. They _are tedious_ blocks. Architecturally Philadelphia
is the most monotonous city in America with its little red-brick houses.
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who has known it through all the years of his life
has called it the "Red City" and rightly, too.
For mile after mile of the older Philadelphia is mile after mile of
those flat-roofed red-brick houses. They seemingly must have been made
at some mill, in great quantities and from a limited variety of
patterns. For they are almost all alike, with their two or three stories
of narrow windows and doors; steps and lintels and cornice of white
marble and invariably set close upon the sidewalk line. There is no more
generosity than individuality about the typical side streets of
Philadelphia.
A single thing will catch your eye about these Philadelphia houses--a
small metal device which is usually placed upon the ledge of a
second-story window. The window must be my lady's sitting-room, for a
closer look shows the device to be a mirror, rather two or three
mirrors, so cunningly placed that they will show her folk passing up and
down or standing upon her doorstep without troubling her to leave her
comfortable rocking chair. There must be a hundred thousand of these
devices in Philadelphia. They call them "busy-bodies" quite
appropriately, and they are as typical of the town as its breakfast
scrapple and sausage.
* * * * *
Even a slow-moving Philadelphia trolley car eventually accomplishes its
purpose and you will find yourself slipping from the older town into the
oldest. The trolley car grinds around an open square--Franklin square,
the conductor informs you and then tells you that despite its name it is
not to be confounded with that aristocrat, Rittenhouse square, nor even
with the more democratic Logan square. You see that for yourself. There
are mean streets aroundabout this square. Oldest Philadelphia assuredly
is not putting her best foot forward.
And yet these sordid streets are not without their fascination. The ugly
monotony of flat-roofs is gone. These roofs are high-pitched and bristle
with small-paned dormer windows and with chimneys, for the houses that
stand beneath them are very, very old indeed. And they are typical of
that Georgian architecture that we love to call Colonial. A brave show
these houses once must have made--even today a bit of battered rail, a
fragment of door or window-casing or fanlight proclaims that once they
were quality. Fallen to a low estate, to the housing of Italians or
Chinese instead of quiet Quakers, they seem almost to be content that
their streets have fallen with them; that few seem to seek them out in
this decidedly unfashionable corner of Philadelphia.
"Arch street," calls the conductor and it is time to get out. It is time
to thread your way down one of the earliest streets of the old Red
City, time to pay your respects at the tomb of him who ranked with Penn,
the Proprietor, as the greatest citizen. You can find this tomb
easily--any newsboy on the street can point the way to it. He is buried
with others of his faith in the quiet yard of Christ church at Fifth and
Arch streets. And in order that the passing world may sometimes stop to
do him the homage of a passing thought, a single section of the old
brick wall has been cut away and replaced by an iron grating. Through
that grating you may see his tomb--a slab of stone sunk flat, for he was
an unpretentious man--and on its face read:
"Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790."
Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting-house of the Friends, one
of the best-known in all that grave city which their patron founded. It
is the meeting-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both
Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. And you can still
see upon a tablet set in one of its faded brick walls these four lines:
"By General Subscription,
For the Free Quakers.
Erected A. D. 1783,
Of the Empire 8."
That "Empire 8" has puzzled a good many tourists. In a republic and
erected upon the gathering-place of as simple a sect as the Friends it
provokes many questions.
"They must have thought it was goin' to be an empire like that French
Empire that was started by the war in '75," the aged caretaker patiently
will tell you with a shake of the head which shows that he has been
asked that very question many times before and never found a really good
answer for it.
A few squares below its graveyard is Christ church itself--a splendid
example of the Georgian architecture as we find it in the older cities
close to the Atlantic seaboard. Designed by the architect of
Independence Hall it is second to that great building only in historic
interest. Its grave-yard is a roster of the Philadelphia aristocracy of
other days. In its exquisitely beautiful steeple there hangs a chime of
eight bells brought in the long ago from old England in Captain Budden's
clipper-ship _Matilda_ freight-free. And local tradition relates that
for many years thereafter the approach of Captain Budden's _Matilda_ up
the Delaware was invariably heralded by a merry peal of welcome from the
bells.
[Illustration: Where William Penn looks down upon the town he loved so
well]
Philadelphia is rich in such treasure-houses of history. To the
traveler, whose bent runs to such pursuits, she offers a rare field. In
the oldest part of the city there is hardly a square that will not offer
some landmark ripe with tradition and rich with interest. Time has laid
a gentle hand upon the City of Brotherly Love. And no American, who
considers himself worthy of the name, can afford not to visit at least
once in his lifetime the greatest of our shrines--Independence Hall.
Within recent years this fine old building has, like many of its
fellows, undergone reconstruction. But the workmen have labored
faithfully and truthfully and the old State House today, in all its
details, is undoubtedly very much as it stood at the time of the signing
of the Declaration. It still houses the Liberty Bell, that intrepid and
seemingly tireless tourist who visits all the world's fairs with a
resigned patience that might well commend itself to human travelers.
* * * * *
Around these landmarks of colonial Philadelphia there ebbs and flows the
human tides of the modern city. The windows of what is today the finest
as well as the largest printing-house in the land look down upon the
tree-filled square in which stands Independence Hall. A little while
ago this printing concern looked down upon the grave of that earlier
printer--Franklin. But growth made it necessary to move from Arch
street--the busiest and the noisiest if not the narrowest of all precise
pattern of parallel roads that William Penn--the Proprietor of other
days--laid back from the Delaware to the Schuylkill river.
One square from Arch street is Market, designed years ago by the
far-sighted Quaker to be just what it is today--a great commercial
thoroughfare of one of the metropolitan cities of America. At its feet
the ferries cross the Delaware to the fair New Jersey land. Up its
course to the City Hall--or as the Philadelphian will always have it,
the Public Buildings--are department stores, one of them a commercial
monument to the man who made the modern department store possible and so
doing became the greatest merchant of his generation. Department stores,
big and little, two huge railroad terminals which seem always
thronged--beyond the second of them desolation for Market street--a
dreary course to the Schuylkill; beyond that stream it exists as a mere
utility street, a chief artery to the great residence region known as
West Philadelphia.
Arch street, Market street, then the next--Chestnut street. Now the
heart of your real Philadelphian begins to beat staccato. Other lands
may have their Market streets--your San Francisco man may hardly admit
that his own Market street could ever be equaled--but there is only one
Chestnut street in all this land.
The big department stores have given way to smaller shops--shops where
Philadelphia quality likes to browse and bargain. Small restaurants,
designed quite largely to meet the luncheon and afternoon tea tastes of
feminine shoppers show themselves. Upon a prominent corner there stands
a very unusual grocery shop. That is, it must be a grocery shop for
that is what it advertises itself, but in the window is a _papier-mache_
reproduction of the _table-d'hôte_ luncheon that it serves upon its
balcony, and within there are quotations from Shakespeare upon the wall
and "best-sellers" sold upon its counters.
And after Chestnut street, which runs the gamut from banks to retail
shops and then to smart homes, Walnut street. We have been tempted to
call Walnut "the Street of the Little Tailors," for so many shops have
they from Seventh street to Broad that one comes quickly to know why
Philadelphia men are as immaculate to clothes as to good manners.
Between the little shops of the tailors there are other little
shops--places where one may find old prints, old books, old bits of
china or bronze. Walnut street runs its course and at the intersection
of Broad is a group of four great hotels, two of them properly
hyphenated, after modern fashion. Beyond Broad it changes. No shops may
now profane it, for it now penetrates the finest residential district of
Philadelphia. Here is the highway of aristocracy and in a little way
will be Rittenhouse square--the holy of holies.
Just as Market street in San Francisco forms the sharp demarking line
between possible and impossible so does Market street, Philadelphia,
perform a similar service for William Penn's city. You must live "below"
Market street, which means somewhere south of that thoroughfare. "No
one" lives "above Market," which is, of course, untrue, for many
hundreds of thousands of very estimable folk live north of that street.
In fact, two-thirds of the entire population of Philadelphia live north
of Market, which runs in a straight line almost east and west. But
society--and society in Philadelphia rules with no unsteady
hand--decries that a few city squares south of Market and west of Broad
shall be its own _demesne_. You may have your country house out in the
lovely suburbs of the town, if you will, and there are no finer suburban
villages in all the world than Bryn Mawr or Ognotz or Jenkintown--but if
you live in town you must live in the correct part of the town or give
up social ambitions. And there is little use carrying social ambitions
to Philadelphia anyway. No city in the land, not even Boston or
Charleston, opens its doors more reluctantly to strange faces and
strange names, than open these doors of the old houses roundabout
Rittenhouse square. And for man or woman coming resident to the town to
hope to enter one of Philadelphia's great annual Assemblies within a
generation is quite out of the possibilities.
Rittenhouse square may seem warm and friendly and democratic with its
neat pattern of paths and grass-plots, its rather genteel loungers upon
its shadiest benches, the children of the nurse-maids playing beneath
the trees. But the great houses that look down into it are neither warm
nor friendly nor democratic. They are merely gazing at you--and
inquiring--inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and
breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But
if you do possess these things they will open--with as warm and friendly
a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of
the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick
houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market,
smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the
north.
* * * * *
To give more than a glimpse of the concrete Philadelphia within these
limits is quite out of the question. It would mean incidentally the
telling of her great charities, her wonderful museum of art whose winter
show is an annual pilgrimage for the painters from all the eastern
portion of the land, of her vast educational projects. Two of these
last deserve a passing mention, however. One might never write of
Philadelphia and forget her university--that great institution upon the
west bank of the Schuylkill which awoke almost overnight to find itself
man-size, a man-sized opportunity awaiting. And one should not speak of
the University of Pennsylvania and forget the college that Stephen
Girard founded. Of course Girard College is not a college at all but a
great charity school for boys, but it is none the less interesting
because of that.
The story of Stephen Girard is the story of the man who was not alone
the richest man in Philadelphia but the richest man in America as well.
But among all his assets he did not have happiness. His beautiful young
wife was sent to a madhouse early in her life, and Girard shut himself
off from the companionship of men, save the necessity of business
dealings with them. He was known as a stern, irascible, hard screw of a
man--immensely just but seemingly hardly human. Only once did
Philadelphia ever see him as anything else--and that was in the yellow
fever panic at the end of the eighteenth century when Stephen Girard,
its great merchant and banker, went out and with his own purse and his
own hands took his part in alleviating the disaster. It was many years
afterward that Girard College came into being; its center structure a
Greek temple, probably the most beautiful of its sort in the land, and
its stern provision against the admission of clergymen even to the
grounds of the institution, a reflection of its founder's hard mind
coming down through the years. Today it is a great charity school,
taking boys at eight years of age and keeping them, if need be, until
they are eighteen, and in all those years not only schooling but housing
them and feeding them as well as the finest private-school in all this
land.
And as Girard College and the University of Pennsylvania stand among the
colleges of America, so stands Fairmount Park among the public pleasure
grounds of the country. It was probably the first public park in the
whole land, and a lady who knows her Philadelphia thoroughly has found
many first things in Philadelphia--the first newspaper, the first
magazine, the first circulating library, the first medical college, the
first corporate bank, the first American warship, the unfurling of the
first American flag, not least of these the first real world's fair ever
held upon this side of the Atlantic. For it was the Centennial which not
only made Fairmount Park a resort of nation-wide reputation, not only
opened new possibilities of amusement to a land which had always taken
itself rather seriously, but marked the turning of an era in the
artistic and the social, as well as the political life of the United
States. The Centennial was, judged by the standard of the greatest
expositions that followed it, a rather crude affair. Its exhibits were
simple, the buildings that housed them fantastic and barnlike. And the
weather-man assisted in the general enjoyment by sending the mercury to
unprecedented heights that entire summer. Philadelphia is never very
chilly in the summer; the northern folk who went to it in that
not-to-be-forgotten summer of 1876 felt that they had penetrated the
tropics. And yet when it was all over America had the pleased feeling of
a boy who finds that he can do something new. And even sober folk felt
that a beginning had been made toward a wider view of life across the
United States.
It is nearly forty years since the Centennial sent the tongues of a
whole land buzzing and the two huge structures that it left in Fairmount
Park have begun to grow old, but the park itself is as fresh and as new
as in the days of its beginning, and there are parts of it that were
half a century old before the Centennial opened its doors. There are
many provisions for recreation within its great boundaries, boating upon
the Schuylkill, the drives that border that river, the further drive
that leaves it and sweeps through the lovely glen of the Wissahickon.
The Wissahickon Drive is a joy that does not come to every
Philadelphian. That winding road is barred to sight-seeing cars and
automobiles of indiscriminate sort because the quality of the town
prefers to keep it to itself. So runs Philadelphia; a town which is in
many ways sordid, which has probably the full share of suffering that
must come to every large city, but which bars its fine drive to the
proletariat while Rittenhouse square blandly wonders why Socialism makes
progress across the land. Philadelphia does not progress--in any broad
social sense. She plays cricket--splendidly--is one of the few American
towns in which that fine English game flourishes--and she dispenses her
splendid charity in the same senseless fashion as sixty years ago. But
she does not understand the trend of things today--and so she bars her
Wissahickon Drive except to those who drive in private carriages or
their own motor car, and delivers the finest of the old Colonial houses
within her Fairmount Park area to clubs--of quality.
Personally we much prefer John Bartram's house to any of those splendid
old country-seats within Fairmount. To find Bartram's Gardens you need a
guide--or a really intelligent street-car conductor. For there is not
even a marking sign upon its entrance, although Philadelphia professes
to maintain it as a public park. Little has been done, however, to the
property, and for that he who comes to it almost as a shrine has reason
to be profoundly thankful. For the old house stands, with its barns,
almost exactly as it stood in the days of the great naturalist. One may
see where his hands placed the great stone inscribed "John-Ann Bartram
1731" within its gable; on the side wall another tablet chiseled there
forty years later, and reading:
"Tis God alone, almighty Lord,
The holy one by me adored."
Neglect may have come upon the gardens but even John Bartram could not
deny the wild beauty of these untrammeled things. The gentle river is
still at the foot of the garden, within it, most of the shrubs and trees
he planted are still growing into green old age. And next to his fine
old simple house one sees the tangled yew-tree and the Jerusalem
"Christ's-thorn" that his own hands placed within the ground.
* * * * *
Philadelphia prides herself upon her dominant Americanism--and with no
small reason. She insists that by keeping the doorways to her houses
sharply barred she maintains her native stock, her trained and
responsible stock, if you please, dominant. She avers that she protects
American institutions. New York may become truly cosmopolitan, may ape
foreign manners and foreign customs. Philadelphia in her quiet, gentle
way prefers to preserve those of her fathers.
One instance will suffice. She has preserved the American
Sabbath--almost exactly as it existed half a century ago. As to the
merits and demerits of that very thing, they have no place here. But the
fact remains that Philadelphia has accomplished it. From Saturday night
to Monday morning a great desolation comes upon the town. There are no
theaters not even masquerading grotesquely as "sacred concerts," no open
saloons, no baseball games, no moving pictures--nothing exhibiting for
admission under a tight statute of Pennsylvania, in effect now for more
than a century. And it is only a few years ago that the churches were
permitted to stretch chains across the streets during the hours of
their services. A few bad fires, however, with the fire-engines
becoming entangled with the chains and this custom was abandoned. But
the churches are still open, and they are well attended. It is an
old-fashioned Sabbath and it seems very good indeed to old-fashioned
Americans.
But upon the other six days of the week she offers a plenitude of
comfort and of amusement. She is accustomed to good living--her oysters,
her red-snappers, and her scrapple are justly famous. She is accustomed
to good playing. In the summer she has far more than Fairmount Park.
Atlantic City--our American Brighton--is just fifty-six miles distant
both in crow-flight and in the even path of the railroads, and because
of their wonderful high-speed service many Philadelphians commute back
and forth there all summer long.
For the old Red City is a paradise for commuters. Those few blocks
aroundabout Rittenhouse square that her social rulers have set aside as
being elect for city residence, long since have grown all too small for
a great city--the great monotonous home sections north of Market and
west of the Schuylkill are hot and dreary. So he who can, builds a stone
house out in the lovely vicinage of the great city, and when you are far
away from the high tower of the Public Buildings and find two
Philadelphians having joyous argument you will probably find that they
are discussing the relative merits of the "Main Line," the "Central
Division" or the "Reading."
And yet the best of Philadelphia good times come in winter. She is famed
for her dances and her dinners--large and small. She is inordinately
fond of recitals and of exhibitions. She is a great theater-goer. And
local tradition makes one strict demand. In New York if a young man of
good family takes a young girl of good family to the theater he is
expected to take her in a carriage. She may provide the carriage--for
these days have become shameful--but it must be a carriage none the
less. In Philadelphia if a young man of good family takes a young woman
of good family to the theater he must not take her in a carriage, not
even if he owns a whole fleet of limousines. Therein one can perhaps see
something of the dominating distinctions between the two great
communities.
But what Philadelphia loves most of all is a public festival. It does
not matter so very much just what is to be celebrated as long as there
can be a fine parade up Broad street--which just seems to have been
really designed for fine parades. On New Year's Eve while New York is
drinking itself into a drunken stupor, Philadelphia masks and
disguises--and parades. On every possible anniversary, on each public
birthday of every sort she parades--with the gay discordancies of many
bands, with long files of stolid and perspiring policemen or firemen or
civic societies, with rumbling top-heavy floats that mean whatever you
choose to have them mean. Rittenhouse square does not hold aloof from
these festivals. Oh, no, indeed! Rittenhouse square disguises itself as
grandfather or grandmother or as any of the many local heroes and rides
within the parade--more likely upon the floats. The parades are
invariably well done. And the proletariat of Philadelphia comes out from
the side streets and makes a double black wall of humanity for the long
miles of Broad street.
There is something reminiscent of Bourbon France in the way that Bourbon
Rittenhouse square dispenses these festivals unto the rest of the town.
It is all very diaphanous and very artificial but it is very sensuous
and beautiful withal, and perhaps the rest of the town for a night
forgets some of its sordidness and misery. And the picture that one of
these celebrations makes upon the mind of a stranger is indelible.
Like all of such _fêtes_ it gains its greatest glory at dusk. As
twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; it becomes a thing
of shapes and shadows--even the restless crowd is tired and softened.
Then the genius of electricity comes to transform workaday land into
fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen--this time in living
glowing lines of fire. It is time for men to exult, to forget that they
have ever been tired. Such is the setting that modern America can give a
parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it all, the most
commanding figure of his town. Below him the searchlights play and a
million incandescents glow; the shuffling of the crowds, the faint
cadences of the band, the echoes of the cheering crowd come up to him.
But he does not move. His hands, his great bronze hands, are spread in
benediction over the great gay sturdy city which he brought into
existence these long years ago.
5
THE MONUMENTAL CITY
If you approach Philadelphia by dusty highway, it is quite as
appropriate that you come to Baltimore by water highway. A multitude of
them run out from her brisk and busy harbor and not all of them find
their way to the sea. In fact one of the most fascinating of all of them
leads to Philadelphia--an ancient canal dug when the railroad was being
born and in all these years a busy and a useful water-carrier. If you
are a tourist and time is not a spurring object, take the little steamer
which runs through the old canal from the city of William Penn to the
city of Lord Baltimore. It is one of the nicest one-day trips that we
know in all the east--and apparently the one that is the least known.
Few gazetteers or tourist-guides recommend or even notice it. And yet it
remains one of the most attractive single-day journeys by water that we
have ever taken.
If you will only scan your atlas you will find that nature has offered
slight aid to such a single-day voyage. She builded no direct way
herself but long ago man made up the omission. He dug the Chesapeake and
Delaware canal in the very year that railroading was born within the
United States. For remember that in 1829 the dreamers, who many times
build the future, saw the entire nation a great network of
waterways--natural and artificial. They builded the Chesapeake and
Delaware canal bigger than any that had gone before. No mere mule-drawn
barges were to monopolize it. It was designed for river and bay
craft--a highway for vessels of considerable tonnage.
* * * * *
You arrive at this canal after sailing three hours down the Delaware
river from Philadelphia--past the Navy Yard at League island, the piers
and jetties at Marcus Hook that help to keep navigation open throughout
the winter and many and many a town whose age does not detract from all
its charm. The river widens into a great estuary of the sea. The narrow
procession of inbound and outbound craft files through a thin channel
that finally widens in a really magnificent fairway.
Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the starboard, toward another
of the sleepy little towns that you have been watching all the way down
from Philadelphia--the man who knows and who stands beside you on the
deck will tell you that it is Delaware City--and right there under a
little clump of trees is the beginning of the canal. You can see it
plainly, with its entrance lock and guarding light, and if the day be
Sunday or some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees
watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of a lock--scarcely
eleven inches of raise at the flow of the tide--but it serves to protect
the languid stretch of canal that reaches a long way inland. This
gateway is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Delaware is
one of the few old-time canals that has retained its prestige and its
traffic. An immense freight tonnage passes through it in addition to the
day-boats and the night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Moreover, the motor boats are already finding it of great service as an
important link in the inside water-route that stretches north and south
for a considerable distance along the Atlantic coast.
[Illustration: In Baltimore Harbor]
Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles of the canal and
the man who prefers to take his travel fast has no place upon the
boat. Four miles an hour is its official speed limit and even then the
"wash" of larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But what
of that speed limit with a good magazine in your hands and a slowly
changing vista of open country ever spread before your hungry eyes? You
approach swing-bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp
order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags of little
Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies; heavy Conestoga wagons filled
with farm produce for the towns and cities to the north; sometimes a big
automobile snorting and puffing as if in rage at a few minutes of
enforced delay.
On the long stretches between the bridges the canal twists and turns as
if finding its way, railroad fashion, between increasing slight
elevations. Sometimes it is very wide and the tow-path side--for
sailing-craft are often drawn by mules through it--is a slender
embankment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You meet whole
flotillas of freighters all the way and when edging your way past them
you throw your Philadelphia morning paper into their wheel-houses you
win real thanks. All the way the country changes its variety--and does
not lose its fascination.
So sail to Baltimore. At Chesapeake City you are done with the canal,
just when it may have begun to tire you ever and ever so slightly. Your
vessel drops through a deep lock into the Back creek, an estuary of the
Elk river. The Elk river in turn is an estuary of Chesapeake bay and you
are upon one of the remote tendons of that really marvelous system of
waterways that has its focal point in Hampton Roads and reaches for
thousands of miles into Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North
Carolina.
You sweep through the Elk river and then through the upper waters of the
Chesapeake bay, just born from the yellow flood of the Susquehanna, as
the day dies. As the sun is nearly down, your ship turns sharply, leaves
the Bay and begins the ascent of the Patapsco river. Signs of a nearby
city, a great city if you please, multiply. There are shipbuilding
plants upon distant shores, the glares of foundry cupolas, multiplying
commerce--Baltimore is close at hand.
And so you sail into Baltimore--into that lagoon-like harbor at the very
heart of the town. The steamboats that go sailing further down the
Chesapeake that poke their inquisitive noses into the reaches of the
Pocomoke, the Pianatank, the Nanticoke, the Rappahannock, the
Cocohannock, the Big Wicomico and the Little Wicomico--all of these
water highways of a land of milk and honey and only rivaling one another
in their quiet lordly beauty--sail in and out of Baltimore. There are
many of these steamers as you come into the inner harbor of the city,
tightly tethered together with noses against the pier just as we used to
see horses tied closely to one another at the hitching-rails, at
fair-time in the home town years ago. And they speak the strength of the
manorial city of Lord Baltimore. For the city that sits upon the hills
above her landlocked little harbor draws her strength from a rich
country for many miles roundabout. For many years she has set there,
confident in her strength, leading in progress, firm in resource.
For well you may call Baltimore--quite as much as Philadelphia--a city
of first things. There are almost too many of these to be recounted
here. It is worthy of note, however, that in Baltimore came the first
use in America of illuminating gas, which drove out the candle and the
oil lamp as relics of a past age. Baltimore's historic playhouse,
Peale's Museum, was the first in all the land to be set aglow by the new
illuminant. And one may well imagine the glow of pride also that dwelt
that memorable evening upon the faces of all the folk who were gathered
in that ancient temple of the drama.
And yet there was an earlier "first thing" of even greater
importance--the hour of inspiration a century ago when an enemy's guns
were trained on that stout old guardian of the town's harbor, Fort
McHenry--an engagement to be remembered almost solely by the fact that
the "Star Spangled Banner" first lodged itself in the mind of man. But
to our minds the greatest of the many, many "first things" of Baltimore
was the coming of the railroad. For the first real railroad system in
America--the Baltimore & Ohio--was planned by the citizens of the old
town--ambitious dreamers each of them--as an offset to those rival
cities to the north, Philadelphia and New York, who were creating canals
to develop their commerce--at the expense of the commerce of Baltimore.
So it was that a little group of merchants gathered in the house of
George Brown, on the evening of the 12th of February, 1827, a date not
to be regarded lightly in the annals of the land. For out of that
meeting was to come a new America--a growing land that refused to be
bound by high mountains or wide rivers. Not that the little gathering of
Baltimore merchants pointed an instant or an easy path to quick
prosperity. The path of the Baltimore & Ohio was hedged about for many
years with trials and disappointments. It was more than a quarter of a
century before it was a railroad worthy of the name, meeting even in
part the ideals and dreams of the men who had planned it to bring their
city in touch with the Ohio and the other navigable rivers of the
unknown West. And at the beginning it was a fog-blinded path that
confronted them. Over in England an unknown youth was experimenting with
that uncertain toy, the steam locomotive, while a Russian gentleman of
known intelligence gravely predicted that a car set with sails to go
before the wind upon its rails was the most practical form of
transportation. And it is worthy of mention that the earliest of the
Baltimore and Ohio steam locomotives was beaten in a neck-and-neck race
toward the West by a stout gray horse. The name of the old locomotive is
still recorded in the annals of the railroad but that of the gray horse
is lost forever.
* * * * *
To know and to love the Baltimore of today, one must know and love the
Baltimore of yesterday. He must know her lore, her traditions, her first
families--the things that have gone to make the modern city. He must
see, as through magic glasses, the Baltimore of other days, the city
that came into her own within a very few years after the close of the
American Revolution. His imagination must depict that stout old merchant
and banker, Alexander Brown; Evan Thomas, the first president of
Baltimore's own railroad; B. H. Latrobe, the first great architect and
engineer that a young nation should come to know and whose real memorial
is in certain portions of the great Federal Capitol at Washington. He
must see Winans, the car-builder, and Peter Cooper, tinkering with the
locomotive. He may turn toward less commercial things and find Rembrandt
Peale; and if his glasses be softened by the amber tints of charity he
may see a drunkard staggering through the streets of old Baltimore to
die finally in a gutter, while some men put their fingers to their lips
and whisper that "Mr. Poe's _Raven_ may be literature after all."
It is indeed the old Baltimore that you must first come to know and to
love, if you are ever to understand the personality of the Baltimore of
today. The new Baltimore is a splendid city. Its fine new homes, its
many, many schools and colleges proclaim that here is a center of real
culture; its great churches, its theaters, its modern hotels, its broad
avenues are worthy of a city of six hundred thousand humans. Druid Hill
Park at the back of the new Baltimore is worthy of a city of a million
souls. From it you can ride or stroll downtown through Eutaw place, that
broad parked avenue which is the full pride of the new Baltimore.
Suddenly you turn to the left, pass through a few mean streets, the gray
pile of the Fifth Regiment armory, known nationally because of the great
conventions that have been held beneath its spreading walls, see the
nearby tower of Mount Royal station--after that you are in the region of
the uptown hotels and theaters--thrusting themselves into the long lines
of tight, red-brick houses. These are builded after the fashion of the
Philadelphia houses, even as to their white marble door-steps, and yet
possess a charm and distinction of their own.
There are many of these old houses upon this really fine street, and you
crane your neck at the first intersection to catch its name upon the
sign-post. "Charles Street" it reads and with a little gladsome memory
you recall a bit of verse that you saw a long time ago in the _Baltimore
Sun_. It reads somewhat after this fashion:
Its heart is in Mount Vernon square,
Its head is in the green wood:
Its feet are stretched along the ways
Where swarms the foreign brood;
A modicum of Bon Marche,
That sublimated store--
And Oh, the treasure that we have
In Charles street, Baltimore!
I love to watch the moving throng,
The afternoon parade;
The coaches rolling home to tea,
The young man and the maid;
The gentlemen who dwell in clubs,
The magnates of the town--
Oh, Charles street has a smile for them,
And never wears a frown!
The little shops, so cool and sweet;
The finesse and the grace
Which mark the mercantility
Of such a market-place;
And then beyond the tempting stores
The quietness that runs
Into the calm and stately square
With marble denizens.
The little and the larger stores
Are tempting, to be sure;
But they are only half the charm
That Charles street holds to lure;
For here and there along the way,
How sweet the homes befall--
The domicile that holds his Grace,
The gentle Cardinal.
The mansions with pacific mien
Whose windows say "Come in!"
The touches of colonialness,
The farness of the din
That rolls a city league away
And leaves this dainty street
A cool and comfortable spot
Where past and present meet.
A measure of la boulevard
Before whose windows pass
The madame and the damoisel,
The gallant and the lass;
The gravest and the most sedate,
The young and gay it calls;
And, oh, how proper over it--
The shadows of St. Paul's!
Dip down the hill and well away,
The southward track it takes,
O fickleness, how many quips,
How many turns it takes!
But ever in its greensward heart,
From head to foot we pour
The homage of our love of it--
Dear Charles street, Baltimore!
[Illustration: Charles Street--Baltimore]
You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very heart of Charles
street. It is a little open place, shaped like a Maltese cross rather
than a real square or oblong, with a modern apartment house looming up
upon it, whose façades of French Renaissance give a slightly Parisian
touch to that corner of the square. To the rest of it, bordered with
sober, old-time mansions there is nothing Parisian, unless you stand
apart and gaze at the Monument, which sends its great shaft some two
hundred feet up into the air. There are such columns in Paris.
It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon square, that adds variety
to the vistas up and down through Charles street. For eighty years it
has stood there, straight and true; for eighty years General Washington
has looked down into the gardens of Charles street, upon the children
who are playing there, the folk coming home at night. It is the most
dominating thing in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-scraper
habit, and because of it we have always known Baltimore as the
Monumental City.
* * * * *
Now turn from the modern Baltimore--right down this street which runs
madly off the sharp hill of Mount Vernon square. Charles street, with
all of its shops and gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot
of the hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat sordid
way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station and since you are to
see so many great railroad stations before you are done with the cities
of America, take a second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It
is not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, very old--as
far as we know the oldest of all the important stations that are still
in use today. From its smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the
Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna country--the
farther lands beyond--since 1848. And that trainshed, with its
stout-pegged wooden-trussed roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone
pillars, seems good for another sixty-five years.
Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. Over in another
of the older parts of the town you can still find Camden station, which
in 1857 was not only proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was
ever built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy place
indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great fire of a decade ago, but
finally forced to close its doors in the face of the competition of
better located and more elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient
cathedral remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Merchants'
Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look east from the
Monument square there in front of the Post Office. Across the harbor you
can find Fort McHenry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Baltimore
does not easily forget.
And here, as you plunge down into the little congested district
roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the really old Baltimore. The
streets are as rambling and as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their
gutters still run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the
credit of the town that she is today fast doing away with these. And
once in a time you can stand at the open door of an oyster establishment
and watch the negroes shocking those bivalves--singing as they work. For
just below Baltimore is a great _habitat_ of the oyster as well as of
the crab, to say nothing of some more aristocratic denizens--the
diamond-back terrapin for instance. Boys with trays--many of them
negroes--walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling cold
deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are uniformly delicious,
and the boys sell them as freely on the streets as the boys down in
Staunton and some other Virginia towns sell cold chicken.
Now we are across Jones Falls[B]--that unimpressive stream that gullies
through Baltimore--and plunging into Old Town. Other cities may boast
their _quartiers_, Baltimore has Old Town. And she clings to the name
and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here is indeed the
oldest part of Old Town and if we search quietly through its narrow,
crowded streets we may still see some of the old inns, dating well back
into the eighteenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling
in eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when the coaches
started forth up the new National Pike to Cumberland or distant
Wheeling, north to York and Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little
old houses of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively
residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are
so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful glass that we
think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see
above our heads in the street cars. But they represent Baltimore's
solution of her housing problem.
[B] During the past year Baltimore has made a very
creditable progress toward building an important commercial
street over Jones Falls; thus transforming it into a hidden,
tunneled sewer. Residents of the city will not soon forget,
however, that it was at Jones Falls that the engines of the
New York Fire Department took their stand and halted the
great fire of 1904. E. H.
For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apartments. She has, like
her Quaker neighbor to the north, mile upon mile of little red-brick
houses, all these also with white door-steps--marble many times, and in
other times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh paintings. In
these little houses Baltimore lives. You may find here and there some
one of them no more than ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories
high, but it is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the rent
of it is ridiculously low--compared even with the lower-priced
apartments and the tenements of New York. That low rent, combined with
the profuse and inexpensive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap
place in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the democracy of
her boulevards makes her a very comfortable place of residence--even for
a poor man. And you may live within your little house and of a summer
evening sit upon your "pleasure porch" as comfortably as any prince.
In Baltimore it is always a "pleasure porch," thus proclaiming her as a
real gateway to the old South--the South of flavor and of romance. In
Baltimore, you always say "Baltimore City," probably in distinction to
Baltimore county, which surrounds it, and your real Baltimorean delights
to speak of his morning journal as "that _Sun_ paper." The town clings
conservatively to its old tricks of speech, and if you pick up that
newspaper you will perhaps find the advertisement of an auctioneer
preparing to sell the effects of some family "declining housekeeping."
That same fine conservatism is reflected in her nomenclature--first as
you see it upon the shop signs and the door-plates. She has not felt the
flood of foreign invasion as some of our other cities have felt it. She
is not cosmopolitan--and she is proud of that. And the names that one
sees along her streets are for the most part the good names of English
lineage. Even the names of the streets themselves are proof of
that--Alpaca and April alleys, Apple, and Apricot courts, Crab
court, Cuba street, China street--which takes one back to the
days of the famous clipper ships which sailed from the wharves of
Baltimore--Featherbed lane, Johnny-cake road, Maidenchoice lane, Pen
Lucy avenue, Sarah Ann street--who shall say that conservatism does not
linger in these cognomens? And what shall one say of conservatism and
Baltimore's devotion to Charles street, sending that famous thoroughfare
up through the county to the north as Charles Street avenue and then as
Charles Street Avenue extension?
* * * * *
Do not mistake Baltimore conservatism for a lack of progress. You can
hardly make greater mistake. For Baltimore today is constantly planning
to better her harbor, to improve the beginning that she has already made
in the establishment of municipal docks--her jealousy of a certain
Virginia harbor far to the south is working much good to herself. She is
constantly bettering her markets--today they are not only among the most
wonderful but the most efficient in the whole land. And today she is
planning a great common terminal for freight right within her heart--a
sizable enterprise to be erected at a cost of some ten millions of
dollars. For she is determined that her reputation for giving good
living to her citizens and at a low cost shall be maintained. She
realizes that much of that cost is the cost of food distribution, and
while almost every other city in the land is floundering and
experimenting she is going straight ahead--with definite progress in
view. Such purpose and such plans make first-rate aids to conservatism.
* * * * *
"Baltimore can prove to any one who will give her half a chance, what a
good, a dignified, a charming thing it is to be an American town,"
writes one man of her. He knows her well and he does not go by the mark.
Baltimore is good, is dignified, is altogether charming. And she is an
American town of the very first rank.
6
THE AMERICAN MECCA
Just as all the roads of old Italy led to Rome so do all the roads of
this broad republic lead to Washington--its seat of government. At every
season of the year travelers are bound to it. It is in the spring-time,
however, that this travel begins to assume the proportions of the
hegira. It is a patriotic trek--essentially. And the slogan "Every true
American should see Washington at least once" has been changed by shrewd
railroad agents and hotel-keepers to "Every true American should see
Washington once a year," although some of the true Americans after one
experience with Washington hotel-keepers are apt to say that once in a
life-time is quite enough. But the national capital is worth all the
hardships, all the extortions large and small. It is a patriotic shrine
and, quite incidentally, the most beautiful city in America, if not the
world, and so it is that there is not a month in the year that Americans
are not pouring through its gateway--the wonderful new Union station.
That terminal still opens the eyes of those folk who come trooping down
toward the Potomac--old fellows who still remember the last time they
went to Washington and the entire country was a-bristle with military
camps and bristling guns, little shavers entering for the first time the
City of Perpetual Delights, lovelorn bridal couples, excursions from
Ohio, round-trips from off back in the Blue Ridge mountains, parties
from up in Pennsylvania--the broad concourse of the railroad station at
Washington is a veritable parade-ground of latent and varied
Americanism.
The members of a self-appointed Reception Committee are waiting for the
tourists--just outside the marble portals of the station. Some of them
are hotel-runners, others are cab-drivers, but they are all there and
their eyes are seemingly unerring. How quickly they detect the stranger
who has heard the "true American" slogan for the first time, and who has
the return part of his ten-day limit ticket tucked safely away in his
shabby old wallet.
"Seein' Washington! A brilliant trip of two hours through the homes of
wealth an' fashion, with a lecture explainin' every point of interest
an' fame."
Here is the first welcoming cry of the Reception Committee--and seasoned
tourist that you are, you do not yield to it. You shake your head in a
determined "no" to the barker at the station but a little while later
over in Pennsylvania avenue you succumb. Two dashing young black-haired
ladies--slender symphonies in white--are sitting high upon one of the
large travel-stained peripatetic grandstands. On another sight-seeing
automobile over across the street are two very blondes--in black. You
cast your fate upon the ladies with the black hair and the white dresses
and climb upon the wagon with them. At intervals you look enviously upon
mere passers-by. Then the intervals cease. Two young men climb upon the
wagon and boldly engage themselves in conversation with the young
ladies. At the very moment when you are about to interfere in the name
of propriety, you discover that the young ladies seem to like it. At any
rate you decide it will be interesting to listen to their conversation
and the important young man who is in charge of the grandstand has taken
your non-refundable dollar for the trip. Otherwise you might still
change in favor of the blondes who are sitting huddled under a single
green sunshade and who look bored with themselves.
You sit ... and sit ... and sit. An old lady finds her cumbersome way up
on the front seat and fumbles for her dollar. A deaf gentleman perches
himself upon the rear bench. After which you sit some more. Three or
four more true Americans find their way upon the wagon. You still sit.
An elderly couple crowds in upon your bench. The man has whiskers like
Uncle Joe Cannon or a cartoon, but his wife seems to have subdued him,
after all these years. The sitting continues. Finally, when patience is
all but exhausted, the personal conductor of the car shouts "All aboard"
and the two young ladies in white duck drop off nimbly. For a moment
their acquaintances seem non-plussed. Then they understand, for they,
too, jump off and follow after.
The chauffeur fumbles with the crank of the top-heavy car. It does not
respond readily. The chauffeur perspires and the personal conductor--who
will shortly emerge in the rôle of lecturer--offers advice. The
chauffeur softly profanes. Interested spectators gather about and begin
to make comments of a personal nature. Finally, when the chauffeur is
about to give it all up and you and yours are to be plunged into
mortification--you can safely suspect those young blondes on the rival
enterprise across the way of laughing in their tight little sleeves at
you--the engine begins to snort violently and throb industriously. The
chauffeur wipes the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand
and smiles triumphantly at the scoffers across the street.
He jumps into his seat briskly, as if afraid that the car might change
its mind, and you are off. The ship's company settles into various
stages of contentment. Seein' Washington at last.... The lecturer
reaches for his megaphone.
But not so fast--this is Washington.
The real start has not yet begun. All these are but preliminaries to the
start of the real start. You are not going to bump into the world of
wealth and fashion as quickly as all this. You go along Pennsylvania
avenue for another two squares and for twenty minutes more traffic is
solicited. The novelty wears off and contentment ceases.
"I don't purpose to pay a dollar for a ride and spend the hull time
settin' 'round like a public hack in front of th' hotels," says a
bald-headed man and he voices a rising sentiment. He is from Baltimore
and he is frankly skeptical of all things in Washington. The lecturer
and the chauffeur confer. The performance with the engine crank is given
once again and you finally make a real start.
Entertainment begins from that start. But you get history as a
preliminary to wealth and fashion, for it so happens that wealth and
fashion do not dwell in that part of Pennsylvania avenue.
"Site of first p'lice station in Washington," the young man rattles out
through his megaphone. "Oldest hotel in Washington. Washington's
Chinatown. Peace Monument. Monument to Albert Pike, Gran' Master of the
Southern Masons; only Confederate monument in the city. Home o' Fightin'
Bob Evans, there with the tree against the window. His house was--"
"What was that about the Confederates?" the deaf man interrupts from the
back seat. The lecturer, with an expression of utter boredom, repeats.
At this moment the chauffeur comes into the limelight. He recognizes a
girl friend on the sidewalk and in the enthusiasm of that recognition
nearly bumps the grandstand into a load of brick. When order is restored
and you go forward in a straight course once again, the lecturer
resumes--
"On our right the United States Pension Office, the largest brick
buildin' in the world and famed for the inaugural balls it has every
four years--only it didn't have one las' time. But when Mr. Taft was
inaugurated nine thousand couples were a-waltzin' an--"
Some of the folk upon the car look shocked. They come from communities
where dancing is taboo, and the lecturer seems to hint at an orgy there
in one of the taxpayer's buildings.
"There is also the largest frieze in the world 'round that building," he
continues, "an' it ain't the North Pole, either. Eighteen hundred
soldiers and sailors--count 'em some day--marchin' there, the sick an'
the wounded laggin' behind, the trail of martyr's blood markin' their
path, comrade helpin' comrade--all a-bringin' honor an' glory to the
flag."
He drops the megaphone to catch his breath and whispers into your ear.
He realizes that you have understood him--and half apologizes for
himself:
"They like that," he explains, in an undertone. "A little oratory now
an' then tickles 'em. An' then they like this:"
The megaphone goes into action.
"We are travelin' west in F street, the Wall street of Washington, the
place of the banker an' broker."
"Ain't we goin' to see the houses of the fashionable people?" demands
the wife of the bald-headed Baltimorean. "Now over in our city Eutaw
place is--"
"We are comin' there, madam," says the lecturer, courteously.
And in a little while you do come there. You sit back complacently in
your seat and smack your mental lips at the sight of the mansion of the
man who owns three banks; of that of him who, the lecturer solemnly
affirms, is the president of the Whiskey Trust; at a third where dwells
"the richest minister of the United States." A little school-teacher,
who has come down from Hartford, Conn., makes profuse notes in a neat
leather-covered book. It is plain to see that she takes the duty of the
true Americans as a serious enterprise, indeed.
