MORE CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS
Because I have told you so much about the Chamber of Commerce you must
not assume that the Chamber of Commerce was with us constantly while we
were in Cleveland, for that is not the case. True, Chamber of Commerce
representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our
rooms, late at night. But at our rooms they left us, merely taking the
precaution to lock us in. No attempt was made to assist us in undressing
or to hear our prayers or tuck us into bed. Once in our rooms we were
left to our own devices. We were allowed to read a little, if we wished,
to whisper together, or even to amuse ourselves by playing with the
fixtures in the bathroom.
On the morning of the second day they came and let us out, and took us
to see a lot of interesting and edifying sights, but by afternoon they
had acquired sufficient confidence in us to turn us loose for a couple
of hours, allowing us to roam about, at large, while they attended to
their mail.
We made use of the freedom thus extended to us by presenting several
letters of introduction to Cleveland gentlemen, who took us to various
clubs.
Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old
club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the
busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a
stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a
great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a
club there are large windows of plate glass, back of which the passer-by
may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. Looking at
the outside of the building, you know that there is a big, high-ceiled
room, at the front, dark in color and containing spacious leather
chairs, which should (and often do) contain aristocratic gentlemen who
have attained years of discretion and positions of importance. One feels
cheated if, on entering, one fails to encounter a member carrying a
malacca stick and wearing waxed mustaches, spats, and a gardenia. The
Union Club of New York is such a club; so is the Pacific Union of San
Francisco; so is the Chicago Club; and so, I fancy, from my glimpse of
it, is the Union Club of Cleveland.
In the larger cities there is usually another club, somewhat less formal
in architecture, decoration, and spirit, and given over, broadly
speaking, to the younger men--though there is often a good deal of
duplication of membership between the first mentioned type of club and
the second. The Tavern of Cleveland is of the second category; so is the
Saturn Club of Buffalo, of which I spoke in a former chapter. Almost
every good-sized city has, likewise, its university club, its athletic
club, and its country club. University clubs vary a good deal in
character, but athletic clubs and country clubs are in general pretty
true to type.
Besides such clubs as these, one finds, here and there, in the United
States, a few clubs of a character more unusual. Cleveland has three
unusual clubs: the Rowfant, a book collector's club; the Chagrin Valley
Hunt Club, at Gates Mills, near the city, and the Hermit Club.
Were it not for the fact that I detest the words "artistic" and
"bohemian," I should apply them to the Hermit Club. It is one of the few
clubs outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco possessing its own
house and made up largely of men following the arts, or interested in
them. Like the Lambs of New York, the Hermits give shows in their
clubhouse, but the Lambs' is a club of actors, authors, composers, stage
managers, etc., while the Hermit Club is made up, so far as the theater
is concerned, of amateurs--amateurs having among them sufficient talent
to write and act their own shows, design their own costumes, paint their
own scenery, compose their own music, and even play it, too--for there
is an orchestra of members. I have never seen a Hermits' show, and I am
sorry, for I have heard that they are worth seeing. Certainly their
clubhouse is. It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered
front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where
wits of old were used to meet. This illusion is enhanced by the
surroundings of the club, for it stands in an alley--or perhaps I had
better say a narrow lane--and is huddled down between the walls of
taller buildings.
The pleasant promise of the exterior is fulfilled within. The ground
floor rooms are low and cozy, and have a pleasant "rambling" feeling--a
step or two up here or down there. The stairway, leading to the floor
above, is narrow, with a genial kind of narrowness that seems to say:
"There is no one here with whom you'll mind rubbing elbows as you pass."
Ascending, you reach the main room, which occupies the entire upper
floor. This room is the Hermit Club. It is here that members gather and
that the more intimate shows are given. Large, with dark panels, and
heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows
overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And
let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and
desirable in a club building--or, for the matter of that, in a home or a
human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a
club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke,
nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least,
overwhelm one with its magnificence; it should not chill one with its
grandeur, so that one lowers one's voice to a whisper and involuntarily
removes one's hat.