You all start and look when ex-Speaker Cannon's house is passed, and you
catch a glimpse of the old man coming down the door-steps. The public
interest in him has not seemed to cease with his retirement from the
center of the national arena. But it has lessened. You realize that a
moment later when your peregrinating grandstand rolls by a solemn-faced
man walking down the street--a big man in a black suit, his face hidden
by a black slouch hat.
"Mr. Bryan," whispers the lecturer, this time without the megaphone.
It is quite unnecessary. For a brief instant Washington is forgotten. In
that instant the crowd regards the second or third best-known man in
America--silently and curiously. The lecturer brings them back to their
dollar's worth. He boldly points out the Larz Anderson house as the home
of "the richest real estate man in the country," the new home of Perry
Belmont as having "three stories above ground and three below"--an
excursionist from Reading, Pa., interrupts to ask how much coal they
will need to fill such a cellar--you see the home of the late Mr. Walsh
with "a forty-five hundred dollar marble bench in the yard, all cut out
of a single piece," the sedate and stately house of Gifford Pinchot.
It is pleasant, driving through these smooth Washington streets, even if
the low-hanging tree branches do make you jump and start at times. You
go up this street, down that, past long rows of neat Colonial houses
that some day are going to look neat and old--turn by one of the lovely
open squares of the city. They have just erected a statue
there--grandstands are already going up around about it and there will
be speeches and oratory before long.
Washington is constantly in the throes of an epidemic of dedications.
There are now more statues in the city than Mr. Baedeker ever can tally
and each of them has undergone dedication--at least once. The President
has been corralled, if possible, although Mr. Wilson has already shown a
reticence for this sort of thing. If the President simply will not come,
a Governor or a rather famous Senator will do as well. And in the far
pinch there are many Representatives in Washington who are mighty good
orators. You can almost get a Representative at the crook of your
finger, and you cannot have a real dedication without a splurry of
oratory. It is almost as necessary as music--or the refreshments.
As you slip by one of those statues--"the equestrian figure of General
Andrew Jackson on horseback"--the gentleman from Reading demands that
the car stop. He wants to ask a question and apparently he cannot ask a
question and be in motion at the same time. So he demands that the car
be stopped. It is one of the privileges of a man who has paid a
perfectly good dollar for the trip. The car stops--abruptly.
You will probably recall that Jackson statue, standing in the center of
Lafayette square and directly in front of the White House. Perhaps
General Jackson rode a horse that way and perhaps he did not, but there
the doughty old warrior sits, his bronze mount plunging high upon hind
legs.
"What is ever going to keep that statue from falling over some day?"
demands the man from Reading. He has a keen professional interest in the
matter, for he has been a blacksmith up in that brisk Pennsylvania town
for many a year.
[Illustration: Through the portals of this Union Station come all the
visitors to Washington]
The lecturer explains that the tail of the bronze horse is heavily
weighted and that the whole figure is held in balance that way. But the
blacksmith is Pennsylvania Dutch--of the sort not to be convinced in an
instant--and he sets forth his opinion of the danger at length, to
the bald-headed man from Baltimore, who sits just behind him.
The lecturer goes forward once again. You look at the proud old mansion
that faces Lafayette square, and gasp when the intelligent young man
with the megaphone tells you that it was given to Daniel Webster by the
American people and that he gambled it away. You notice the house that
Admiral Dewey got from the same source, and wonder if he could not have
contrived possibly to gamble it away. You note St. John's church--"the
Church of State," the young man calls it--and turn into Sixteenth
street. But alas, it is Sixteenth street no longer. Through a bit of the
official snobbery that frequently comes to the surface in the governing
of the national capital that fine highway has been named "the Avenue of
the Presidents," a name that is so out of harmony of our fine American
town that it will probably be changed in the not distant future.
The lecturer points your attention to another house.
"The Dolly Madison Hotel, for women only," he announces. "No men or dogs
allowed above the first floor. The only male thing around the premises
is the mail-box and it is--"
He has gone too far. You fix your steely glance of disapproval upon him
and he withers. He drops his megaphone and whispers into your ear once
again:
"I hate to do it," he apologizes, "but I have to. The boss says:--'Give
'em wit an' humor, Harry, or back you goes to your old job on a
Fourteenth street car.' Think of givin' that bunch wit an' humor! Look
at that old sobersides next to you, still a-worryin' about that statue!"
Wit and humor it is then. Wit and humor and wealth and fashion. It
almost seems too little to offer a mere dollar for such joys. You make
the turn around the drive in back of the White House and you miss the
Taft cow--which in other days was wont to feast upon the greensward. You
ask the lecturer what became of Mr. Taft's cow.
"She was deceased," he solemnly explained, "a year before his term was
up--of the colic."
And of that somewhat ambiguous statement you can make your own
translation.
* * * * *
The sight-seeing car stops at the little group of hotels in Pennsylvania
avenue, near the site of the old Baltimore & Potomac railroad station.
The lecturer begins to use his megaphone to expatiate upon the
advantages of a trip to Arlington which is about to begin, but Arlington
is too sweetly serious a memorial to be explored by a humorous
motor-car. And--in the offing--you are seeing something else. Another
car of the line upon which you have been voyaging is moored at the very
point from which you started, not quite two hours ago. Upon that car sit
the same two young black-haired ladies. Two young men are climbing up to
sit beside them. Your gaze wanders. On the rival car across the way the
two very blondes in black are still holding giggling conversation. Your
suspicions are roused.
Do they ever ride?
Apparently not. Tomorrow they will be upon the cars again, the blondes
upon the right, the brunettes upon the left. And the day after tomorrow
they will sit and wait and appear interested and in joyous anticipation.
And if it rains upon the following day they will don their little
mackintoshes and talk pleasantly about its being nearly time to clear
up.
Now you know. Seein' Washington employs cappers. Those young ladies sit
there to induce dollars--faith, 'tis seduction, pure and simple--from
narrow masculine pockets. You do know, now.
* * * * *
If we are giving much space to the tourist view of Washington it is
because the tourist plays so important a part in the life of the town.
He is one of its chief assets and, seriously speaking, there is
something rather pathetic in the joy that comes to the faces of those
who step out from the great portals of the new station for the very
first time. There is something in their very expressions that seems to
express long seasons of saving and of scrimping, perhaps of downright
deprivation in order that our great American mecca may finally be
reached. You will see the same expressions upon the faces of the humbler
folk who go to visit any of the great expositions that periodically are
held across the land.
That expression of eminent satisfaction--for who could fail to see
Washington for the first time and not be eminently satisfied--reaches
its climax each week-day afternoon in the East Room of the White House.
If President Wilson has reached a finer determination than his
determination to let the folk of his nation-wide family come and see
him, we have yet to hear of it. And there is not a man or woman in the
land who should be above attending the simple official reception that
the President gives each afternoon at his house to all who may care to
come.
There is little red-tape about the arrangements in advance. The tendency
to hedge the President around with restrictions has been completely
offset in the present administration. A note or a hurried call upon the
President's secretary in advance--a card of invitation is quickly
forthcoming. And at half-past two o'clock of any ordinary afternoon you
present yourself at the east wing of the White House. Your card is
quickly scrutinized and you may be sure of it that the sharp-eyed
Irishman who is more than policeman but rather a mentor at the gate, has
scrutinized you, too. His judgment is quick, rarely erring. And unless
you meet his entire approval, you are not going to enter the President's
house. But he has approved and before you know it you--there are several
hundred of you--are slipping forward in a march into the basement of the
Executive Mansion and up one of its broad stairs. There are numerous
attendants along the path.
"Single file!" shouts one of them and single file you all go--just as
you used to play Indian or follow-your-leader in long-ago days. And you
all step from the stair-head into the East Room, while the women-folk
among you conjure imagination to their aid and endeavor to see that
lovely apartment dressed for a great reception or, best of all, one of
the infrequent White House weddings.
Other attendants quickly and easily form you into a great crescent, two
or three human files in width and extending in a great sweep from a vast
pair of closed doors which give to the living portion of the house. No
one speaks, but every one takes stock of his neighbors. If it is in
vacation season there are many boys and girls--for whole schools make
the Washington expedition in these days--there may be several Indians in
war-paint and feather making ceremonious visit to the Great White
Brother. If you are traveled you will probably see New England or
Carolina or Kansas or California in these folk, whose hearts are
quickened in anticipation.
Suddenly--the great door opens, just a little. A thin, wiry man in gray
steps into the room and takes his position near the head of the
crescent. An aide in undress military uniform stands close to him, two
sharp-faced young men stand a little to the left of them and act as a
human Scylla and Charybdis through which all must pass. There are no
preliminaries--no hint of ceremony. Within five seconds of the time when
the President has taken his place, the line begins to move forward. In
twenty minutes he has shaken hands with three or four hundred people and
the reception is over. But in the brief fraction of a single minute when
your hand has grasped that of the President you feel that he knows no
one else on earth. He concentrates upon you and that, in itself, is a
gift of which any statesman may well be proud. And while you are
thinking of the pleasure that his word or two of greeting has given you,
you awake to find yourself out of the room and hunting for your umbrella
at the check-stand in the lower hall. The pleasant personal feeling is
with you even after you have left the shelter of the White House roof.
It is showering gently and a man under a tree is murmuring something
about Secretary Bryan seeing visitors at a quarter to five but neither
makes impress upon you. You are merely thinking how much easier it is to
come to see the President of the greatest republic in the world than
many a lesser man within it--railroad heads, bankers, even petty
politicians.
In other days it was not as easy to gain admittance to the President,
but the tourist who was not above guile could be photographed shaking
hands with the great person. A place on that always alluring
Pennsylvania avenue did the trick. You stepped in a canvas screen into
the place of the enlarged image of a sailor who was once snapped shaking
hands with President Taft. When the picture was finished you were where
the sailor had been, and you had a post-card that would make the folks
back home take notice. True you were a little more prominent in it than
the President, but then Mr. Taft was not paying for the picture. In fact
Mr. Taft, when he heard of the practice, grew extremely annoyed and had
it stopped, so ending abruptly one of the tourist joys of Washington.
After the White House, the Capitol is an endless source of delight to
those who have come to Washington from afar. A little squad of aged men,
who have a wolfish scent for tourists, act as its own particular
Reception Committee. These old men, between their cards and the sporting
extras of the evening papers, condescend to act as guides to the huge
building. We shall spare you the details of a trip through it with them.
It is enough to say that they are, in the spirit at least, sight-seeing
car lecturers grown into another generation. Their quarrels with the
Capitol police are endless. On one memorable occasion, a captain of that
really efficient police-force had decided to mark the famous whispering
stone in the old Hall of Representatives with a bit of paint. You can
read about that whispering stone in any of the tourist-guides which the
train-boy sells you on your way to Washington. Suffice it now to say
that when you have found this phonetic marvel and have stood upon it
your whisper will be heard distinctly in a certain far corner of the
gallery of the room. It is an acoustic freak of which the schoolboys out
in Racine can tell you better than I. And it is one of the prized assets
of the Capitol guides. The police captain forgot that when he set out to
mark it.
It came back to him the evening of that day, however, when the building
had been cleared. He chanced to cross the old hall and, looking for his
marker, found three of the guides upon their knees carefully restoring
it to absolute uniformity with its neighbors. And the captain nearly
lost his job. He had sought to interfere with prerogative, and
prerogative is a particularly sacred thing at the Federal capital--as we
shall see in a little while.
* * * * *
Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to walk in F street.
The little girls come out of the matinees, the bigger girls drift out
from the tea-rooms, there is a swirl of motor vehicles--gasoline and
electric--but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flammeries of
Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. Souvenir shops rivet him to
their counters. Post-cards--grave, humorous, abominable--urge themselves
upon him. But if all these fail--they have post-cards nowadays of the
high schools in each of the little Arizona towns--here upon a counter
are the little statuettes of pre-digested currency.
Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that money today could not
buy one drop of gasoline, let alone an imported touring automobile, for
once it has passed through the government's macerating machine it is
only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go into a Benjamin
Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a model of the Washington Monument
that looks as if it were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty
thousand doll--stay, there is a limit to credulity. And you refuse to
buy without a signed certificate from the Treasury Department as to
these valuations.
Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly
credulous--these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so
very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath
to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor
slipped around the town with amazing rapidity--Washington is hardly more
than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand
folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them
could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they
all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it--at a
safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet no
one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program.
* * * * *
There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of
the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in
dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings.
For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply
defined--and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are
telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness.
But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt
themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of
Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw
themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the
very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the
question.
[Illustration: The stately dome of our lovely Capitol]
For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mixture of real
democracy and false aristocracy as well as real--if there be any such
thing as real aristocracy. The fact that almost every person in the town
works, more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the democracy. And
that self-same fact seems to fairly establish the aristocracy--you can
frankly call much of it snobbishness--of the place. To understand the
whys and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, to be an
employé of the government, of large or small degree. They are many and
they are complicated. But an illustration or two will suffice to show
what we mean:
A rule, which no one nowadays seems very desirous of fathering, but
nevertheless a rule of long standing, states that when a department
chief enters an elevator in any of the department buildings it must
carry him without other stops to his floor. The other passengers in the
car must wait the time and the will of the chief, no matter how
urgent may be their errands or how short the time at their command. A
gradual increase of this silly rule has made it include many assistants,
sub-chiefs and assistants to sub-chiefs. Only the elevator man knows the
rank at which a government employé becomes entitled to this peculiar
privilege. But he does know, and woe be to that little stenographer who
enters the Department of X---- at just three minutes of nine in the
morning, with the expectation of being at her desk with that promptness
which the Federal government demands of the folk in its service. The
second assistant to a second assistant of a sub-chief of a sub-division
may have entered. The little stenographer's desk is upon the third
floor; the gentleman whose official title spelled out reaches almost
across a sheet of note paper is upon the seventh. There are folk within
the crowded elevator-car for the fourth and fifth and sixth floors as
well. But they have neither title nor rank and the car shoots to the
seventh floor for the benefit of the Mr. Assistant Somebody. If there is
another Assistant Somebody there to ride down to the ground floor--and
there frequently is--you can imagine the consternation of the clerks.
And yet it is part of the system under which they have to work when they
work for that most democratic of employers--Uncle Samuel.
The secretary of an important department who entered the cabinet with
the present administration stayed very late at his office one evening,
but found the elevator man awaiting him when he stepped out into the
hallway of the deserted building. It was only a short flight of stairs
to the street, and the secretary--it was Mr. Bryan--asked the man why he
had not gone home.
"My orders are to stay here, sir, until the secretary has gone home for
the night," was the reply.
It is hardly necessary to say that right there was one order in the
State department that was immediately revoked, while some twenty
thousand clerks and stenographers who form the working staff of official
Washington sent up little prayers of thanksgiving. These clerks and
stenographers make up the every-day fiber of the town life. They go to
work in the morning at nine--for a half-hour before that time you can
see human streams of them pouring toward the larger departments--and
they quit at half past four. The closing hour used to be five, but the
clerks decided that they would have a shorter lunch-time and so they
moved their afternoon session thirty minutes ahead. Half an hour is a
short lunch-time and so official Washington carries its lunch to its
desk, more or less cleverly disguised. The owners of popular priced
downtown restaurants have long since given up in utter disgust.
But official Washington does not care. Official Washington ends its day
at half-past four and official Washington is such a power that matinées,
afternoon lectures and concerts of any popular sort are rarely planned
to begin before that hour. And on the hot summer afternoons of the
Federal capital the wisdom of such early closing is hardly to be
doubted. On such afternoons, matinée or concert, a cup of tea or a walk
along the shop windows of F street are all forgotten. For beyond the
heat of the city, within easy reach by its really wonderful
transportation system, are playgrounds of infinite variety and joy. True
it is that the really fine parts of Rock Creek Park are rather rigidly
held for those folk who can afford to ride in motor cars, but there is
the river, innumerable picnic-grounds in every direction, fine bathing
at Chesapeake beach, not far distant--and the canal.
Of all these the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal is by far the most
distinctive. And how the Washington folk do love that old waterway! What
fun they do have out of it with their motor boats and their canoes. If
that old water-highway, almost losing its path in the stretches of
thick wood and undergrowth, had been created as a plaything for the
capital city, it could hardly have been better devised. The motor boats
and the canoes set forth from Georgetown--on holidays and Sundays in
great droves. They go all the way up to Great Falls--and even
beyond--working their passage through the old locks, exchanging repartee
with the lock-tenders, loafing under the shadows of the trees, drinking
in the indolence of the summer days.
* * * * *
But Shafer's Lock or Cabin John's Bridge is not the Chevy Chase Club and
official Washington knows that. It reads in the daily papers of that
other life, of the folk who wear white flannels and dawdle around great
porches all day long; hears rumors brought, Lord knows how, from the
gossipy Metropolitan Club; almost touches shoulders with its smart
breakfasts and lunches and dinners when it comes in and out of the
confectioners' and the big hotels. But it is none the less apart,
hopelessly and irrevocably apart. Uncle Sam may take the office folk of
his capital and give them the assurance of a livelihood through long
years, but that is all. He gives them no chance to step out of the
comfortable rut into which they have been placed. The good positions,
the positions that mean rank and title and entrance to the hallowed
places, rarely come through promotions. They are the gifts of fortune,
gifts even to strange folk from Cleveland or Madison or Stockton. They
are not the reward of faithful service at an unknown desk.
And so official Washington, as we have seen here, is quite helpless. The
other official Washington--the official Washington of the society
columns--little cares. It is not above noticing the twenty thousand, but
it is mere notice and nothing more. And as for interest or graciousness
or kind-heartedness--they are quite out of the question. Washington is
being rebuilt, in both its physical and its social structure. The
architects of its social structure are not less capable than those folk
who are working out marvels in steel and marble. These first see the
Washington of tomorrow, modeled closely after the structures of European
capitals. Already our newly created class of American idle rich is
establishing its _habitat_ along the lovely streets of our handsomest
town. That is a beginning. In some of the departments they have begun to
serve tea at four of an afternoon--just as they do on the terrace of the
House of Commons. That is another beginning. We are starting.
The structure of European capitals is largely built upon class
distinctions. Washington is being builded close to its models.
For ourselves, we prefer the touch of Europe as the architects work them
in steel and in marble. A man who has been to Washington and who has not
returned within the decade will be astonished to see the change already
worked in its appearance. From the moment he steps across the threshold
of the fine new station--itself a revelation after the old-time railroad
terminals of the town--he will see transformation. Washington is still
in growth. They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon
their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the
modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be
modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital
for the entire world to follow.
7
THE CITY OF THE SEVEN HILLS
You can compare Richmond with Rome if you will, with an allusion upon
the side to her seven hills; but, if you have even a remote desire for
originality, you will not. Rather compare the old southern capital with
a bit of rare lace or a stout bit of mahogany. Of the two we would
prefer the mahogany, for Richmond is substantial, rather than
diaphanous. And like some of the fine old tables in the dining-rooms of
her great houses she has taken some hard knocks and in the long run come
out of them rather well. She is scarred, but still beautiful. And she
wears her scars, visible and invisible, both bravely and well.
But if a man come down from the North with any idea of the histories of
that war, which is now fifty years old and almost ready to be forgotten,
too sharply in his memory, and so imagines that he is to see a Richmond
of 1865, with grass growing in the streets, ruins everywhere, mules and
negroes in the streets, he is doomed to an awakening. There are still
plenty of mules and negroes in the streets and probably will be until
the end of time, but the Richmond of today boasts miles and miles of as
fine modern smooth pavements as his motor car might ever wish to find.
And as for ruins, bless you, Richmond has begun to tear down some of the
buildings which she built after the war so as to get building-sites for
her newest skyscrapers.
Do not forget that there is a new spirit abroad in the South--and
Virginia, in many ways the most poetic and dramatic of all our states,
has not lagged in it. There are Boards of Trade at Roanoke and Lynchburg
that are not averse to sounding the praises of those lively
manufacturing towns of the up-country, and as for Norfolk--let any
Norfolk man get hold of you and in two hours he will have almost
convinced you that his town is going to be the greatest seaport along
the North Atlantic--and that within two decades, sir. But this chapter
is not written of Roanoke or Lynchburg or Norfolk. This is Richmond's
chapter and in it to be writ the fact that the capital of Virginia has
not lagged in enterprise or progress behind any of the other cities of
the state. In the transformation she has sacrificed few of her
landmarks, none of that delightful personality that makes itself
apparent to those who tarry for a little time within her gates. That
makes it all the better.
It is the spirit of the new South that is not only bringing such
wonderful towns as Birmingham, to make a single instance, to the front,
but is working the transformation of such staunch old settlements as
Memphis or Atlanta--or Richmond. Not that Richmond is willing to forget
the past. There is something about the Virginia spirit that seems
incapable of death. There is something about the Virginian's loyalty to
his native state, his blindness to her imperfections, almost every one
of them the result of decades of civic poverty, that cannot escape the
most calloused commercial soul that ever walked out of North or South.
And there is something about this bringing up of spirit and of loyalty
with the spirit of the new America that makes a combination well-nigh
irresistible.
Here, then, is the new South. The generation that liked to discuss the
detail of Pickett's charge and the horrors of those days in the
Wilderness is gone. The new generations are rather bored with such
detail. The new generations are not less spirited, not less loyal than
the old. But they are new. That, of itself, almost explains the
difference. Now see it in a little closer light.
Volumes have been written of the loyalty of the old South. Richmond
herself today presents more volumes, although unwritten, of that
loyalty. You can read it in her streets, in her fine old square houses,
in that stately building atop of Schokoe hill, which generations have
known as the Capitol and which was for a little time the seat of
government of a new nation. Within that Capitol stands a statue. It is
the marble effigy of a great Virginian, who was, himself, the first head
of a new government. The guide-books call it the Houdini statue of
Washington, and keen critics have long since asserted that it is not
only the finest statue in the United States but one of the most notable
art works of the world. It was known as such in France at the time of
the Civil War. And hardly had that very dark page in our history been
turned before the Louvre made overtures to Virginia for the purchase of
the Houdini statue. The matter of price was not definitely fixed.
France, in the spendthrift glories of the Second Empire, was willing to
pay high for a new toy for her great gallery.
Poor Virginia! She was hard pressed those days for the necessities of
life, to say nothing of its ordinary comforts. Her pockets were empty.
She was bankrupt. Her mouth must have watered a bit at thought of those
hundreds of thousands of French francs. But she stood firm, and if you
know Virginia at all, you will say "of course she stood firm." A
Southern gentleman would almost repudiate his financial obligations
before he would sell one of the choice possessions of his families.
There are great plantation houses still standing in the Old Dominion,
which were spared the torch of war by the mercy of God, and whose walls
hold aloft the handiwork of the finest painters of England, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; rare portraits of the masters and
mistresses of those old houses. In them, too, are furniture and silver
whose real value is hardly to be computed, not even by the screw of a
dealer in antiques. The folk in these old houses may be poor--if they
come of the oldest Virginia stock they very likely are. They stand
bravely, though, to the traditions of their hospitality, even though
they wonder if the bacon is going to last and if it is safe for the
brood to kill another chicken. But they would close their kitchen and
live on berries and on herbs before they would part with even the
humblest piece of silver or of furniture; while if a dealer should come
down from Washington or New York and make an offer, no matter how
generous, for one of the paintings, he would probably be put off the
place.
Family means much to these Virginians. If you do not believe this go to
Richmond, stop in one of its fine houses and make your host take you to
one of the dances for which the city is famed. Almost any dance will do
and from the beginning you will be charmed. The minor appointments will
approach perfection, and you will find the men and women of the city
worthy of its best traditions. Some places may disappoint in their
well-advertised charm but the girls of Richmond never disappoint. Here
is one of them. She gets you in a quiet corner of the place, meets a
friend over there, and a conversation somewhat after this fashion gets
under way:
"Miss Rhett, allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Blinkins, of New
York."
You bow low and ask Miss Rhett if by any chance she is related to the
Rhetts of Charleston.
"Only distantly. My people are all Virginians. The Charleston Rhetts are
quite another branch. My grandfather's brother married a Miss Morris,
from Savannah and the Charleston Rhetts all come from them. If my papa
were only here he would explain."
You say that you understand and murmur something about having met a
Richard Henry Rhett at the old Colonial town of Williamsburgh a few
years ago when you were down for the Jamestown exposition.
"He was a Petersburgh Rhett," the young lady explains, "son of a cousin
of my father. He married Miss Virginia Tredegar last year."
You remember hearing of a Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke, and you
slip out that fact. But this is Miss Virginia Tredegar of Weldon and a
cousin of Miss Virginia Tredegar of Roanoke. Miss Virginia Tredegar of
Weldon--now Mrs. Richard Henry Rhett, of course, is a delightful girl.
The young lady who has you in the corner assures you that--and she,
herself, is not lacking in charms. Mrs. Rhett was a sponsor for the
state for several years, and you vaguely wonder just what that may mean
as you have visions of large floats lumbering along in street parades,
with really lovely girls in white standing upon them. And you also have
visions of the Miss Virginia Tredegar, of Weldon, sitting in the other
days upon the door-steps of an old red and white Colonial house, which
faces a hot little open square, visions of her accomplishments and her
beauty; of her ability to ride the roughest horse in the county, to
dance seven hours without seeming fatigue, of the jealous beaux who come
flocking to her feet. You find yourself idly speaking of these visions
to your companion. She laughs.
"I've just the right girl for you," she says, "and she is here in this
ball-room. She is all these things--and some more; the rightest,
smartest girl in all our state--Miss Virginia Bauregard, daughter of Mr.
Calhoun Bauregard, of Belle Manor in King and Queen county."
Apparently they are all named Virginia in Richmond, seemingly
three-quarters of these girls who live in the nicer parts of the town
are thus to bespeak through their lives the affectionate loyalty of
their parents to the Old Dominion.
All these folk come quite easily to the transformation that has come
over the South within the decade, since she ceased to grieve over a past
that could never be brought back and overcome. The young boys and the
young girls turn readily from fine horses to fine motor cars, the coming
of imported customs causes few shocks, it is even rumored that the
newest of the new dances have invaded the sober drawing-rooms of the
place. But the New South is kind to Richmond. She does not seek to
eliminate the Old South. And so the old customs and the old traditions
run side by side with the new. And even the old families seem to soften
and many times to welcome the new.
* * * * *
If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood
cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy
of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate
fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of
Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more
than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond
might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the
finest of all Virginia rivers--the James--by those hills. Man did the
rest. It was man who created the roadways and who placed the monuments.
And not the least interesting of these is the strange tomb of President
James Monroe, an imposing bronze structure, in these days reminding one
of an enlarged bird-cage. It is interesting perhaps because nearby there
is another grave--the grave of still another man who came to the highest
office of the American people. The second grave is marked by a small
headstone, scarcely large enough to accommodate its two words: "John
Tyler."
But more interesting than these older monuments is the group that stands
alone, at the far corner of the cemetery and atop of one of those
little hillocks close beside the river. The head of that family is
buried beneath his effigy. It is the grave of Jefferson Davis, who
stands facing the city, as if he still dreamed of the days that might
have been but never were. And close beside is the grave of his little
girl, "The Daughter of Confederacy." When she died, only a few years
since, the South felt that the last of the living links that tied it
with the days when men fought and died for the Lost Cause had been
severed. It was then that it set to work to build the new out of the
old.
Nowadays the Old South does not come publicly into the streets of
Richmond--save on that memorable occasion in the spring of 1907 when a
feeble trail of aging men--all that remained of a great gray
army--limped down a triumphant path through the heart of the town. The
Old South sits in her dead cities, and perhaps that is the reason why
the Southerner so quickly takes the stranger within his gates to the
cemetery. It is his apologies for thirty or forty years lost in the
march of progress. And it is an apology that no man of breadth or
generosity can refuse to accept.
* * * * *
Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon her great hills and
shooting the tendrils of her growth in every direction. For she is
growing, rapidly and handsomely. Her new buildings--her wonderful
cathedral, her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying out by
the Lee statue--what self-respecting southern town does not have a Lee
statue--all bespeak the quality of her growth. But her new buildings
cannot easily surpass the old. It was rare good judgment in an American
town for her to refrain from tearing down or even "modernizing" that
Greek temple that stands atop of Schokoe hill and which generations have
known as the Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made absolutely
necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion have not robbed the older
portion of the building of one whit of its charm.
It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to stand beside one
another. In other days Virginia was proud of her capital, it was with no
small pride that she thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be
chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw it take its
stormy place among the nations of the world. In these days Virginia may
still be proud of her capital town--it is still a seat of government
quite worthy of a state of pride and of traditions.
8
WHERE ROMANCE AND COURTESY DO NOT FORGET
"You are not going to write your book and leave out Charleston?" said
the Man who Makes Magazines.
We hesitated at acknowledging the truth. In some way or other Charleston
had escaped us upon our travels. The Magazine Maker read our answer
before we could gain strength to make it.
"Well, you can't afford to miss that town," he said conclusively. "It's
great stuff."
"Great stuff?" we ventured.
"If you are looking into the personality of American cities you must
include Charleston. She has more personality than any of the other old
Colonial towns--save Boston. She's personality personified, old age
glorified, charm and sweetness magnified--the flavor of the past hangs
in every one of her old houses and her narrow streets. You cannot pass
by Charleston."
After that we went over to a railroad ticket office in Fifth avenue and
purchased a round-trip ticket to the metropolis of South Carolina. And a
week later we were on a southbound train, running like mad across the
Jersey meadows. Five days in Charleston! It seemed almost sacrilege.
Five miserable days in the town which the Maker of Magazines averred
fairly oozed personality. But five days were better than no days at
all--and Charleston must be included in this book.
The greater part of one day--crossing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the
up-stretched head of little Delaware, Maryland--finally the Old
Dominion and the real South. A day spent behind the glass of the car
window--the brisk and busy Jersey towns, the Delaware easily crossed;
Philadelphia, with her great outspreading of suburbs; Wilmington; a
short cut through the basements of Baltimore; the afternoon light dying
on the superb dome of the Washington Capitol--after that the Potomac.
Then a few evening hours through Virginia, the southern accent growing
more pronounced, the very air softer, the negroes more prevalent, the
porter of our car continually more deferential, more polite. After that
a few hours of oblivion, even in the clattering Pullman which, after the
fashion of all these tremendously safe new steel cars, was a bit chilly
and a bit noisy.
In the morning a low and unkempt land, the railroad trestling its way
over morass and swamp and bayou on long timber structures and many times
threading sluggish yellow southern rivers by larger bridges. Between
these a sandy mainland--thick forests of pine with increasing numbers of
live-oaks holding soft moss aloft--at last the outskirts of a town.
Other folk might gather their luggage together, the vision of a distant
place with its white spires, the soft gray fog that tells of the
proximity of the open sea blowing in upon them, held us at the window
pane. A river showed itself in the distance to the one side of the
train, with mast-heads dominating its shores; another, lined with
factories stretched upon the other side. After these, the streets of the
town, a trolley car stalled impatient to let our train pass--low streets
and mean streets of an unmistakable negro quarter, the broad shed of a
sizable railroad station showing at the right.
"Charleston, sah," said the porter. Remember now that he had been a
haughty creature in New York and Philadelphia, ebon dignity in Baltimore
and in Washington. Now he was docility itself, a courtesy hardly to be
measured by the mere expectation of gratuity.
The first glimpse of Charleston a rough paved street--our hotel 'bus
finding itself with almost dangerous celerity in front of trolley cars.
That unimportant way led into another broad highway of the town and
seemingly entitled to distinction.
"Meeting street," said our driver. "And I can tell you that Charleston
is right proud of it, sir," he added.
Charleston has good cause to be proud of its main highway, with the
lovely old houses along it rising out of blooming gardens, like fine
ladies from their ball gowns; at its upper end the big open square and
the adjacent Citadel--pouring out its gray-uniformed boys to drill just
as their daddies and their grand-daddies drilled there before them--the
charms of St. Michael's, and the never-to-be-forgotten Battery at the
foot of the street.
We sped down it and drew up at a snow-white hotel which in its
immaculate coat might have sprung up yesterday, were it not for the
stately row of great pillars, three stories in height, with which it
faced the street. They do not build hotels that way nowadays--more's the
pity. For when the Charleston Hotel was builded it entered a
distinguished brotherhood--the Tremont in Boston, the Astor and the St.
Nicholas in New York, Willard's in Washington, the Monongahela at
Pittsburgh, and the St. Charles in New Orleans were among its
contemporaries. It was worthy to be ranked with the best of these--a
hotel at which the great planters of the Carolinas and of Georgia could
feel that the best had been created for them within the very heart of
their favorite city.
We pushed our way into the heart of the generous office of the hotel,
thronged with the folk who had crowded into Charleston--followers of
the races, just then holding sway upon the outskirts of the town,
tourists from the North, Carolinans who will never lose the habit of
going to Charleston as long as Charleston exists. In due time a brisk
and bustling hotel clerk--he was an importation, plainly, none of your
courteous, ease-taking Southerners--had placed us in a room big enough
for the holding of a reception. From the shutters of the room we could
look down into Meeting street--into the charred remnants of a store that
had been burned long before and the débris never removed. When we threw
up the window sash we could thrust our heads out and see, a little way
down the street, the most distinctive and the most revered of all
Charleston's landmarks--the belfried spire of St. Michael's. As we
leaned from that window the bells of St. Michael's spoke the
quarter-hour, just as they have been speaking quarter-hours close upon a
century and a half.
We had been given the first taste of the potent charm of a most
distinctive southern town.
* * * * *
"... The most appealing, the most lovely, the most wistful town in
America; whose visible sadness and distinction seem almost to speak
audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet waves that ripple round her
southern front, speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning and breathe
not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle,
old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling
mellow-tinted plaster; King's Port the retrospective, King's Port the
belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the
marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks veiled in gray moss,
brooding with memories. Were she my city how I should love her...."
So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to know so well. You can
read Charleston in _Lady Baltimore_ each time he speaks of "King's
Port" and read correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance
of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old traditions and
old affections. In no other city of the land might he have laid such a
story. For no other city of the land bears the memory of tragedy so
plaintively, so uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat
peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at the very gateway
of South Carolina. Like a scarred man, Charleston will bear the visible
traces of her great disaster until the end of her days. And each of
them, like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more potent in her
charm.
Up one street and down another--fascinating pathways, every blessed one
of them. Meeting and King and Queen and Legare and Calhoun and
Tradd--with their high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the
sidewalks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hospitality,
inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a southern garden can
bloom--with jessamine and narcissus and oleander and japonica. Galleries
give to these fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her
sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. She calls them
piazzas, with the accent strong upon the "pi."
The gardens themselves are more than a little English, speaking clearly
something of the old-time English spirit of the town, which has its most
visible other expression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its
older public buildings and churches. And some of the older folk, defying
the Charleston convention of four o'clock dinner, will take tea in the
softness of the late afternoon. Local tradition still relates how, in
other days, a certain distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing
neither garden nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table and
chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take his tea of a late
afternoon. And the Charleston of that other day walked upon the far side
of the street rather than disturb the gentleman!
Nor is all that spirit quite gone in the Charleston of today. The older
negroes will touch their hats, if not remove them, when you glance at
them. They will step into the gutter when you pass them upon the narrow
sidewalks of the narrow streets. They came of a generation that made
more than the small distinction of separate schools and separate places
in the railroad cars between white and black. But they are rapidly
disappearing from the streets of the old city. Those younger negroes who
drive the clumsy two-wheeled carts in town and out over the rough-paved
streets have learned no good manners. And when the burly negresses who
amble up the sidewalks balancing huge trays of crabs or fresh fruits or
baked stuffs smile at you, theirs is the smile of insolence. Fifty years
of the Fifteenth Amendment have done their work--any older resident of
Charleston will tell you that, and thank God for the inborn courtesy
that keeps him from profanity with the telling.
But if oncoming years have worked great changes in the manner of the
race which continues to be of numerical importance in the seaport city,
it will take more than one or two or three or even four generations to
work great changes in the manners of the well-born white-skinned folk
who have ruled Charleston through the years by wit, diplomacy, the keen
force of intellect more than even the force of arms. And, as the city
now runs its course, it will take far more years for her to change her
outward guise.
For Charleston does not change easily. She continues to be a city of
yellow and of white. Other southern towns may claim distinction because
of their red-walled brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds
of Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have
grown up and over the old walls--exquisite bits of masonry, every one of
them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and
full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from
a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said,
stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the
rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses
through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston
does not parade herself. The closed windows of her houses seem to close
jealously against the Present as if they sought to hold within their
great rooms the Past and all of the glories that were of it.
Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most
famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they
might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town.
Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of
cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once
red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is
another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such
picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston
an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches
and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and
the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian.
Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of
France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon
her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some
corner of the Old World.
Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can
appreciate these negroes is in their street calls--if he has not been up
too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the
brigades of itinerant merchants are on their ways through the narrow
streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and
the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the
finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their
way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck,
lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies--the list runs to great
length.
You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last
precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that
something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it
comes musically to your ears:
"Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw."
And from another direction comes a slowly modulated:
"Waw cwab. WAW Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b."
A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these.
"She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is
a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors,
female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to
sleep in Charleston--well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To
dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes
rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an
opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day,
quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early
morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is
quite gone--unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants:
"Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat--monkey _meat_." And that old relic
of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes
and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char--coal.
Char--coal."
If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of
the delectable mixture of cocoanut and molasses candy which is to the
younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake
is to the older.
* * * * *
The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly
asserting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town,
the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of
Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets
and demanded the obeisance of the port--gladly rendered her. She has
stood to her corner through sunshine and through storm--through the glad
busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing those
upstart northern towns--New York and Boston--through the bitterness of
two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four
cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has
ever known--through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the
Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when
she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet
bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a
resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her
lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it
has been a stilled Charleston.
For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not
spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the
Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth
century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within
their belfry before the Revolution broke out--broke out at Charleston
just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last
time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his
"perquisite" and had shipped them back to England. An indignant American
town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New
York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance
such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a
speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people
of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal
procession--the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The
first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy
years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her
children--at the quarters of the hours.
After those seventy years more war--ugly guns that are remembered with a
shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious,
hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair
and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the
danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men
in the town--all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines--but
they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state--to Columbia,
the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea
marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men
in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the
South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army,
completely destroyed them.
When peace came again Charleston--bruised and battered and bleeding
Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal--gave first
thought to her bells--a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was
a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are
a conservative nation--to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still
had the molds in which the chime was first cast--a hundred years before.
Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them
came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones
unchanged. The town had regained its voice.
If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because
they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself
is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two
sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have
ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in
Charleston in the days of her glories--Pringles and Pinckneys;
Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina--Rutledge and
Ravenel and Rhett--the names within that silent place read like the
roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the
moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things; in
the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead--narcissus,
oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning
that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird--the
famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south--sang to us from his perch in a
magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson
river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.
The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone within the
little paths of her high-walled churchyard. Within the sturdy church, in
the serenity of her sanctuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so
many years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you might say;
in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk underneath where sat the old
time "clark" to read the responses and the notices; even the stately
pew, set aside from all the others, in which General Washington sat on
the occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina town, is the
fullness of her charm. If you are given imagination, you can see the
brown and white church filled as in the old days with the planters and
their families--generation after generation of them, coming first to the
church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font at the door and then,
years later, being carried out of that center aisle for the final time.
You can see the congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set
and determined. You can see one memorable congregation, as it hears the
crash of a Federal shell against the heavy tower, and then listen to the
gentle rector finishing the implication of the Litany before he
dismisses his little flock.
Dear old St. Michael's! The years--the sunny years and the tragic
years--set lightly upon her. When war and storm have wrecked her, it has
been her children and her children's children who have arisen to help
wipe away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, the great
wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, one hundred and eighty-five
feet above the street was sent hurtling down to the ground. They will
show you the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly replaced.
But within a year worse than cyclone was upon St. Michael's--the
memorable earthquake which sank the great tower eight inches deeper into
the earth. And only last year another of the fearful summer storms that
come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful damage upon the old
church. Yet St. Michael's has been patiently repaired each time; she
still towers above these disasters--as her quaint weather-vane towers
above the town, itself.
* * * * *
[Illustration: St. Michael's churchyard, Charleston--a veritable roster
of the Colonial Elect]
After St. Michael's, St. Philip's--although St. Philip's is the real
mother church of all Charleston. The old town does not pin her faith
upon a single lion. The first time we found our way down Meeting street,
we saw a delicate and belfried spire rising above the greenery of the
trees in a distant churchyard. The staunch church from which that spire
springs was well worth our attention. And so we found our way to St.
Philip's. We turned down Broad street from St. Michael's--to commercial
Charleston as its namesake street is to New York--then at the little
red-brick library, housed in the same place for nearly three-quarters of
a century, we turned again. The south portico of St. Philip's,
tall-columned, dignified almost beyond expression, confronted us. And a
moment later we found ourselves within a churchyard that ranked in
interest and importance with that of St. Michael's, itself.
A shambling negro care-taker came toward us. He had been engaged in
helping some children get a kitten down from the upper branches of a
tree in the old churchyard. With the intuition of his kind, he saw in
us, strangers--manifest possibilities. He devoted himself to attention
upon us. And he sounded the praises of his own exhibit in no mild key.
"Yessa--de fines' church in all de South," he said, as he swung the
great door of St. Philip's wide open. He seemed to feel, also
intuitively, that we had just come from the rival exhibit. And we felt
more than a slight suspicion of jealousy within the air.
The negro was right. St. Philip's, Charleston, is more than the finest
church in all the South. Perhaps it is not too much to say that it is
the most beautiful church in all the land. Copied, rather broadly, from
St. Martins-in-the-Fields, London, it thrusts itself out into the
street, indeed, makes the highway take a broad double curve in order to
pass its front portico. But St. Philip's commits the fearful Charleston
sin of being new. The present structure has only been thrusting its
nose out into Church street for a mere eighty years. The old St.
Philip's was burned--one of the most fearful of all Charleston
tragedies--in 1834.
"Yessa--a big fire dat," said the caretaker. "They gib two slaves dere
freedom for helpin' at dat fire."
But history only records the fact that the efforts to put out the fire
in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. It does tell, however, of a
negro sailor who, when the old church was threatened by fire on an
earlier occasion, climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles
from it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a fishing-boat
and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It was in our Third Reader--some
lurid verses but, alas for the accuracy that should be imparted to the
growing mind--it was St. Michael's to whom that widespread glory was
given. St. Michael's of the heart of the town once again. No wonder that
St. Philip's of the side-street grieves in silence.
In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. Philip's?
If you are from the North it were better that you did not ask that
question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their day hardly less famous
than those of the sister church, went into cannon for the defense of the
South. When the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the barren
houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the gun-foundry, the
supreme sacrifice was made. The bells rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and
for a final time. The next day they were unshipping them and one of the
silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed.
But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first place, her own
graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial elect. Within it stands the
humble tomb of him who was the greatest of all the great men of South
Carolina--John C. Calhoun--while nightly from her high-lifted spire
there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower sent far out to sea
for the guidance of the mariner. The ship-pilots along the North
Atlantic very well know when they pass Charleston light-ship, the range
between Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway all the
distance up to the wharves of Charleston.
* * * * *
There are other great churches of Charleston--some of them very handsome
and with a deal of local history clustering about them, but perhaps none
of these can approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner of
Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, modestly disdaining
such a worldly thing as a spire, in a crumbling churchyard whose
tombstones have their inscriptions written in French. A few folk find
their way to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen attentively to
its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the leader of his little
flock. But this little chapel is the sole flame of a famous old faith,
which still burns, albeit ever so faintly, in the blackness and the
shadow of the New World.
That is the real Charleston--the unexpected confronting you at almost
every turn of its quiet streets: here across from the shrine of the
Huguenots a ruinous building through which white and negro children play
together democratically and at will, and which in its day was the
Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with; down another byway a
tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall in the form of a powder
magazine; over in Meeting street the attenuated market with a Greek
temple of a hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the
slaves still pointed out to folk from the North; farther down on Meeting
street the hall of the South Carolina Society, a really exquisite aged
building wherein that distinguished old-time organization together with
its still older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an appointed
day each month and whose polished ballroom floor has felt the light
dance-falls of the St. Cecilias.
"The St. Cecilia Society?" you interrupt; "why, I've heard of that."
Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies Charleston--the social
life of the place, which is all there is left to it since her monumental
tragedy of half a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground.
You are either recognized socially--or else you are not. And the St.
Cecilia Society is the sharply-drawn dividing point. Established
somewhere before the beginning of the Revolution it has dominated
Charleston society these many years. Invitations to its three balls each
year are eagerly sought by all the feminine folk within the town. And
the privilege of being invited to these formal affairs is never to be
scorned--more often it is the cause of many heart-burnings.
No one thing shows Charleston the more clearly than the fact that on the
following morning you may search the columns of the venerable _News and
Courier_ almost in vain for a notice of the St. Cecilia ball. In any
other town an event of such importance would be a task indeed for the
society editor and all of her sub-editresses. If there was not a
flashlight photograph there would be the description of the frocks--a
list of the out-of-town guests at any rate. Charleston society does not
concede a single one of these things. And the most the _News and
Courier_ ever prints is "The ball of the St. Cecilia Society was held
last evening at Hibernian Hall," or a two-line notice of similar
purport.
Charleston society concedes little or nothing--not even these
new-fashioned meal hours of the upstart Northern towns. In Charleston a
meal each four hours--breakfast at eight, a light lunch at sharp noon,
dinner at four, supper again at eight. These hours were good enough for
other days--ergo, they are good enough for these. And from eleven to
two and again from five to seven-thirty remain the smart calling hours
among the elect of the place. Those great houses do not yield readily to
the Present.
Charleston society is never democratic--no matter how Charleston
politics may run. Its great houses, behind the exclusion of those high
and forbidding walls, are tightly closed to such strangers as come
without the right marks of identification. From without you may breathe
the hints of old mahogany, of fine silver and china, of impeccable
linen, of well-trained servants, but your imagination must meet the
every test as to the details. Gentility does not flaunt herself. And if
the younger girls of Charleston society do drive their motor cars
pleasant mornings through the crowded shopping district of King street,
that does not mean that Charleston--the Charleston of the barouche and
the closed coupé--will ever approve.
* * * * *
On the April day half a century ago that the first gun blazed defiantly
from Fort Sumter and opened a page of history that bade fair to alter
the very course of things, Prosperity slipped out of Charleston.
Gentility, Courage, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant
steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. The great docks
along the front of the splendid harbor stand unused, the warehouses upon
them molder. A brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit--Galveston--boasts that
she is the second ocean-port of America, with the hundreds of thousands
of Texas acres turned from grazing ranges into cotton-field, just behind
her. New Orleans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come into
existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of tragedies. And the
docks along her waterfront grow rusty with disuse.
She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that they have
builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five stories in height, and
she will reply that you can still see the house in Church street where
President Washington was entertained in royal fashion by her citizens;
hint to her of the great canal to the south, and she will ask you if you
remember how the blockade runners slipped night after night through the
tight chain that the Federal gunboats drew across the entrance of her
harbor for four long years; bespeak into her ears the social glories of
the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will tell you of the
gentle French and English blood that went into the making of her first
families. Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may
ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price.
Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy
summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon
her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft
gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And
Romance and Courtesy do not forget.
9
ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS
The three great cities of western New York--Syracuse, Rochester,
Buffalo--are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are
strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan
district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common
and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to
virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities
across New York state; and yet their personality is as varied as that of
three sisters; lovely but different.
Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive; one of the most
distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief
subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the
most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is
conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and
the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons
there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon
newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the
contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of "society notes" and the
reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by
writing long lists of the "among those present." Buffalo leans more to
Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the
man who comes to dwell there--unless he comes labeled with letters of
introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit
of _camaraderie_. A man is taken into good society there because of
what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it
may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in
their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of
the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her "the Boston of
the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real
Boston "the Omaha of the East."
Take these cities separately and their personality becomes the more
pertinent and compelling. Consider them one by one as a traveler sees
them on a westbound train of the New York Central railroad--Syracuse,
Rochester, Buffalo--and in the same grading they increase in population;
roughly speaking, in a geometrical ratio. Syracuse has a little more
than a hundred thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size
and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester.
[Illustration: The Erie Canal still finds an amiable path through
Rochester]
Each of them is the result of the Erie canal. There had been famous
post-roads across central and western New York before DeWitt Clinton dug
his great ditch, and the Mohawk valley together with the little known
"lake country" of New York formed one of the earliest passage-ways to
the West. But the Erie canal, providing a water level from the Great
Lakes to the Hudson river and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous
impulse to the state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the three
big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and accounted as cities
almost before they realized it. The building of the railroads across the
state and their merging into great systems was a second step in their
transition, while the third can hardly be said to be completed--the
planning and construction of a network of inter-urban electric lines
that shall again unite the three and--what is far more important to
each--bring a great territory of small cities, villages and rich farms
into closer touch with them.
In Rochester, a good many years ago, one Sam Patch jumped into the falls
of the Genesee. He first planned his spectacular jump for a Sunday, but
the citizens of Rochesterville, as the town by the great falls was first
known, objected strenuously to such profanation of the Sabbath. So Sam
Patch jumped not on a Sunday but on a Friday, which almost any
superstitious person might have recognized as an unfortunate change of
date; and jumping, he did not survive to jump again. But the point of
this incident hinges not on Fridays, but upon Sundays in Rochester. All
that was a long time ago, but she has not changed her ideas of Sabbath
observance very much since then--despite the vast change in Sunday
across the land. The citizens of Rochester still go to church on Sunday
and they "point with pride" to the big and progressive religious
institutions of their community. People in Syracuse, however, have
Sunday picnics and outings off into the country, while Buffalo has
always been known for its "liberal Sunday," whatever that may mean.
Rochester has always frowned upon that sort of thing. She has the same
point of view as her Canadian neighbor across Lake Ontario--Toronto--a
city which we shall see in a little time. Rochester rather cleaves to
the old-fashioned Sabbath; even her noisy beach down at Ontario's edge,
which has always served as a sort of Coney island to western New York,
has been a thorn in the side of her conservative population. If you want
to stop and consider how the old-fashioned Sabbath of your boyhood days
still reigns at the city at the falls of the Genesee, recall the fact
that in one street that is bordered by some of the town's largest
churches the trolley cars are not operated on Sundays.[C] In
Philadelphia you will remember they used years ago to stretch ropes
across the streets in front of the churches at service times. But
imagine the possibilities of that sort of thing in New York, or Chicago,
or San Francisco.
[C] A recent rerouting of the trolley cars in Rochester has
left this particular street without regular service most of
the days of the week. The fact remains, however, that for
many years the Park avenue line had its terminal loop
through Church street. On the Sabbath that terminal was
moved bodily so that churchgoers would not be annoyed. E. H.
* * * * *
Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for James Roscoe Day. The
Onondaga Indians are the oldest inhabitants, and a great help to the
ingenious local artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are
needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. He has taken a
half-baked Methodist college that stood on a wind-swept and barren hill
and by his indomitable ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it
into a real university. For Syracuse University is tremendously real to
the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor
man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four
thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the
farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term
"Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of
cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden
power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim
to college spirit of surpassing dimensions. She does claim individual
spirit among her students, however, that is second to none. As a
university--as some know a university--the collection of ill-matched
architectural edifices that house her is typical; but as an opportunity
for popular education to the boys and girls of the rural districts of
the state of New York she is monumental, and they come swarming to her
in greater numbers each autumn.
So much for the hill--they call it Mount Olympus--which holds the
university and those things that are the university's. Now for downtown
Syracuse; for while the city's newer districts are ranged upon a series
of impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her factories are
squatted upon the flats at the head of Onondaga lake.
We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every self-respecting
geography used to print; salt-sheds running off over an indefinite
acreage. We were given to understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for
existence was as a sort of huge salt-cellar for the rest of the nation.
Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten that there is a
salt industry left, and will tell you glibly of the typewriters,
automobiles, steel-tubing and the like that are made in their town in
the course of a twelvemonth.
They will not tell you of one thing, for of that thing you may judge
yourself. Life in Syracuse is punctuated by the railroad and the canal.
The canal is not so much of an obstruction unless one of the cumbersome
lift-bridges sticks and refuses to move up or down, but that railroad!
Every few minutes life in Syracuse comes to an actual standstill because
of it. Men whose time is worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour and who
grow puffy with over-exertion are violently halted by the passing of
switch-engines with trails of box-cars. Appointments are missed. Board
meetings at the banks halt for directors--directors who are halted in
their turn by the dignified and stately passage of the Canastota Local
through the heart of the city.
But the old canal is going to go some day--when the State's new barge
canal well to the north of the town is completed--and perhaps in that
same day Syracuse will have a broad, central avenue replacing the
present dirty, foul-smelling ditch. Some day, some very big Syracusan
will miss an appointment while he stands in Salina street watching the
serene Canastota Local drag its way past him. That missed appointment
will cost the very big Syracusan a lot of money and there will be a
revolution in Syracuse--a railroad revolution. After that the
locomotives will no longer blow their smoky breaths against the fronts
of Syracuse's best buildings and grind their way slowly down Washington
street from the tunnel to the depot, for the railroad which operates
them stands in the forefront of the progressive transportation systems
of America, and it is only waiting for Syracuse to take the first
definite step of progress. Some day Syracuse--Syracuse delayed--is going
to take that step. Only a year or two ago the Chicago Limited held up
the carnival parade--and therein lies the final paragraph of this
telling of Syracuse.
She is a festive lass. Each September she rolls up her sleeves, her
business men swell the subscription lists, her matrons and her pretty
girls bestir themselves, and there is a concert of action that gives
Syracuse a harvest week long to be remembered. By day folk go out to the
State Fair and see the best agricultural show that New York state has
ever known--a veritable agricultural show that endeavors not only to
furnish an ample measure of fun, but also endeavors to be a real help to
the progressive owners of those rich farms of central and western New
York. By night Syracuse is in festival. Do not let them tell you that an
American town cannot enter into the carnival spirit and still preserve
her graciousness and a certain underlying sense of decorum. Tell those
scoffers to go to Syracuse during the week of the State Fair. They will
see a demonstration of the contrary--Salina street ablaze with an
incandescent beauty, lined with row upon row of eager citizens. The
street is cleared to a broad strip of stone carpet down its center and
over this carpet rolls float after float. These in a single year will
symbolize a single thing. In one September we recall that they
represented the nations of the world and that the Queen of Ancient
Ireland wore eyeglasses; but that is as nothing, the policemen in Boston
are addicted to straighteners, and Mr. Syracuse and Mrs. Syracuse, Miss
Syracuse and Master Syracuse stand open-eyed in pleasure and go home
very late at night on trolley cars that are as crowded as the trolley
cars in very big cities, convinced that there possibly may be other
towns but there is only one Syracuse.[D]
[D] Let it be recorded in the interest of accuracy that the
fall festival of 1913 was not given--much to the
disappointment of Mr. Syracuse, Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse
and Master Syracuse. It is hoped, however, that the festival
has not been permanently abandoned. The loss of its
influence would be felt far outside of Syracuse. E. H.
All of which is exactly as it should be. Syracuse's great hope for her
future rests in just such optimism on the part of her people. And in
such optimism she has a strong foundation on which to build through
coming years.
* * * * *
Buffalo is not as frivolous as Syracuse. She cares but little for
festivals but speaks of herself in the cold commercial terms of success.
If you have ever met a man from Buffalo, when you were traveling, and he
began to tell you of his town, you will know exactly what we mean. He
undoubtedly began by quoting marvelous statistics, some of them
concerning the number of trains that arrived and departed from his
native heath in the course of twenty-four hours. When he was through,
you had a confused idea that Buffalo was some sort of an exaggerated
railroad yard, where you changed cars to go from any one corner of the
universe to any other corner. When your time came to see Buffalo for
yourself, that confused idea returned to you. Your train slipped for
miles through an apparently unending wilderness of branching tracks and
dusty freight cars, past grimy round-houses and steaming locomotives,
until you were ready to believe that any conceivable number of trains
arrived at and departed from that busy town within a single calendar
day.
If you have approached her by water in the summertime you have seen her
as a mighty port, her congestion of water traffic suggesting salt water
rather than fresh. When we come to visit the neighboring port of
Cleveland we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the inland
seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as something more than a
railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a melting-pot for the fusing of as
large and as difficult a foreign element as is given to any American
town to fuse. Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The dull
roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of power, is
within hearing. That dull roar has been Buffalo's incentive, the lullaby
which induced her dreams of industrial as well as of commercial
strength. And much has been written of her growing strength in these
great lines.
To our own minds the real Buffalo is to be found in her typical citizen.
If he is really typical of the city at the west gate of the Empire
state, you will find him optimistic and energetic to a singular degree,
and he needs all his optimism and his energy to combat the problems that
come to a town of exceeding growth, just crossing the threshold of
metropolitanism. Those problems demand cool heads and stout hearts.
Buffalo is just beginning to appreciate that. It is becoming less
difficult than of old for them to pull together, to dig deep into their
purses if need be, and to plan their city of tomorrow in a generous
spirit of coöperation.
[Illustration: Rochester is a city of charming homes]
The Buffalonians have a full measure of enjoyment in their city. They
are intensely proud of it and rightfully--do not forget the man who once
told you of the number of railroad trains within twenty-four hours--and
they are thoroughly happy in and around it. Niagara Falls and a
half-dozen of lake beaches on Erie and Ontario are within easy reach,
while nearer still is the lovely park of the town--which a goodly corner
of America remembers as the site of the Pan-American Exposition, in
1901. The Buffalonians live much of the time outdoors, and that holds
true whether they are able to patronize their country clubs or the less
pretentious suburban resorts. They play at golf, at baseball, at
football, and in the long hard winter months at basketball and hockey
and bowling. They organize teams in all these sports--and some
others--and then go down to Rochester and enter into amiable contests
with the folks who live by the Genesee. Syracuse, too, comes into the
fray and these three cities of the western end of the state of New York
fight out their natural and healthy rivalry in series upon series of
sturdy athletic championships. The bond between them is really very
close indeed.
* * * * *
Rochester stands halfway between Syracuse and Buffalo and as we have
already said, is different from both of them. One difference is apparent
even to the man who does not alight from his through train. For no
railroad has dared to thrust itself down a main business street in
Rochester; in fact she was one of the very first cities in America to
remove the deadly grade crossings from her avenues, and incalculable
fatalities and near fatalities have been prevented by her wisdom. Many
years ago she placed the main line of the New York Central railroad,
which crosses close to her heart, upon a great viaduct. When that
viaduct was built, a great change came upon the town. The old depot,
with its vaulted wooden roof clearing both tracks and street and
anchored in the walls of the historic Brackett House; with its ancient
white horse switching the cars of earlier days (as it is years and years
and years since that white horse went to graze in heavenly meadows)
vanished from sight, and a great stone-lined embankment--high enough and
thick enough to be a city wall--appeared, as if by magic, while
Rochester reveled in a vast new station, big enough and fine enough for
all time. At least that was the way the station seemed when it was first
built in 1882. But alas, for restless America! They have begun to tear
the old station down as this is being written--a larger and still finer
structure replaces it. And the folk who pray for the conservatism of our
feverish American energy are praying that it will last more than
thirty-one years!
But in just this way Rochester has grown apace and quite ahead of the
facilities which her earlier generations thought would be abundant for
all time. The high civic standard that forced the great railroad
improvement in the earlier days when most American towns, like Topsy,
were "jus' growin'" and giving little thought for the morrow, made
Rochester different. It made her seek to better her water supply and in
this she succeeded, tapping a spring pure lake forty miles back in the
high hills and bringing its contents to her by a far-reaching aqueduct.
It was a large undertaking for a small city of the earlier days, but the
small city was plucky and it today possesses a water supply that is
second to none. That same early placed high civic standard made
fireproof buildings an actuality in Rochester, years in advance of other
towns of the same size.
That civic standard has worked wonders for the town by the falls of the
Genesee. For one thing it has made her prolific in propaganda of one
sort or another. Strange religious sects have come to light within her
boundaries. Spiritualism was one of these, for it was in Rochester that
the famed Fox sisters heard the mysterious rappings, and it was only a
little way outside the town where Joseph Smith asserted that he found
the Book of Mormon and so brought a new church into existence. And the
ladies who are conducting the "Votes for Women" campaign with such ardor
should not forget that it was in Rochester that Susan B. Anthony lived
for long years of her life, working not alone for the cause that was
close to her heart, but in every way for the good of the town that meant
so much to her.
Perhaps the most interesting phases of the Rochester civic standard are
those that have worked inwardly. She has a new city plan--of course.
What modern city has not dreamed these glowing things, of transforming
ugly squares into plazas of European magnificence, of making dingy Main
and State streets into boulevards? And who shall say that such dreams
are idly dreamed? Rochester is not dreaming idly. She has already
conceived a wonderful new City Hall, to spring upwards from her Main
street, but what is perhaps more interesting to her casual visitors in
her new plan is the architectural recognition that it gives to the
Genesee. The Genesee is a splendid river--in many ways not unlike the
more famous Niagara. You have already known the part it has played in
the making of Rochester. Yet the city has seen fit, apparently, to all
but ignore it. Main street--for Rochester is a famous one-street
town--crosses it on a solid stone bridge but that bridge is lined with
buildings, like the prints you used to see of old London bridge. None of
the folk who walk that famous thoroughfare ever see the river. In the
new scheme the old rookeries that hang upon the edge of Main street
bridge are to be torn away and the river is to come into its own. And
Rochester folk feel that that day can come none too soon.
But the Rochester civic standard has worked no better for her than in
social reforms. The phases of these are far too many to be enumerated
here, but one of them stands forth too sharply to be ignored. A few
years ago some Rochesterian conceived the idea of making the schools
work nights as well as day. He had studied the work of the settlement
houses in the larger cities, and while Rochester had no such slums as
called for settlement houses it did have a large population that
demanded some interest and attention. For instance, within the past few
years a large number of Italians have come there, and although they
present no such difficult fusing problem as the Jews of New York, the
Polocks of Buffalo or the Huns of Pittsburgh, it is not the Rochester
way to ignore in the larger social sense any of the folk who come to
her.
"We will make the school-houses into clubs, we will make them open
forums where people can come evenings and get a little instruction, a
little more entertainment, but best of all can speak their minds
freely," said this enthusiast. "We will broaden out the idea of the ward
clubs."
The ward clubs to which he referred were neat and attractive structures
situated in residential parts of the town, where folk who lived in their
own neat homes and who earned from three to eight thousand dollars a
year gather for their dances, their bridges, their small lectures and
the like. The enthusiast proposed to enlarge this idea, by the simple
process of opening the school-houses evenings. His idea was immensely
popular from the first. And within a very few weeks it was in process of
fruition. The school-houses--they called them "Social Centers"--were
opened and night after night they were filled. It looked as if Rochester
had launched another pretty big idea upon the world.
That idea, however, has been radically changed, today. One of the
professors of the local university threw himself into it, possibly with
more enthusiasm than judgment, and was reported in the local prints as
having said that the red flag might be carried in street parades along
with the Stars and Stripes. That settled it. Rochester is a pretty
conservative town, and its folk who live quietly in its great houses sat
up and took notice of the professor's remarks. Those great houses had
smiled rather complacently at the pretty experiment in the schools. Of
a sudden they decided that they were being transformed into incubators
for the making of socialists or of anarchists--great houses do not make
very discerning discriminations.
The professor had kicked over the boat. A powerful church which has
taken a very definite stand against Socialism joined with the great
houses. The question was brought into local politics. The professor lost
his job out at the university, and the school-houses ceased to be open
forums. Today they are called "Recreation Centers" and are content with
instruction and entertainment, but the full breadth of the idea they
started has swept across the country and many cities of the mid-West and
the West are adopting it.
The Rochester way of doing things is a very good way, indeed. For
instance, the city decided a few years ago that it ought to have a fair.
It had been many years since it had had an annual fair, and it saw
Syracuse and Toronto each year becoming greater magnets because of their
exhibitions. Straightway Rochester decided that it would have some sort
of fall show, just what sort was a bit of a problem at first. It wanted
something far bigger than a county fair, and yet it could hardly ask the
state for aid when the state had spent so much on its own show in nearby
Syracuse.
Then it was that Rochester decided to dig down into its own pockets. It
saw a fortunate opening just ahead. The state in abandoning a penal
institution had left fourteen or fifteen acres of land within a mile of
the center of the city--the famous Four Corners. The city took that
land, tore down the great stone wall that had encircled it, erected some
new buildings and transformed some of the older ones, created a park of
the entire property and announced that it was going in the show
business, itself. It has gone into the show business and succeeded. The
Rochester Exposition is as much a part of the city organization as its
park board or its health department. Throughout the greater part of the
year the show-grounds are a public park, holding a museum of local
history that is not to be despised. And for two weeks in each September
it comes into its own--a great, dignified show, builded not of wood and
staff so as to make a memorable season and then be forgotten, but
builded of steel and stone and concrete for both beauty and permanency.
* * * * *
"Now what are the things that have gone to make these things possible?"
you are beginning to say. "What is the nature of the typical
Rochesterian?"
Putting the thing the wrong way about we should say that the typical
Rochesterian is pretty near the typical American. And still continuing
in the reversed order of things consider, for an instant, the beginnings
of Rochester. We have spoken of these three cities of the western end of
New York state as the first fruit of the wonderful Erie canal. That is
quite true and yet it is also true that before the canal came there was
quite a town at the falls of the Genesee, trying in crude fashion to
avail itself of the wonderful water-power. And while the canal was still
an unfinished ditch, three men rode up from the south--Rochester and
Fitzhugh and Carroll--and surveyed a city to replace the straggling
town. That little village had, during the ten brief years of its
existence, been known as Falls Town. Col. Rochester gave his own name to
the city that he foresaw and lived to see it make its definite
beginnings. All that was in the third decade of the last century, and
Rochester has yet to celebrate her first centenary under her present
name.
Her career divides itself into three epochs. In the first of these--from
the days of her settlement up to the close of the Civil War--she was
famed for her flouring-mills. She was known the world over as the Flour
City, and she held that title until the great wheat farms of the land
were moved far to the west. But they still continued to call her by the
same name although they spelled it differently now--the Flower City. For
a new industry arose within her. America was awakening to a quickened
sense of beauty. Flowers and florists were becoming popular, and a group
of shrewd men in and around Rochester made the nursery business into a
very great industry. In more recent years the nature of her manufactures
has broadened--her camera factory is the most famous in all the world,
optical goods, boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, come pouring out of
her in a great tidal stream of enterprise.
She is an industrial city, definitely and distinctly. Fortunately she is
an industrial city employing a high grade of labor almost exclusively,
and yet none the less a town devoted to manufacturing. Once again, do
not forget that she has not neglected her social life, and you may read
this as you please. You may look away from the broadening work of the
ward clubs and of the school-houses and demand if there is an
aristocracy in Rochester. The resident of the town will lead you over
into its Third ward--a compact community almost within stone-throw of
the Four Corners, and shut off from the rest of the vulgar world by a
river, a canal and a railroad yard. In that compact community, its
tree-lined streets suggesting the byways of some tranquil New England
community, is the seat of Rochester social government. The residents of
the Third ward are a neighborly folk, borrowing things of one another
and visiting about with delightful informality among themselves, and yet
their rule is undisputed.
East avenue--the great show street of Rochester--feels that rule. East
avenue is lined with great houses, far greater houses than those of the
Third ward--many of them built with the profits of "Kodak" stock--yet
East avenue represents a younger generation, a generation which seems to
have made money rather easily. There has been some intermarriage and
some letting down of the bars between the ambitious East avenue and the
dominant Third ward--but not much of it. Rochester is far too
conservative to change easily or rapidly.
[Illustration: The canal gives Syracuse a Venetian look]
She is proud of herself as she is--and rightly so. Her people will sing
of her charms by the hours--and rightly so, again. They live their lives
and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of
Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her
movements toward social reform, not even in her parks--although
Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect
and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion--nor does it
reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that
may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics--her glory is in
her homes. The tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city
house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown there.
Apartment houses are rarities--there are not more than twenty or thirty
in the town--and consequently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and
poor, dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land; the chances
are that he has market-truck growing in his backyard, a real
kitchen-garden. There are thousands of these little homes in the
outlying sections of the town, with more pretentious ones lining East
avenue and the other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together
are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of Rochester are
less governed and themselves govern more than in most places of the
size. That is the value of the detached house to the city. Detached
houses in a city seem to mean good schools, good fire and police
service, clean streets, health protection, social progress--Rochester
has all of these in profusion.
East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents these ideals of
Rochester on dress parade. We rather think, however, that you can read
the character of the town better in the side streets. Now a long street,
filled with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses does not
mean much at a glance--even when the street is parked and filled for a
mile with blossoming magnolias, as Oxford street in Rochester is filled.
But such a street, together with all the other streets of its sort,
means that much of the disappearing charm and loveliness of our American
village life is being absorbed right into the heart of a community of
goodly size.
Sometimes citizens from other towns running hard amuck Rochester's
conservatism call her provincial. She has clung to some of her small
town customs longer than her neighbors, but of late she has attempted
metropolitanism--they have builded two big new hotels in the place, and
the radicals have dared to place a big building or two off Main
street--quite a step in a town which has become famous as a one-street
town.
But Rochester, like most conservatives, is careless of outside
criticism. She points to the big things that she has accomplished. She
shows you her streets of the detached houses and her parks--perhaps
takes you down to Genesee Valley Park of a summer night when carnival is
in the air and the city's band, the city's _very own band_, if you
please, is playing from a great float in midstream, while voices from
two or three thousand gaily decorated canoes carry the melodies a long
way. She shows you her robust glories, the fair country in which she is
situate. For miles upon miles of splendid highways surround her, the
Genesee indolent for a time above the Valley Park appeals to the man
with a canoe, the great lake to the north gives favorable breezes to
the yachtsman. Do you wonder that the Rochesterians know that they dwell
in a garden land, and that they are in the open through the fullness of
a summer that stretches month after month, from early spring to late
autumn? Do you wonder that they really live their lives?
10
STEEL'S GREAT CAPITAL
A man, traveling across the land for the very first time, slips into a
strange town--after dark. It is his first time in the strange town, of
course. Otherwise it would not be strange. He finds his hotel with
little difficulty, for a taxicab takes him to it. He immediately
discovers that it is not more than two squares from the very station at
which he has arrived. Still a friendly taxicab in a strange town is not
an institution at which to scoff, and the man who is very tired is glad
to get into his hotel room and to bed without delay.
He awakes the next morning very early--at least it must be very early
for it is still dark. It is dark indeed as he stumbles his way across
the room to the electric switch. In the sudden radiance that follows, he
sputters at himself for having arisen so early--for he is a man fond of
his lazy sleep in the morning. He fumbles in his pockets and finds his
watch. Ten minutes to nine, it says to him.
"Stopped," says the man, half aloud. "That's another time I forgot to
wind it."
But the watch has not stopped. Insecure in his own mind he lifts it to
his ear. It is ticking briskly. The man is perplexed. He goes to the
window and peeps out from it. A great office building across the way is
gaily alight--a strange performance for before dawn of a September
morning. He looks down into the street. Two long files of brightly
lighted cars are passing through the street, one up, the other down. The
glistening pavements are peopled, the stores are brightly lighted--the
man glances at his watch once again. Eight minutes of nine, it tells him
this time.
He smiles as he gazes down into that busy street.
"This is Pittsburgh," he says.
Later that day that same man stands in another window--of a tall
skyscraper this time--and again gazes down. Suspended there below him is
a seeming chaos. There are smoke and fog and dirt there, through
these--showing ever and ever so faintly--tall, artificial cliffs,
punctured with row upon row of windows, brightly lighted at midday. From
the narrow gorges between these cliffs come the rustle and the rattle of
much traffic. It comes to the man in waves of indefinite sound.
He lifts his gaze and sees beyond these artificial cliffs,
mountains--real mountains--towering, with houses upon their crests, and
steep, inclined railroads climbing their precipitous sides. In these
houses, also, there are lights burning at midday. Below them are great
stacks--row upon row upon row of them, like coarse-toothed combs turned
upside down--and the black smoke that pours up from them is pierced now
and then and again by bright tongues of flame--the radiance of furnaces
that glow throughout the night and day.
"We're mud and dirt up to our knees--and money all the rest of the way,"
says the owner of that office. He is a native of the city. He comes to
the window and points to one of the rivers--a yellow-brown mirrored
surface, scarcely glistening under leaden clouds but bearing long tows
by the dozen--coal barges, convoyed by dirty stern-wheeled steamboats.
"There is one of the busiest harbors in the world," says the Pittsburgh
man. "A harbor which in tonnage is not so far back of your own blessed
New York."
The New Yorker, for this man is a New Yorker, laughs at the very idea of
calling that sluggish narrow river a harbor. They have a real harbor in
his town and real rivers lead into it. This does not even seem a real
river. It reminds him quite definitely of Newtown creek--that slimy,
busy waterway along which trains used to pass in the days when the
Thirty-fourth street ferry was the gateway to Long Island.
"We have tonnage in this town," says the proud resident of Pittsburgh,
"and if you won't believe what I tell you about the water traffic, how
about our neat little railroad business? If you won't listen to our
harbor-master here when I take you down to him, look at the lines of
freight cars for forty miles out every trunk-line railroad that gets in
here. This is the real gathering ground for all the freight
rolling-stock of this land."
And then he falls to telling the native of Manhattan island how all that
traffic has come to pass--how a mere quarter of a century ago the
Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad had offered itself to the historic Erie
for a mere hundred thousand dollars--and had been refused as not worth
while. Today the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is the pet child of the entire
Vanderbilt family of aristocratic railroads, earning more clear profit
to the mile than any other railroad in the world. The Pittsburgh man
makes this all clear to his caller. But the man from New York only looks
out again upon the city in semi-darkness at midday, and thinks of the
towers of his own Manhattan rising high into the clearest blue sky that
one might imagine, and whispers incoherently:
"This Pittsburgh gets me."
Pittsburgh gets some others, too. It gets them from the back country,
green country lads filled with ambition rather than anything else, and
if they have the sticking qualities it makes them millionaires, if that
so happens that such is the scheme of their ambitions. It has made some
other millionaires, almost overnight, as we shall see in a few minutes.
The picking for dollars seems good in the neighborhood of the
confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny.
Consider for a moment that confluence--the geography of Pittsburgh, if
you please. In a general way the older part of the town has a situation
not unlike that of the great metropolis of the continent. For New York's
East river, substitute the Monongahela; for the Hudson, the Allegheny;
and let the Ohio, beginning its long course at the Point--Pittsburgh's
Battery--represent the two harbors of New York. Then you will begin to
get the rough resemblance. To the south of the Monongahela, Pittsburgh's
Brooklyn is Birmingham, set under the half-day shadows of the towering
cliffs of Mount Washington. Allegheny--now a part of the city of
Pittsburgh and beginning to be known semi-officially as the North
Side--corresponds in location with Jersey City.
And the problems that have beset Pittsburgh in her growth have been
almost the very problems that from the first have hampered the growth of
metropolitan New York. If her rivers have been no such stupendous
affairs as the Hudson or the East rivers, the overpowering hills and
mountains that close in upon her on every side have presented barriers
of equal magnitude. To conquer them has been the labor of many tunnels
and of steep inclined railroads, the like of which are not to be seen in
any great city in America. It has been no easy conquest.
As a result of all these things the growth of the city has been uneven
and erratic. Down on the narrow spit of flat-land at the junction of the
two rivers that go to make the Ohio--a location exactly corresponding
with Manhattan island below the City Hall and of even less area--is the
business center of metropolitan Pittsburgh--wholesale and retail stores,
banks, office buildings, railroad passenger terminals, hotels, theaters
and the like. The same causes that made the skyscraper a necessity in
New York have worked a like necessity in the city at the head of the
Ohio.
So it has come to pass that no one lives in Pittsburgh itself, unless
under absolute compulsion. The suburbs present housing facilities for
the better part of its folk--Sewickley and East Liberty vie for greatest
favor with them and there are dozens of smaller communities that crowd
close upon these two social successes. "We can never get a decent census
figure," growls the Pittsburgh man, as he contemplates the size of these
outlying boroughs that go to make the city strong in everything, save in
that popular competitive feature of population. And that very reason
made the merging of the old city of Allegheny a popular issue, indeed.
The fact that Pittsburgh men live outside of Pittsburgh goes to give her
the fourth largest suburban train service in the country. Only New York,
Boston and Philadelphia surpass her in this wise. Even San Francisco has
less. One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest is Cleveland, the
sixth city in the country and outranking Pittsburgh in population. There
is not a single distinctive suburban train run in or out of Cleveland.
From one single terminal in Pittsburgh four hundred passenger trains
arrive and depart in the course of a single business day and ninety-five
percent of these are for the sole benefit of the commuter.
So congested have even these railroad facilities become that the city
cries bitterly all the while for a transit relief and experts have been
at work months and years planning a subway to aid both the steam roads
and the overworked trolley lines. At best it is no sinecure to operate
the trolley cars of Pittsburgh. Combined with narrow streets, uptown and
downtown, are the fearful slopes of the great hills. It takes big cars
to climb those hills, let alone haul the trailers that are a feature of
the Pittsburgh rush-hour traffic. When the New Yorker sees those cars
for the first time he looks again. They are chariots of steel, hardly
smaller than those that thread the subway in his daily trip to and from
Harlem, and when they come toward him they make him think of
locomotives. The heavy car gives a sense of strength and of hill
capability. But the company staggers twice each day under a traffic that
is far beyond its facilities--and it staggers under its political
burdens.
For it is almost as much as your very life is worth to "talk back" to a
street car conductor in Pittsburgh. The conductor is probably an arm of
the big political machine that holds that western Pennsylvania town as
in the hollow of its hand. The conductors get their jobs through their
alderman, and they hold them through their alderman. So if a New York
man forgets that he is four hundred and forty miles from Broadway, and
gets to asserting his mind to the man who is in charge of the car let
him look out for trouble. Chances are nine to one that he will be hauled
up before a magistrate for breaking the peace, and that another arm of
the political machine will come hard upon him.
A man, who was a life-long resident of Pittsburgh, once made a protest
to the conductor of a car coming across from Allegheny. The passenger
was in the right and the conductor knew it. But he answered that protest
with a volley of profanity. If that thing had happened in a seaboard
town, the conductor's job would not have been worth the formality of a
resignation. In Pittsburgh a bystander warned--the passenger--and he
saved himself arrest by keeping his mouth shut and getting off the car.
But the Pittsburgh man had not quite lost his sense of justice, and so
he hurried to a certain high officer of the street railroad company.
When he came to the company's offices he was ushered in in high state,
for it so happened that the born Pittsburgh man was a director of that
very corporation. It so happens that street railroad directors do not
ride--like their steam railroad brethren--on passes, and the conductor
did not know that he was playing flip-flap with his job.
"You'll have to fire that man," said the director, in ending his
complaint. "If that had happened at the club I would have punched him in
the head."
The big man who operated the street railroad looked at the director, and
smiled what the lady novelists call a sweet, sad smile.
"Sorry, Ben," said he, "but I know that man. He's one of Alderman
X----'s men, and if we fired him X---- would hang us up on half a dozen
things."
Do you wonder that in the face of such a state of things transit relief
comes rather slowly to Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh men have been trying to worm their way out of their
difficulties for about a century and a half now, for it was 1758 that
saw a permanent settlement started there at the junction of the three
great rivers. Before that had been the memorable fight and defeat of
Braddock--not far from where more recently Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie
have been engaged in a rivalry as to which could erect the higher
skyscraper and most effectually block out the _façade_ of the very
beautiful Court House that the genius of H. H. Richardson designed--more
than a score of years ago. At Braddock's defeat George Washington fought
and it was no less a prophetic mind than that of the Father of His
Country which foresaw and prophesied that Pittsburgh, with proper
transportation facilities, would become one of the master cities of the
country.
Today, when Pittsburgh men grow nervous in one of their chronic fits of
agitation--generally started by some talkative city, such as Chicago and
Duluth, proclaiming herself as the future center of the steel
industry--she gains comfort from the sayings of two Presidents--General
Washington, as just quoted, and the gentleman who sits at the head of
the board of the United States Steel Corporation, who goes out there
from time to time and tells them to be of good cheer, that the center of
the steel business is irrevocably fixed within their town. Pittsburgh
worries much more about the steel business than about the Richardson
Court House, which has just been left high and dry upon a local
Gibraltar because of the desire of the local aldermen to lower Fifth
avenue some eight or ten feet. But who shall say that she should not be
restive about a business that reaches an output in a single twelvemonth
of something over 150,000,000 tons? That is a jewel that is well worth
the keeping.
* * * * *
Philadelphia stands at the east end of Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh is the
west gate of that Keystone commonwealth. Yet two peas in a pod were
never half so different. Philadelphia stands for conservatism,
Pittsburgh for progress. While Philadelphia was climbing to the zenith
of her power and influence through the first three-quarters of the last
century and reaching her apotheosis in her great Centennial, Pittsburgh
was quiet beneath her smoke umbrellas experimenting with that strange
new metal, which man called steel. In the day dreams that Philadelphia
enjoyed in 1876 Pittsburgh was forgotten.
"I suppose the Pennsylvania railroad must have some place to end at,"
said a lady from Rittenhouse square, when her attention was called to
the city at the junction of the three rivers. And in the next year that
lady and many other ladies of the staunch old Quaker town were holding
up their hands in holy horror at the news from Pittsburgh. Great riots,
the bloodiest that had ever been known, were marking the railroad strike
there--why, in a single day the rioters had burned the great Union
station, every other railroad structure, and every car in the place.
That was bad advertising for a town that had none too many friends.
But Pittsburgh was finding herself--she is still in that fascinating
process of development. For word was eking out from the rough mountains
of western Pennsylvania that a little group of Scotchmen--led by a
shrewd ironmaster whom politic folk were already calling "Mr.
Carnegie"--had made steel an economic structural possibility. In this
day when wood has become a luxury, steel is coming into its own and
Pittsburgh is today the most metropolitan city between New York and
Chicago. But she is still finding herself. The Survey, financed by Mrs.
Russell Sage, and equipped with some of the ablest and fairest minded
social workers in America, has called sharp attention to her
shortcomings. The Survey did its work thoroughly and it was not the work
of a minute or a day or a week or a month. When its report was ready,
Pittsburgh smarted. It was the sort of smarting that goes before a cure.
Much has been done already. The man who went to Pittsburgh as recently
as ten years ago carried away some pretty definite memories of neglected
railroad stations and inferior hotel facilities. He remembered that in
Liberty and Penn avenues--two of the chief shopping streets in the
city--long trails of freight cars were constantly being shifted by dirty
switch engines in among the trolley cars, while farther up these same
avenues the Fort Wayne railroad tracks formed two of the nastiest grade
crossings in America. When a fine new hotel was finally built away out
Fifth avenue, he could sit on its porch and face Pittsburgh's famous
farm. The Schenley farm stretched over the hill and far away. Its barns
were sharply silhouetted upon the horizon, rail zigzag fences ran up and
down the slopes and sometimes one could see cattle outlined against the
sky edge.
The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. It occupied a tract
somewhat similar in location to that of Central Park in Manhattan, and
the struggling, growing town crawled its way around the obstacle
slowly--then grew many miles east once again. Resentment gathered
against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped through at Harrisburg
imposing double taxes on property held by persons residing out of the
United States--a distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate
protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the
farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn.
So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a site for one of the
finest civic centers in America. The farm has begun to disappear--the
University of Pittsburgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an
American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. The new Athletic
Club, the development of the Hotel Schenley, the great Soldiers'
Memorial Hall which Allegheny county has just finished, the even greater
Carnegie Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are going
toward the making of this fine, new civic center, and Pittsburgh being
Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social heroes, Forbes Field the finest
baseball park in all this land--a wizardry of glass and steel and
concrete--is a distinctive feature of this improvement.
[Illustration: The old and the new at Pittsburgh]
The freight trains are gone from the downtown shopping streets and the
two wicked grade crossings disappeared when the Pennsylvania built its
splendid new Union Station. Other fine railroad terminals and new hotels
have added to the comfort of the stranger. They are beginning in a faint
way to give transfers on the trolley cars, and there is more than a
promise that some day wayfarers will not be taxed a penny every time
they walk across the bridges that bind the heart of the city. The bridge
companies are private affairs, paying from fifteen to twenty percent
in annual dividends, and they hang pretty tightly on to their bonanzas.
But the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce is after them, and that Chamber
is a fairly energetic body. It has already sought the devil in his lair
and tried to abolish the smoke nuisance, with some definite results.