In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he
prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue
that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home;
others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events,
_look_ more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as
though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many
pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that
any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off
his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he
encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this
subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is
that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not.
* * * * *
The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired
its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland
himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed
at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and
was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little
village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind
them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a
Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is
Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and
small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on
either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old
meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England
hamlet.
[Illustration: In this charming, homelike old building, with its
grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a
visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west"]
The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the
place took its name, is passing a mellow old age as the house of the
Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its
grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a
visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of
the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."
The Connecticut resemblance is accounted for by the fact that all this
section of the country was in the Western Reserve, which belonged to,
and was settled by, Connecticut. Thus travel teaches us! I knew
practically nothing, until then, of the Western Reserve, and even less
of hunt clubs. I had never been in a hunt club before, and my
impressions of such institutions had been gleaned entirely from short
stories and from prints showing rosy old rascals drinking. Probably
because of these prints I had always thought that "horsey"
people--particularly the "hunting set"--were generally addicted to the
extensive (and not merely external) use of alcohol. As others may be of
the same impression it is perhaps worth remarking that, while in the
Hunt Club, we saw a number of persons drinking tea, and that only two
were drinking alcoholic beverages--those two being visitors: an
illustrator and a writer from New York.
I mentioned that to the M. F. H., and told him of my earlier impression
as to hunt-club habits.
"Lots of people have that idea," he smiled, "but it is wrong. As a
matter of fact, few hunting people are teetotalers, but those who ride
straight are almost invariably temperate. They have to be. You can't be
in the saddle six or eight hours at a stretch, riding across country,
and do it on alcohol."
I also learned from the M. F. H. certain interesting things regarding a
fox's scent. Without having thought upon the subject, I had somehow
acquired the idea that hounds got the scent from the actual tracks of
the animal they followed. That is not so. The scent comes from the body
of the fox and is left behind him suspended in the air. And, other
conditions being equal, the harder your fox runs the stronger his scent
will be. The most favorable scent for following is what is known as a
"breast-high scent"--meaning a scent which hangs in suspension at a
point sufficiently high to render it unnecessary for the hounds to put
their heads down to the ground. Sometimes a scent hangs low; sometimes,
on the other hand, it rises so that, particularly in a covert, the
riders, seated upon their horses, can smell it, while the hounds cannot.
But I think I have said enough about this kind of thing. It is a
dangerous topic, for the terminology and etiquette of hunting are even
more elaborate than those of golf. Probably I have made some mistake
already; indeed, I know of one which I just escaped--I started to write
"dogs" instead of "hounds," and that is not done. I have a horror of
displaying my ignorance on matters of this kind. For I take a kind of
pride--and I think most men do--in being correct about comparatively
unimportant things. It is permissible to be wrong about important
things, such as politics, finance, and reform, and to explain them,
although you really know nothing about them. But with fox hunting it is
different. There are some people who really _do_ know about that, and
they are likely to catch you.
* * * * *
Two other Cleveland organizations should be mentioned.
Troop A of the Ohio National Guard is known as one of the most capable
bodies of militia in the entire country. It has been in existence for
some forty years, and its membership has always been recruited from
among the older and wealthier families of the city. The fame of Troop A
has reached beyond Ohio, for under its popular title, "The Black Horse
Troop," it has gone three times to Washington to act as escort to
Presidents of the United States at the time of their inauguration.
Cleveland is, furthermore, the headquarters for trotting racing. The
Cleveland Gentlemen's Driving Club is an old and exceedingly active
body, and its president, Mr. Harry K. Devereux, is also president of the
National Trotting Association.