A New York girl who has been living in Pittsburgh for the last four
years complained that she had never seen but two sunsets there. There is
hope for that girl. If the Chamber of Commerce keeps hard at its
anti-smoke campaign, she may yet stand on the Point and down the muddy
Ohio see something that dimly resembles the glorious dying of the day,
as one sees it from the heights of New York city's Riverside Drive.
A keen-eyed man sat in an easy chair in the luxury of the Duquesne Club,
and faced the New York man.
"Are we so bad?" he demanded. "You New York men like to paint us that
way. You judge us falsely. You think that when you come out here you are
going to see a sort of modern Sodom, bowing to all the gods of money and
the gods of the high tariff. You think you are going to fairly revel in
a wide open town, in the full significance of that phrase, and what do
you see?
"You see a pretty solid sort of a Scotch Presbyterian town, where you
cannot even get shaved in your hotel on Sunday, to say nothing of buying
a drink. And as for shows, you can't buy your way into a concert here on
Sunday. Why, some of the elders of my kirk have even looked askance at
Mr. Carnegie for the free recitals that he gives Sabbath afternoons in
that splendid hall of the Institute.
"There's your real Pittsburgher, and if some of the boys have chafed a
bit under all the restraint that they have had here and gone to the
wicked city after a little fling and a little advertising, is that any
just reason why it all should be charged against Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh
has enough troubles of her own without borrowing any additional ones.
"The trouble is we've been making too much money to notice much about
the boys, or give proper attention to some pretty vital civic
problems--that's why the rottenness cropped out in the City Councils.
It's the taint of the almighty dollar, Mr. New Yorker! Why, Mr. Carnegie
made a couple of hundred of us millionaires within a single twenty-four
hours. Can you think of any worse blow for an average town?
"He took some of us, who had been working for him a long time, and got
us into the business--some for an eighth interest, others for a
sixteenth or even a thirty-second. That was great, and we appreciated
it, but it kept us fairly tight on ready money for a while, even though
Frick and Mellen were standing pat with an offer of a hundred million
dollars for the bonds of the steel company. I tell you I was short on
ready money myself, and wondering if I could not cut down on my house
rent $2,000 a year and get my wife to keep two hired girls instead of
three. Then you know what happened. Carnegie himself took over the bonds
at a cold two hundred million dollars. Within a week or so I was in New
York talking with an architect about building a new house for the
missus, and getting passage tickets through to Europe."
The ironmaster called his automobile and bundled the New York man within
it.
"We are going down into the slums," he said. "I can show you a single
block where thirteen different languages are spoken. That is the new
Pittsburgh--taking up one another's burdens, or something of that sort,
as they call it. It is queer until you get used to it, and when you get
used to it, it makes you feel like going up on the roof and yelling that
Pittsburgh is going to be the greatest city on earth, not just the
greatest in tonnage or in dollars.
"That is why we are cottoning to that idea of a civic center out by
Schenley Park; that's why we pat Andrew Carnegie on the back when we
know that he is giving us the best in pictures and in music in America;
that's why Frick is holding back with his horse pasture there in front
of Carnegie Institute to build something bigger and better. Don't you
get the idea now of the bigger and better Pittsburgh?"
The limousine stopped and the ironmaster beckoned a large, whiskered
Russian to it. "Here's a real anarchist," he said, "but he is one of my
protégés. He speaks down in a dirty hall in Liberty avenue, near the
Wabash terminal, but he's for the new Pittsburgh, and he's for it
strong--so we come together after a fashion."
The Russian, who was a teacher, came close to the big automobile and
pointed to a woman of his own people--a woman wretchedly poor, who dwelt
in one of the hovels which are today Pittsburgh's greatest shame.
"She's reading Byron," he said quietly, "and she has been in America
less than six months. She says there is a magnificent comparison between
Byron and Tolstoy."
That reminded the ironmaster of an incident.
"After that bad time in 1907," he said, "I chanced into one of Mr.
Carnegie's libraries, and the librarian complained to me of the way the
books were being ruined. Their backs were being scratched and filled
with rust and even shavings. I had an idea on that myself. I went back
to our own mill--it was pretty dull there and I was dodging the forlorn
place as much as I could. But we were sifting out a gang from the men
who were beating at our doors every morning for work, and even then we
were carrying twice as many men as we really needed. I went around back
of the furnaces and there were the library books--the men were reading
them in the long shifts."
"They weren't reading fiction?" asked the New Yorker.
"Not a bit of it," said the ironmaster. Then he added:
"One of them spoke to me. He was only getting three days a week. 'Mr.
Carnegie can give the books,' was his quiet observation, 'and the money
to buy them. But we need more than money. Can't he ever give us the
leisure to read them without its costing us the money for our food?'
"That, New Yorker, from the mouth of one of those of the new Pittsburgh
is the real answer to your question."
11
THE SIXTH CITY
They call her the Sixth City, but that is only in a comparative sense,
and exclusively in regard to her statistical position in the population
ranks of the large cities of our land. For no real citizen of Cleveland
will ever admit that his community is less than first, in all of the
things that make for the advance of a strong and healthy American town.
His might better be called "the City of Boundless Enthusiasm." Your
Cleveland man, however, is content to know it as the Sixth City.
"Not that it really matters whether we are the fifth or the seventh--or
the sixth," he tells you. "Only it all goes to show how we've bobbed up
in the last twenty years. You know what we used to be--an inconsiderable
lake port up on the north brink of Ohio with Cincinnati down there in
the south pruning herself as a real metropolis and calling herself the
Queen City. We might call ourselves the Queen City today and stretch no
points, but that's a sort of fancy title that's gone out of fashion now.
The Sixth City sounds more like the Twentieth Century."
And Cleveland having thus baptized herself, as it were, proceeded to
spread her new name to the world. "Cleveland--Sixth City" appeared on
the stationery of her business houses; her tailors stitched it in upon
the labels of the ready-made suits they sent to all corners of the land;
her bakers stamped it on the products of their ovens; big shippers
stenciled it over packing-cases; manufacturers even placed it upon the
brass-plates of the lathes and other complicated machines they sent
forth from their shops. Today when you say "Sixth City" to an American
he replies "Cleveland," which is precisely what Cleveland intended he
should reply.
Now why has Cleveland taken her new position of sixth among the cities
of the land? Ask your Cleveland man that, and he will take you by the
elbow and march you straight toward the docks, that not only line her
lake front but extend for miles up within the curious twistings of the
Cuyahoga river.
"Lake traffic," he will tell you, and begin to quote statistics.
We will spare you most of the statistics. It is meet that you should
know, however, that upon the five Great Lakes there throbs a commerce
that might well be the envy of any far-reaching, salty sea. To put the
thing concretely, the freight portion of this traffic alone reached
tremendous totals in 1912. In the navigation months of that year,
exactly 47,435,477 tons of iron ore and an even greater tonnage of coal
moved upon the Lakes, while the enormous total of 158,000,000 bushels of
grain were received at the port of Buffalo. And although there are tens
of thousands of sailormen upon the salt seas who have never heard of
Cleveland, the business of the port of Cleveland is comparable with that
of the port of Liverpool, one of the very greatest and the very busiest
harbors in all the world. For four out of every five of the great steel
steamships carrying the iron ore and coal cargoes of the lakes are
operated from Cleveland. Until the formation of the United States Steel
corporation a few years ago she could also say that she owned four out
of five of these vessels. And today her indirect interest in them,
through the steel corporation, is not small.
As the Cleveland man continues to din these statistics into your ear,
you let your gaze wander. Over across a narrow slip a gaunt steel
framework rises. It holds a cradle, large enough and strong enough to
accommodate a single steel railroad "gondola," which in turn carries
fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are clamped over
the sides of one of these "gondola" cars, which a seemingly tireless
switch-engine has just shunted into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to
the top of the framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge,
three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of the car in an
uprising cloud of black dust and drops through a funnel into the
expansive hold of the vessel that is moored at the dock. The car is
righted; some remaining coal rattles to its bottom. Once again it is
overturned and the remaining coal goes through the funnel. When it is
righted the second time it is entirely empty. The cradle returns to its
low level, the car is unfastened and given a push. It makes a gravity
movement and returns to a string of its fellows that have been through a
similar process.
You take out your watch. The process consumes just two minutes for each
car. That means thirty cars an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of
coal, the capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been placed
in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are familiar, perhaps, with the
craft that tie up at the wharves of seaboard towns, and you roughly
estimate the capacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred
tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great hold, and
you find yourself astonished at the result of such computations. You
confide that astonishment to your Cleveland man. He smiles at you,
benignly.
"That is really not very rapid work," he says, "they put eleven thousand
tons of ore into the _Corey_ in thirty-nine minutes up at Superior last
year."
And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the world. When the
British ship-owners heard of that feat at a port two thousand miles
inland, they ceased to deride American docking facilities.
The Cleveland man begins telling you something of this lake traffic in
iron ore and soft coal--almost three-quarters of the total tonnage of
the lakes. The workable iron deposits of America are today in greatest
profusion within a comparatively few miles of the head of Lake
Superior--nothing has yet robbed western Pennsylvania and West Virginia
of their supremacy as producers of bituminous coal. There is an ideal
traffic condition, the condition that lines the railroad cars for forty
miles roundabout Pittsburgh. The great cost in handling freight upon the
average railroad comes from the fact that it is generally what is known
as "one-way" business--that is, the volume of traffic moves in a single
direction, necessitating an expensive and wasteful return haul of empty
cars. There is no such traffic waste upon the Great Lakes. The ships
that go up and down the long water lanes of Erie and Huron and Superior
do not worry about ballast for the return. They carry coal from Buffalo,
Erie, Ashtabula, Conneaut and Cleveland to Duluth and Superior and they
come back with their capacious holds filled with red iron ore. There is
your true economy in transportation, and the reflection of it comes in
the fact that these ships haul cargo at the rate of .78 of a mill for a
ton-mile, which is the lowest freight-rate in the world.
Cleveland built these ships, in fact she still is building the greater
part of them. And she thinks nothing of building the largest of these
steel vessels in ninety days. Take a second look at that vessel--the
coal cars are still pouring their grimy treasure into her hold. She is
builded, like all of these new freighters, with a severity that shows
the bluff utilitarianism of the shipbuilders of the Great Lakes. None of
the finicky traditions of the Clyde rule the minds of the men who today
are building the merchant marine of the Lakes. One deckhouse, with the
navigating headquarters, is forward; the other, with funnel and the
other externals of the ship's propelling mechanism, is at the extreme
stern. Amidships your Great Lakes carrier is cargo--and nothing else. No
tangle of line or burden of trivials; just a red-walled hull of thick
steel plates and a steel-plate deck--broken into thirty-six hatches and
of precisely the same shade of red--for these ships are quickly painted
by hose-spray. Remember that it is ninety days--from keel-plates to
launching. In another thirty days the ship's simple fittings are
finished and her engines in her heart are ready to pound from down-Lakes
to up-Lakes and back innumerable times.
* * * * *
If we have given some attention in this Cleveland chapter to the traffic
of the Great Lakes, it is, as we have already intimated, because the
traffic of the Great Lakes has made her the Sixth City. It has also made
the most important of her industries, the very greatest of her fortunes.
Your Cleveland man will tell you of one of these--before you leave the
pier-edge. It was the fortune that an old Lake captain left at his death
a little time ago--the fortune a mere matter of some twenty-eight
millions of dollars. The old captain knew the Lakes and he had studied
their traffic--all his life. But his will directed that his money should
not be expended in the building of ships. It provided that at least a
quarter of a million of the income should annually go to the purchase of
Cleveland real estate. And Cleveland was quick to explain that it was
not that the old man loved shipping less, but that he loved Cleveland
real estate more. He had the gift of foresight.
If you would see that foresight in his own eyes drive out Euclid
avenue--that broad thoroughfare that leads from the old-fashioned Public
Square in the heart of the city straight toward the southeast. Euclid
avenue gained its fame in other days. Travelers used to come back from
Cleveland and tell of the glories of that highway. Alas, today those
glories are largely those of memory. The old houses still sit in their
great lawns, but the grime of the city's industry has made them seem
doubly old and decadent, while Commerce has pushed her smart new shops
out among them to the very sidewalk line. Many of these shops are given
over to the automobile business--a business which does not hesitate in
any of our towns to transform resident streets into commercial. But in
Cleveland one may partly forgive the audacity of this particular trade
in recognition of its perspicacity. For Euclid avenue, rapidly growing
now from an entirely residential street into an entirely business
highway, is the great automobile thoroughfare of the East Side of the
city. And when you consider that one out of every ten Cleveland families
has a motor car, you can begin to estimate the traffic through Euclid
avenue.
There is a West Side of Cleveland--you might almost say, of course--but
one does not come to know it until he comes to know Cleveland well. The
city is builded upon a high plateau that rises in a steep bluff from the
very edge of the lake. Through this plateau, at the very bottom of a
ravine, wide and deep, the navigable Cuyahoga twists its tortuous way
into Lake Erie. It seems as if that ravine must almost have been cut to
test the resources of the bridge-builders of America. For it has been
their problem to keep the Sixth City from becoming entirely severed by
her great water artery. They have solved it by the construction of one
huge steel viaduct after another but the West Side remains the West
Side--and always somewhat jealous of the East. She knows that the great
public buildings of Cleveland--that comprehensive civic center plan to
which we shall come in a moment--are fixed for all time upon the East.
And so when Cleveland decides to build a great new city hall, the West
Side demands and receives the finest market house in all the land.
So it is that it is the East Side that your Cleveland man shows you
alone when your time is limited, and so it is that Euclid avenue is the
one great thoroughfare of the whole East Side.
"If you want to know how we've bobbed up, look at here," the Cleveland
man tells you.
You look. A contractor is busy changing a railroad crossing from level
to overhead; a much-needed improvement--despite the fact that it should
have been under-surface rather than overhead--when you come to consider
the traffic that moves through Euclid avenue in all the daylight hours
and far into the night.
"When the old Cleveland and Pittsburgh--it's part of the Pennsylvania,
now--was built, thirty-five or forty years ago, they thought they would
put the line around the town. But the town was up to their line before
they knew it--and they decided ten or a dozen years ago that they would
put a suburban station here." He points to a handsome red brick
structure of modern architecture. "The Pennsylvania folks are
long-headed--almost always. But if they had known that Cleveland was to
become the Sixth City within ten years they never would have put two
hundred thousand dollars in a grade crossing station at Euclid avenue.
The way we've grown has sort of startled all of us."
Today Euclid avenue is a compactly built thoroughfare for miles east of
that Pennsylvania railroad crossing. It is at least two miles and a half
from that crossing to Cleveland's two great educational lions--the Case
School of Applied Science and the Western Reserve University--and they
in turn only mark the beginning of the city's newest and most
fashionable residence district.
Indeed Cleveland has "bobbed up." And her growth within the last quarter
of a century has been more than physical, more than that recorded by
emotionless census-takers. For beneath those grimy old houses on Euclid
avenue and the down town residence streets, beneath the roofs of those
gray and grimy story-and-a-half wooden houses which line far less
pretentious streets for long miles, lies as restless and as hopeful a
civic spirit as any town in America can boast. It makes itself manifest
in many ways--as we shall see. The man who first brought it into a
working force was a resourceful little man who died a little while ago.
But before Tom L. Johnson died he was Mayor of the city; something more;
he was the best liked and the best hated man that Cleveland had ever
known; and he was better liked than he was hated.
In person a plump little man with a ceaseless smile that might have been
stolen from a Raphael cherub, a democratic little man, who knew his
fellows and who could read them, almost unfailingly. And the smile could
change from softness into severity--when Tom L. Johnson wanted a thing
he wanted it mighty hard. And he generally succeeded in getting it. He
could not only read men; he could read affairs. He saw Cleveland coming
to be the Sixth City. And he determined that she should realize the
dignity of metropolitanism in other fashion than in merely census totals
or bank clearances.
[Illustration: Cleveland is proud of her great, broad streets]
Johnson began by going after the street railroad system of the town. He
had had some experience in building and operating street railroads in
other parts of the country, and he set out along paths that were not
entirely unfamiliar to him. It so happened that at the time he began his
crusade Cleveland was quite satisfied with her street railroad service.
Her residents went out to other cities of the land and bragged about how
their big yellow cars ran out to all the far corners of their rapidly
growing city. But Johnson was not criticising the service. He was merely
saying in his gentle insistent way that five cents was too much for a
man to pay to ride upon a street car. He thought three cents was quite
enough. The street railroad company quite naturally thought differently.
In every other town in the land five cents was the standard fare, and
any Cleveland man could tell you how much better the car-service was at
home. That company produced vast tables of statistics to prove its
contentions. Tom L. Johnson merely laughed at the statistics and
reiterated that three cents was a sufficient street-car fare for
Cleveland.
The details of that _cause celébre_ are not to be recited here. It is
enough here to say that Tom L. Johnson lived long enough to see
three-cent fares upon the Cleveland cars, and that the conclusion was
not reached until a long and bitter battle had been fought. The
conclusion itself as it stands today is interesting. The owners of the
street railroad stock, the successors of the men who invested their
money on a courageous gamble that Cleveland was to grow into a real city
are assured of a legitimate six percent upon their stock. They cannot
expect more. If the railroad earns more than that fixed six percent its
fares must be reduced. If, on the other hand, it fails to earn six
percent the fares must be raised sufficiently to permit that return. The
fare-steps are simple, a cent at a time, with a cent being charged for a
transfer, or a transfer being furnished free as best may meet the income
need of the railroad.
At present the fare is three cents, transfers being furnished free. A
little while ago the fare was three cents, a cent being charged for the
transfer. That brought an unnecessarily high revenue to the railroad,
and so today while the conductor who issues you a transfer gravely
charges you a cent for it, the conductor who accepts it, with equal
gravity, presents you a cent in return for it. This prevents the
transfers being used as stationery or otherwise frivoled away. For,
while the street car system of Cleveland is among the best operated in
America, it is also one of the most whimsical. Its cars are proof of
that. Some of them are operated on the so-called "pay-as-you-enter"
principle, although Cleveland, which has almost a passion for
abbreviation, calls them the "paye" cars. These cars are still a
distinct novelty in most of our cities. In Cleveland they are almost as
old as Noah's Ark compared with a car in which you pay as you leave--a
most sensible fashion--or a still newer car in which you can pay as you
enter or pay as you leave--a choice which you elect by going to one end
or the other of the vehicle.
But the fact remains that Cleveland has three-cent fares upon her
excellent street railroad system, to say nothing of having control over
her most important utility, the street railroad, which pays six percent
dividends to its owners. The three-cent fare seems standard in
Cleveland. In fact, she is becoming a three-cent city. Small shops make
attractive offers at that low figure, and "three-cent movies" are
springing up along her streets. She has already gone down to Washington
and demanded that the Federal government issue a three-cent piece--to
meet her peculiar needs. So does the spirit of Tom L. Johnson still go
marching on.
It must have been the spirit of Tom L. Johnson that gave Cleveland a
brand-new charter in this year of Grace, 1913. Into this new charter
have been written many things that would have been deemed impossible in
the charter of a large American city even a decade ago. Initiative and
referendum, of course--Johnson and his little band of faithful followers
were not satisfied until they had gone to Columbus a few winters ago
and written that into the new constitution of the state of Ohio--a
department of public welfare to regulate everything from the safety and
morals of "three-cent movies" to the larger questions of public health
and even of public employment, the very sensible short ballot, and even
the newest comer in our family of civic reforms--the preferential
ballot, although at the time that this is being written it is being
sharply contested in the high courts at Columbus. Cleveland rejected the
commission form of government. The fact that a good many other
progressive American towns have accepted it, did not, in her mind,
weigh for or against it. She has never been a city of strong
conventions--witness her refusal to regard the five-cent fare as
standard, simply because other towns had it. Neither has tradition been
permitted to warp her course. A few years ago her citizens decided that
her system of street names was not good enough or expansive enough for a
town that was entering the metropolitan class. So she changed most of
her street names--almost in the passing of a night. In most American
towns that would have been out of the question. Folk cling to street
names almost as they cling to family traditions. But Cleveland folk
seemed to realize instantly that the new system of numbered
cross-streets--with the broad diagonal highways named "roads"--after the
fashion of some English cities--was so far the best that she immediately
gave herself to the new scheme with heart and soul, as seems to be her
way.
To tell of a splendid new charter adopted, of the control gained over
her chief utility and necessity, of the progressive social reforms that
she houses, is not alone to tell of the splendid heart and soul that
beats within the walls and roofs of her houses. It is, quite as much, to
tell of a remarkable coöperation, remarkable when you consider that
Cleveland has become a city of more than six hundred thousand humans.
That coöperation may best be illustrated by a single incident:
A retail dealer in hardware recently opened a fine new store out in
Euclid avenue. He opened it as some small cities might open their new
library or their new city hall--with music and a reception. His friends
sent great bouquets of flowers, the concerns from which he bought his
supplies sent more flowers; but the biggest bunch of flowers came from
the men who were his competitors in the same line of business. That was
Cleveland--Cleveland spirit, Cleveland generosity. Perhaps that is the
secret of Cleveland success.
* * * * *
One thing more--the plan for the Cleveland civic center. For the Sixth
City having set her mental house in order is to build for it a physical
house of great utility and of compelling beauty. You may have heard of
the Cleveland civic plan. It is in the possibility that you have not,
that we bring it in for a final word. When Cleveland set out to obtain a
new Federal Post Office and Court House for herself, a few years ago, it
came to her of a sudden that she was singularly lacking in fine public
buildings. It was suggested that she should seek for herself not only a
Federal building but a new Court House and City Hall as well. In the
same breath it was proposed that these be brought into a beautiful and a
practical group. It was an attractive suggestion. In the fertile soil of
Cleveland attractive suggestions take quick root. And so in Cleveland
was born the civic center idea that has spread almost like the
proverbial wildfire all the way across the land.
To create her civic group she moved in a broad and decisive fashion. She
engaged three of the greatest of American architects--A. W. Brunner,
John M. Carrere, D. H. Burnham--two of them poets and idealists, the
third almost the creator of America's most utilitarian type of
building, the modern skyscraper. To these men she gave a broad and
unlocked path. And they created for her, along a broad Mall stretching
from Superior street to the very edge of that mighty cliff that
overlooks the lake, a plan for the housing of her greatest functions.
It is not too much that Cleveland should dream of this Mall as an
American Place de la Concorde. It was not too much when the architects
breathed twenty millions of dollars as the possible cost of this civic
dream. Cleveland merely breathed "Go ahead," and the architects have
gone ahead. The Post Office and the new County Building are already
completed and in use, the City Hall should be completed before 1915
comes to take his place in the history of the world. Other buildings are
to follow, not the least of them a new Union station--although there
will be travelers who will sincerely regret the passing of Cleveland's
stout old stone station, whose high-vaulted train-shed seemed to them in
boyhood days to be the most lofty and wonderful of apartments. The bulk
of this new open square is yet to be cleared of the many buildings that
today occupy it. But that is merely a detail in the development of
Cleveland's greatest architectural ambition.
The civic group can never be more than the outward expression of the
ambitious spirit of a new giant among the metropolitan cities of
America. As such it can be eminently successful. It can speak for the
city whose civic heart it becomes, proclaiming her not merely great in
dollars or in the swarming throngs of her population, but rather great
in strength of character, in charity, in generosity--in all those
admirable things that go to make a town preëminently good and great. And
in these things your Cleveland man will not proclaim his as the Sixth
City, but rather as in the front rank of all the larger communities of
the United States.
12
CHICAGO--AND THE CHICAGOANS
Early in the morning the city by the lake is astir. Before the first
long scouting rays of earliest sunlight are thrusting themselves over
the barren reaches of Michigan--state and lake--Chicago is in action.
The nervous little suburban trains are reaching into her heart from
South, from North and from West. The long trains of elevated cars are
slipping along their alley-routes, skirting behind long rows of the
dirty colorless houses of the most monotonous city on earth, threading
themselves around the loop--receiving passengers, discharging passengers
before dawn has fully come upon the town. The windows of the tedious,
almost endless rows of houses flash into light and life, the trolley
cars in the broad streets come at shorter intervals, in whole companies,
brigades, regiments--a mighty army of trucks and wagons begin to send up
a great wave of noise and of clatter from the shrieking highways and
byways of the city.
* * * * *
The traveler coming to the city from the east and by night finds it
indeed a mighty affair. For an hour and a half before his train arrives
at the terminal station, he is making his way through Chicago
environs--coming from dull flat monotonies of sand and brush and pine
into Gary--with its newness and its bigness proclaimed upon its very
face so that even he who flits through at fifty miles an hour may read
both--jolting over main line railroads that cross and recross at every
conceivable angle, snapping up through Hammond and Kensington and Grand
Crossing--to the right and to the left long vistas with the ungainly,
picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking
stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses, the vistas suddenly closed
off by long trails of travel-worn freight-cars, through which the
traveler's train finds its way with a mighty clattering and
reverberating of noisy echoes. This is Chicago--Chicago spreading itself
over miles of absolutely flat shore-land at almost the extreme southern
tip of Lake Michigan--Chicago proudly proclaiming herself as the
business and the transportation metropolis of the land, disdaining such
mere seaport places as New York or Boston or Baltimore or San
Francisco--Chicago with the most wretched approaches on her main lines
of travel of any great city of the world.
If you come to her on at least one of the great railroads that link her
with the Atlantic seaboard, you will get a glimpse of her one redeeming
natural feature, for five or six miles before your train comes to a
final grinding stop at the main terminal--the blue waters of the lake.
This railroad spun its way many years ago on the very edge of the
lake--much to the present-day grief of the town. It gives no grief to
the incoming traveler--to turn from the sordid streets, the quick
glimpses of rows of pretentious but fearfully dirty and uninteresting
houses--to the great open space to the east of Chicago--nature's
assurance of fresh air and light and health to one of the really vast
cluster-holds of mankind. To him the lake is in relief--even in splendid
contrast to the noise, the dirt, the streets darkened and narrowed by
the over-shouldering constructions of man. From the intricate and the
confusing, to the simplicity of open water--no wonder then that Chicago
has finally come to appreciate her lake, that she seizes upon her
remaining free waterfront like a hungry and ill-fed child, that she
builds great hotels and office-buildings where their windows may
look--not upon the town, stretching itself to the horizon on the
prairie, but upon the lake, with its tranquillity and its beauty, the
infinite majesty of a great, silent open place.
* * * * *
In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to divine the real
character of the city. You see it, a great crucible into which the
people of all nations and all the corners of one of the greatest of the
nations are being poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a
window that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, overshadowed by
the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, is the bent figure of a
hatless peasant woman from the south of Europe--seeing her America for
the first time and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of fear
and of amazement. Next to her is a sleek, well-groomed man who may be
from the East--from an Atlantic seaport city, but do not be too sure of
that, for he may have his home over on Michigan avenue and think that
"New York is a pretty town but not in it with Chicago." You never can
tell in the most American and most cosmopolitan of American cities. At a
third window is a man who has come from South Dakota. He has a big ranch
up in that wonderful state. You know that because last night he sat
beside you on a bench in the dingy, busy office of the old Palmer House
and told you of Chicago as he saw it.
"I've a farm up in the South Dakota," he told you, in brief. "This is my
first time East." You started in a bit of surprise at that, for it had
always occurred to you that Chicago was West, that you, born New Yorker,
were reaching into the real West whenever you crossed to the far side of
Main street, in Buffalo. You looked at the ranchman, feeling that he was
joking, and then you took a second look into his tired eyes and knew
that you were talking to no humorist.
"The first real big town that I ever ran into," he said, in his simple
way, "was Sioux City, and I set up and took a little notice on it. It
seemed mighty big, but that was five years ago, and four years ago I
took my stock down to Cudahy in Omaha--and there _was_ a town. You could
walk half a day in Omaha and never come to cattle country. Just houses
and houses and houses--an' you begin to wonder where they find the folks
to fill them. This year I come here with the beef for the first
time--an' you could put Omaha in this town and never know the
difference."
After that you confessed, with much pride, that you lived in New York
city, and you began. You knew the number of miles of subway from the
Bronx over to Brooklyn, and the number of stories in the Woolworth
building, all those things, and when you caught your breath, the
stockman asked you if Tom Sharkey really had a saloon in your town, and
was Steve Brodie still alive, and did New York folks like to go down to
the Statue of Liberty on pleasant Sunday afternoons. You answered those
questions, and then you told the stockman more--of London, made of
dozens of Omahas, where the United States was but a pleasant and withal
a somewhat uncertain dream, of Paris the beautiful, and of Berlin the
awfully clean. When you were done, you went with the stockman to eat in
a basement--that is the Chicago idea of distinction in restaurants--and
he took you to a lively show afterwards.
Now you never would have wandered into a Broadway hotel lobby and made
the acquaintance of a perfect stranger, dined with him and spent the
evening with him--no, not even if you were a Chicagoan and fearfully
lonely in New York. It is the Chicago that gets into a New Yorker's
veins when he comes within her expanded limits, it is the unseen aura
of the West that creeps as far east as the south tip of Lake Michigan.
It made you acknowledge with hearty appreciation the "good mornings" of
each man as he filed into the wash-room of the sleeping car in the early
morning. You never say "good morning" to strangers in the sleeping cars
going from New York over to Boston. For that is the East and that is
different.
* * * * *
A Chicago man sits back in the regal comfort of a leather-padded office
chair and tells you between hurried bites of the lunch that has been
placed upon his desk, of the real town that is sprawled along the Lake
Michigan shore.
"Don't know as you particularly care for horse-food," he apologizes,
between mouthfuls, "but that's the cult in this neck-o'-woods nowadays."
"The cult?" you inquire, as he plunges more deeply in his bran-mash.
"Precisely," he nods. "We're living in cults out here now. We've got
Boston beaten to culture."
He shoves back the remnant of his "health food" luncheon with an
expression that surely says that he wishes it was steak, smothered with
onions and flanked by an ample-girthed staff of vegetables, and faces
you--you New Yorker--with determination to set your path straight.
"Along in the prehistoric ages--which in Chicago means about the time of
the World's Fair--we were trying to live up to anything and everything,
but particularly the ambition to be the overwhelmingest biggest town in
creation, and to make your old New York look like an annexed seaport. We
had no cults, no woman's societies, nothing except a lot of men making
money hand over fist, killing hogs, and building cars and selling stuff
at retail by catalogues. We were not æsthetic and we didn't
particularly care. We liked plain shows as long as the girls in them
weren't plain, and we had a motto that a big lady carried around on a
shield. The motto was 'I will,' and translated it meant to the bottom of
the sea with New York or St. Louis or any other upstart town that tried
to live on the same side of the earth as Chicago. We were going to have
two million population inside of two years and--"
He dives again into his cultish lunch and after a moment resumes:
"The big lady has lost her job and we've thrown the shield--motto and
all--into the lake. We're trying to forget the motto and that's why
we've got the cult habit. We're class and we're close on the heels of
you New Yorkers--only last winter they began to pass the French pastry
around on a tray at my club. We learn quickly and then go you one
better. We've finally given Jane Addams the recognition and the support
that she should have had a dozen years ago. We're strong and we're
sincere for culture--the university to the south of us has had some
funny cracks but that is all history. Together with the one to the north
of us, they are finally institutions--and Chicago respects them as such.
"Take opera. We used to think it was a fad to hear good music, and only
the society folks went to hear it--so that the opera fairly starved to
death when it came out here. Now they are falling over one another to
get into the Auditorium, and our opera company is not only an
institution but you New Yorkers would give your very hearts to have it
in your own big opera house."
"You'll build an opera house out here then," you venture, "the
biggest--"
He interrupts.
"Not necessarily the biggest," he corrects, "but as fine as the very
best."
The talk changes. You are frankly interested in the cults. You have
heard of how one is working in the public schools, how the school
children of Chicago work in classrooms with the windows wide open, and
you ask him about it.
"It must be fine for the children?" you finally venture.
"It is," he says. "My daughter teaches in a school down Englewood way,
and she says that it is fine for the children--but hell on the teachers.
They weren't trained to it in the beginning."
You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could
not have understood how a man like this--head of a giant corporation
employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big
houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and
influences--would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are
beginning to understand the man--the man who is typical of Chicago. You
come to know him the more clearly as he tells you of the city that he
really loves. He tells you how Sorolla "caught on" over at the
Institute--although more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the
brilliance of the Spaniard's reception--and how the people who go to the
Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and more solid literature all
the while. Then--of a sudden, for he realizes that he must be back again
into the grind and the routine of his work--he turns to you and says:
"And yesterday we had the big girl and the motto. It was hardly more
than yesterday that we thought that population counted, that acreage was
a factor in the consummation of a great city."
* * * * *
[Illustration: Michigan Avenue and the wonderful lakefront--Chicago]
So you see that Chicago is only America, not boastful, not arrogant, but
strong in her convictions, strong in her sincerity, strong in her poise
between right and power together, and not merely power without right.
A city set in the heart of America must certainly take strong American
tone, no matter how many foreigners New York's great gateway may pour
into her ample lap in the course of a single twelvemonth. Chicago has
taken that dominating tone upon herself.
She is a great city. Her policemen wear star-shaped badges after the
fashion of country constables in rural drama, and her citizens call the
trolleys that run after midnight "owl cars," but she is a great city
none the less for these things. Her small shops along Michigan avenue
have the smartness of Paris or of Vienna, the greatest of her department
stores is one of the greatest department stores in all the land, which
means in the whole world. It is softly carpeted, floor upon floor, and
the best of Chicago delights to lunch upon one of its upper floors.
Chicago likes to go high for its meals or else, as we have already
intimated, down into basements. The reason for this last may be that one
of the world's greatest _restauranteurs_, who had his start in the city
by Lake Michigan, has always had his place below sidewalk level on a
busy corner of the city.
The city is fearfully busy at all of its downtown corners. New Yorkers
shudder at Thirty-fourth street and Broadway. Inside the Chicago loop
are several dozen Thirty-fourth streets and Broadways. There you have
it--the Chicago loop, designed to afford magnificent relief to the town
and in effect having tightly drawn a belt about its waist. The loop is a
belt-line terminal, slightly less than a mile in diameter, designed to
serve the elevated railroads that stretch their caterpillar-like
structures over three directions of the widespread town. Within it are
the theaters, the hotels, the department stores, the retail district,
and the wholesale and the railroad terminals. Just without it is an arid
belt and then somewhere to the north, the west and the south, the great
residential districts. So it is a mistake. For, with the exception of a
little way along Michigan avenue to the south, the loop has acted
against the growth of the city, has kept it tightly girdled within
itself.
"Within the loop," is a meaningful phrase in Chicago. It means
congestion in every form and the very worst forms to the fore. It means
that what was originally intended to be an adequate terminal to the
various elevated railroads has become a transportation abomination and a
matter of local contempt. For you cannot exaggerate the condition that
it has created. It is fearful on ordinary days, and when you come to
extraordinary days, like the memorable summer when the Knights Templar
held their triennial conclave there, the newspapers print "boxed"
summaries of the persons killed and injured by congestion conditions
"within the loop." That takes it out of being a mere laughing matter.
It is no laughing matter to folks who have to thread it. Trolley cars,
automobiles, taxicabs, the long lumbering 'buses that remind one of the
photographs of Broadway, New York, a quarter of a century ago or more,
entangle themselves with one another and with unfortunate pedestrians
and still no one comes forward with practical relief. The 'buses are
peculiarly Chicago institutions. For long years they have been taking
passengers from one railroad station to another. A considerable part of
Western America has been ferried across the city by Lake Michigan, in
these institutions. For Chicago, with the wisdom of nearly seventy-five
years of growth, has steadily refused to accept the union station idea.
St. Louis has a union station--and bitterly regrets it. Modern big towns
are scorning the idea of a union station; in fact, Buffalo has just
rejected the scheme for herself. For a union station, no matter how big
or how pretentious it may be architecturally, will reduce a city to
way-station dimensions. St. Louis is a big town, a town with
personality, the great trunk lines of east and south and west have
terminals there; but the many thousands of travelers who pass through
there in the course of a twelvemonth, see nothing of her. They file from
one train into the waiting-room of her glorious station--one of the few
really great railroad stations of the world--and in a little while take
an outbound train--without ever having stepped out into the streets of
the town.
In Chicago--as it is almost a form of _lese majeste_ to discuss St.
Louis in a chapter devoted to Chicago we herewith submit our full
apologies--four-fifths of the through passengers have to be carried in
the omnibuses from one of the big railroad stations to another. They
know that in advance, and they generally arrange to stop over there for
at least a night. This means business for the hotels, large and small.
It also means business for the retail stores and the theaters. And it is
one of the ways that Chicago preserves her metropolitanism.
And yet with all of that metropolitanism--there is a spirit in Chicago
that distinctly breathes the smaller town, a spirit that might seem
foreign to the most important city that we have between the two oceans.
It is the spirit of Madison, or Ottumwa, or Jackson, perhaps a little
flavor still surviving of the not long-distant days when Chicago was
merely a town. You may or you may not know that in the days before her
terrific fire she was called "the Garden City." The catalpa trees that
shaded her chief business streets had a wide fame, and older prints show
the Cook County Court House standing in lawn-plats. In those days
Chicago folk knew one another and, to a decent extent, one another's
business. In these days, much of that town feeling remains. You sit in
the great tomb-like halls of the Union League, or in the more modern
University Club, perhaps up in that wonderful bungalow which the
Cliff-dwellers have erected upon the roof of Orchestra Hall, and you
hear all of the small talk of the town. Smith has finally got that
franchise, although he will pay mighty well for it; Jones is going to
put another fourteen-story addition on his store. Wilkins has bought a
yacht that is going to clean up everything on the lake, and then head
straight for laurels on the Atlantic seaboard. You would have the same
thing in a smaller western town, expressed in proportionate dimensions.
After all, the circle of men who accomplish the real things in the real
Chicago is wonderfully small. But the things that they accomplish are
very large, indeed.
They will take you out to see some of these big things--that department
store, without an equal outside of New York or Philadelphia at least,
and where Chicago dearly loves to lunch; a mail-order house which
actually boasts that six acres of forest timber are cleared each day to
furnish the paper for its catalogue, of which a mere six million copies
are issued annually; they will point out in the distance the stacks and
smoke clouds of South Chicago and will tell you in tens of thousands of
dollars, the details of the steel industry; take you, of course, to the
stock-yards and there tell you of the horrible slaughter that goes
forward there at all hours of the day and far into the night. Perhaps
they will show you some of the Chicago things that are great in another
sense--Hull House and the McCormick Open Air School, for instance. And
they will be sure to show you the park system.
A good many folk, Eastern and Western, do not give Chicago credit for
the remarkable park system that she has builded up within recent years.
These larger parks, with their connecting boulevards, make an entire
circuit around the back of the town, and the city is making a distinct
effort to wrest the control of the water-front from the railroad that
has skirted it for many years, so that she may make all this park land,
too--in connection with her ambitious city plan. She has accomplished a
distinct start already in the water-front plan along her retail shop and
hotel district--from Twelfth street north to the river. The railroad
tracks formerly ran along the edge of the lake all that distance. Now
they are almost a third of a mile inland; the city has reclaimed some
hundreds of acres from the more shallow part of Lake Michigan and has in
Grant Park a pleasure-ground quite as centrally located as Boston's
famous Common. It is still far from complete. While the broad strip
between Michigan avenue and the depressed railroad tracks is wonderfully
trim and green, and the Art Institute standing within it so grimy that
one might easily mistake it for old age, the "made ground" to the east
of the tracks is still barren. But Chicago is making good use of it. The
boys and young men come out of the office-buildings in the noon recess
to play baseball there, the police drill and parade upon it to their
heart's content, it is gaining fame as a site for military encampments
and aviation meets.
Chicago makes good use of all her parks. You look a long way within them
before you find the "Keep off the Grass" signs. And on Saturday
afternoons in midsummer you will find the park lawns thronged with
picnic parties--hundreds and even thousands of them--bringing their
lunches out from the tighter sections of the town and eating them in
shade and comfort and the cooling breezes off Lake Michigan. For Chicago
regards the lake as hardly more than an annex to her park system, even
today when the question of lake-front rights is not entirely settled
with the railroad. On pleasant summer days, her residents go bathing in
the lake by the thousands, and if they live within half a dozen blocks
of the shore they will go and come in their bathing suits, with perhaps
a light coat or bath-robe thrown over them. A man from New York might be
shocked to see a Chicago man in a bathing suit riding a motorcycle down
an important residence street--without the semblance of coat or robe;
but that is Chicago, and Chicago seems to think nothing of it. She
wonders if a man from Boston might not be embarrassed to see a coatless,
vestless, collarless, suspendered man driving a four-thousand-dollar
electric car through Michigan avenue.
Chicago is fast changing, however, in these respects. She is growing
more truly metropolitan each twelvemonth--less like an overgrown country
town. It was only a moment ago that we sat in the office of the
manufacturer, and he told us of the Chicago of yesterday, of the big
girl who had "I will" emblazoned upon her shield. There is a Chicago of
tomorrow, and a hint of its glory has been spread upon the walls of a
single great gallery of the Art Institute, in the concrete form of
splendid plans and perspectives. The Chicago of tomorrow is to be
different; it is to forget the disadvantages of a lack of contour and
reap those of a magnificent shore front. In the Chicago of tomorrow the
railroads will not hold mile after mile of lake-edge for themselves, the
elevated trains will cease to have a merry-go-round on the loop, the
arid belt between downtown and uptown will have disappeared, great
railroad terminal stations and public buildings built in architectural
plan and relation to one another are to arise, her splendid park and
boulevard system is to be vastly multiplied.
Chicago looks hungrily forward to her tomorrow. She is never discouraged
with her today, but with true American spirit, she anticipates the
future. The present generation cares little for itself, it can tolerate
the loop and its abominations, the _hodge-podge_ of the queer and the
_nouveau_ that distinguishes the city by the lake in this present year
of grace. But the oncoming generations! There is the rub. The oncoming
generations are to have all that the wisdom and the wealth of today can
possibly dedicate to them. There, then, is your Chicago spirit, the
dominating inspiration that rises above the housetops of rows of
monotonous, dun-colored houses and surveys the sprawling, disorderly
town, and proclaims it triumphant over its outer self.
13
THE TWIN CITIES
A fine yellow train takes you from Chicago to St. Paul and Minneapolis,
in the passing of a single night. And if you ever meet in the course of
your travel the typical globe-trotter who is inclined to carp at
American railroads, refer him to these yellow trains that run from
Chicago up into the Northwest. There are no finer steam caravans in all
the entire world. And when the globe-trotter comes back at you with his
telling final shot about the abominable open sleepers of America--and
you in your heart of hearts must think them abominable--tell him in
detail of the yellow trains. For a price not greater than he would pay
for a room in a first-class hotel over-night, he can have a real room in
the yellow trains. Like the compartments in the night-trains of Europe?
No, not at all. These are real rooms--a whole car filled with them and
they are the final and unanswerable argument for the comfort and luxury
of the yellow trains.
In such a stateroom and over smooth rails you sleep--sleep as a child
sleeps until Lemuel, the porter, comes and tears you forth by
entreaties, persuading you that you are almost upon the brink of--not
St. Peter but of St. Paul. Of course, Lemuel has let his enthusiasm
carry away his accuracy--even a porter upon a yellow train is apt to do
that--but you have full chance to arise and dress leisurely before your
train stops in the ancient ark of a Union station[E] upon the river
level at the capital of the state of Minnesota. For at St. Paul you
have come to the Mississippi--the Father of Waters of legendary lore. If
you have only seen the stream at St. Louis or at New Orleans, polluted
by the muddy waters of the Missouri or the Ohio or a dozen sluggish
southern streams, you will not recognize the clear northern river
flowing turbulently through a high-walled gorge, as the Mississippi.
There are a few of the flat-bottomed, gaily caparisoned steamboats at
the St. Paul to heighten the resemblance between the lower river and the
upper, but that is all.
[E] Since the above was written word has come of the
destruction of the Union station by fire, an event which
will not be regretted by travelers or by residents of the
place. E. H.
St. Paul owes her birth to the river-trade nevertheless. For she was,
and still is, at the real head of navigation on the Mississippi and in
other days that meant very much indeed. A few miles above her levee were
the falls of St. Anthony and a thriving little town called
Minneapolis--of which very much more in a moment. From that levee at St.
Paul began the first railroad building into the then unknown country of
the Northwest. The first locomotive--the _William Crooks_--which ran
into the virgin territory is still carefully preserved. And the man who
made railroading from St. Paul into a great trunk line system still
lives in the town.
He began by being assistant wharfmaster--in the days when there was
something to do in such a job. Today they know him as the Empire
Builder. The Swedes, who form so important a factor in the population of
the Twin Cities, call him "Yem Hill" and he loves it. But he is entered
in all records as James J. Hill.
To tell the story of the growth of Jim Hill from wharfmaster to master
of the railroads, would be to tell the story of one of the two or three
really great men who are living in America today. It is a story closely
interwoven with the story of St. Paul, the struggling town to which he
came while yet a mere boy. He has lived to see St. Paul become an
important city, the rival village at the falls of St. Anthony even
exceed her in size and in commercial importance, but his affection for
the old river town to which he has given so much of his life and
abundant personality has not dimmed. He has made it the gateway of his
Northwest and when one says "Hill's Northwest" he says it advisedly; for
while there might have been a Northwest without Jim Hill, there would
have been no Jim Hill without the Northwest.
He found it a raw and little known land over which stretched a single
water-logged railroad fighting adversity, and in momentary danger of
extinction through receivership; a trunk-line railroad at that time
distinguished more for its arrogance than for any other one feature of
its being. Somewhere in the late eighties J. J. Hill took a trip over
that railroad. He saw Seattle for the first time and found it a mere
lumber-shipping town of but a few thousand population and with but
little apparent future. He saw great stretches of open country--whole
counties the size of the majestic states of New York and of Pennsylvania
and still all but unknown. He also saw unbridled streams, high-seated
mountain ranges and because J. J. Hill was a dreamer he saw promise in
these things.
From that trip he returned to the budding city of St. Paul, enthused
beyond ordinary measure, and determined that in the coming development
of the half-dozen territories at the northwestern corner of the country
he would share no ordinary part. He turned his back on the navigation of
the Mississippi--already beginning to wane--and gave his attention to
railroading. Purchasing an inconsequential lumber railroad in Minnesota,
he laid the foundations for his Great Northern system. There was a
something about Jim Hill in those earlier days by which he could give
his enthusiasm and his lofty inspiration to those with whom he came in
contact. That rare faculty was his salvation. Men listened to the
confident talker from St. Paul and then placed their modest savings at
his disposal. They have not regretted their steps. The Great Northern,
through Hill's careful leadership has, despite much of the sparse
territory through which it passes, become one of the great conservative
railroad properties of the United States.
But Hill did more. He took that earlier system--the Northern Pacific, so
closely allied to his territory--and made it hardly second in efficiency
to the Great Northern itself. Both of these great railroads of the
Northwest have never reached farther east than St. Paul, which Hill,
with that fine sentiment which is so important a part of his nature, has
been pleased to maintain as the gateway city of his own part of the
land. But, while he has been a most helpful citizen of St. Paul, he has
not hesitated to dominate her. A few years ago when the Metropolitan
company presenting grand opera came to St. Paul, it was Hill who headed
the subscription list for a guarantee--headed it with a good round
figure. Three days before the opening night of the opera he walked into
the passenger office of the linking railroad that he owned between the
Twin Cities and Chicago. The singers were scheduled to come from
Chicago.
"Are you going to bring the troupe up in extra cars or in a special
train?" he demanded, in his peremptory fashion.
There was confusion in that office, and finally it was explained to him
that a rival line, the M----, had been given the haul of the special
train, as a return courtesy for having placed its advertisement on the
rear cover of the opera programmes. Hill's muscles tightened.
"If the troupe doesn't come up over our road," he said, "I will withdraw
the opera subscription."
The M---- road lost the movement of that opera company.
* * * * *
Hill is an advertiser, a patient, persistent and entirely consistent
user of public print in every form. Of the really big men of the land he
is perhaps the most accessible. His door swings quickly open to any
resident of the Northwest. He is in demand at public dinners in the East
and at every conceivable function in his own territory. And yet those
folk of his own town who come to know Mr. Hill intimately know him
rather as a great publicist, no poor musician, a painter of real
ability, and a kind-hearted neighbor. His house in Summit avenue
contains one of the finest art galleries west of Chicago. In this rare
taste for good art he is not unlike the late Collis P. Huntington, or
Sir William C. Van Horne, the dominating force of the Canadian Pacific.
Hill has a real faculty not only for judging, but for executing oil
paintings. It is related on good authority that, having been a member of
a committee to purchase a portrait of a distinguished western
railroader, he found the picture as it hung in the artist's studio in
Chicago far from his liking.
"He's missed W----'s expression entirely," said the Empire Builder. And
so saying he grasped a palette that was resting on a table, dove his
brush into the soft paints, and before the astonished artist could
recover enough self-possession to protest, Hill was deftly at work upon
the canvas. In five minutes he had convinced the little committee of
which he was chairman, that the expression of the portrait had been
lacking, for it was Hill who made that portrait so speaking a likeness
that the artist received warm and undue praise for the fidelity of his
work.
* * * * *
There is in St. Paul--a city of wealthy men--a man who is even
wealthier than J. J. Hill. His name is Frederick Weyerheuser, and
newspapers have a habit of speaking of him as the Lumber King. Mr.
Weyerheuser does not court publicity, he shrinks from invitations to
speak at public dinners. He has a press agent whose chief work it was
for many years to keep his chief out of the columns of the newspapers.
It is only within a comparatively short time that Weyerheuser consented
to give his first interview to the press.
He is quite typical of the conservatism of St. Paul. Minneapolis snaps
its fingers at conservatism, social and business, and signs of progress.
But Minneapolis mortgages her downtown business property. St. Paul does
not. The two towns are as different as if they were a thousand instead
of but ten miles apart. And St. Paul believes that Minneapolis may do as
she pleases. St. Paul has a reputation to preserve. She is the capital
of the state of Minnesota and as capital her pride and her dignity are
not slight.
Perhaps it was that pride that made her set forth to build a capitol
that should stand through the long years as the Bulfinch State House in
Boston has stood through the long years--a monument to good taste,
restraint, real beauty in architecture. She summoned one of her native
sons to do the work. He was unhampered in its details. And when he was
done and had placed it upon a sightly knoll he must have been proud of
his handiwork. In years to come the Capitol of Minnesota may become
quite as famous as the capitols of older states, and the name of Cass
Gilbert, its architect, may be placed alongside of that of Bulfinch.
St. Paul is hardly less proud of her Auditorium. It is really a
remarkable building and perhaps the first theater in the land to be
operated by a municipality, although we have a distinct feeling that the
small city of Northampton, Mass., has also accomplished something of
the sort. But the St. Paul Auditorium is hardly to be placed in the same
class as any mere theater. It is a huge building although so cunningly
constructed that within ten hours it can be changed from a compact
theater into a great hall with some 10,000 seats. And this change can be
effected, if necessary, without the slightest disturbance to the
audience.
To this great hall come grand opera, well-famed orators, conventions of
state and national bodies, drama, concerts of every sort in great
frequency and variety. Perhaps no entertainment that it houses, however,
has keener interest for the entire city than the free concerts that are
given each winter. Last year there were five of these concerts, and it
was soon found that the small-sized auditorium with its three thousand
seats was too small. It became necessary to utilize the entire capacity
of the structure. The concerts were immensely popular from the
beginning.
They were but typical of the high public spirit of the capital city of
Minnesota, a spirit which showed itself in the early adoption of the
commission form of city government, in the establishment of playgrounds
and modern markets, in the buildings of the great public baths on
Harriet island, in the development of a half hundred active and
progressive forms of modern civic endeavor. St. Paul, with all her rare
flavor of history and her great conservatism can well be reckoned in the
list of the modern cities that form the gateways of what was once called
the West and is today rapidly becoming an integral part of the nation.
* * * * *
The first time that we ever came into Minneapolis was at dusk of a July
night two years ago. That is, it might have been dusk in theory. For
while the clocks of the town spelled "eight," the northern day hung
wonderfully clear and wonderfully sharp--a twilight that was hardly
done until well towards ten of the evening. We came out of the somewhat
barn-like Union station, found an unpretentious cab and drove up
Nicollet avenue toward our hotel.
The initial impression that a city makes upon one is not easily
forgotten. And the first impression that Nicollet avenue makes upon a
first-comer to Minneapolis cannot easily be erased. It is with pleasure
that a stranger notes that it has not been invaded by street railroad
tracks. The chief shopping and show-street of the largest city of
Minnesota thereby conveys a sense of breadth and roominess that the
chief streets of some other fairly important American towns lack
utterly. And we distinctly recall that upon that July night the cluster
lights up and down Nicollet avenue each bore a great flower-box, warm
and summerlike with the brightness of geraniums. In the windows of the
large stores that lined the avenue were more window-boxes, up to their
seventh and eighth floors. The entire effect was distinct and different
from that of any other town that we have ever seen. It seemed as if
Minneapolis at first sight typified the new America.
Nor was that impression lessened when a little later we drove out in the
softness of the summer night to see the residence streets of the
city--quiet, shady streets that seem to have been stolen from older
eastern towns; drove into the parks, caught here and there the strains
of bands, saw the canoes darting here and there and everywhere upon the
surface of the park lakes. In other cities they have to build waterways
within their parks and boast to you of the way in which they have done
it. In Minneapolis they can have no such boast. For they have builded
their parks around their lakes, and a man can have a sheet of water
instead of greensward at the door of his home if he so choose. Where a
modern canoe shoots across the waters of Lakes Calhoun or Harriet, the
Indian once shot his birch-bark creation. There are some two hundred
lakes in Hennepin county. But the lake of all lakes--the joy of the
residents of the Twin Cities for a day's outing, Minnetonka--was the
favored gathering spot for the council fires of the Indian tribes for
many miles around. Do not forget that the Falls of St. Anthony were the
making of Minneapolis--and you can go by trolley within the half-hour
from the center of the city to the gentler Falls of Minnehaha and there
recount once again the immortal romance of Hiawatha.
Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. Anthony--despite the
fact that they were the very cause of her existence. They are hemmed in
by great flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of industry with
a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a day, and even if you steal
your way to them across one of the roadway bridges over the turbulent
Mississippi you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that
turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the great Falls of St.
Anthony are the roar of the flouring-mills, their energy, the
bread-stuff of the nation.
[Illustration: St. Paul is still a river town]
Minneapolis does not affect to forget entirely her mother river. For a
long time it irritated her that St. Paul should be regarded as the head
of navigation upon the Mississippi, and within the past twenty years she
has put the Federal government to much trouble and incidentally the
expenditure of something over a million dollars, to make herself a
maritime city. A ship-channel has been dredged, locks put in, draws cut
in the railroad bridges but all apparently without a very definite
purpose in mind--save possible holding her own in the expenditure of the
annual rivers and harbors appropriation. For one can hardly imagine
water commerce coming in great volume to the docks of Minneapolis, the
one exclusive glory of St. Paul--passed long ago by her greatest
rival in the commercial race of the Northwest--stolen from the older
town. But one could hardly have driven out from the brisk little city of
St. Paul forty years ago to the straggling mill village at the Falls of
St. Anthony and imagined that in the second decade of the twentieth
century it would have become a city of more than three hundred thousand
souls. The men who are today active in the affairs of the city have seen
her grow from a straggling town into a city of almost first rank.
Here was one of them who sat the other day in the well-ordered elegance
of the Minneapolis Club--a structure instantly comparable with the
finest club-houses of New York or Boston or Philadelphia--who admitted
that he had seen the town grow from eight thousand to over three hundred
thousand population, the receipts of his own fine business increase from
eighty-eight to twenty-two thousand dollars a day. But he was a modest
man, far more modest than many of these western captains of industry,
and he quickly turned the talk from himself and to the commercial
importance of the town with which he was pressing forward. Still he
delighted in statistics and the fact that Minneapolis "was doing a
wholesale business of $300,000,000 a year" seemed to give him an immense
and personal pride.
But do not believe that Minneapolis is all commercial--and nothing else.
A quick ride through those shaded streets and lake-filled parks will
convince you that she is a home-city; a cursory glance of the University
of Minnesota, so cleverly located that she may share it with her rival
twin, together with an inspection of her schools, large and small, would
make you believe that she is a city that prides herself upon being well
educated. The dominant strain of Norse blood that the Swedish immigrants
have been bringing her for more than half a century is a strain that
calls for education--and makes the call in no uncertain fashion. And
when you come to delve into the details of her living you will make sure
that she is a well-governed city. She has not gone deeply into what she
calls "the fads of municipal government" but she is a town which offers
security and comfort, as well as pretty broad measure of opportunity, to
her residents. And in no better way can you gauge the sensible way in
which she takes care of her residents than in the one item of the street
railroad system. It has never been necessary for either St. Paul or
Minneapolis to assume control, actual or subtle, over the street
railroad property which they share. And yet each has a street railroad
service far superior to that of most American towns--with the possible
exception of Washington. The traction company seems to have assimilated
much of the breadth of spirit that dominates the Twin Cities of the
Northwest.
Nor can you assume that Minneapolis is content to be merely commercially
alive, well educated or efficiently governed. Down on one of the quiet
business streets of the city is a printing-shop, so unique and so very
distinctive that it deserves a paragraph here and now. In that printing
shop is published a trade paper of the milling industry which has to
make no apologies for its existence, and a weekly newspaper called the
_Bellman_. Some one is yet to write an appreciation of the new weekly
press of America, the weekly press outside of New York, if you please,
such publications as the _Argonaut_ of San Francisco; the _Mirror_ of
St. Louis, the _Dial_ of Chicago and the _Minneapolis Bellman_. The part
that these papers are playing in the making of a broad and cultured
America will perhaps never be known; but that it is a large part no one
who reads them faithfully will ever doubt. The _Bellman_ holds its own
among this distinguished coterie. Its house is a fit temple for its
soul, and you may gain a little insight into that soul when you are
bidden to join its staff at one of its Thursday luncheons at the
dining-board of the printing-house--a fashion quickly and easily brought
from _London Punch_ halfway across the continent and into Minneapolis.
No American of taste or appreciation would ever go to Minneapolis and
miss one wonderful shop there--no huge box-like structure rearing itself
from sidewalk edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the
brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a shadowy
structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but unmistakable hints of the
real treasures that it holds. For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a
revelation to folk from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior
of the land is an intellectual desolation.
It may have been one of these who dined a little time ago at a house in
one of these shaded streets of Minneapolis. After dinner the talk
drifted without apparent reason to painting, and the man from the
seaboard found his host in sharp touch with many of the new pictures.
Definitely the talk turned to Walter Graves, London's newest sensation
among the portrait painters, and the possibilities of his succeeding
Whistler.
The Minneapolis man beckoned the guest into the hall, and pointed
silently to a picture hung there. It was a splendid portrait of
Whistler,[F] painted by Walter Graves.
"I never expected to find a picture like that--out here," frankly
stammered the man from the seaboard.
"You will find many things here that you do not expect," was all that
the man from Minneapolis said.
[F] Since writing the above we have been led to believe, by
a gentleman from Rochester that a picture of Whistler by
Graves is no great prize. He says that he can buy them by
the dozen at a certain London shop. Because we claim no wit
as an art critic we take no sides in this matter. The facts
are here. You may choose for yourself. E. H.
* * * * *
If a town that is scarce forty years old can accomplish these things,
how long will it be before the older cities of the land will have to
look sharply as to their laurels? The new cities of America are to be a
force in her intellectual progress not to be under-estimated or
despised.
14
THE GATEWAY OF THE SOUTHWEST
There are three great cities, or rather three groups of great cities,
along the course of the Mississippi. To the north are St. Paul and
Minneapolis, while far to the south is New Orleans, to which we will
come in the due order of things. Between these St. Louis stands, close
to the business center of the land. For nearly twenty miles she sprawls
herself along the west bank of the Mississippi. Throughout her central
portion she extends for a dozen miles straight back from her once busy
levee. She is a great city, a very great city, in wealth, in industry,
in resource. And yet she is a rather unimpressive city to the eye, at
first sight and at last.
It takes even a seasoned traveler some time to get used to that. If he
dreams of St. Louis as a French city and preserving something of the
French atmosphere, as do New Orleans and Quebec, he is doomed to utter
disappointment. Save for a few tatterdemalion cottages down in
Carondolet, at the south tip of the town, there is no trace of the
builders of the city to which they gave the name of one of their kings.
And if he has heard of the great German population and dreams of great
summer-gardens, of winter-gardens, too, with huge bands and huge steins,
he is doomed to no less disappointment. For that sort of thing you go to
Milwaukee. St. Louis has as many Germans as that brisk Wisconsin city,
and the largest brewery in the world, but she has never specialized in
beer-gardens. She is old and yet you could hardly call her quaint.
There are rows of small houses in her older streets, their green blinds
tightly closed as if seemingly to escape the almost endless bath of soot
and cinders that falls upon them, and the flat-bottomed steamboats still
are fastened at the wharf-boats along the levee. But these make a
pitiful showing nowadays when your mind compares them with the tales of
ante-bellum days when there were so many of them that they could only
put the noses of their bows against the levees. But tradition still
rules the hearts of the rivermen, and the Mississippi steamboat has lost
none of those fantastics of naval architecture that has endeared it to
every writer from Mark Twain down to the present day.
The streets aroundabout the levee are mean and dirty, and nowadays as
silent as the Sabbath. Those convivial resorts, the Widow's Vow and the
Boatman's Thirst have long since ceased to exist. As this is being
written the Southern Hotel has closed its doors. Cobwebs are growing
through its wonderful office, and the glorious marble stair up which a
regiment might have marched is silent, save for the occasional halting
steps of a watchman. The old Planters'--than which there was no more
famous hostelry in the Mississippi valley, unless we choose to except
the St. Charles down at New Orleans--is long since gone, torn away
twenty years ago to make room for a new Planters', which has already
begun to get grimy and aged. The Lindell went its way a dozen years ago.
The St. Louis of the riverman is dead. They are tearing away the old
warehouses from the levees, and no one looks at the Mississippi any more
save when it gets upon one of its annual rampages and makes itself a
yellow sea.
[Illustration: The entrance to the University--St. Louis]
But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself is dead. There
are other hotels, and far finer than those of the war-times and the
river-trade. And you have only to walk a few squares back from the levee
to find industry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid
buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each representing
commerce. St. Louis is still the very center of the world to the great
Southwest and to her it pays its tribute, in demands for merchandise of
every sort. That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores and
wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable sort, and builds them
for eight or ten or twelve stories in height, closely huddled together,
even through unimportant side streets. That is her reason for existence
today--when the river-trade, her first reason for growth and expansion,
is dead. But the railroad is a living, vital force, when the rivers are
frozen and dead, and railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible
direction. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there at the
city from whence they radiate Commerce sits enthroned.
For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and today, as essentially a
commercial city. She is not a cultured city, although she has an
excellent press, including a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary
distinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all her many
miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads or cults of any sort; but
she measures the percentage which a business dollar will earn with a
delightful accuracy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is to the
casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we think that her lack of
a dignified main street in her business section is responsible for much
of this impression. In other years Broadway--Fifth street upon her city
plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running parallel to the
river--ranked almost as a main street and had some dignity, if little
beauty. But today St. Louis, like so many other of our American towns,
is restless and she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving
that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted and herself without a
single great business thoroughfare--such as Market street, San Francisco
or State street, Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as much
alike as peas in a pod.
And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St.
Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and
sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the
riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of
them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above
her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy
peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is
driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will
find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous
affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going
ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot--and who
shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days,
is ever anything less than capable--could send the boat spinning like a
top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible
with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are
hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving
slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty
water.
If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the
Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one
of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so
very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves,
and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it
cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And
before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its
ancient stones, you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk
that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge.
St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge these days. Yet it
was only a few years ago that it was bragging about that wonderful
conception of the engineer--who had finally spanned the lordly
Mississippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have come,
two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north and a public bridge
to the south--that is, it will be a public bridge if the voters of St.
Louis ever cease quarreling about it. At the present time it is hardly a
bridge, only a great span over the water and for long months absolutely
unprovided with approaches because the taxpayers of St. Louis refuse to
vote the funds for its completion. So it is that the Eads bridge is
today but a single agency out of three or four for the spanning of the
river; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the railroad
travelers who come across through its lower deck only remember that from
it there leads under the heart of the city of St. Louis one of the
smokiest railroad tunnels in existence--and that is saying much.
But the fact remains that it was the first structure to span the river,
and to end the importunities of the unspeakable ferry. And today it is,
with all of its grime, the one impressive feature of downtown St. Louis.
It is the only wagonway that leads from the sovereign state of Illinois
into the sovereign city of St. Louis. Across its upper deck passes at
all hours of the day and far into the night a silent parade of trolley
cars, mule teams, automobiles, farm trucks, folk of every sort and
description, on foot. It is as interesting as London bridge and a far
finer piece of architecture. But the modern St. Louis has all but
forgotten it, save when it chooses to take a motor run across the
Illinois prairies.
* * * * *
The casual traveler finally turns his back upon the river and its
oldest bridge, although not without some regret if any real sentiment
dwells within him. He threads his way through the narrow streets of
downtown St. Louis and finally he enters the oldest residential part,
the streets still narrow but the houses of rather a fine sort, many of
them transformed into small shops or given these days to lodgers. They
are of a type somewhat peculiar to the town. They were built high and
rather narrow and as a rule set upon a terrace and detached. Builded of
brick, the fancy of those old-time architects seemed to turn almost
invariably to a façade of marble, an unblushing and unashamed veneer to
the street, with the side walls humble and honest in dark red brick.
Steps and lintels were of marble or what must have been marble in the
beginning. A Philadelphia housewife would quail beneath the steady bath
of smoke and cinders that falls upon St. Louis.
There are many thousands of these red-brick and white-marble houses,
finally important cross streets, such as Jefferson and Grand, and then
you come into the newer St. Louis--a residential district of which any
city might well be proud. In the newer St. Louis the houses are more
modern and more attractive perhaps, due partly to the fact that they are
farther away from the river and the great factories and railroad yards
that line it. You can trace the varying fads in American house
architecture in layers as you go back street by street in the new St.
Louis--Norman, Italian Renaissance, American Colonial, Elizabethan--all
like the slices in a fat layer-cake. Some of the more pretentious of
these houses are grouped in great parks or reservations which give to
the public streets by entrance gates and are known as Westminster place,
or Vandeventer place, or the like. They form a most charming feature of
the planning of St. Louis, and one almost as distinctive as the tidy
alleys which act as serviceways to all the houses. The houses
themselves are almost invariably set in lawns, although there are many
fine apartments and apartment hotels. The fearful monotony of the side
street of New York or Philadelphia does not exist within the town.
At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. Louis stands the
chief park of the town, not very distinctive and famed chiefly as the
site of the biggest World's Fair that was ever held, "considerably
larger than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell you. Our
individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical
Gardens just adjoining it. Tower Grove is in no very attractive section
of St. Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is rather
lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old Southern Hotel, which
was burned many years ago and was a fearful tragedy, being set here and
there. But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard by
is the Botanical Gardens that Henry Shaw gave to the city in which he
was for so many years a dominating figure. And for even a casual
traveler to go to St. Louis and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost
inconceivable.
In the first place, it is an excellent collection of plants and of trees
and of exceeding interest to those folk who let their tastes carry them
that way. And in the second place, Henry Shaw was so typical of the old
St. Louis that you must stop for a moment and remember him. You must
think of the steady purpose of the man visiting all the great gardens of
Europe and then seeking to create one that should outrank all of them,
in the mud-bog of St. Louis. For the St. Louis of war-times, the St.
Louis to which Shaw gave his benefaction was little more than a bog. And
Americans of those days laughed at parks. True there was Fairmount Park
in Philadelphia, but the Fairmount Park of those days was a fantastic
idea and hardly to be compared with the Fairmount Park of today. Henry
Shaw went much farther than the banks of the Schuylkill, although he
must have known and appreciated John Bartram's historic gardens there.
Shaw was only forty years of age when he retired from business. He had
saved through his keen business acumen and a decent sense of thrift, a
quarter of a million dollars--a tremendous fortune for those days. He
was quite frank in saying that he thought that $250,000 was all that a
man could honestly earn or honestly possess, and he retired to enjoy his
fortune as best it might please him to do. He traveled far and wide
through Europe, and upon one of the earliest of those trips he visited
the World's Fair of 1851, at the Crystal Palace, London; one of the very
first of these international exhibitions. He was impressed not so much
by the exhibits as by the fine park in which the Crystal Palace stood. A
little later he was a guest at Chatsworth House, that splendid English
home given by William the Conqueror to his natural son, William Peveril,
and he became a frequent visitor at Kew Gardens. It was at that time he
decided to make a botanical garden out of the place which he had just
purchased outside of St. Louis.
[Illustration: A luxurious home in the newer St. Louis]
Henry Shaw must have remembered his boyhood days in St. Louis and the
wonderful garden of Madame Rosalie Saugrain. In those earlier days St.
Louis was small enough in population but large enough in the material
for social enjoyment. The French element was still dominant, although
Madame Saugrain was comparatively a newcomer, an accomplished lady who
had brought the manners and tastes of Paris into the wilds of western
America. Her garden, which was then in open country beyond the
struggling town, was close to what is today Seventh street, St. Louis.
Great skyscrapers and solid warehouses have sprung up where formerly
Madame's roses and hollyhocks bloomed, and one would have to go weary
blocks to find a spear of grass, unless within some public park.
But Shaw's Gardens still exist, although their founder lived to a ripe
old age and has now been dead a quarter of a century. Older folk of St.
Louis remember him distinctly, a vigorous and seemingly lonely man,
unmarried, but who seemed to be content to live alone in his great house
in the Gardens, giving a loving and a personal care to his flowers and
then, as dusk came on, invariably sitting in his room and reading far
into the night. They will show you his will when you go to the museum in
the Gardens, a curious old document, keenly prepared and devising to the
remaining members of his family, servants and intimates, everything from
immensely valuable real estate in the very heart of St. Louis down to
the port and sherry from his cellars. But the part that interested St.
Louis most was that part which gave the Gardens to the town, although
not without restrictions. And the old Missouri town made Shaw's Gardens
quite as much a part of its existence as its County Fair.
The St. Louis Fair was a real institution. There have been far greater
shows of the kind in our land, but perhaps none that ever entered more
thoroughly into the hearts of the folk to whom it catered. Every one in
St. Louis used to go to the Fair. It had a social status quite its own.
When, after the hot and gruelling summer which causes all St. Louis folk
who possibly can to flee to the ocean or to the mountains, they came
home again in the joys of Indian summer there was the Fair--up under the
trees of Grand avenue in the north part of the town--to serve for a
getting together once again. It had served that way since long before
wartime. And with it ran that mighty social bulwark of St. Louis, the
Procession of the Veiled Prophet. One night in "Fair Week"--locally
known as "Big Thursday"--was annually given to this pageant, frankly
modeled upon the Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans. Through the
streets of the town the pageant rolled its triumphal course, all St.
Louis came out to see it, and afterwards there was a ball. To be bidden
to that ball was the social recognition that the city gave you.
But in 1904 there came that greater fair--the Louisiana Purchase
Exposition, to which the world was bidden. It was a really great fair
and it has left a permanent impress upon the town in the form of a fine
Art Gallery and the splendid group of buildings at the west edge of the
city which are being devoted to the uses of Washington University. But
the big fair spelled the doom of the smaller. The town had grown out
around its grounds and they were no longer in the country. So the career
of the old St. Louis Fair ended--brilliantly in that not-to-be-forgotten
exposition. Although some attempts have recently been made to
reëstablish it in another part of the town, the older folk of St. Louis
shake their heads. They very well know that you cannot bring the old
days back by the mere waving of a wand.
Upon a crisp October evening, the Veiled Prophet still makes his way
through the narrow streets of the town. The preparations for his coming
are hedged about with greatest secrecy, and the young girls of St. Louis
grow expectant just as their mothers and their grandmothers before them
used to grow expectant when October came close at hand. At last,
expectancy rewarded--out of the unknown an engraved summons to attend
the court of a single night--with the engraved summons some souvenir of
no slight worth; the prophet's favor is a generous one.
Absurd, you say? Not a bit of it. It is a pity that we do not have more
of it in our land. We have been rather busy grubbing; given ourselves
rather too much to utility and efficiency, to the sordid business of
merely making money. A Veiled Prophet is a good thing for a town, a
Mardi Gras a tonic. It is an idea that is spreading across America, and
America is profiting by it.
* * * * *
This is a personality sketch of St. Louis and not a guide-book. If it
were the latter, it would recount the superb commercial position of the
city, each of the bulwarks of its financial fortresses. The river-trade
is dead indeed; even the most optimistic of those who are most anxious
to see it revived doubt, in their heart of hearts, if ever it can be
revived. But commerce is not dead at St. Louis. As St. Paul and
Minneapolis are gateways to the Northwest remember that she is one of
the great gateways to the Southwest. To the man in Arkansas or Oklahoma
or Texas she is another New York; she stands to him as London stands to
the folk of the English counties. And this relation she capitalizes and
so grows rich. She is solid and substantial--the old French town of the
yesterdays has taken her permanent place among the leading cities of
America.
15
THE OLD FRENCH LADY OF THE RIVERBANK
At the bend of the river she stands--this drowsy old French lady of the
long ago. They have called her the Crescent City. But the Mississippi
makes more than a single turn around the wide-spreading town. And the
results are most puzzling, even to those steadyminded folk who assert
that they are direction-wise. In New Orleans, east seems west and north
seems south. It must almost be that the Father of Rivers reverses all
the laws of Mother Nature and runs his course up-stream.
New Orleans is upon the east bank of the Mississippi. All the
guide-books will tell you that. But in the morning the sun arises from
over across the river, and in the cool of evening his reddish radiance
is dying over Lake Ponchartrain, directly east from the river--at least,
so your direction-wise intelligence seems to tell you. But east is east
and west is west and Old Sol has made such a habit of rising and setting
these many thousand years that his reliability is not to be trusted. As
to the reliability of the Father of Waters--there is quite another
matter.
Truth to tell, the Mississippi river is probably the most utterly
unreliable thing within the North American continent. He has shifted his
course so many times within the brief century that the white-skinned men
have known him, that the oldest of them have lost all trace of his
original course. And so to steer a vessel up and down the stream is a
doubly difficult art. The pilot does not merely have to know his
steering-marks--the range between that point and this, the thrust of
some hidden and fearfully dangerous reef, the advantage to be gained
between eddies and currents for easy running--he has to learn the entire
thing anew each time he brings a craft up or down the river. Mark Twain
has long since immortalized the ample genius of the Mississippi pilots.
The stories of the river's unreliability, of its constant tendency to
change its channel are apocryphal--almost as old as the oldest of the
houses of old New Orleans. And this is not the story of the river.
Yet it must not be forgotten that the river almost is New Orleans, that
from the beginning it has been the source of the French lady's strength
and prosperity. Before there was even thought of a city the river was
there--pouring its yellow flood down from an unknown land to the great
gulf. Bienville, the real founder of New Orleans, saw with the prophetic
sight of a really great thinker what even a river that came to the sea
from an unexplored land might mean in years to come to the city of his
creation. His prophecy was right. When the river, with the traffic upon
its bosom, has prospered, New Orleans has prospered. And in the lean
years when the river traffic has dwindled, New Orleans has felt the loss
in her every fiber. There are old-timers in the city who shake their
heads when they tell you of the fat river-boats crowding in at the
levee, of the clipper-ships and the newer steam-propelled craft at the
deeper docks, of the crowds around the old St. Louis and the St. Charles
Hotels, the congested narrow streets, the halcyon days when the markets
of the two greatest nations in the world halted on the cotton news from
Factors Row. And New Orleans awaits the opening of the Panama canal with
something like feverish anticipation, for she feels that this mighty
nick finally cut into the thin neck of the American continents, her
wharves will again be crowded with shipping--this time with a variety of
craft plying to and from the strange ports of the Pacific. So much does
her river still mean to her.
Factors Row still stands, rusty and somewhat grimed. No longer is it
consequential in the markets of the world. In fact, to put a bald truth
baldly, no longer is New Orleans of supreme consequence in the cotton
problem of all nations. A great cotton shipping port she still is and
will long remain. But the multiplication of railroad points and the
rapid development of such newer cotton ports as Galveston, to make a
single instance, have all worked against her preëminence.
This is not a story of the commercial importance of New Orleans, either.
There are plenty who are willing to tell that story, with all of its
romantic traditions of the past and its brilliant prophecies for the
future. This is the story of the New Orleans of today, the city who with
an almost reverential respect for the Past and its monuments still holds
her doors open to the Present and its wonders.
Of the Past one may know at every turn. North of Canal street--that
broad thoroughfare which ranks as a dividing path with Market street in
San Francisco--the city has changed but little since the Civil War.
South of Canal--still called the "new" part of the city--there has been
some really modern development. Prosperous looking skyscrapers have
lifted their lordly heads above the narrow streets and the compactly
built "squares" which they encompass; there are several modern hotels
with all the momentary glory of artificial marbles and chromatic
frescoes, department stores with show windows as brave and gay as any of
those in New York or Chicago or Boston. But even if the narrow streets
were to be widened, New Orleans would never look like Indianapolis or
Kansas City or St. Paul--any of the typical cities of the so-called
Middle West. Too many of her stout old structures of the fifties and the
sixties still remain. And hung upon these, uncompromising and
triumphant, are the galleries.
The galleries of New Orleans! They are perhaps the most typical of the
outward expressions of a town whose personality is as distinct as that
of Boston or Charleston or San Francisco. They must have been master
workmen whose fingers and whose ancient forges worked those delicate and
lacelike traceries. And it has been many thankful generations who have
praised the practical side of their handicraft. For in the long hot
summer months of New Orleans these galleries furnish a shade that is a
delight and a comfort. On rainy days they are arcades keeping dry the
sidewalks of the heart of the town. And from the offices within, the
galleries, their rails lined with growing things, are veritable
triumphs. Once in a great while some one will rise up and suggest that
they be abolished--that they are old-fashioned and have long since
served their full purpose. That some one is generally a smart shopkeeper
who has drifted down from one of these upstart cities from the North or
East. But New Orleans is smarter still. She well knows the commercial
value of her personality. There are newer cities and showier within the
radius of a single night's ride upon a fast train. But where one man
comes to one of these, a dozen alight at the old French town by the bend
of the yellow river.
"Give J---- a few French restaurants, some fame for its cocktails or its
gin-fizzes--just as New Orleans has--and I will bring a dozen big new
factories here within the next three years," said the secretary of the
Chamber of Commerce of a thriving Texas town the other day. He knew
whereof he spake. And now, we shall know whereof we speak. We shall
give a moment of attention to the little restaurants and the gin-fizzes.
Let the gin-fizzes come first, for they are nearly as characteristic of
the old town as her galleries! You will find their chief habitat just
across a narrow alley from the St. Charles Hotel. There is a long bar on
the one side of the room, upon which stand great piles of ice-bound
southern oysters--twelve months of the year, for New Orleans never reads
an "R" in or out of her oyster-eating calendar. But any bar may bring
forth oysters, and only one bar in the world brings forth the real New
Orleans gin-fizz. Two enterprising young men stand behind the
bar-keepers in a perpetual shaking of the fizzes. If it is tantalizing
to shake that whereof you do not taste, they show it not. And in the
hours of rush traffic there are six of the non-bar-keeping bartenders
who give the correct amount of ague to New Orleans' most delectable
beverage. A hustler from North or East would put in electric shakers
instanter--a thousand or is it ten thousand revolutions to the minute?
He would brag of his electric shakers and the New Orleans gin-fizz would
be dead--forever. Romance and an electric shaker cannot go hand in hand.
"The ingredients?" you breathlessly interrupt. "The manner of the
mixing?"
Bless your heart, if the Gin Fizz House published its close-held secret
to the world, it would lose its chief excuse for existence and then
become an ordinary drinking-place. As it is, it holds its head above the
real variety of saloons, even above the polished mahogany bar of the
aristocratic hotel across the narrow street. For its product, if
delightful, is still gentle, although insidious, perhaps. It is largely
milk and barely gin. You can drink it by the barrel without the
slightest jarring of your faculties. And it is rumored that some of the
men of New Orleans use it as a breakfast-food.
From the Gin Fizz House to the Absinthe House is a long way,--in more
meanings than one. The Absinthe House is hardly less famed, but in these
days when drinking has largely gone out of fashion and wormwood is under
the particular ban of the United States statutes, it is largely a relic
of the past. It stands in the heart of the old French town and before we
come to its broad portal, let us study the fascinating quarter in which
we are to find it.
We have already spoken of Canal street, so broad in contradistinction to
the very narrow streets of the rest of the older parts of the town, that
one can almost see the narrow water-filled ditch that once traversed it,
as the dividing line of the city. South of Canal street, the so-called
American portion of the city, with many affectations of modernity--north
of that thoroughfare--curiously enough the down-stream side--the French
quarter, architecturally and romantically the most fascinating section
of any large city of the United States. The very names of its
streets--Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Burgundy, Dauphine, St.
Louis--quicken anticipation. And anticipation is not dulled when one
comes to see the great somber houses with their mysterious and
moth-eaten courtyards and the interesting folk who dwell within them.
We choose Royal street, heading straight away from Canal street as if in
shrinking horror of electric signs and moving-picture theaters. In a
single square they are behind and forgotten and, if it were not for the
trolley cars and the smartly dressed French girls, we might be walking
in Yesterday. The side streets groan under the same ugly, heavy patterns
of Belgian block pavement that have done service for nearly a century.
Originally the blocks--brought long years ago as ballast in the ships
from Europe--were in a pretty pattern, laid diagonally. But heavy
traffic and the soft sub-strata of the river-bank town have long since
worked sad havoc with the old pavements. And a new city administration
has finally begun to replace them with the very comfortable but utterly
unsentimental asphalt.
Here is the Absinthe House, worth but a single glance, for it has
descended to the estate of an ordinary corner saloon. Only ordinary
corner saloons are not ordinarily housed in structures of this sort. You
can see houses like this in the south of France and in Spain--so I am
told. For below Canal street is both French and Spanish. Remember, if
you please, that the French of the Southland shared the same hard fate
of their countrymen in that far northern valley of the great St.
Lawrence--neglect. The French are the most loyal people on earth. Their
fidelity to their language and their customs for nearly two centuries
proves that. That faith, steadfast through the tragedy of the
indifference and neglect of their mother country, doubly proves it. And
the only difference between the Frenchman of Quebec and the Frenchman of
New Orleans was that in the South the Spaniard was injected into the
problem. But the Frenchman in the South was not less loyal than his
fellow-countryman of the North. A dissolute king sitting in the wreck of
his great family in the suburbs of Paris might barter away the title of
his lands, but no Louis could ever trade away the loyalty of the older
French of New Orleans to their land and its institutions. In such a
faith was the French quarter of the city born. In such faith has it
survived, these many years. And perhaps the very greatest episodes in
the history of the city were in those twenty days of November, 1803,
when the French flag displaced the Spanish in the old Place d'Armes, to
be replaced only by the strange banner of a newborn nation which was
given the opportunity of working out the destiny of the new France.
So it was the Spaniard who took his part in the shaping of the French
quarter of New Orleans. You can see the impress of his architects in the
stout old houses that were built after two disastrous and wide-spread
fires in the closing years of the eighteenth century--even in the great
lion of the town; the Cabildo which rises from what was formerly the
Place d'Armes and is today Jackson square. And the old Absinthe House,
with its curiously wrought and half-covered courtyard is one of these
old-time Spanish houses.
Now forget about the absinthe--as the rest of the French folk of the
land are beginning to forget it--and turn your attention to the
courtyards. In another old Southern city--Charleston--the oldest houses
shut the glories of their lovely-aging gardens from the sight of vulgar
passers-by upon the street by means of uncompromising high fences. The
old houses of New Orleans do more. Their gardens are shielded from the
crowded, noisy, horrid streets by the houses themselves. And he who runs
through those crowded, noisy, horrid streets, must really walk, for only
so will he catch brief glimpses of the glories of those fading courtyard
gardens.
Sometimes, if you have the courage of your convictions and the proper
fashion of seizing opportunity by the throat you may wander into one of
the tunnel-like gateways of one of these very old houses. No one will
halt you.
Here it is--old France in new America. The tunnel-like way from the
street is shady and cool. From it leads a stair to the right and the
upper floor of the house, a stair up which a regiment might have walked,
and down which the old figure of a Balzac might descend this moment
without ever a single jarring upon your soul. The stair ends in a great
oval hall, whose scarlet paper has long since faded but still remains a
memory of the glories of the days that were. The carved entablatures
over the doors, the bravado of cornice and rosette where the plaster has
not finally fallen, proclaim the former grandeur of this apartment. And
in some former day a great chandelier must have hung from the center of
its graceful ceiling. Today--some one of the neighboring antique stores
has reaped its reward, and a candle set in a wall-lantern is its sole
illumination. A shabby room will not bear the glories of a gay
chandelier. And the old Frenchman and his wife who live in the place
have all but forgotten. They have a parrot and a sewing-machine and what
are the glories of the past to them?
Of course, such a house must have its courtyard. And if the huge
copper-bound tank is dry, and the water has not forced its way through
the battered fountain these many years, if the old exquisite tiles of
the house long since went to form the roof of the new garage of some
smart new American place up the river--the magnolia still blossoms
magnificently among the decay, and Madame's skill with her jessamine and
her geraniums would confound the imported tricks of those English
gardeners in the elaborate new places.
Here then is the old France in the new land--the priceless treasure that
New Orleans wears at her very heart. And here in the very heart of that
heart is an ugly old building boarded up by offensively brilliant
advertising signs.
[Illustration: You still see white steamboats at the New Orleans levee]
An ugly old building did we say, with rough glance at its rusty façades?
Can one be young and beautiful forever? Rusty and beautiful--oh no, do
not scorn the old St. Louis Hotel for following the most normal of all
the laws of Nature. For within this moldering and once magnificent
tavern history was made. In one of its ancient rooms a President of the
United States was unmade, while in another chamber human life was
bought and sold with no more concern than the old Creole lady on the far
corner shows when she sells you the little statues of the Blessed
Virgin.
These wonders are still to be seen--for the asking. The _concierge_ of
the old hotel is a courteous lady who with her servant dwells in the two
most habitable of its remaining rooms. There is no use knocking at the
hotel door for she is very, very deaf indeed, poor lady. But if you will
brave a stern "No Admittance" sign and ascend the graceful winding stair
for a single flight--such a stair as has rarely come to our sight--you
will find her--ready and willing. One by one she shows you the rooms,
faded and disreputable, for the hotel is in a fearful state of
disrepair. The plaster is falling here and there, and where it still
adheres to the lath the old-time paper hangs in long shreds, like giant
stalactites, from the ceiling. Once, for a decade in the "late
eighties," an effort was made to revive the hotel and its former
glories--a desperate and a hopeless effort--and the pitiful
"innovations" of that régime still show. But when you close your eyes
you do not see the St. Louis Hotel of that decade, but rather in those
wonderful twenty years before the coming of the cruel war. In those days
New Orleans was the gayest city in the new world, uptilting its saucy
nose at such heavy eastern towns as New York or Boston. Its wharves were
crowded with the ships of the world, the river-boat captains fought for
the opportunity of bringing the mere noses of their craft against the
overcrowded levee. Cotton--it was the greatest thing of the world. New
Orleans was cotton and cotton was the king of the world.
No wonder then that the St. Louis Hotel could say when it was new, that
it had the finest ballrooms in the world. They still show them to you,
in piecemeal, for they were long since cut up into separate rooms. The
great rotunda was ruined by a temporary floor at the time the state of
Louisiana bought the old hotel for a capitol, and used the rotunda for
its fiery Senate sessions.
All these things the _concierge_ will relate to you--and more. Then she
takes you down the old main-stair, gently lest its rotting treads and
risers should crumble under too stout foot-falls. Into the cavernous
bottom of the rotunda she leads you. It is encumbered with the
steam-pipes of that after era, blocked with rubbish, very dark withal.
The _concierge_, with a fine sense of the dramatic, catches up a bit of
newspaper, lights it, thrusts it ahead as a lighted torch.
"The old slave mart," she says, in a well-trained stage whisper, and
thrusts the blazing paper up at full arm's length. As the torch goes
higher, her voice goes lower: "Beyond the auction block, the slaves'
prison."
As a matter of real fact, the "slaves' prison" is probably nothing more
or less than the negro quarters that every oldtime southern hotel used
to provide for the slaves of its planter patrons. But the _concierge_
does not overlook dramatic possibilities. And she is both too deaf and
too much a lady to be contradicted. She has given you full value for the
handful of pennies she expects from you. And as for you--a feeling of
something like indignation wells within you that the city of New Orleans
has permitted the stoutly built old hotel to fall into such ruin. In an
era which is doing much to preserve the monuments of the earlier
America, it has been overlooked.
Such resentment softens a little further down. You are in Jackson square
now--the Place d'Armes of the old French days--and facing there the
three great lions that have stood confronting that open space since
almost the beginning of New Orleans. The great cathedral flanked by the
Cabilda and the Presbytery is not, of itself, particularly beautiful or
impressive. But it is interesting to remember that within it on a
memorable occasion Andrew Jackson sat at mass--interesting because he
had just fought the battle of New Orleans and ended the Second War with
England. And the _Te Deum_ that went up at that time was truly a
thankful one. The Cabilda and the Presbytery, invested as they are with
rare historical interest, are more worth while.
But to our mind the chief delight of Jackson square are the two long
red-brick buildings that completely fill the north and south sides of
that delectable retreat. In themselves these old fellows are not
architecturally important, although by close inspection you may find in
the traceries of their gallery rails the initials of the wife of the
Spanish grandee--Madama de Pontalba--historically they are not
distinguished, unless count the fact that in one of them dwelt Jenny
Lind upon the occasion of a not-to-be-forgotten engagement in New
Orleans--but as the sides of what is perhaps the most delightful square
in the entire Southland they are most satisfying. Jackson square has
fallen from its high estate. Its gardens were once set out in formal
fashion for the elect of New Orleans, nowadays they are visited by
swarms of the cheaper French and Italian lodgers of the neighborhood,
and scrawny felines from the old Pontalba buildings use it as a
congregating place. But, even in decadent days, its fascination is none
the less.
Beyond Jackson square rests the French market, the very index to all
that New Orleans' love of good eating that has become so closely linked
with the city. The market-scheme of the city as this is being written is
being greatly revised. Up to the present time the market-men have been
autocrats. The grocers of the city have been forbidden to sell fresh
fruits or vegetables; if a retailer be audacious enough to wish to set
out with a private market, he must be a certain considerable number of
squares distant from a public institution--and pay to the city a heavy
license fee as penalty for his audacity. Nor is that all. The consumer
is forbidden to purchase direct from the producer, even though the
producer's wagon be backed up against the market curb in most inviting
fashion. New Orleans recognizes the middleman and protects him--or has
protected him until the present time. Even peddlers have been barred
from hawking their wares through her streets until noon--when the public
markets close and the housewives have practically completed their
purchases for the day.
But--banish the thoughts of the markets as economic problems, cease
puzzling your blessed brains with that eternal problem of the
cost-of-living. Consider the French market as a truly delectable spot.
Go to it early in the morning, when the sun is beginning to poke his way
down into the narrow streets and the shadows are heavy under the
galleries. Breakfast at the hotel? Not a bit of it.
You take your coffee and doughnuts alongside the market-men--at long and
immaculate counters in the market-house. And when you are done you will
take your oath that you have never before tasted coffee. The coffee-man
bends over you--he is a coffee-man descended from coffee-men, for these
stalls of the famous old markets are almost priceless heritages that
descend from generation to generation. In these days they never go out
of a single family.
"_Café lait?_" says the coffee-man.
You nod assent.
Two long-spouted cans descend upon your cup. From one the coffee, from
the other creamy milk come simultaneously, with a skill that comes of
long years of practice on the part of the coffee-man.
That is all--_café lait_ and doughnuts. They make just as good doughnuts
in Boston, but New England has never known the joys of _café lait_. If
it had, it would never return to its oldtime coffee habits. And the
older markets of Boston do not see the fine ladies of the town coming to
them on Sunday morning, after mass, negro servants behind, to do their
marketing, themselves.
Hours of joy in this market--the food capital of a rich land of milk and
honey. After those hours of joy--breakfast at the Madame's.
The Madame began--no one knows just how many years ago--by serving an
eleven o'clock breakfast to the market-men, skilled in food as purveyors
as most critical of the food they eat. The Madame realized that
problem--and met it. So well did she meet it that the fame of her
cookery spread outside the confines of the market-houses, and city folk
and tourists began drifting to her table. In a few years she had
established an institution. And today her breakfast is as much a part of
New Orleans as the old City Hall or the new Court House.
She has been dead several years--dear old gastronomic French lady--but
her institution, after the fashion of some institutions, lives after
her. It still stands at the edge of the market and it still serves one
meal each day--the traditional breakfast. It is sad to relate that it
has become a little commercialized--they sell souvenir spoons and
cook-books--but you can shut your eyes to these and still see the place
in all of its glories.
A long, low room at the back of and above a little saloon, reached from
the side-door of the saloon by a turning and rickety stair. A meagerly
equipped table in the long, low room, from which a few steps lead up to
a smoky but immensely clean kitchen. From that kitchen--odors. Odors?
What a name for incense, the promise of preparation. You sometimes catch
glimpses of busy women, fat and uncorseted. Cooks? Perish the words.
These are artists, if artists have ever really been.
Finally--and upon the stroke of eleven--the breakfast. It shall not be
described here in intimate detail for you, dear reader, will not be
sitting at the Madame's hospitable table as you read these lines. It is
enough for you to know that the liver is unsurpassable and the
coffee--the coffee gets its flavor from an adroit sweetening of cognac
and of sugar. What matter the souvenirs now? The breakfast has lost none
of its savor through the passing of the years.
For here is New Orleans where it seems impossible to get a poor meal.
There is many and many an interior city of size and pretentious
marbleized and flunkeyized hotels of which that may not be said. But in
New Orleans an appreciation of good cookery is an appreciation of the
art of a real profession. And of her restaurants there is an infinite
variety--La Louisiane, Galatoire's, Antoine's, Begue's, Brasco's--the
list runs far too long to be printed here. Nor does the space of this
page permit a recountal of the dishes themselves--the world-famed
_gumbos_, the crawfish _bisque_, the red-snapper stuffed with oysters,
the crabs and the shrimps. And lest we should be fairly suspected of
trying to emulate a cook-book, turn your back upon the fine little
restaurants, where noisy orchestras and unspeakable _cabarets_ have not
yet dared to enter, and see still a little more of the streets of the
old French quarter.
More courtyards, more old houses, a venerable hall now occupied by a
sisterhood of the Roman church but formerly gay with the "quadroon
balls" which gave spicy romance to all this quarter. And here, rising
high above the narrow thrust of Bourbon street, the French Opera, for be
it remembered that New Orleans had her opera house firmly established
when New York still regarded hers as a dubious experiment. To come into
the old opera house, builded after the impressive fashion of architects
of another time, with its real horseshoe and its five great tiers rising
within it--is again to see the old New Orleans living in the new. It is
to see the exclusive Creoles--perhaps the most exclusive folk in all
America--half showing themselves in the shadowy recesses of their boxes.
And to be in that venerable structure upon the night of Mardi Gras is to
stand upon the threshold of a fairy world.
* * * * *
It is not meet that the details of the greatest annual carnival that
America has ever known should be fully described here. It is enough here
and now to say that New Orleans merely exists between these great
parties at the eve of each Lent; that nearly a twelvemonth is given to
preparations for the Mardi Gras. One _festa_ is hardly done before plans
are being made for the next--rumor runs slyly up and down the narrow
streets, _costumiers_ are being pledged to inviolate secrecy, strange
preparatory sounds emerge from supposedly abandoned sheds and houses,
rumors multiply, the air is surcharged with secrecy. Finally _the_ night
of nights. Canal street, which every loyal resident of New Orleans
believes to be the finest parade street in all the world, is ablaze with
the incandescence of electricity, a-jam with humanity. For a week the
trains have been bringing the folk in from half-a-dozen neighboring
states by the tens of thousands. There is not a single parish of
venerable Louisiana without representation; and more than a fair
sprinkling of tourists from the North and from overseas.
Finally--after Expectancy has almost given the right hand to Doubt, the
fanfare of trumpets, the outriders of Parade. From somewhere has come
Rex and The Queen and all the Great and all the Hilariously Funny and
the rest besides. From the supposedly abandoned sheds and houses, from
the _costumiers_? Do not dare to venture that, oh uncanny and worldly
minded soul!
Fairyland never emerged from old sheds, a King may not even dream of a
_costumier_. From thin air, from the seventh sense, the land of the
Mysterious, this King and Queen and all their cavalcade. Then, too, the
Royal Palace--the historic French Opera House floored and transformed
for a night. More lights, more color, the culinary products of the best
chefs of all the land working under a stupendous energy, music, dancing,
white shirts, white shoulders, gayety, beauty--for tomorrow is Ash
Wednesday, and Catholic New Orleans takes its Lent as seriously as it
gaily takes the joyousness of its carnivals.
* * * * *
For three-quarters of a century these carnivals have been the outspoken
frivols of the old French lady by the bend of the yellow river. In all
that time the carnival has progressed until it today is the outward
expression of the joyousness of a joyous city. In all that time did we
say? There was an interregnum--the Four Years. In the Four Years the
little French restaurants were closed, the lights at the Opera
extinguished--there could be no Carnival, for Tragedy sat upon the
Southland. And in a great house in Lafayette square there sat a man from
Massachusetts who ruled with more zeal than kindness. And that man New
Orleans has not forgotten--not even in the half-century that has all but
healed the sores of the Four Years.
"It is funny," you begin, "that New Orleans should make so much of the
Boston Club, when Butler came from--"
It is not funny. You saw the Boston Club which vies for social supremacy
in the old French city with the Pickwick Club, there in Canal street, at
least you saw its fine old white house in that broad thoroughfare. It
is not funny. Your New Orleans man tells you--courteously but clearly.
"We named our club from that game," he says.
"Boston was a fine game, sir," he adds. "And that without ever a thought
of that town up in Massachusetts."
* * * * *
From a carnival to a graveyard is a far cry indeed, and yet the
cemeteries of New Orleans are as distinctive of her as her Mardi Gras
festivities. We have spoken of the river and the great part it has
played in the history of the city that rests so close to its treacherous
shore. And it is that very treacherous shore that makes it so
exceedingly difficult to arrange a cemetery in the soft and marshy soil
on which the city is built.
So it is that the New Orleans' cemeteries are veritable cities of the
dead. For the bodies that are buried within them are placed above the
ground, not under them. Tombs and mausoleums are the rule, not the
exception, and where a family is not prosperous enough to own even the
simplest of tombs, it will probably join with other families or with
some association in the ownership of a house in the city of the dead.
And for those who have not even this opportunity there are the ovens.
The ovens are built in the great walls that encompass the older
cemeteries and make them seem like crumbling fortresses. Four tiers
high, each oven large enough to accommodate a coffin--the sealed fronts
bear the epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of other days.
A motley company they are--poets, pirates, judges, planters, soldiers,
priests--around them the scarred regiments of those who lived their
lives without the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder--no one will
even venture a guess as to the number that have been laid away within a
single one of these cities.
And when you are done with seeing the graves of Jean Lafitte or
Dominique You--why is it that the average mind pricks up with a more
quickened interest at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher--the
Portuguese sexton begins plucking at the loosely laid bricks of one of
these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He lifts out a skull, this twentieth
century Yorick and bids you peep through the aperture. Like the
_concierge_ of the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing
folding copy of the morning _Picayune_. In the place are seemingly
countless skulls, with lesser bones.
"He had good teeth, this fellow," coughs the Portuguese.
You do not answer. Finally--
"Do they bury all of them this way?"
Not at first, you find. The strict burial laws of New Orleans demand
that the body shall be carefully sealed and kept within the oven for at
least a year. After that the sexton may open the place, burn the coffin
and thrust the bones into the rear of the place. And New Orleans can see
nothing unusual in the custom.
* * * * *
"New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community
I have ever seen," says the Californian. Not in any architectural sense
and of course two cities could hardly be further apart in location than
the city in the flat marshlands whose trees are below the level of the
yellow river at flood-tide, and the new city that rises on mountainous
slopes from the clear waters of the Golden Gate. But there is an
intangible likeness about New Orleans and his city that was but never
again can be, that strikes to the soul of the Californian. Perhaps he
has come to know something of the real life of the Creoles--of those
strange folk who even today can say that they have lived long lives in
New Orleans and never gone south of Canal street. Perhaps he has met
some of that little company of old French gentlemen who keep their
faded black suits in as trim condition as their own good manners, and
who scrimp and save through years and months that they may visit--not
Chicago or New York--but Paris, Paris the unutterable and the
unforgettable.
"New Orleans is more like the old San Francisco than any other community
that I have ever seen," reiterates the Californian. "It is more like the
old than the new San Francisco can ever become."
And there is a moral in that which the San Franciscan speaks. In the
twinkling of an eye the old San Francisco disappeared--forever. Slowly,
but surely, the old New Orleans is beginning to fade away. There are
indubitable signs of this already. When it shall have gone, our last
stronghold of old French customs and manners shall have gone. One of the
most fascinating chapters in the story of our Southland will have been
closed.
16
THE CITY OF THE LITTLE SQUARES
In after years, you will like to think of it as the City of the Little
Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone--the
narrow streets twisting and turning their tortuous ways through the very
heart of the old town, the missions strung out along the Concepcion road
like faded and broken bits of bric-a-brac, the brave and militant show
of arsenal and fort--then shall the fragrance of those open plazas long
remain. The Military Plaza, with its great bulk of a City Hall facing
it, the Main Plaza, where the grave towers of the little cathedral look
down upon the palm-trees and the beggars, the newer, open
squares--always plazas in San Antonio--and then, best of all, the Alamo
Plaza, with that squat namesake structure facing it--_the_ lion of a
town of many lions. These open places are the distinctive features of
the oldest and the best of the Texas towns. They lend to it the Latin
air that renders it different from most other cities in America. They
help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe than America.
[Illustration: One of the little squares--and the big cathedral--San
Antonio]
To this old town come the Texans, always in great numbers for it
is their great magnet--the focusing point that has drawn them
and before them, their fathers, their grandfathers and their
great-grandfathers--far reaching generations of Texans who have
gone before. For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star
State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their several ways,
but at the best their fame is distinctly commercial--Fort Worth as a
packing-house town, Dallas as a distributing point for great wholesale
enterprises, Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great
water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port of the whole
land. San Antonio is none of these things. While the last census showed
her to be the largest of all Texas cities in point of population, it is
said by her jealous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of
that population is composed of Mexicans; and here is a part of our
blessed land where the Mexican, like his dollar, must be accepted at far
less than his nominal value.
But if it were not for these Mexicans--that delicate strain of the fine
old Spanish blood that still runs in her veins--San Antonio would have
lost much of her naïve charm many years ago. The touch of the old
grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the narrow streets, the
architecture of the solid stone structures that crowd in upon them in a
tremendously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the Spaniard in every
corner; it appears again and again--in the iron traceries of some
high-sprung fence or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the
lineaments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet place. The
Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there in the Main Plaza, looks as if
it might have been stolen from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily
north without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like walls or the
crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four missions out along the
Concepcion road are direct fruit of Spanish days--and remember that each
of the little squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart of
a Latin when he comes to build a real city.
But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, far-seeing and in
her golden age, was dreaming of Texas as a mighty principality, is not
alone in the wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the
delirious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The impress of a
Latin nation still not three hundred miles distant, is in the bronzed
faces of the Mexicans who fill her streets. Some of them are the old men
who sit emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, and
vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to affluence perhaps and
maintain the marketing of _tamales_ and _chile con carne_ at one of the
many little outdoor stands that line the business streets of San
Antonio, and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course
dinner, if he will, without passing indoors. These are the Mexicans of
San Antonio who are most in evidence--the men still affecting in
careless grandeur their steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the
rest of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue jeans; the
women scorning such humility and running to the brilliancy of red and
yellow velvets, although of late years the glories of the American-made
hat have begun to tell sadly upon the preëminence of the mantilla. These
are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of the older part of the
town--they are something more than dominant factors in the West end of
the city, long ago known as the Chihuahua quarter.
But there is another sort--less often seen upon the streets of San
Antonio. This sort is the Mexican of class, who has come within recent
years in increasing numbers to dwell in a city where unassuming soldiery
afford more real protection for him and for his than do all of the
brilliantly uniformed regiments with which Diaz once illuminated his gay
capital. Since our neighbor to the south entered fully upon its
troublous season these refugees have multiplied. You could see for
yourself any time within the past two years sleeping cars come up from
Laredo filled with nervous women and puzzled children. These were the
families of prosperous citizens from the south of Mexico, who in their
hearts showed no contempt for the comfortable protection of the American
flag.
* * * * *
A man plucks you by the sleeve as you are passing through the corridors
of one of the great modern hotels of San Antonio, hotels which, by the
way, have been builded with the profits of the cattle-trade in Texas.
"That _hombre_," he says, "he is the uncle of Madero."
But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President hardly counts in a town
which has the reputation of fairly breeding revolutions for the sister
land to the south; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and
counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counterplot. There is a
whole street down in the southwestern corner of San Antonio lined with
neat white houses, and the town will know it for many years as
"Revolutionary Row." For in the first of these houses General Bernardo
Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former governor of Nuevo
Leon planned his _coup d'etat_ by which he was to march into Mexico City
with all the glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display
of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, and he remembered
that one Prince Charlie had attempted something of the very sort. In the
long run the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded while
Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City.
Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolution. There is not an
hour in San Antonio when the secret agents of the United States and all
the governments and near-governments of our southern neighbor are not
fairly swarming in the town and alive to their responsibilities. The
border is again passing through historic days--and it fully realizes
that. It is twenty-four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to
El Paso--the queer little city under the shadows of the mountains and
perched hard against the "silver Rio Grande," this last often so
indistinguishable that a young American lieutenant marched his men right
over and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the difference--until
he was confronted by the angry citizens of Ciudad Juarez and an _affaire
nationale_ almost created. Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in
the air.
And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very seriously. It is
almost an old story, and if the revolutionists will only be kind enough
to point their guns away from the U.S.A. they can blaze away as long as
they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso feels that as long
as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are
first-rate advertising attractions for the town--quite discounting mere
Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days,
as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On
battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill.
But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its
worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon
American soil, El Paso grows angry. It demands of Washington if it
realizes that the U.S.A. is being bombarded--the fun of fighting dies
out in a moment.
San Antonio is a safer breeding ground for insurrection than is El Paso.
For one thing it is out of careless rifle-shot, and for another--well at
El Paso some Mexican troopers might come right across the silver Rio
Grande in a dry season, never wetting their feet or dreaming that they
were crossing the majestic river boundary, and pick up a few erring
citizens without much effort. There is a risk at El Paso that is not
present in San Antonio. Hence the bigger town--in its very atmosphere
emitting a friendly comfort toward plottings and plannings--is chosen.
You wish to come closer to the inner heart of the town. Very well then,
your guide leads you to the International Club which perches between the
narrow and important thoroughfare of Commerce street and one of the
interminable windings of the gentle San Antonio river. It was on the
roof of the International Club that Secretary Root was once given a
famous dinner. It is an institution frankly given "to the encouragement
of a friendly feeling between Mexico and the United States." It is
something more than that, however. It is a refuge and sort of harbor for
storm-tossed hearts and weary minds that perforce must do their thinking
in a tongue that, to us, is alien. Most of the time the newspaper men of
the town sit in the rear room of the club and look down across the tiny
river on to the quiet grounds of an oldtime monastery. They play their
pool and dominoes--two arts that seem hopelessly wedded throughout all
Texas. The International Club nods.
Suddenly a tall bronzed man, with _mustachios_, perhaps a little group
of Mexicans will come into the place. The pool and the dominoes stop
short. There are whisperings, flashy papers from Mexico city are
suddenly produced, maps are studied. One man has "inside information"
from Washington, another lays claim to mysterious knowledge up from the
President's palace of the southern capital, perhaps from the
constitutionalists along the frontier. There is a great deal of talk,
much mystery--after all, not much real information.
But when some real situation does develop, San Antonio has glorious
little thrills. To be the incubator of revolution is almost as exciting
as to have bull-fights or a suburban battle-field, the treasures for
which San Antonio cannot easily forgive her rival, El Paso. Each new
plot-hatching of this sort gives the big Texas town fresh thrills.
Gossip is revived in the hotel lobbies and restaurants, the cool and
lofty rooms of the International Club are filled with whisperers in an
alien tongue, out at Fort Sam Houston the cavalrymen rise in their
stirrups at the prospect of some real excitement. San Antonio does not
want war--of course not--but if it must have war--well it is already
prepared for the shock. And it talks of little else.
"Within ten years the United States will have annexed Mexico and San
Antonio will have become a second Chicago," says one citizen in his
enthusiasm. "And what a Chicago--railroads, manufactories and the best
climate of any great city in the world."
Even in war-times your true San Antonian cannot forget one of the chief
assets of his lovely town.
The others say little. One is a junior officer from out at the post. He
can say nothing. But he is hoping. There is not much for an army man in
inaction and the best of drills are not like the real thing. For him
again--the old slogan--"a fight or a frolic."
* * * * *
Not all of San Antonio is Spanish--although very little of it is negro.
An astonishing proportion of its population is of German descent. These
are largely gathered in the east end of the town, that which was
formerly called the Alamo quarter, and like all Germans they like their
beer. The brewing industry is one of the great businesses of San
Antonio--and the most famous of all these breweries is the smallest of
them. On our first trip to "San Antone" we heard about that beer; all
the way down through Texas--"the most wonderful brew in the entire
land."
[Illustration: San Juan Mission--a bid of faded bric-a-brac outside of
San Antonio]
The active force of this particular Los Angeles brewery consisted of but
one man, the old German who carried his recipe with him in the top of
his head, and who had carefully kept it there throughout the years. In
the cellar of the little brewery he made the beer, upstairs and in the
garden he served it. In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles,
in the late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind his bar
awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out in the shady garden they
must serve themselves. There were no waiters in the place. If a man
could not walk straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no
condition for it. The old German was as proud of the respectability of
his place as he was of the secret recipe for the beer, which had been
handed down in his family from generation to generation.
Only once was that secret given--and then after much tribulation and in
great confidence to an agent of the government. But he had his reward.
For the government at Washington in its turn pronounced his the purest
beer in all the land. Men then came to him with proposals that he place
it upon the market. They talked to him in a tempting way about the
profits in the business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to be
taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which San Antonians and
tourists alike had tried to swerve him, to no purpose. Of course, every
rule has its exceptions but there was only a single exception to this.
Each Saturday night Mr. Degen used to send a small keg over with his
compliments to a boyhood friend--he believed that friendship of a
certain sort can break all rules and precedents.
All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our lips at the thought of
Degen's beer. Before we had been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found
our way to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the historic
Alamo. But we had no beer.
The brewer was dead. In a neighboring street his friends were quietly
gathering for his funeral, and rumor was rife as to whether or no he had
confided his recipe to his sons. It was a great funeral, according to
the local newspapers, the greatest in the recent history of San
Antonio. It was a tribute from the chief citizens of a town to a simple
man who had lived his life simply and honestly--who in his quiet way had
builded up one of the most distinctive institutions of the place.
Rumor was soon satisfied. The secret of the recipe of the beer had not
died. In a few days the brisk little brewery in the side street was in
action once again. The stout Germans in their shirt-sleeves were again
tramping with their paddles round and round the great vat while their
foaming product was being handed to patrons in the adjoining room. But,
alas, the traditions of the founder are gone. The beer is now bottled
and sold on the market--in a little while is will be emblazoned in
electric lights along the main streets of New York and Chicago. We are
in a commercial and a material age. Even in San Antonio they are
threatening to widen Commerce street--that narrow but immensely
distinctive thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the
town--threatening, also, to tear down the old convent walls next the
Alamo and there erect a modern park and monument. By the time these
things are done and San Antonio is thoroughly "modernized" she will be
ready for an awakening--she is apt to find with her naïve charm gone the
golden flood of tourists has ceased to stop within her walls. Truly she
will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
* * * * *
You will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After
all the other memories of San Antonio are gone you will revert to
these--gay open places, filled with palms and other tropical growths,
and flanked by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the
newer constructions of today. You will like to think of those squares in
the sunny daytime with the deep shadows running aslant across the faces,
there is delight in the memory of them at eventide, when the cluster
lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are filled with gaily
dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall Texans down from the ranches for
a really good time in "old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan
town, tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the hour when
the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its noisy clocks speaking midnight
hours to mere emptiness--San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the
days when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, and then looks
forward to the morrow. She believes that her golden age is not yet come.
Her plans for the future are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come.
In so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old in San Antonio
and the coming of the new, God grant that they will never come true.
17
THE AMERICAN PARIS
A great bronze arch spans Seventeenth street and bids you welcome to
Denver. For the capital of Colorado seems only second to the Federal
capital as a mecca for American tourists. She has advertised her charms,
her climate, her super-marvelous scenery cleverly and generously. The
response must be all that she could possibly wish. All summer and late
into the autumn her long stone station is crowded with travelers--she is
the focal point of those who come to Colorado and who find it the ideal
summer playground of America.
To that great section known as the Middle West, beginning at an
imaginary line drawn from Chicago south through St. Louis and so to the
Gulf, there is hardly a resort that can even rival Colorado in popular
favor. Take Kansas, for a single instance. Kansas comes scurrying up
into the Colorado mountains every blessed summer. It grows fretfully hot
down in the Missouri bottoms by the latter part of July, and the Kansans
begin to take advantage of the low rates up to Denver and Colorado
Springs and Pueblo. And with the Kansans come a pretty good smattering
of the folk of the rest of the Middle West. They crowd the trains out of
Omaha and Kansas City night after night; at dawn they come trooping out
through the portal of the Denver Union station and pass underneath that
bronze arch of welcome.
They find a clean and altogether fascinating city awaiting them, a city
solidly and substantially built. Eighteen years ago Denver decided that
she must discontinue the use of wooden buildings within her limits. She
came to an expensive and full realization of that. For Colorado is an
arid country nominally, and water is a precious commodity within her
boundaries. The irrigation ditches are familiar parts of the landscapes
and ever present needs of her cities. To put out fire takes water, and
Denver sensibly begins her water economy by demanding that every
structure that is within her be built of brick or stone or concrete. And
yet her parks are a constant reproach to towns within the regions of
bountiful water. They are wonderfully green, belying that arid country,
and the water that goes to make them green comes from the fastnesses of
the wonderful Rockies, a full hundred miles away.
The brick buildings make for a substantial city, but Denver herself has
a solidity that you do not often see in a Western city. Giant office
buildings in her chief streets do not often shoulder against ill-kempt
open lots, have as unbidden neighbors mere shanties or hovels. Moreover,
she is not a "one-street town." Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets vie
for supremacy--the one with the great retail establishments, the other
with the hotels, banks and railroad offices. There are other streets of
business importance--no one street not even as a _via sacre_ of this
bustling town for the best of her homes.
* * * * *
The Paris of America, is what she likes to call herself and when you
come to know her, the comparison is not bad. But Paris, with all of her
charms, has not the location of Denver--upon the crest of a rolling,
treeless plain, with the Rocky Mountains, jagged and snow-capped, to
serve as a garden-wall. Belasco might have staged Denver--and then been
proud of his work. But hers is a solitary grandeur and a very great
isolation. She is isolated agriculturally and industrially, and before
long we shall see how difficult all this makes it for her commercial
interests. It makes things difficult in her social life, and Denver
must, and does, have a keen social life.
The isolation and the altitude, constantly tending to make humans
nervous and unstrung, demands amusement, self-created amusement of
necessity. If Denver is not amused she quarrels; you can see that in her
unsettled and troubled politics, and her endless battles with the
railroads. So she is wiser when she laughs and it is that faculty of
much laughing, much fun, expressed in a variety of amusements that have
led magazine writers to call the town, the Paris of America, although
there is little about her, save the broad streets and her many open
squares and parks to suggest the real Paris. But, on the other hand, the
Seine is hardly to be compared to the majesty of the backbone of the
continent, Denver's greatest glory.
In winter Denver society has a fixed program. On Monday night it
religiously attends the Broadway Theater, a playhouse which on at least
one night of the week blossoms out as gayly as the Metropolitan Opera
House. Denver assumes to prove herself the Paris of America by the
gayness of its gowns and its hats and a Denver restaurant on Monday
night after the play only seems like a bit of upper Broadway, Manhattan,
transplanted. On Tuesday afternoon society attends the vaudeville at the
Orpheum and perhaps the Auditorium or one of the lesser theaters that
night. By Wednesday evening at the latest the somewhat meager theater
possibilities of the place are exhausted and one wealthy man from New
York who went out there used to go to bed on Wednesday until Monday,
when the dramatic program began anew. For him it was either bed or the
"movies," and he seemed to prefer bed.
In summer the Broadway is closed, and Elitch's Gardens, one of the
distinctive features of the town, takes its place as a Monday
rendezvous. It is a gay place, Elitch's, with a quaint foreign touch. A
cozy theater stands in the middle of an apple orchard--part of the
one-time farm of the proprietress' father. Good taste and the delicate
skill of architect and landscape gardener have gone hand in hand for its
charm. You go out there and dine leisurely, and then you cross the long
shady paths under the apples to the theater. And even if the play in
that tiny playhouse were not all that might be expected--although the
best of actors play upon its stage--one would be in a broadly generous
mood, at having dined and spent the evening in so completely charming a
spot.
But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the
wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become
mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride--and read
riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the
saddle of some cranky broncho--they can build fires, cook and live in
the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her _khakias_ as
about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and
well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all
the tourists.
Do not forget that we started by showing Denver as a mecca for these
folk. When you come to see how very well the Paris of America takes care
of them you do not wonder that they return to her--many times; that they
are with her more or less the entire year round. Her hotels are big and
they are exceedingly well run. There are more side trips than a tourist
can take, using the city as a base of operations, than a man might
physically use in a month. The most of these run off into the mountains
that have been standing sentinel over Denver since first she was born.
In a day you can leave the bustling capital town, pass the foothills of
the Rockies and climb fourteen thousand feet aloft to the very backbone
of the continent. Indeed, it seems to be the very roof of the world when
you stand on a sentinel peak and look upon timber line two thousand feet
below, where the trees in another of Nature's great tragedies finally
cease their vain attempts to climb the mountain tops.
A man recommended one of the mountain trips over a wonderfully
constructed railroad, poetically called the "Switzerland Trail."
"You'll like that trip," he said, with the enthusiasm of the real
Denverite. "It's wonderful, and such a railroad! Why, there are
thirty-two tunnels between here and the divide."
The tourist to whom this suggestion was made looked up--great scorn upon
his countenance.
"That doesn't hit me," he growled, "not even a little bit. I live in New
York--live in Harlem, to be more like it, and work down in Wall
street--use the subway twelve times a week. I don't have to come to
Colorado to ride in tunnels."
[Illustration: A broad arch spans Seventeenth Street and bids you
welcome to Denver]
Tourists form no small portion of Denver industry. She has restaurants
and souvenir shops, three to a block; seemingly enough high-class hotels
for a town three times her size. Yet the restaurants and the hotels are
always filled, the little shops smile in the sunshine of brisk
prosperity. And as for "rubberneck wagons," Denver has as many as New
York or Washington. They are omnipresent. The drivers take you to the
top of the park system, to the Cheesman Memorial, to see the view.
All the time you are letting your eyes revel in the glories of those
great treeless mountains, the megaphone man is dinning into your ears
the excellence of his company's trips in Colorado Springs, in Manitou,
in Salt Lake City. He assumes that you are a tourist and that you will
have never had enough.
Tourists become a prosperous industry in a town that has no particular
manufacturing importance. Great idle plants, the busy smelters of other
days, bespeak the truth of that statement. Denver, as far as she has any
commercial importance, is a distributing center. Her retail shops are
excellent and her wholesale trade extends over a dozen great western
states. Her banks are powers, her influence long reaching. But she is
not an industrial city.
That has worried her very much, is still a matter of grave concern to
her business men. Their quarrels with the railroads have been many and
varied. Denver realizes, although she rarely confesses it, that she has
disadvantages of location. These same mountains that the tourist comes
to love from the bottom of his heart, just as the Coloradians have loved
them all these years, are a real wall hemming her in, barriers to the
growth of their capital. When the Union Pacific--the first of all the
transcontinental railroads--was built through to the coast it was
forced, by the mountains, to carry its line far to the north--a bitter
pill to the ambitious town that was just then beginning to come into its
own. Denver sought reprisals by building the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio
Grande, a most remarkable feat of railroad engineering; bending far to
the south and then to the north and west through the narrow niches of
the high mountains. But hardly had the Denver & Rio Grande assumed any
real importance in a commercial fashion and the mistake of its first
narrow-gauge tracks corrected, before it was joined at Pueblo by direct
routes to the east and Denver was again isolated from through
transcontinental traffic. She was then and still is reached by
side-lines.
This was a source of constant aggravation to the man who was until his
death two or three years ago, Denver's first citizen--David H. Moffat.
Mr. Moffat's interest and pride in the town were surpassing. He had
grown up with it--in the later years of his life he used to boast that
he once had promoted its literature, for he had come to Denver when it
was a mere struggling mining-camp as a peddler, selling to the miners
who wanted to write home a piece of paper and a stamped envelope, for
five cents.
Moffat saw that a number of important lines were making Denver their
western terminal--particularly the Burlington and the Kansas stems of
the Union Pacific and the Rock Island. He felt that he might pick up
traffic from these roads and carry it straight over the mountains to
Salt Lake City, a railroad center suffering the same disadvantages as
Denver. He sent surveyors up into the deep canyons and the _impasses_ of
the Rockies. When they brought back the reports of their
_reconnoissances_, practical railroad men laughed at Mr. Moffat.
The big bankers of the East also laughed at him when he came to them
with the scheme, but the man was of the sort who is never daunted by
ridicule. He had a sublime faith in his project, and when men told him
that the summit of 10,000 feet above the sea level where he proposed to
cross the divide was an impossibility, he would retort about the number
of long miles he was going to save between the capital of Colorado and
the capital of Utah and he would tell of the single Routt county
stretch, a territory approximating the size of the state of
Massachusetts and estimated to hold enough coal to feed the furnace
fires of the United States for three hundred years. When he was refused
money in New York and Chicago he would return to Denver and somehow
manage to raise some there. The Moffat road was begun, despite the
scoffers. Its promoter made repeated trips across the continent to
secure money, and each time when he was home again he would raise the
dollars in his own beloved Denver and move the terminal of his road west
a few miles. He was at it until the day of his death and he lived long
enough to see his railroad within short striking reach of the treasures
of Routt county.
At his death it passed into the hands of a receiver, and Denver seemed
to have awakened from its dream of being upon the trunk-line of a
transcontinental railroad. But there were hands to take up the lines
where Moffat had dropped them. Times might have been hard and loan money
scarce around Colorado, but the men who were taking up what seemed to be
the deathless project of Denver's own railroad were hardly daunted.
Instead, they boldly revised Moffat's profile and prepared to cut two
thousand feet off the backbone of the continent and shorten their line
many miles by digging a tunnel six miles long and costing some four
millions of dollars. Now a tunnel six miles long and costing $4,000,000
is quite an enterprise, even to a road which has boasted thirty-two of
them in a single day's trip up to the divide; a particularly difficult
enterprise to a road still in the shadows of bankruptcy. But the men who
were directing the fortunes of the Denver & Salt Lake--as the Moffat
road is now known--had a plan. Would not the city of Denver lend its
credit to an enterprise so fraught with commercial possibilities for it?
Would not the city of Denver arrange a bond issue for the digging of
that tunnel--incidentally finding therein a good investment for its
spare dollars?
Would Denver do that? Ask this man over there. He is well acquainted
with the Paris of America.
"Of course it would," he answers. "If some one was to come along with a
scheme to expend five million dollars in building a statue to Jupiter
atop of Pikes Peak, he would find plenty of supporters and enthusiasm in
Denver. The only scheme that does not succeed out there is the one that
is practical."
The gentleman is sarcastic--and yet not very far from the truth. For
last year when the bond issue for the railroad tunnel went to a vote it
was carried--with enthusiasm. Thereafter Denver was upon the trunk-line
railroad map. The mere facts that the nine miles of tunnel were yet to
be bored and many additional miles of the most difficult railroad
construction of the land builded to its portals were mere details. The
thin air of the Mile-High city lifts its citizens well over details. And
they are far too broad, far too generous to trouble with such minute
things.
For in them dwells the real spirit of the West--by this time no mere
gateway--and it is a rare spirit, indeed. The town, as we have already
intimated, has a strong social tendency. She has sent her men and women,
her sons and her daughters to the East and they have won for themselves
on their own merits. The Atlantic seaboard has paid full tribute to the
measure of her training--and why not? Her schools are as good as the
best, her fine homes and her little homes together would be a credit to
any town in the land, her big clubs would grace Fifth avenue. Her whole
social organism from bottom to top is well fibered. It is charmingly
exclusive in one way, warmly democratic in many others.
A girl tourist from Cleveland, a recent summer, essayed to make the
ascent of the capitol dome between two connecting trains. She
miscalculated distances during the hour and a half that was at her
disposal and almost missed her outbound train. She surely would have
missed it, if it had not been for the courtesy of a well-dressed Denver
woman. The girl stood at the corner of Seventeenth street and Broadway,
where a group of large hotels center, waiting for a trolley car to take
her to the station. She could see its sightly tower a long way down
Seventeenth street, but there were no cars in sight at that instant. She
spoke to the woman, who was coming out of a drug store, and asked about
the car service to the station. In the East she might have had a
perfunctory answer, if she received an answer at all. The Denver woman
began explaining, then she checked herself:
"Better yet," she smiled, "I have my automobile here and I'll take you
down there while we are talking about it."
The car was a big imported fellow and the girl made her train. Some time
after, she discovered that the woman who had been of such courteous
attention was one of the very biggest of Denver society leaders.
Imagine, if you can, such a thing coming to pass upon the Atlantic
seaboard--in New York, in Boston, in Philadelphia--or in Charleston!
* * * * *
There is still another phase of life in Denver--and that is the fact
that most of her residents, for one reason or another, have drifted out
to her from the East. Once in a long while, if you loaf over your
morning newspaper on a shady bench in the Capitol grounds, you will
become acquainted with some whiskered old fellow who will tell you that
he chased antelope where the big and showy City Park today stands, that
he remembers clearly when a nearby street was the Santa Fé Trail and
then a country road, and that two generations after him are living in
Denver; or sometimes if you go down into Larimer street, which is old
Denver, you can find a veteran who likes to prate of other days--of the
time when he used to pack down to the capital from his mountain claim,
one hundred and twenty-five miles over the mountain snows, for his
winter's bacon. But the majority of these Denverites have come from the
East. There is some old town in New England with avenues of giant trees
that is still home to them, and yet they all have a heap of affection
for the city of their adoption.
Some of them have gone to Denver against their will, and that is the
tragic shadow of Colorado. They are expatriates--exiles, if you
please--for Colorado is the American Siberia. This dread thing, this
thing that is impartial to all low altitudes--the white plague--marks
the victims, who go shuffling their way to die among the hills--in the
gay Paris of North America. It is the gaunt tragedy of Denver, and even
though the Denverites speak lightheartedly of the "T. B.'s" who have
come to dwell among them, they themselves know best the bitter tragedy
of it all.
Here were two girls, sisters, who worked in a restaurant. A customer
held his home newspaper spread as he supped alone. Its title, after the
fashion of country weeklies, was emblazoned that all might read; the
widespread eagle has been its feature for three-quarters of a century
now. One of the waitresses made bold to speak.
"So you are from near Syracuse?" she said.
It was affirmed. She beckoned to her sister to come over. The little
restaurant--Denver fashion, it made specialities of "short orders,"
cream waffles and T-bone steaks--was almost deserted. She spoke to her
sister.
"He's from Syracuse," she said. The sister was a delicate, colorless
little thing, but the blood flushed up into her pale cheeks for an
instant.
"We're from Syracuse," she said proudly. "We used to live up on the
hill, just around the corner from the college. It was great fun to see
the students go climbing up around Mount Olympus there. It was twice as
great fun in winter, when the north wind was blowing the snow right up
into our faces."
Exiles these. They had left their nice, comfortable home there in the
snug, New York state city to make the long dreary trek to Denver. They
were clever girls, and it seemed certain that they might find work in
some nice office in the big and growing Colorado city. They were fairly
competent stenographers, and it seemed to them that they might live in
peace and comfort in the new home. It was a change from their big
Syracuse house to a narrow hallroom in a Denver boarding house. Then
upon that came the fruitless search for a "nice place." Hundreds of
other girl stenographers, driven on the long trip West, were pressing
against them. The two Syracusans held their heads high--for a time. Then
they were glad to get the menial places as waitresses.
The man who checks trunks at one of the biggest transfer companies
confessed that he was an exile, too.
"Came out here a dozen years ago with a busted lung," he admitted with a
quizzical smile. "Guess I'll stay for a while longer. But I want to go
back to Baltimore. Before I am done with it I am going back to
Baltimore. I'm going to walk down Charles street once again and breathe
the fragrance of the flowers in the gardens, if it kills me."
A girl in a boarding house leaned up against the wall of the broad and
shady piazza and said she liked Denver "really, truly, immensely."
"Do you honestly?"
"Honestly," she drawled gravely. "God knows, I've got to. I'm a lunger,
although they don't know it here. I've only got one lung, but it's a
good lung," she ended with a little hysterical laugh.
Another exile. The American Siberia, in truth, save that this Siberia is
a near Paradise--a kingdom for exiles where the grass is as green as it
is back in the old East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the
strange new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. But a Siberia none the
less. The big sanitariums all about the city tell that. The keeper of
the Denver Morgue will tell it, too. The suicide rate in Denver runs
high. Desperate folk go out to Colorado to shut the door in the face of
death--and go too late. They are far from home, alone, friendless,
penniless in despair--the figures of the statisticians cannot lie.
The East has this as a debt to pay Denver, and generally she pays it
royally. Denver does not forget the times when the Atlantic seaboard has
come to her assistance--despite the troubles of David H. Moffat in
raising capital for his railroad. Once in a business council there while
the East was getting some rather hard knocks for its "fool
conservatism"--perhaps it had been refusing to buy the bonds of the
mountain-climbing railroad--a big Denver banker got the floor. He was a
man who could demand attention--and receive it.
"I want you to remember one thing," he said; "fifteen years ago we were
laying out and selling town-lots for a dozen miles east of Denver; we
were selling them to Easterners--for their good money. When they came
out and looked for their land what did they see? They saw plains--mile
after mile of plains--peopled by what? They were peopled by jackrabbits,
and the jackrabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the
surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots and built our city
out to them and upon them, gentlemen, we have not redeemed our promise
to the East."
And no one who knows Denver doubts that the time will yet come when she
will redeem that promise. Her railroad may or may not come to be a
transcontinental route of importance, manufacturing may or may not
descend upon her with its grime and industry and wealth, but her
magnificent situation there at the base of the Rockies will continue to
make her at least a social factor in the gradually lengthening roll of
really vital American cities.
18
TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC--AND A THIRD
"When you get to Portland you will see New England transplanted. You
will see the most American town on the continent, bar only
Philadelphia."
The man on the train shrieking westward down through the marvelous
valley of the Columbia spoke like an oracle. He had a little group of
oddly contorted valises that bespoke him as a traveling salesman, and
hence a person of some discrimination and judgment. He was ready to talk
politics, war to the death on railroads, musical comedy and the
condition of the markets with an equally uncertain knowledge, a fund of
priceless information that never permitted itself to undergo even the
slightest correction.
But he was right, absolutely right, about Portland. From the cleanest
railroad station that we have ever seen, even though the building is
more than twenty years old, to the very crests of the fir-lined hills
that wall her in, here is a town that is so absolutely American, that it
seems as if she might even boast one of the innumerable George
Washington headquarters somewhere on her older streets. Her downtown
streets are conservatively narrow, her staunch Post Office suggests a
public building in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and
her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about thirty percent
of them given over to the retail vending of chocolate. Our Portland
guide was grieved when we made mention of this last fact.
"I once went to Boston," said he, "and found it an almost continuous
piano store."
Which was, of course, a mere evasion of the truth of our suggestion as
to the chocolate propensities of the maids of Portland. They are very
much like the girls in Hartford or Indianapolis or St. Paul or any other
bustling town across this land, attending the Saturday matinées with an
almost festal regularity; rollicking, flirting girls, grave and gay,
girls dancing and girls driving their big six-cylinder automobiles with
almost unerring accuracy up the tremendous hills of the town.
Hills they really are and well worth the tall climb to Council Crest,
the showiest of them all. If your host does not mind tire expense and
the wear and tear on his engine, he may take you up there in his
automobile. The street car makes the same ascent, and the managers of
the local traction system who have to pay for all the repairs and
renewals to the cars do not hesitate to say that it is the least
profitable line in creation. But the final result at Council Crest is
worth a set of tires, or a six-months' ageing of a trolley car.
You have climbed up from the heart of the busy town, past the business
section, spreading itself out as business sections of all successful
towns must continue to do, past the trim snug little white Colonial
houses--that must have been stolen from old Salem or Newburyport--all
set among the dark greens of the cedars and the firs, and belying the
Northland tales of the tree foliage by the great rose-bushes that bloom
all the year round, up on to the place where tradition says the silent
chiefs of red men used to gather.... Below you from Council Crest the
town--the town, at dusk, if you please. The arcs are showing the regular
pattern of trim streets, the shops and the big office buildings are
aglow for the night with the brilliancy of artificial illumination. It
is dark down in the town--night has closed in upon it.
Now lift your eyes and let them carry past the town and the black gloom
of the river, over the nearest encirclings of the fir-clad hills and see
the day die in the most high place. You see it now--a peculiar pink
cloud, which is not a cloud at all, but a snow-capped cone-shaped peak
rising into the darkening heavens. Mount Hood is an asset for Portland,
because for any habitation of man it would be an inspiration. And beyond
Mount Hood--fifty miles distant--but further to the north are Mount
Adams, Mount St. Helen's and sometimes on a fine clear evening Rainier
bidding alike brilliant farewells to the dying day.
[Illustration: Belasco might have staged Seattle]
This then is the city into which a traveler may enter on an autumn day
to find the innumerable cedars and firs, the changing brilliancy of the
maple leaves proclaiming it North, with the gaily blossoming rose-bushes
and the home-grown strawberries of October telling a paradoxical story
and locating the Oregon metropolis to the South. The publicity experts
of the town can--and do--sound its praises in no faint terms. They will
tell you of a single day when twenty-two wheat vessels were at Portland
docks gathering the food-stuffs for a hungry Orient, they will reel off
statistics as to the shipping powers of the great lumber port in all the
world and then, without a lessening of the pride, will go further and
explain Portland's hopes for the further inland navigation of the
streams that make her an important ocean port although fifty miles
distant from the sight of the sea. The Columbia river is already
navigable for four hundred miles inland and Portland is today
coöperating with the Canadian authorities in British Columbia for
extending the waterway's availability as a carrier for another four
hundred miles. A great work has been performed in pulling the teeth of
the mighty Columbia where it meets the sea--in building jetties at the
mouth of the river. The government with unusual energy is making new
locks at the impressive Cascades. Portland has good reason for her faith
in the future. Her railroad systems are in their infancy; a part of
Central Oregon as large as the state of Ohio is just now being reached
by through routes from Portland. What future they shall bring her no man
dares to predict.
But we, for ourselves, shall like to continue to think of Portland as a
gentle American town set between guardian fir-clad hills and sentineled
by snow-capped peaks; we shall enjoy remembering the yellow and red
leaves of Autumn, the luxuriant roses, the strawberries and the crisp
October nights in one delightful paradoxical jumble.
* * * * *
To make a great seaport city out of a high-springing ridge of volcanic
origin was a truly herculean task, but Seattle sprang to it with all the
enthusiasm of her youth. "Re-grading" is what she has called it, and
because even armies of men with pick and with shovel could not work fast
enough for her own satisfaction, she borrowed a trick from the old-time
gold miners and put hose-men at work. Hydraulic science supplanted men
and teams and picks and even the big steam shovels. The splashing hose
wore down the crest of the great hills until sturdy buildings teetered
on their foundations and late moving tenants had to come and go up and
down long ladders.
In 1881 President Hayes came to this strange little lumbering town and
spoke from the platform of the two-storied Occidental Hotel in the
center of the village to its entire population--some five hundred
persons. The Occidental Hotel was gone within ten years, to be replaced
by a hostelry that in 1890 was big and showy for any town and that in
1912, Seattle regarded almost as a relic of past ages. And stranger
still, the hills--the eternal hills, if you please--that looked upon the
Occidental Hotel only yesterday, have gone. Not that Seattle will not
always be a side-hill town, that the cable cars will not continue to
climb up Madison street from the waterfront like flies upon a
window-glass, but that a tremendous reformation has been wrought, with
the aid of engineers' skill and the famous "hard money" of the Pacific
coast.
For here was a town that decided almost overnight to be a seaport of
world-wide reputation. She looked at her high hills ruefully. Then she
called for the hose-men. The hills were doomed.
There was Denny hill, with a park of five acres capping it. The
surveyors set their rival stakes five hundred feet below the lowest
level of the little park and a matter of almost a million cubic yards of
earth went sploshing down the long hydraulic sluices to make the
tide-water flats at the bottom of the hills into solid footing for
future factories and warehouses. And when the "regraders" were done the
architects and the builders were upon their heels.
Denny hill had boasted a hotel upon its summit, which in the late
eighties Seattle regarded as an architectural triumph, a wooden thing of
angles and shingles and queer Queen Anne turrets and dormers. The name
of the old hotel went to a new one which supplanted it at a proper
altitude for a city that was determined to be metropolitan--and the new
hotel was a dignified structure worthy of the best town in all this
land.
"We had to do it," the Seattle man will tell you, without smiling. "We
have got to be ready for a population of a million or more. Our house
has got to be in order."
It is not every day that one can see an American metropolitan city in
the making.
* * * * *
Back of the high-crested hills that have been suffered to remain as a
part of the topography of this remarkable town--for its residents still
like to perch their smart new houses where they may command a view of
Puget Sound or the snow-capped Rainier--is as lovely a chain of lakes as
was ever given to an American city. Boston would have made the edges of
these the finest suburbs in the land; she is trying some sort of an
experiment of that kind with her dirty old Charles river. Seattle saw in
the great bowl of Lake Washington something more.
"We can crowd into Portland a little more," said the shrewdest of her
citizens, "by making this lake into a fresh-water harbor."
Just what the advantages of a fresh-water harbor may be to Seattle which
already possesses one of the finest deep-water harbors on the North
Pacific, may be obscure to you for the moment. Then the Seattle man
informs you that Portland has a fresh-water harbor, that the masters of
ships, still thirty days' sailing from port, make for its haven, knowing
that in fresh water the barnacles that make so great a drag upon a
vessel's progress will fall away from the hull. A fresh-water bath for a
salt-water hull is better than a drain-off in a dry dock--and a great
sight cheaper.
Here, then, is a masterful new town seeking new points of advantage over
its rivals, piercing canals through to its backyard lakes so that it may
eventually be as completely surrounded by docks and shipping as are New
York and Boston. It is impossible to think of Seattle ever hesitating.
Seattle proceeds to accomplish. Before she has a real opportunity to
count the cost, the improvements which she has undertaken are rolling in
revenue to her coffers.
* * * * *
Tacoma is smaller than either Seattle or Portland--and not one whit less
vigorous than either of them. She has not undergone the wholesale
transformations of her sister to the north and still retains all the
aspects of a busy port of the Far North--long reaching wharves, busy,
dirty railroad yards reaching and serving them, fir-clad hills rising
from the water, the smell and industry of lumber--and back of all these
her mountain. It is her mountain--"The Mountain that was God" as the
Indians used to say--and if for long weeks it may stay modestly hidden
behind fog-banks, there do come days when its great snow-capped peak
gazes serenely down upon the little city.
Do not dare to come into this town and call her mountain Rainier, after
the fashion of government "map sharps" and railroad advertisements. It
is Mount Tacoma, if you please, and woe be to any man who calls it
anything else. Former President Taft once shouldered the question upon
reaching the northwestern corner of the land like a true diplomat. At
the dinners in both Seattle and Tacoma he referred to the great guardian
peak of Washington as "the mountain" thereby offending no one and
leaving a pleasant "lady or the tiger" mystery as to which of the two
names he would use in private conversation.
But whether the mountain be Rainier or Tacoma, it is going to be one of
the great playgrounds of the nation--and that within very few years.
Think of starting out from a brisk American city of a hundred thousand
population and within two hours standing at the foot of a giant glacier
grinding down from the heavens, a cold, dead, icy thing but still imbued
with the stubborn sort of life that stunted vegetable growths possess, a
life that makes the frozen river travel toward the sea every day of the
year. A man living in Tacoma, or Seattle, or Portland, for that matter,
can have both the dangers and the joys of Swiss mountain climbing but a
few hours distant. It takes knowledge and courage to make the ascent of
Rainier--a tedious trip which starts through the three summer months in
which it is possible at five o'clock in the morning so as to reach the
summit before the snows begin to melt to the danger point. And yet, in
the hands of skilled guides, so many women cross the crevices and climb
the steep upward trails, that the record of their ascents is no longer
kept.
This great Swiss mountain--higher than Blanc, and vastly more impressive
from the fact that its fourteen thousand foot summit rises almost
directly from the sea--is the central feature of the newest of all the
government parks. It is in the stages of early development and already
the tourists are coming to it in increasing numbers. Given a few years
and Rainier will vie in popularity with the Yellowstone, the Yosemite
and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In scenic beauty of its own
inimitable sort it already ranks with these.
The man who makes the ascent of Rainier--if poetry and imagination rest
within his soul--may truly feel that he has come near to God. He can
feel the ardor and the inspiration of the red men who gave the mountain
its mystic symbolism. He can look up into the clouds and feel that he is
at the dome of the world. He can look down, down past the timber line
off across miles of timber land and catch the silver of Puget Sound and
the distant horizon flash of the Pacific. He can see smoke to the
south--Portland--smoke to the north and west--Seattle--and nearer than
these--the brisk Tacoma that hugs this mountain to herself.
If imagination rest within him he can now know that these cities, at the
northwest corner of America, are barely adult, just beginning to come
into their own. A great measure of growth and strength is yet to be
given to them.
19
SAN FRANCISCO--THE NEWEST PHOENIX
We came upon it in the still of an early Sunday evening--the wonderful
city of Saint Francis. Throughout that cloudless Sabbath we had
journeyed southward through California. At dawn the porter of the
sleeping car had informed us that we were in the Golden State, not to be
distinguished in its northern reaches from Oregon. Men were talking of
the wonders of the Klamath country into which the civilizing rails of
steel are being steadily pushed, the breath of tomorrow was upon the
lips of every one who boarded the train, but the land itself was wild,
half-timbered, rugged to the last degree. Through the morning grays the
volcanic cone of Shasta was showing ever and ever so faintly, and if an
acquaintance of two hours with the peak that Joaquin Miller has made so
famous did not enthuse the man behind the car-window, it must have been
that he was still a bit dazed, not surfeited, with the wonders of
Rainier.
At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten minutes while
travelers descended and partook of the vilest tasting waters that nature
might boast in all California. Shasta spring water is supposed to be
mightily beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience with
spring waters has been that their benefits have existed in an inverse
ratio to their pleasantness of taste. But if Nature had given her
benefactions to Shasta a sort of Spartan touch, she has more than
compensated for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their
setting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. The railroad
performs earthly miracles to land a passenger in front of them. It
descends a vast number of feet in an incredibly short length of
track--the conductor will reduce these to cold statistics--and your idea
is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the base of the lowest leg of
this hair-pin is the spring, set in a deep glen, the mossy banks of
which are constantly adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving
waterfall, even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. The
whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly different--a bit of Swiss
scenery root-dug and brought to the West Coast of the United States.
After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, fascinating
canyons to be threaded for many miles besides the twistings of a
melancholy river, then--of a sudden--open country, farmers growing green
things, ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles plowing them
dustier still, little towns, more ranches--everything in California from
two to two million acres is a ranch--then a grinding of air-brakes and
your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red-covered
time-table to locate the station upon it. As for you, you don't care
about what station it really may be. It is a station. You are sure of
that. There is the familiar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept
lawn that abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and the
palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense of your mentality.
This is the real California. The mountains have already become
accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own
before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland,
a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little
unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a
land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants--December,
January and February--and calls itself summer the whole year round.
This palm has brought you to a sense of your location--to California.
The romance that has been spelled into you of a distant land, and of the
men who toiled that it become a great state peopled with great cities,
of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon it, came
into your heart and soul and body at the first glimpse of that tree.
Before the train is under way again your camera has been called into
action--mental processes are supplemented by a permanent record
chemically etched upon a film of celluloid.
After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these little yellow depots
and more of these rarely beautiful palms standing beside them. The
ranches multiply, this valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing.
Growth stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation.
California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And again and again
you will be declaring it the most mountainous of all our states. The
flat-lands carry you beyond daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a
glow of arc reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento a
dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, a halt at a
junction station, and mail is being gathered from the impromptu
literature makers on our train to go east. The main line is reached. And
a little later the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of
the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might declare that
Holland, not Switzerland, had been transplanted into California. The sea
laughs at bridges, and so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great
ferryboat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger
locomotive--all of us together. For twenty minutes we slip across the
water, breathing fresh air once again and standing in the ferry's bow
looking toward the shadowy outline of a high, black hill carelessly
punctuated here and there by yellow points of light. A new land is
always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mysterious, doubly
fascinating.
The ferry boat fast to its bridge, the locomotive is no longer an
impotent thing. We are making the last stage of a long trip across the
continent by rail. The little towns are multiplying. The subtle
prescience of a great city is upon us. We turn west, then south and the
suburban villages are shouldering one another all the more closely the
entire way. We skirt and barely miss Berkeley, hesitate at Oakland and
then come to a grinding final stop at the end of a pier that juts itself
far out beyond the shallow reaches of San Francisco bay. Again there is
a ferry boat--a capacious craft not unlike those craft upon which we
have ridden time and time again between Staten island and the tip of
Manhattan--and when its screws have ceased to turn we will finally be in
the real San Francisco, reached as a really great metropolis may be
reached, after an infinitude of time and trouble. It is still
October--the warmest month of the year in the city by the Golden
Gate--and the girls and their young men fill the long benches on the
open decks of the ferry. The wind blows soft from the Pacific, and
straight ahead is San Francisco--a mystery of yellow illumination rising
from the water's edge.
As the ferry makes her course, the goal is less and less of a mystery.
Street lights begin to give some sort of half-coherent form to the high
hills that make the amphitheater site of San Francisco, they dip in even
lines to show the course of straight avenues. A great beer sign changes
and rechanges in spelling its lively message, there is a moon-faced
clock held aloft, you pinch your memory sharply, and then know that it
must be the tower of the great ferry-house, the conspicuous waterfront
land-mark of San Francisco.
In another five minutes you are passing under that tower--a veritable
gate-keeper of the city--and facing up Market street; from the beginning
its undisputed chief thoroughfare. A taxicab is standing there. You
throw your hand-baggage into it, come tumbling after, yourself. There is
a confusion of street-lights, a momentary intimacy of a trolley car
running alongside--a little later the glare and confusion of a hotel
lobby, the fascinating fuss of getting yourself settled in a strange
town. There is a double witchery in approaching a great new city at
night.
In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that same strange town
in the clarity of early sunshine, to have this great street or that or
that--Market or Geary or Powell--stretching forth as if longing to
invite your explorations--here again is the fascination of travel. The
big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in quick succession, and
for an instant their appeal is strong. But over there is a car of
another sort, running on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an
endless cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little cars upon
those narrow tracks interest you. They are as gaily colored and as
bravely striped as any circus wagon of boyhood days, and when you pay
your fare you can take your choice--between the interior of a stuffy
little cabin amidships or open seats at either end arranged after the
time-honored fashion of Irish jaunting cars. San Franciscans do not
hesitate. They range themselves along the open seats of the dinky cars
and look proud as toads as the cars go clanking up the awful hills.
The San Francisco cable car is in a transportation class by itself. It
clings tenaciously to early traditions. For in San Francisco the cable
railroad was born--and in San Francisco the cable railroad still
remains. One Andrew S. Halladie was its inventor--somewhere early in the
"seventies." Up Clay street hill, and to know and appreciate the slope
of Clay street hill one must have seen it once at least, Halladie's
first car struggled, while its passengers held their breaths just as
first-comers to San Francisco still hold their breaths as they ride up
and down the fearful hills. The telegraph told to the whole land how a
street railroad was running on a rope out in that little-known land of
marvels--California. But the telegraph could not tell what the railroad
on a rope meant to San Francisco--San Francisco encompassed and held in
by her high sand hills. The Clay street cable road had conquered one of
the meanest of these hills and they began to plan other roads of a
similar sort. Like a blossoming and growing vine the city spread, almost
overnight. Sand-dunes became building-lots of high value and a new
bonanza era was come to San Francisco. And, with the traditional
generosity of the coast, she gave her transportation idea to other
cities. In a little while St. Louis, Chicago, Washington and New York
were banishing the horse cars from their busiest streets. A new era in
city transit was begun.
A few years later the broomstick trolley--cheaper and in many respects
far more efficient--displaced the cable-cars in many of these cities.
But San Francisco up to the present time has stuck loyally to her
old-time hill conquerors. And the nervous lever-clutch of the gripman as
he "gets the rope" is as distinctive of her as are the fantasies of her
marvelous wooden architecture.
Some of the cable cars have disappeared--they began to go in those
wonderful years of reconstruction right after the fire, and they are
already obsolete in the city's chief thoroughfare, Market street. The
others remain. Over on Pacific avenue is a little line that the San
Franciscans dearly love, for it is particularly reminiscent of the trams
that used to clatter through Market street before the fire--a diminutive
summer-house in front and pulling an immaculate little horseless horse
car behind. Eventually all will go. One road's franchise has already
expired and upon it San Francisco is today maintaining the first
municipally operated street car line in any metropolitan city of
America. If the experiment in Geary street succeeds, and it is being
carefully operated with such a hope clearly in view, it will probably be
extended to the cable lines when their franchises expire and they revert
automatically to the city.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Where the Pacific rolls up to San Francisco]
The distinctive mannerisms of San Francisco are changing--slowly but
very surely indeed. Some of them still remain, however, in greater or
less force. At the restaurants, in the shops and in the hotels you
receive your change in "hard money"--gold and silver coin. Your real San
Franciscan will have nothing else. There is something about the
substantial feeling of a coin, something about the tinkling of a handful
of it that runs straight to the bottom of his heart. Since the
fire--which worked ever more fearful havoc with San Francisco comforts
than with the physical structure of the city--the use of paper money has
increased. But your true Californian will have none of it. When he goes
east and they give him paper money he fusses and fumes about
it--inwardly at least. He thinks that it may slip out of that pesky
inner pocket or vest or coat. He wants gold--a handful of it in his
trousers-pocket to jingle and to stay put. And as for pennies. You who
count yourself of the East will have to come east once again before you
pocket such copper trash--they will have none of them upon the West
Coast. Small change may be anything else but it is not Western.
"Western," did we say?
Hold on. San Francisco is not western. California is not western. To
call either western is to commit an abomination approaching the use of
the word "Frisco."
"California is to all purposes, practical and social--a great island,"
your San Franciscan will explain to you. "To the east of us lies
another dividing sea--the broad miles of desert and of mountains, and so
broad is it that Hong Kong or Manila or Yokohama seem nearer to us than
Chicago or St. Louis. We recognize nothing west of New York and
Washington. Between is that vast space--the real West--which fast trains
and good, bridge in a little more than four days. In there is your
West--Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado--all the rest of
that fine family of American states.
"In Los Angeles, now, it is different. The lady that you take out upon
your arm there is probably from Davenport or Kokomo or Indianapolis,
whether she will admit it or not. Los Angeles is western. We are not. We
are 'the Coast' and be exceeding careful, young man, how you say it."
He has spoken the truth. Your typical San Franciscan is quite as well
versed in the streets and shops and hotels of London, Paris and Vienna,
as your typical New Yorker or Bostonian. The four days bridging across
the North American continent is no more to him than the Hudson river
ferries to the commuter from New Jersey. His city is cosmopolitan--and
he is proud of it. Her streets are cosmopolitan and so are her shops and
her great hotels. To the stately Palace reared from the site of the old,
and with a new glass-covered court rivaling the glories of its
predecessor, still come princes and diplomats, globe-trotters of every
sort and bearing in their train wondrous luggage of every sort,
prosperous miners from the North, bankers from the East, Californians
from every corner of their great state, and look with curious interest
at the elect of San Francisco sipping their high tea there in the court
yard.
And the cosmopolitanism of the streets is still more marked. Portuguese,
Italian, sour-doughs from Alaska, hundreds of the little brown Japs who
are giving California such a tremendous worry these days, Indians,
French Kanakas, Mexicans, Chinese--the list might be run almost
interminably. Of these none are more interesting than the Chinese. You
see them in all the downtown quarters of San Francisco--the men with
that inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of
civilization seem to have given them, the women and the little girls, of
high caste or low, invariably hatless and wearing loose coat and
trousers--in many cases of brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And
when you come to their own city within a city--San Francisco's famous
Chinatown--they are the dominant folk upon the street. Of course the new
Chinatown is not the old--with its subterranean labyrinths of
unspeakable vileness and dirt, with danger and crime lurking in each of
its dark corners. That passed completely in the fire. But it had begun
to pass even before that great calamity. It was being exploited. Paid
guides, with a keen sense of the theatrical, were beginning to work the
damage. The "rubberneck wagons" were multiplying.
Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever.
Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings
than the old ever had. It does not lack color--by day, the treasures of
its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red
placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs
through Grant avenue--its chief thoroughfare--the swinging lanterns
above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted
and mysterious rooms along the way--the new Chinatown of San Francisco.
But it is now frankly commercial. The paid guides and the "rubberneck
wagons" have completed the ruin. If you are taken into an opium den, you
may be fairly sure that the entire performance has been staged for the
delectation of you and yours. For the real secrets even of the new
Chinatown are not shown to the unappreciative eyes of white folk.
At the edge of Chinatown slopes Portsmouth square and here the
cosmopolitanism of San Francisco reaches its high apex. Around it
chatters the babel of all tongues, beyond it stretches the "Barbary
Coast,"[G] that collection of vile, if picturesque resorts that
possesses a tremendous fascination for some San Franciscans and some
tourists but which has no place within the covers of this book. To
Portsmouth square come the representatives of all these little colonies
of babbling foreigners, the men who sail the seven seas--the flotsam and
the jetsam not alone of the Orient but of the whole wide world as well.
There is a little man who sits on one side of the square and who for a
very small sum will execute cubist art upon your cuticle. Among
tattooers he acknowledges but two superiors--a one-legged veteran who
plies his trade near the wharves of the Mersey, and a Hindu artist at
Calcutta. The little shops that line Portsmouth square are the little
shops of many peoples. Over their counters you can buy many things
practical, and many, many more of the most impractical things in all the
world. And the new Hall of Justice rises above the square in the precise
site of the old.
[G] As this goes to press a "vice crusade" has swept San
Francisco and the "Barbary Coast" has been forced to close
its doors. It is not unlikely that they may be opened once
again. E. H.
Portsmouth square has played its part in the history of San Francisco.
From it the modern city dates. It was the plaza of the old Spanish town,
and within this plaza Commodore Montgomery of the American sloop-of-war
_Portsmouth_ first raised the Stars and Stripes--in the strenuous days
of the Mexican war. After that the stirring days of gold-times with the
vigilantes conducting hangings on the flat roofs of the neighboring
houses of adobe. Portsmouth square indeed has played its part in the
history of San Francisco.
"Portsmouth square," you begin to say, "Portsmouth square--was it not
Portsmouth square that Stevenson--"
Precisely so. There are still some of the shop-keepers about that
ancient plaza who can recall the thin figure of the poet and dreamer who
loafed lazy days in that open space--hobnobbing with sailors and the
strange dark-skinned vagabond folk from overseas. There is a single
monument in the square today--a smooth monolith upon whose top there
rests a ship, its sails full-bellied to the wind but which never reaches
a port. Upon the smooth surface of that stone you may read:
TO REMEMBER
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
To be honest To be
kind--To earn a lit-
tle To spend a lit-
tle less--to make
upon the whole a
family happier for
his presence--To re-
nounce when that shall
be necessary and not
be embittered--To
keep a few friends but
these without capitula-
tion--Above all on
the same grim condition
to keep friends
with himself--Here is
a task for all that a
man has of fortitude
and delicacy
That is the lesson that Portsmouth square gives to the wanderers who
drag themselves today to its benches--the words that come as a sermon
from one who knew and who pitied wrecked humanity.
There are other great squares of San Francisco--and filled with
interest--perhaps none other more so than Union square, in the heart of
the fine retail section with its theaters and hotels and clubs. Of these
last there is none more famous than the Bohemian. More showy clubs has
San Francisco. The Pacific Union in its great brown-stone house upon the
very crest of Nob Hill, where in other days the bonanza millionaires
were wont to build their high houses so that they might look across the
housetops and see the highways in from the sea, has a home unsurpassed
by any other in the whole land. But the Bohemian does not get its fame
from its fine town club-house. Its "jinks" held in August in a great
cluster of giant redwood trees off in the wonderful California hills are
world-renowned. In the old days all that was necessary for a man to be a
Bohemian, beyond the prime requisite of being a good fellow, was that he
be able to sing a song, to tell a story or to write a verse. In these
days the Bohemian Club, like many other institutions that were simple in
the beginning, has waxed prosperous. Some of its members have rather
elaborate cottages in among the redwoods and go back and forth in
automobiles. But much of the old spirit remains. It is the spirit which
the San Franciscan tells you gave first American recognition to such an
artist as Luisa Tetrazzini, which many years ago gave such a welcome to
the then famous Lotta that the generous actress in a burst of generous
enthusiasm returned with the gift to the city of the Lotta fountain--at
one of the most famous of the Market street corners. It is the spirit
which makes San Francisco give to art or literature the quickest
appreciation of any city in America. It is, in fact, the same spirit
that gives to San Francisco the reputation of having the gayest night
life of any city in the world--with the possible exception of Paris.
Night life in a city means the intoxication of many lights, the creature
comfort of good restaurants. San Francisco does not lack either. When
the last glimmer of day has disappeared out over the Golden Gate, Market
street, Powell street, all the highways and the byways that lead into
them are ablaze with the incandescent glories of electricity. Commerce
and the city's lighting boards vie with one another in the splendor of
their offerings.
And as for the restaurants--San Francisco boasts of twelve hundred
hotels, alone. Each hotel has presumably at least one restaurant. And
some of the finest of the eating-places of the city at the Golden Gate
are solely restaurants. As a matter of real fact, San Francisco is the
greatest restaurant city on the continent--in proportion to her
population even greater than New York. In New York and more recently in
Chicago the so-called "kitchenette apartment" has come into great vogue
among tiny folks--two or three rooms, a bath and a very slightly
enlarged clothes-press in which a small gas or electric stove, a sink
and a refrigerator suffices for the preparation of light breakfasts and
lunches. Dinners are taken out. In San Francisco the "kitchenettes" are
omitted in thousands of apartments. All the meals are eaten in public
dining-rooms and the restaurants thrive wonderfully. The soft climate
does much to make this possible.
Living in these new apartments of San Francisco is a comparatively
simple matter. Your capital investment for house-keeping may be small. A
few chairs, a table or two, some linen--you are ready to begin.
Beds?
Bless your soul, the builder of the apartment house solved that problem
for you. Your bed is a masterpiece of architecture which lets down from
the wall, _à la Pullman_. By day it goes up against the wall again and
an ingenious arrangement of wall-shutters enables the bedding to air
throughout the entire day. In some cases the beds will let down either
within, or without, to a sleeping-porch, for your real San Franciscan
has a healthy sort of an animal love for living and sleeping in the
open. The glories of the open California country that lie within an hour
or two of the city tempt him into it each month of the year, and he is
impeccable in his horseback riding, his fishing and his shooting.
To return to the restaurants--a decided contrast to that rough life in
the open which he really loves--here is one, quite typical of the city.
It is gay, almost garish with color and with light. Its cabaret almost
amounts to an operatic performance and its proprietor will tell you with
no little pride that he was presenting this form of restaurant
entertainment long months before the idea ever reached New York. He will
also tell you that he changes the entire scheme of decoration each three
months--the San Franciscan mind is as volatile as it is appreciative.
Little Jap girls pass through the crowded tables bringing you hot tea
biscuits of a most delicious sort. Other girls, this time in Neapolitan
dress, are distributing flowers. The head-waiter bends over you and
suggests the salad with which you start your dinner, for it seems to be
the fashion in San Francisco restaurants to eat your salad before your
soup. The restaurant is a gay place, crowded. Late-comers must find
their way elsewhere. And the food is surprisingly good.
But we best remember a little restaurant just back of the California
market in Pine street--into which we stumbled of a Saturday night just
about dinner-time. It was an unpretentious place, with two musicians
fiddling for dear life in a tiny balcony. But the _table d'hôte_--price
one dollar, with a bottle of California wine after the fashion of all
San Francisco _table d'hôtes_--was perfection, the special dishes which
the waiter suggested even finer. _Soupe l'oignon_ that might linger in
the mind for a long time, a marvelous combination salad, chicken _bonne
femme_--which translated meant a chicken pulled apart, then cooked with
artichokes in a _casserole_, the whole smothered with a wonderful brown
gravy--there was a dinner, absolute in its simplicity yet leaving
nothing whatsoever to be wished. And a long time later we read that
Maurice Baring, author and globe-trotter, had visited the place and
pronounced its cookery the finest that he had ever tasted.
[Illustration: The Mission Dolores--San Francisco]
There are dozens of such little places in San Francisco--named after the
fashion of its shops in grotesque or poetic fashion--and they are almost
all of them good. There is little excuse for anything else in a town
whose very cosmopolitanism proclaims real cooks in the making, whose
wharves are rubbed by smack and schooner bringing in the food treasures
of the sea, whose farms are vast truck gardens for the land, whose
markets run riot in the richest of edibles. Your San Franciscan is
nothing if not an epicure. It is hardly fair, however, to assume that he
is a glutton or that he merely lives to eat. For he is, in reality, so
very much more--optimistic, generous, brave--and how he does delight to
experiment. California is still in the throes of what seems to be a
social and political earthquake, with each shake growing a little more
rough than its predecessor. She has just overturned most of her
political ideals for the first fifty years of her life. She delights in
politics. She really lives. San Francisco, standing between those two
great schools of thought, the University of California at Berkeley, and
Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto, prides herself upon her growing
intellectuality. From the folk who dally with advanced thought of every
sort down to those who are merely puzzled and dissatisfied, the
population of this Californian metropolis demands a new order of things.
That as much as anything else explains the recent political revolutions.
Since the great fire, the plans for those revolutions have been under
progress.
The mention of that fire--if you make any pretense to diplomacy you must
never call it an earthquake around the Golden Gate--brings us back to
the San Francisco of today. You look up and down Market street for
traces of that fire--and in vain. The city looks modern, after the
fashion of cities of the American west, but its buildings do not seem to
have arisen simultaneously after the scourge that leveled
them--simultaneously. But turn off from Market street, to the south
through Second or Third streets or north through any of the parallel
throughfares that lead out of that same main-stem of San Francisco.
Now the fullness of that disaster--which was not more to you at the time
than the brilliancy of newspaper dispatches--comes home to you for the
first time. In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melancholy
ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others beyond in rapid
succession. On the side streets, fragments of "party-walls," a bit of
crumbling arch, a stout standing chimney remind you of the San Francisco
that was and that can never be again. When you go out Market street, you
may see where stood the pretentious City Hall--today a stretch of
foundation-leveled ruins with a single surviving dome still devoted to
the business of the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the
disaster you must make your way into San Francisco's wonderful Golden
Gate Park, past the single standing marble doorway of the old Towne
house--a pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old San
Francisco--and straight up to the crest of the high lifted Strawberry
Hill. On that hill there stood until the eighteenth of April, 1906, a
solid two-storied stone observatory. It seemed to be placed there for
all time, but today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome--a half
circle of its double row of arches still standing but the weird ruin
bringing back the most tragic five minutes that an American city has
ever spent. Or if you will go a little farther, an hour on a
quick-moving suburban train will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains
of Leland Stanford University, that remarkable institution whose museum
formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's gowns and a _papier-mache_
reproduction of a breakfast once eaten by a member of her family.
It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was
wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of
its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the
dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The
chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so
many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say
nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that
April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the
master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe
to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the
quadrangle has been in part eradicated.
For Leland Stanford University today represents one of the bravest
attempts ever made in this land to repair an all but irreparable loss.
It has never lost either faith and hope, and so the visitor to its
campus today will see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of
the buildings of what was one of the "show universities" of the land.
With a patience that must have been infinite, the stones of the old
chapel have been sorted out of the ruin--even fragments of the intricate
mosaics have been carefully saved--numbered and placed in sequence for
re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave and transepts is up again
and the tedious work of erecting the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland
Stanford has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco--the
city that would not be defeated.
To analyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all but impossible.
Incident upon incident will show it in all its phases. For instance,
there was in San Francisco on the morning of the earthquake a
sober-minded German citizen who had put his all into a new business--a
business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of his investment. When
Nature awoke from her long sleep and stretching began to rock the city
by the Golden Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and
daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms and frantic with
terror.
"Papa! Papa!" they shrieked. "We are going to die. It is the end of the
world--the business is gone. We are going to die!"
He smiled quietly at them.
"Well, what of it?" he asked quietly. "We die together--and in San
Francisco."
A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could capitalize
sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul in mere dollars and
cents. What price could he give for a love and loyalty of that sort?
That was, and still is, the affection that every San Franciscan from the
ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost hill gives to
his city--it is the thing that makes her one of the few American towns
that possess distinctive personality.
A young matron told us of her own experience on the morning of the fire.
"Of course it was exciting," she said, "with the smoke rolling up upon
us from downtown, and the rumors repeating themselves that the disaster
was world-wide, that Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a
tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single bit of it. I
bundled my children together and hurried toward the Presidio--my
knowledge of army men assured me that there could be no danger there. I
took the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keeping in it.
It still seemed very real and not so very difficult.
"But when those odd little newspapers--that had been printed over in
Oakland--came, and I saw the first of their head-lines 'San Francisco in
Ruins' then it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and it
was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the world and I cried
all that night, not for a single loss beyond that of the San Francisco
that I had loved. But the next morning they told me how they had
telegraphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morning I
began planning a new house just as if it had been a pet idea for months
and months and months...."
* * * * *
Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco
may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is
painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San
Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great
disaster. More than $375,000,000--a sum approximating the cost of the
Panama canal--has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now,
like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal,
the western metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional
$18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone
before." That takes financing--of a high order. It takes something more.
It has taken a real spirit--enthusiasm and love and courage--to build a
new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories
of the city that was.
20
BELFAST IN AMERICA
Concerning Toronto it may be said that she combines in a somewhat
unusual fashion British conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat
streets are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as delight
the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find them; and yet she has
among these "the tallest skyscraper of the British Empire," although the
sixteen stories of its altitude would be laughed to scorn by many a
second-class American city.
Still, many a first-class American city could hardly afford to laugh at
the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself
that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history
and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more
difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war
of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a
mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as
York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the
place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little
place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was
granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine
thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other
appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today
in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels
of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the
Dominion.
But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge
that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her
population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of
Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today
can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a
dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in
the American fashion--to use that word in its broadest sense.
And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows--not more
American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or
thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a
Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town
markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys
and the wherefores of this.
We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the
folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the
Loyalists--"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire
Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them--who fled
from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite
impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of
Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of
the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose
doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact
replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its
proprietors a century and a half ago.
Those Loyalists laid the foundations of Toronto of today. The
municipality of Toronto of today is, as you shall see, most progressive
in the very fibers of its being, ranking with such cities as Des Moines
and Cleveland and Boston as among the best governed upon the North
American continent. Such civic progress was not drawn from the cities
of England or of Scotland or of Ireland. And Toronto was a well
organized and governed municipality, while Glasgow and Manchester were
hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Because in Toronto
the old New England town-meeting idea worked to its logical triumph. The
Loyalists who had left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought
more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely fine clothes or
family plate.
To this social foundation of the town came, as stock for her growth
through the remaining three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the folk
of the north of Ireland. The southern counties of the Emerald Island
gave to America and gave generously--to New York and to Boston; to New
Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The men from the north of Ireland went to
Toronto and the nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario.
And when Toronto became a real city they began to call her the Belfast
of America. For such she was. She was a very citadel of Protestantism.
Her folk transplanted, found that they would worship God in their
austere churches without having the reproachful phrase of "dissenter"
constantly whipped in their faces. Toronto meant toleration. So came the
Ulster men to their new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came--a
great migrating army. And if you would know the way they took root give
heed to a single illustration.
One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little
city of Toronto. It thrived--tremendously. News of its success went back
to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.
"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that passed
through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took
good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper.
Today the firm has two great stores--one in Toronto and one in
Winnipeg--and they are not only among the largest in North America but
among the largest in the world.
This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when,
after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin
left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side
of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.
No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started,
but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of
the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it
has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish
immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads
have shown that it pays to advertise.
There is good reason for this immigration--of course. Canada, with no
little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers.
She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs.
The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come
to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship piers, at Quebec
and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter,
are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the
strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York.
They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young
nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and
progress.
And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of
Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west
of it draining old England. It is related that one little English
village--Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire--has
been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago and it
boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in
America--a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you
please--and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened
charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land
that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of
so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in
His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross
Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria.
Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call
Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost
in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an
Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from
hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.
But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so
your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of
his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her
damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the
car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him
and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town
that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from
Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool--even London itself. The little
red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively
British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the
States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the
street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro
servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better
grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British
model--even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the
table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a
distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to
stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish
and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to
the cockney heart.
* * * * *
Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an
industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of
Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland--alongside of the
greatest ports of the world--for Ontario is the lonely sister of the
five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But
Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still
multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just
intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her
industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men.
They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the
town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The
street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive
the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they
fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a
high degree of intellectual effort.
Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems
willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used
to municipal street railroads and such schemes and the New England
town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come
home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto
may groan under its burden--it is paying over a million dollars this
year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a
private corporation. But the Englishman of that city merely grunts at
the bargains it offers--six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours,
ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same
price--and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger
that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"
Toronto will see that they do better--that is her vision into the
future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan
ideas of the town--there is another question. Here is a single one of
the new puzzling points--the temperance problem. It was not so very long
ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her
whiskey--and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is
ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July--which you will
probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne--used to
be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in
Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the
temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities
have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have
been without saloons today--if it had not been for the English invasion.
For your Englishman regards his beer as food--"skittles and beer" is
something more than merely proverbial--and he must have it. He looks
complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto--Sunday in an English
city is rarely a hilarious occasion--but he must have his beer. Up to
the present time he has had it.
But these problems are slight compared with the problem of assimilation
of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past
two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all,
and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her
politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an
enthusiasm of a distinct sort. With all of his anti-American and
pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his
own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as
much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open
question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played
in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in
providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands
is undisputed.[H] The Englishman is no small factor in Canadian
politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the
city of Toronto.
[H] This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose
enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.
Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your
attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal
entertainments a-plenty--dinners, balls, receptions--a great new castle
is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and
presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from
Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you
may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For
those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach,
Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in
Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake.
There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing,
canoeing--the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder
seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even
cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and
iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with
good health.
In the autumn there is the big fair--officially the Canadian National
Exhibition--which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real
institution. Last year nearly a million persons entered its gates,
there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very
big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as
Australia--there were special excursion rates from all but three of the
United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing
larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of
it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is
not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one
autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign
poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the
genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British
banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read:
ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION
* * * * *
To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must go to her in May--at
the time of her spring races. The fair is very much like any of the
great fairs in the United States. The race-meet is distinctly different.
In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill-repute, and most
of the famous tracks around our larger cities have been cut up into
building lots. The sport with us was commercialized, ruined, and then
practically forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although the
tendency to make the sport entirely professional and so not sport at all
has begun to show itself even over there. But in Toronto they go to
horse-races for the love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making
a living without working for it.
The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's Guineas. It is
at the Woodbine and in addition to being the oldest racing fixture in
America it is also just such a day for Canada as Derby Day is for
England. If you go to Toronto for Plate Day--as they call that great
race-day--you will be wise to have your hotel accommodations engaged
well in advance. You will find Plate Day to be the Saturday before the
twenty-fourth of May. And, lest you should have forgotten the
significance of the twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that
for sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as the
Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most tender tribute that
the Canadians can render Victoria--their adherence to her birthday as
the greatest of their national holidays.
If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will
reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront
which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger
within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still
support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats
wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents
of the employés are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you
will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English
would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of
hospitality.
From it you will drive out to the track, and if you elect you can find
seats upon a tally-ho, drawn by four or six horses, properly prancing,
just as they prance in old sporting-prints. Of course, there are
ungainly motor-cars, like those in which the country folk explore
Broadway, New York, but you will surely cling to the tally-ho. And if
your tally-ho be halted in the long and dusty procession to the track to
let a coach go flying by, if that coach be gay in gilt and color,
white-horsed, postilioned, if rumor whispers loudly, "It's the
Connaughts--the Governor-General, you know," you will forget for that
moment your socialistic and republican ideas, and strain your old eyes
for a single fleeting glimpse of bowing royalty.
For royalty drives to Plate Day just as royalty drives to Ascot. Its
box, its manners and its footmen are hardly less impressive. And in the
train of royalty comes the best of Toronto, not the worst. Finely
dressed women, jurists, doctors, bankers--the list is a long, long one.
And in their train in turn the artisans. The plumber who tinkers with
the pipes in your hotel in the morning has a dollar up on the "plate,"
so has the porter who handles your trunk, so have three-quarters of the
trolley-car men of the town--and yet they are not gamblers. The "tout"
who used to be a disagreeable and painfully evident feature of New York
racing is missing. So are the professional gamblers, the betting being
on the _pari-mutuel_ system. And the man who loses his dollar because he
failed to pick the winning horse feels that he has lost it in a
patriotic cause. It should be worth a miserable dollar to see royalty
come to the races in a coach.
* * * * *
From Toronto we will go to her staunch French rival, Montreal. If we are
in the midsummer season we may go upon a very comfortable steamer, down
the lonely Ontario and through the beauties of the Thousand Islands. And
at all seasons we will find the railroad ride from Toronto filled with
interest, with glimpses of lake and river, with the character of the
country gradually changing, the severe Protestant churches giving way to
great tin-roofed Roman churches, holding their crosses on high and
gathering around their gray-stone walls the houses of their little
flocks.
21
WHERE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MEET
Our hotel faces a little open square and in the springtime of the year,
when the trees are barely budding, we can still see the sober gray-stone
houses on the far side of the square, each with its brightly colored
green blinds. At one is the "Dentiste," at another the "Avocat," a third
has descended to a _pension_ with its "Chamber d'Louer." There are shiny
brass signs on the front of each of these three old houses, and every
morning at seven-thirty o'clock three trim little French Canadian maids
attack the signs vigorously with their wiping cloths. Then we know that
it is time to get up. By the same fashion we should be shaved and ready
for our marmalade and bacon and eggs as the regal carrier of the King's
mail trots down the steps of the French consulate and rings at the area
door of the neighboring "Conservatoire Musicale." In a very little time
that row of houses across the Place Viger Gardens has become a factor in
our very lives. It is the starting-point of our days.
In the morning, when the marmalade and the bacon and eggs are finished,
we step out into the Gardens for the first breath of crisp fresh air of
the north. There is a line of wonderful cabs waiting at its edge, and a
prompt driver steps forward from each to solicit our patronage. The cab
system of Montreal is indeed wonderful--it first shows to the stranger
within that city's gates its remarkable continental character. For you
seemingly can ride and ride and ride--and then some more--and the cabby
tips his hat at a quarter or a half a dollar. He has an engaging way of
smiling at you at the end of the trip, and leaving it to you as to what
he gets. You can trust to the Montreal cabby's sense of fairness and he
seems to feel that he can trust to yours. But that is not all quite as
altruistic as it may seem at first glance. Back of the cabby's smile is
the unsmiling, sober sense of justice always existent in a British city,
and it is that which really keeps the Montreal cab service as efficient
as it really is, as cheap and as accessible. For at every one of the
almost innumerable open squares of the city, are the cab-stands, the
long line of patiently waiting carriages, and the little kiosk from
which they can be summoned. It is all quite simple and complete and an
ideal toward which metropolitan New York may be aspiring but has never
reached.
* * * * *
On sunny mornings we scorn the cabs and stroll across the Gardens.
Sometimes we drop for a moment on one of the clumsily comfortable
benches under the shade of the Canadian maples, and glance at the
morning paper--a ponderous sheet much given to the news of Ottawa and
London, discoursing upon the work of two Parliaments, but only granting
grudging paragraphs to the news of a home-land, scarce sixty miles
distant. That is British policy, the straining policy of trying to make
a unified nation of lands separated from one another by broad seas. That
England has done it so well is the marvel of strangers who enter her
dominions. Montreal is loyal to her mother land, despite some local
influences which we shall see in a moment. A surprising number of her
citizens go back and forth to the little island that governs her, once
or twice or three times a year. There are thousands of business men in
the metropolis of Canada who know Pall Mall or Piccadilly far more
intimately than either Wall street or Times square--and New York is
but a night's ride from Montreal. So much can carefully directed
sentiment accomplish.
The paths that lead from the Gardens are varied and fascinating. One
stretches up a broad and sober street to Ste. Catherine's, the great
shopping promenade of the town, where the girls are all bound west
toward the big shops that stretch from Phillips to Dominion
squares--another at the opposite direction three blocks to the south and
the harbor-front, a wonderful place now in a chaos of transformation
that is going to make Montreal the most efficient port in the world. We
can remember the water-front of the old town as it first confronted us a
quarter of a century ago, after a long all-day trip down the rapids of
the upper St. Lawrence--back of the gay shipping a long stretch of sober
gray limestone buildings, accented by numerous domes, the joy of every
British architect, the long straight front of Bonsecours market, the
little spire of Bonsecours church, and the two great towers of Notre
Dame rising above it all. There was a curving wall of stone along the
quay street and it all seemed quite like the geography pictures of
Liverpool, or was it Marseilles?
[Illustration: A church parade in the streets of Montreal]
Nowadays that quiet prospect is gone. A great waterside elevator of
concrete rises almost two hundred and fifty feet into the air from the
quay street; there are other elevators nearly as large and nearly as
sky-scraping, a variety of grim and covered piers and the man from a
boat amidstream hardly catches even a glimpse of Notre Dame or
Bonsecours. And Montreal gave up her glimpses of the river that she
loves so passionately, not without a note of regret; the market-men
gently protested that they could no longer sit on the portico of the
Bonsecours and see the brisk activity of the harbor. But Montreal
realizes the importance of her harbor to her. She is a thousand miles
inland from "blue water" and for five months of the year her great
strength giving river is tightly frozen; despite these obstacles she has
come within the past year to be the most efficient port in the world,
and among twelve or fourteen of the greatest. And commercial power is a
laurel branch to any British city.
There are other paths that lead from Place Viger Gardens--that lead on
and on and to no place in particular, but all of them are filled with
constant interest. The side streets of Montreal are fascinating. Their
newer architecture is apt to be fantastic, ofttimes incongruous, but
there are still many graystone houses in that simple British style that
is still found throughout the older Canada, all the way from Halifax to
the Detroit river. There are the inevitable maple trees along the curbs
that make Montreal more of a garden city than unobservant travelers are
apt to fancy it. And then there are the institutions, wide-spreading and
many-winged fellows, crowned with the inevitable domes and shielded from
the vulgarity of street traffic by high-capped walls. These walls are
distinctive of Montreal. Often uncompromising, save where some gentle
vine runs riot upon their lintels and laughs at their austerity, they
are broken here and there and again by tightly shut doors, doors that
open only to give forth on rare occasions; to let a somber file of nuns
or double one of cheaply uniformed children pass out into a sordid and
sin-filled world, and then close quickly once again lest some of its
contaminations might penetrate the gentle and unworldly place. And near
these great institutions are the inevitable churches, giant
affairs--parish churches still dominating the sky-line of a town which
is just now beginning to dabble in American skyscrapers, and standing
ever watchful, like a mother hen brooding and protecting her chicks.
These chance paths often lead to other squares than the Gardens of the
Place Viger--squares which in spring and in summer are bright green
carpets spread in little open places in the heart and length and
breadth of the city, and which are surrounded by more of the solid
graystone houses with the green blinds. When we go from Montreal we
shall remember it as a symphony of gray and green--remember it thus
forever and a day.
But best of all we like the path that leads from the Place Viger west
through the very heart of the old city and then by strange zig-zags,
through the banking center, Victoria square, Beaver Hall Hill and smart
Ste. Catherine's to Dominion square and the inevitable afternoon tea of
the British end of the town. We turn from our hotel and the great new
railroad terminal that it shelters, twist through a narrow
street--picturesquely named the Champ d'Mars--and follow it to the plain
and big City Hall and Court House. They are uninteresting to us, but
across the busy way of Notre Dame street stands the Chateau de Ramezay,
a long, low, whitewashed building, which has had its part in the making
of Montreal. This stoutly built old house was built in 1705 by Claude de
Ramezay, Governor of Montreal, and was occupied by him for twenty years
while he planned his campaigns against both English and Indians. Then
for a time it was the headquarters of the India company's trade in furs,
and for a far longer time after 1759 the home of a succession of British
governors. Americans find their keenest interest in the Chateau de
Ramezay, in the fact that it was in its long rambling low-ceilinged
rooms that Benjamin Franklin set up his printing-press, away back during
the days of the first unpleasantness between England and this country.
After that, all was history, the Chateau was again the Government House
of the old Canada--until Ottawa and the new Dominion came into
existence. Nowadays, it faces one of the busiest streets of a busy
city--and is not of it. It is like a sleeping man by the roadside, who,
if he might awake once more, could spin at length the romances of other
days and other men.
Beyond the Chateau de Ramezay is a broad and open market street that
stretches from the inevitable Nelson monument, that is part and pride of
every considerable British city, down to that same water-front, just now
in process of transformation. Sometimes on a Tuesday or a Friday morning
we have come to the place early enough to see the open-air market of
Montreal, one of the heritages of past to present that seems little
disturbed with the coming and the passing of the years. Shrewd shoppers
coming out of the solid stone mass of the Bonsecours pause beside the
wagons that are backed along the broad-flagged sidewalks. The country
roundabout Montreal must be filled with fat farms. One look at the
wagons tells of low moist acres that have not yet lost their fertility.
And sometimes the market women bring to the open square hats of their
own crude weaving, or little carved crosses, or even bunches of delicate
wild-flowers and sell them for the big round Canadian pennies. There is
hardly any barterable article too humble for this market-place, and with
it all the clatter of small sharp pleasant talk between a race of small,
sharp, pleasant folk.
From the market-place leading out from before the ugly City Hall and the
uninteresting Court House, our best walk leads west through Notre Dame
street up to the nearby Place d'Armes. It is a very old street of a very
old city and even if the history of the town did not tell us that some
of the old houses, staunch fellows every one of them, high-roofed and
dormered, with their graystone walls four and five feet thick and as
rough and rugged as the times for which they were built, would convince
us, of themselves. They are fast going, these old fellows, for Montreal
has entered upon boom times with the multiplication of transcontinental
railroads across Canada. But it seems but yesterday that they could
point to us in the Place d'Armes the very house in which lived LaMothe
Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, nearby the house of Sieur Duluth.
Montreal seems almost to have been the mother of a continent.
* * * * *
It is in this Place d'Armes, this tiny crowded square in the center of
the modern city, hardly larger than the garden of a very modest house
indeed, that so many of the romantic memories of the old Montreal
cluster. With the great church that has thrust its giant shadow across
it for more than three quarters of a century, the Place d'Armes has been
the heart of Montreal since the days when it was a mere trading post, a
collection of huts at the foot of the lowest rapids of the mighty river.
Much of the old Montreal has gone, even the citadel at the west end of
the town gave way years ago to Dalhousie square, which in turn gave way
to the railroad yards of the Place Viger terminals. But the Place
d'Armes will remain as long as the city remains.
At its northwest corner is the colonnaded front of the Bank of Montreal,
one of the finest banking-homes in Canada.
"It is the great institution of this British Dominion," says a very old
Canadian, whom we sometimes meet in the little square. "It is the
greatest bank in North America."
Offhand, we do not know as to the exact truth of that sweeping
statement, but it is a certain fact that the Bank of Montreal is the
greatest bank in all Canada, one of the greatest in the world, with its
branches and ramifications extending not only across a continent four
thousand miles in width but also over two broad seas. To Montreal it
stands as that famous "old lady of Threadneedle street" stands to
London.
"And yet," our Canadian friend continues, "right across the Place
d'Armes here is an institution that could buy and sell the Bank of
Montreal--or better still, buy it and keep it."
Our eyes follow his pointing hand--to a long, low building on the south
side of the little square. It is very old and exceeding quaint. Although
built of the graystone of Montreal, brought by the soot of many years to
almost a dead black, it seems of another land as well as of another
time. Its quaint belfry with delicate clock-face and out-set hands is
redolent of the south of France or Spain or even Italy. It does not seem
a part and parcel of Our Lady of the Snows--and yet it is.
"You know--the Seminary of St. Sulpice," says our Canadian friend. "It
was the original owner of the rich island of Montreal. No one knows its
wealth today, even after it has parted with many of its fee-holds. It
still holds title to thousands of acres and no one save the Gentleman of
the Corporation of St. Sulpice, themselves, knows the wealth of the
institution. To say that it is the richest ecclesiastical institution of
the Americas is not enough, for here is an organization that for
coherency, wealth and strength surpasses Standard Oil and forms the
chief financial support of the strongest church in the world."
And this time we feel that our acquaintance of the Place d'Armes is not
by any chance over-stepping the mark. In the quaint little Seminary that
stands in the half-day shadow of the second largest church on the
continent--a church that it easily builded in the first third of the
nineteenth century from its accumulated wealth--there centers much of
the mystery of Montreal, a mystery which to the stranger takes concrete
form in the high walls along the crowded streets, in whispered rumors of
this force or that working within the politics of the city, in the
so-called Nationalist movement, and flaunts itself in rival displays of
Union Jack and the historic Tricolor of France. There is little of
mystery in the outer form of the Seminary. The quiet folk who live
within those very, very old walls are hospitality itself--even though
their ascetic living is of the hardest, crudest sort. The only bed and
carpeted room within the building is reserved for the occasional visits
of bishop, or even higher church authority. But hidden from the street
by the earliest part of the Seminary--almost unchanged since its
erection in 1710--and enclosed by a quadrangle of the fortress-like
stone buildings of the institution, is a most delicious garden with
old-fashioned summer flowers and quaint statues of favored saints set in
its shaded place. We remember a garden of the same sort at the mission
of Santa Barbara, in California. These two are the most satisfactory
gardens that we have ever seen. And it is from the rose-bushes in the
Seminary of Montreal that one gets a full idea of the size and beauty of
the exterior of the parish church of Notre Dame. Like so many of the
cathedrals of Europe, it is so set as to have no satisfactory view-point
from the street.
And yet Notre Dame is one of the most satisfying churches that we have
ever seen. It is not alone its size, not alone its wonderfully
appropriate location facing that historic Place d'Armes, not any one of
the interesting details of the great structure that comes to us, so much
as the thing which the parish church typifies--the intact keeping of the
customs, the language and the faith of a folk who were betrayed and
deserted by their motherland, more than a century and a half ago. One
rarely hears the word of English spoken in the shadowy and worshipful
aisles of Notre Dame. It is the babbling French that is the language of
three-quarters of the residents of Montreal.
For there stands French, not only entrenched in the chief city of
England's chief possession, but a language that, in the opinion of
unprejudiced observers, gains rather than loses following each
twelvemonth. There are reasons back of all this, and many of them too
complicated and involved to be entered upon here. Suffice it to say here
and now that the city school taxes are divided pro rata between
Protestants and Roman Catholics for the conduct of their several schools
of every sort. And that in most of the Catholic schools French is
practically the only language taught, a half-hour a day being sometimes
given to English, whenever it is taught at all. The devotion of these
French Canadians to their language is only second to their religion, and
is closely intermingled with it. There is something pathetic and lovable
about it all that makes one understand why the _habitans_ of a little
town below Montreal tore down the English sign that the Dominion
government erected over their Post Office, a year or so ago. And the
Dominion government took the hint, made no fuss, but replaced its error
with a French sign. Remember that there are more Tricolors floating in
lower Canada than British Union Jacks.
The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must
be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places
them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other.
This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the
flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a
British institution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its
brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.
To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh
ineffaceable. It is to bring back in future years recollections of a
great church, lifted from its week-day shadows by a wealth of dazzling
incandescents, to be ushered past silent, kneeling figures to a stout
pew, by a stout _Suisse_ in gaudy uniform; to look to a high altar that
stands afar and ablaze with candles, while priests and acolytes, by the
hundreds, pass before it chanting, and the Cardinal sits aloft on his
throne silent and in adoration; to hear not a word of English from that
high place or the folk who sit upon the great floor or in the two
encircling galleries, but to catch the refrain of chant and of "Te
Deum;" these are the things that seem to make religion common to every
man, no matter what his professed faith. And then, after it is all over,
to come out of the shadows of the parish church into the brilliant
sunshine of the Place d'Armes, the place where they once executed
murderers under the old French law by breaking their backs and then
their lesser bones, and to hear Gros Bourdon sing his chant over the
city from the belfry of Notre Dame--this is the old Montreal living in
the heart of the new. They do not swing the great bell any more--for
even Notre Dame grows old and its aged stones must be respected--but
they toll it rapidly, in a sort of sing-song chant. We have stood in the
west end of the town, three miles distant from the Place d'Armes, and
heard the rich, sweet tones of his deep throat come booming over the
crowded city--a warning to a half a million folk to turn from worldier
things to the thought of mighty God.
* * * * *
Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, past the newly
reconstructed General Post Office, more stately banks here concentrating
the wealth of the strong, new Canada; smart British-looking shops and
restaurants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at rare
cheeses, of which Montreal is _connoisseur_, and eat rare roast beef
done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, six days in a week. But you will
look in vain for real French restaurants with their delectable
_cuisines_. We have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to
the city under the mountain. We have enlisted our friend Paul, who
avers that he knows Montreal as he knows the fingers on his hand. Paul
is a reporter on a French paper. He works not more than fourteen
consecutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine dollars a
week, and the rest of the time he is our entertainment committee--and an
immense success at that. Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal
French, and he has shown us many curious places about the old city, but
he has never found us a French restaurant that could even compare with
some we know in the vicinity of West Twenty-seventh street in the city
of New York. Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of final
success and we have girded our loins quickly to go with him. But when we
have arrived it has been a place white-fronted like the dairy lunches
off from Broadway, and we have never seen one of them without the
listing of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince-pie or
other typical dishes from the States. And at Paul's rarest find we
interviewed _Monsieur le proprietaire_, only to have the dashing news
that he had once served as second _chef_ in the old Burnet House, in
Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between two neighboring
nations than either Ottawa or London is willing to admit and even Paul,
loyal to his language and to his traditions, admits that.
"Some day--some day," he dreams to us between cigarettes, "I am going
down to see the Easter parade on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand
went from Montreal"--he chuckles--"and folks from Bordeaux ward looked
at the swells from Westmount and thought they were real New Yorkers."
And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds:
"And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand--that reporters get
fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers."
Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for cigarettes fiendish,
but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which,
old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks
forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great
possessions--a city filled with more than a million folk.
* * * * *
We pass through the splendors of Victoria square and up the steep turn
of Beaver Hall Hill into Phillips square and smart Ste. Catherine
street. In a general way, the French element have preëmpted the eastern
end of the city for themselves, while the English-speaking portion of
the population clings to the section north and west of Phillips square
and Ste. Catherine street right up to the first steep slopes of Mount
Royal. This part of the city looks like any smart, progressive British
town--with its fine Gothic Cathedral of the Church of England facing its
showy main street, its exclusive clubs and its great hotels. And
nowadays smart modern restaurants are also crowding upon Ste. Catherine
street, for modern Montreal will proudly tell you, and tell you again
and again, that it is more continental, far more continental than
London, which in turn is tightly bound down by the traditions of English
conservatism. Montreal is not very literary--Toronto surpassing it in
that regard--but it has a keen love of good paintings, good art of every
sort. It ranks itself next to New York and Boston and among North
American cities in this regard.
"We are more proud of our public and private galleries," says the
citizen of the town who sips tea at five o'clock with you in the lounge
of the Windsor, "than we are of our New Yorkish restaurants that have
imported themselves across the line within the past year or two. We have
smiled at our daughters drifting in here for their tea on matinée
afternoons, but dinners and American cocktails--well there are some
sorts of reciprocity that we decidedly do not want."
We understand. Montreal wants her personality, her rare and varied
personality, preserved inviolate and intact. That is one great reason
why she has cherished the pro-British habits of her press. New York is
well enough for a trip--Montreal delights in our metropolis, as she does
in our Atlantic City--as mere pleasure grounds, and the Easter hegira,
in which Paul is yet to join, grows each year. But New York is New York,
and Montreal must be Montreal. With her wealth of tradition, her
peculiarly unique conservatism of two languages and two great peoples
working out their problems in common sympathy, without conceding a
single heritage, one to the other, the city of the gray and green must
keep to her own path.
22
THE CITY THAT NEVER GROWS YOUNG
He stands, hat in hand, facing the city that honors his memory so
greatly. To Samuel de la Champlain Quebec has not merely given the glory
of what seems to us to be one of the handsomest monuments in America,
but here and there in her quiet streets she brings back to the stranger
within her walls recollections of the doughty Frenchman who braved an
unknown sea to find a site for the city, which for more than three
hundred years has stood as guardian to the north portal of America.
Other adventurous sea spirits of those early days went chiefly in the
quest of gold. Champlain had loftier ambitions within his heart. He
hoped to be a nation-builder. And not only Quebec, but the great
young-old nation that stands behind her, is his real monument.
Still, the artist's creation of bronze and of marble is effective--not
alone, as we have already said, because of its own real beauty--but also
very largely because of its tremendously impressive setting at the rim
of the upper town--facing the tiny open square that as far back as two
hundred and fifty years ago was the center of its fashionable life.
Champlain in bronze looks at the tidy Place d'Armes--older residents of
Quebec still delight in calling it the Ring--with its neat pathways of
red brick and its low, splashing fountain, as if he longed to return to
flesh and blood and walk through the little square and from it down some
of the narrow streets that he may, himself, have planned in the days of
old.
Or perhaps he would have chosen that once imposing main thoroughfare of
Upper Town, St. Louis street, which out beyond the city wall has the
even more distinctive French title of the Grande Allee. We have chosen
that main street many times ourselves, leading straight past the
castellated gateways of the Chateau, fashioned less than a score of
years ago by a master American architect--Mr. Bruce Price--and since
grown very much larger, quite like a lovely girl still in her teens. On
the other side of the street, close to the curb of the Place d'Armes, is
the ever-waiting row of Victorias and _caleches_, whose drivers rise
smilingly in their places even at the mere suggestion of a coming fare.
Beyond these patient Jehus stands the rather ordinary looking Court
House, somewhat out of harmony with the architectural traditions of the
town--and then we are plunged into the heart of as fascinating a street
as one may hope to see in North America. It is clean--immaculate, if you
please, after the fashion of all these _habitans_ of lower Canada--and
it is bordered ever and ever so tightly by a double row of clean-faced
stone houses, their single doors letting directly upon the sidewalk,
and, also after the fashion of all Quebec, surmounted by steep pitched
tin roofs and wonderfully fat chimneys, covered with tin in their turn.
Quebec seems to have a passion for tin. It is her almost universal
roofing, and in the bright sunshine, glittering with mirror-like
brilliancy of contrast against the age-darkened stone walls, it has a
charm that is quite its own.
One of these old houses of St. Louis street sets well back from the
sidewalk in a seeming riotous waste of front lawn, and bears upon its
face a tablet denoting it as the one-time home of the Duke of Kent. This
distinguished gentleman lived in Quebec many years before he became
father of Queen Victoria. In fact, Quebec remembers him as a rather gay
young blade of a fellow who had innumerable mild affairs with the
fascinating French-Canadian girls of the town. These things have almost
become traditions among the older folk of the place. Those girls of
Quebec town seem always to have held keen attractions for young blades
from afar. When you turn down Mountain Hill and pass the General Post
Office with its quaint Golden Dog set in the _façade_, they will not
only make you re-read that fascinating romance of the old Quebec, but
they will tell you that years after the Philiberts and the Repentignys
were gone and the English were in full enjoyment of their rare American
prize, that same old inn, upon whose front the gnawing dog was so
securely set, was run by one Sergeant Miles Prentice, whose pretty
niece, Miss Simpson, so captivated Captain Horatio Nelson of His
Majesty's Ship _Albemarle_ that it became necessary for his friends to
spirit away the future hero of Trafalgar to prevent him from marrying
her.
Beyond the old house of the Duke of Kent, St. Louis street is a narrow
path lined by severe little Canadian homes all the way to the city gate.
Many of these houses are fairly steeped in tradition. One tiny fellow
within which the ancient profession of the barber still works is the
house wherein Montcalm died. And to another, Benedict Arnold was taken
in that ill-starred American attack upon Quebec. A third was a gift two
centuries ago by the Intendant Bigot to the favored woman of his
acquaintance. Romance does creep up and down the little steps of these
little houses. They change hardly at all with the changing of the years.
[Illustration: Lower Town, Quebec--from the Terrace]
Here among them are the ruins of an old theater--its solid-stone façade
still holding high above the narrow run of pavement. It has been swept
within by fire--the evil enemy that has fallen upon Quebec again and
again and far more devastatingly than even the cannon that have
bombarded her from unfriendly hands.
"Are they going to rebuild?" you may inquire, as you look at the stolid
shell of the old theater.
"Bless you, no," exclaims your guide. "The Music Hall was burned more
than a dozen years ago. Quebec does not rebuild."
But he is wrong. Quebec does rebuild, does progress. Quebec progresses
very slowly, but also very surely. To a man who returns after twenty
years' absence from her quiet streets, the changes are most apparent.
There are fewer _caleches_ upon the street--those quaint two-wheeled
vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney island whirly-coaster and the
benefits of Swedish massage--although the drivers of these distinctive
carriages still supply the American's keen demand for "local color" by
shouting "_marche donc_" to their stout and ugly little horses as they
go running up and down the steep side-hill streets. Nowadays most
tourists eschew the _caleche_ and turn towards trolley cars. That of
itself tells of the almost sinful modernization of Quebec. It is almost
a quarter of a century since the electric cars invaded the narrow
streets of the Upper Town, and in so doing caused the wanton demolition
of the last of the older gates--Porte St. Jean. The destruction of St.
Jean's gate was a mistake--to put the matter slightly. It came at a time
when the question was being gently raised of the replacement of the
older gates that had gone long before--Palace, Hope and Prescott.
Nowadays but two of these portals remain, the St. Louis and the Kent
gates, and these are not in architectural harmony with the solid British
fortifications.
Indeed, that is one of the great crimes to be charged against the
modernization of Quebec. Other old towns in America have brought their
architects to a clever sense of the necessity of making their newer
buildings fit in absolute harmony with the older. They have clung
jealously to their architectural personality. Quebec has missed that
point. With the exception of the lovely Chateau which fits the
traditions of the town, as a solitaire fits a ring setting, the newer
buildings represent a strange hodge-podge of ideas.
Quebec herself rather endures being quaint than enjoys it; for in this
day of Canadian development she has dreamed of the future after the
fashion of those insistent towns further to the west. It has not been
pleasant for her to drop from second place in Canadian commercial
importance to fourth or fifth. She has had to sit back and see such
cities as Winnipeg, for instance, come from an Indian trading-place to a
metropolitan center two or three times her size, while her own wharves
rot. It is a matter of keen humiliation to the town every time a big
ocean liner goes sailing up the river to Montreal--her river, if you are
to give ear to the protests of her citizens whom you meet along the
Terrace of a late afternoon--without halting at her wharves, perhaps
without even a respectful salute to the town which has been known these
many years as the Gibraltar of America.
So she has given herself to the development of transcontinental railroad
projects. When one Canadian railroad decided to use her as the summer
terminal of its largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those
great vessels further up to Montreal, Quebec saw quickly what that meant
to her in prestige and importance. When the railroads told her, as
politely as they might, that they could not develop her as a mighty
traffic center because of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which
blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits together and set
out to bridge that arm with the greatest cantilever in the world. The
fall of the Quebec bridge five years ago with its toll of eighty lives,
was a great blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they have
begun to arise once more. The wreckage of that tragedy is already out
of the way and the workmen are trying again, placing fresh foundations
for the slender, far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to
the portal city of Canada.
* * * * *
But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. It seems quite unlikely
that such a brutal tragedy shall ever come. They may come as they did a
year or two ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market--one of
the very great lions of the Lower Town--but they do not understand the
_habitans_ from those back country villages around Quebec. Progress does
not come to those obscure communities--no, not even slowly. The women
still gather together at some mountain stream on wash-days and cleanse
their laundry by placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and
pounding it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed with thatch
than with shingles, to say nothing of farms where a horse is an unknown
luxury and men till the soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of
Christ. From those places came the _habitans_ to Champlain
market--within my memory some of them in two-wheeled carts drawn by
great Newfoundland dogs--and it was a gay place on at least two mornings
of the week. One might buy if one pleased--bartering is a fine art to
the French-Canadian and one dear to his soul--or one might pass to the
next stall. But one could never pass very many stalls, with their bright
offerings of food-stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in
garniture of the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm
summer.
And now that the sturdy Champlain market is no more--literally torn
apart, one stone from another--a few of these folk--typical of a North
American race that refuses to become assimilated even after whole
centuries of patient effort--still gather in the open square that used
to face the market-house. They do not understand. There are only a few
of them, and their little shows of wares are still individually brave,
still individually gay. But even these must see that the folk with money
no longer come to them. Perhaps they see and with stolid French-Canadian
indifference refuse to accept the fact. Such a thing would be but
characteristic of a folk, who, betrayed and forgotten by their home-land
for a little more than one hundred and fifty years, still cling not
merely to their religion, but to traditions and a language that is alien
to the land that shelters them. In Montreal the traveler from the States
first finds French all but universal, the hardy Tricolor of France
flying from more poles than boast British Union Jacks. In Quebec that
feeling is intensified. We hunted through the shops of the town for a
British standard, and in vain. But every one of the obliging
shop-keepers was quick to offer us the flag of France. And the
decorative _motif_ of the modern architecture of new Quebec lends itself
with astonishing frequency to the use of the lilies of old France.
"It is that very sort of thing that makes Britain the really great
nation that she is," an old gentleman told us one afternoon on the
Terrace. We had been discussing this with him, and he had told us how
the city records of Quebec--a British seaport town--were kept in French,
how even the legislative proceedings in the great new parliament
building out on the Grande Allee beyond the city wall were in that same
prettily flavored tongue. "Yes, sir," he continued, "we may have a King
that is English in title and German in blood, sir, but here in Canada we
have one who through success and through defeat is more than King--Sir
Wilfred Laurier--our late premier, sir."
We liked the old gentleman's spunk. He was typical of the old French
blood as it pulses within the new France. We liked the old gentleman,
too. To us he was as one who had just stepped from one of Honoré
Balzac's stories, with his mustaches, waxed and dyed into a drooping
perfection, his low-set soft hat, his vast envelope of a faded
greatcoat, his cane thrust under his arm, as Otis Skinner might have
done it. We had first met him one morning coming out of the arched
gateway of the very ancient whitewashed pile of the Seminary; again as
he stepped from his morning devotions out through the doorway of the
Basilica into the sunlight of what was once the market-square of the
Upper Town--after that many more times. Finally we had risked a little
smile of recognition, to be answered by the salute courtly. We had
conquered. We knew that romance personified was close to him. Perhaps
our old gentleman was an army man; he must have been able to sit on the
long porch of the Garrison Club, that delectable and afternoon-teable
place that looks out upon the trim grass-carpeted court-yard, and tell
stories at least as far back as the Crimea.
"A Frenchman?" you begin, as if attacking the very substance of our
argument of romance, "fighting the battles of the English Queen?"
Bless your heart, yes. The Frenchmen of lower Canada have never
hesitated at helping England fight her battles. Within sixteen years
after their own disastrous defeat before the walls of the citadel city
that they loved so dearly, they were fighting alongside of their
conquerors to hold her safe from the attacks of the tremendously brave,
and half-fed little American army which ventured north through the
fearful rigors of a Canadian winter, hopelessly to essay the impossible.
But our old gentleman was not a soldier. He was a seller of cheeses in
St. Roch ward, who had retired in the sunset of his life. He knew the
Quebec of the days when the Parliament house stood perched at the
ramparts at the Prescott gate, and the old gateways themselves were
narrow _impasses_ at which the traffic of great carts and little
_caleches_ in summer, and dancing, splendid sleighs in winter, was
forever fearfully congested; he could tell many of the romances that
still linger up this street and down that, within the stout walls of
this house or in the sheltered garden of some nunnery or half-hidden
home. He could speak English well, which, for a Frenchman in Quebec, is
a mark of uncommon education. But, best of all, he knew his Quebec. He
was in a true sense the old Quebec living in the new.
Even among the cosmopolitan folk of the Terrace in the shady late
afternoons, you could recognize him as such. He was apart from the
throng--a motley of bare-footed, brown-cloaked friars, full-skirted
priests, white nuns and gray and black, red-coated soldiers from the
Citadel to give a sharp note of color to the great promenade of Quebec,
millionaires real and would-be from New York, tourists of every sort
from all the rest of our land, funny looking English folk from the
yellow-funnelled _Empress_, which had just pulled in from Liverpool and
even now lay resting almost under the walls of old Quebec--he was
readily distinguished. To be with him was, of itself, a matter of
distinction.
[Illustration: Four Brethren upon the Terrace]
To walk the staid streets of the fascinating old town with him was a
privilege. Always the excursion led to new and unexpected turns; one day
up the narrow lane and through the impressive gates of the Citadel,
where a petty officer detained our American cameras and assigned us to a
mumbling rear private for perfunctory escort around the old place. It is
no longer tenanted by British troops. The last of these left forty years
ago. These red-coats are counterfeit; raw-boned boys from Canadian farms
being put through their military paces by a distant government which may
sometimes overlook, but not always. The Citadel as a military work is
tremendously out-of-date. Even as it now stands, it is almost a century
old, and that tells the story. The guns that have so wide a sweep and so
exquisite a view from the ramparts may look fear-inspiring, but the
ramparts are of stone and would be quickly vulnerable to modern naval
ordnance.
The gun that is unfailingly shown to Americans is a small field-piece
which is said to have been captured from us at Bunker Hill. Whereupon
our tourists, with a rare gift of repartee, always exclaim:
"Ah, you may have the gun, but we have the hill!"
And the military training of the young Canadian militiaman is so perfect
that he smiles politely in response. As a matter of fact, there is no
record of the fact that the gun was ever taken from the Americans,
although each little while there is a request from the States for its
return, which is always met with derision and scorn by the Canadians.
Politics in Our Lady of the Snows is almost entirely beyond the
understanding of an American.
* * * * *
Sometimes our friend of old Quebec led us to the churches of the
town--many of them capped with roosters upon their steeples, instead of
the Roman cross which we had believed inevitable with the Catholic
church. Since then we have been informed that many of the Swiss churches
of the same faith have that high-perched cock upon the steeple-tops. We
paused once at a new church on the rim of the town, where the very old
habit of having a nun in constant adoration of the Host is perpetuated,
paused again at the ever fascinating Notre Dame des Victoiries in Lower
Town, with its battlemented altar and its patriotic legends in French,
which a British government has been indulgent enough to overlook, stood
again and again at the wonderful Van Dyke which hangs in the clear,
cool, white and gold Basilica. From the churches, we sometimes went to
the chapels; the modern structure of the Seminary, or the fascinating
holy places of the Ursulines, where the kind-hearted Mother Superior
turned our attention from the imprisoned nuns chanting their prayers
behind an altar screen, like the decorous and constant hum of
honey-bees, to the skull of Montcalm. Then we must see his burial place
in the very spot in the chapel wall cleft open by a rampant British
shell sent to harass his army.
"Montcalm," said our gentleman of the old Quebec. "He was, sir, the
bravest soldier and the finest that France ever sent overseas."
And we could only remember that other fine monument of Quebec, out on
the Grande Allee toward the point where Abraham Martius's cows, chewing
their cuds on an open plain, awoke one day to find one of the world's
great battles being fought--almost over their very heads. In that
creation of marble and of bronze, the great figure of Fame is perched
aloft, reaching down to place her laurel branch upon a real French
gentleman--Montcalm--at the very hour of his death. That memorial is
something more. In a fashion somewhat unusual to monuments, it fairly
vitalizes reality.
* * * * *
There must be a real reason why Quebec is such a Mecca for honeymoon
journeys. You can see the grooms and the brides out on the Terrace,
summernight after summernight. Romance hovers over that high-hung place.
It sometimes saunters there of a sunshiny morning--a couple here, or a
couple there in seemingly loving irresponsibility as to the fact that
ours is a workaday world, after all. It lingers at the afternoon tea,
along the Terrace promenade. It comes into its own, night after night,
when the boys and girls of the town promenade back and forth to the
rhythmical crash of a military band, or in the intervals stand at the
rail looking down at the rough pattern of street-lights in Lower Town,
the glistening string of electrics at Levis, or listening to the rattle
of ship's winches which give a hint that, after all, there is a world
beyond Quebec.
When night comes upon the Terrace, one may see it at its very best. He
may watch the day die over the Laurentians, the western sky fill with
pink afterglow, and the very edge of those ancient peaks sharpen as if
outlined with an engraver's steel. For a moment, as the summer day
hesitates there on the threshold of twilight and good-by, he may trace
the country road that runs its course along the north bank of the St.
Lawrence by the tiny homes of the _habitans_ that line it, he may raise
his eyes again to the sharp blue profile of the mountains. He may hear,
as we heard, the old gentleman from St. Roch, whisper as he raises his
pointing cane:
"I come here every night and look upon the amphitheater of the gods."
So it is the night that is the most subtle thing about Quebec. It is
night when one may hear the bells of all the churches that have been
a-jangle since early morning ring out for vespers before the many
altars, the sharp report of the evening gun speaking out from the
ramparts of the Citadel. After that, silence--the silence of waiting.
There is a surcease of the chiming bells--the Terrace becomes deserted
of the army of pleasure-seekers who a little time before were making
meaningless rotation upon it, the bandmen fall asleep in their cell-like
casements of the Citadel, the lights of Lower Town and of Levis go
snuffing out one by one. Silence--the silence of waiting. Only the
sentinels who pace the ramparts of the crumbling fortifications, the
occasional policeman in the narrow street, the white-robed sister who
sits in perpetual adoration of the Sacrament, proclaim Quebec awake.
Quebec does not sleep. She lives, like an aged belle in memory of her
triumphs of the past, keeps patiently the vigil of the lonely years, and
awaits the coming of Christ.
THE END
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Punctuation and spelling standardized.
Frequent inconsistent hyphenation not changed.
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