* * * * *
A curious and characteristic thing which we encountered in no other city
is the Three-Cent Cult--a legacy left to the city by the late Tom
Johnson. Cleveland's street railway system is controlled by the city
and the fare is not five cents, but three. But that is not all. A
municipal lighting plant is, or soon will be, in operation, with charges
of from one to three cents per kilowatt hour. Also the city has gone
into the dance-hall business. There, too, the usual rate is cut: fifteen
cents will buy five dances in the municipal dance halls, instead of
three. No one will attempt to dispute that dancing, to-day, takes
precedence over the mere matter of eating, yet it is worth mentioning
that the Three-Cent Cult has even found its way into the lunch room.
Sandwiches may be purchased in Cleveland for three cents which are not
any worse than five-cent sandwiches in other cities.
Perhaps the finest thing about the Three-Cent Cult is the fact that it
runs counter to one of the most pronounced and pitiable traits of our
race: wastefulness. Sometimes it seems that, as a people, we take less
pride in what we save than in what we throw away. We have a "There's
more where that came from!" attitude of mind. A man with thousands a
year says: "Hell! What's a hundred?" and a man with hundreds imitates
him on a smaller scale. The humble fraction of a nickel is despised. All
honor, then, to Cleveland--the city which teaches her people that two
cents is worth saving, and then helps them to save it. Two points, in
this connection, are interesting:
One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to
resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage
of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the
population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the
savings banks pay 4 per cent.
* * * * *
We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down
by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of
Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in
the space of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel
coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load
of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand.
Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track,
only to snatch the next one and repeat the operation.
Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down
into the vessel's hold, snatch them up filled with tons of the precious
product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into
a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is
held by the steamer _Corry_, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons
of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the
_George F. Perkins_, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was
removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.
Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in
size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel shell more than
six hundred feet long, with a little space set aside at the bows for
quarters and a little space astern for engines. The deck is a series of
enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be
removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great
vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up
throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it
is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them
make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and
an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement
that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the
total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the
little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement.
It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they
would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious
they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the
same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States
and Canada _lies_ within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."
* * * * *
I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I
think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved
themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my
clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of
homes.
Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real
beauty--most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or
on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity--it is
nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the
workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some
months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.
I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay
of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo,
and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run
down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's
which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy
faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans.
Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing
only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble
wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.
These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were
it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and
glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid
thoroughfares, but in a different way.
Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to
be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings,
dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come
down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice,
there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This
plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has
contemplated for its own beautification. In this country it was, at the
time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and
San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland
plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its
kind.
When an American city has needed some new public building it has been
the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and
cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins), and cause those plans to be
executed (by their brothers-in-law). This may have been "practical
politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement.
No one will dispute the convenience of having public buildings "handy"
to one another, but there may still be found, even in Cleveland, men
whose feeling for beauty is not so highly developed as their feeling for
finance; men who shake their heads at the mention of a group plan; who
don't like to "see all that money wasted." I met one or two such. But I
will venture the prophecy that, when the Cleveland plan is a little
farther advanced, so that the eye can realize the amazing
splendor of the thing, as it will ultimately be, there will be no one
left in Cleveland to convert.
[Illustration: Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines,
expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and
unloading ships in the space of a few hours]
It is a fine and unusual thing, in itself, for an American city to be
planning its own beauty fifty years ahead. Cleveland is almost
un-American in that! But when the work done--yes, and before it is
done--this single great improvement will have transformed Cleveland from
an ordinary looking city to one of great distinction.
Fancy emerging from a splendid railway station to find yourself facing,
not the little bars and dingy buildings which so often face a station,
but a splendid mall, two thousand feet long and six hundred wide, parked
in the center and surrounded by fine buildings of even cornice height
and harmonious classical design. At one side of the station will stand
the public library; at the other the Federal building; and at the far
extremity of the mall, the county building and the city hall.
Three of these buildings are already standing. Two more are under way.
The plan is no longer a mere plan but is already, in part, an actuality.
When the transformation is complete Cleveland will not only have re-made
herself but will have set a magnificent example to other cities. By that
time she may have ceased to call herself "Sixth City"--for population
changes. But if a hundred other cities follow her with group plans, and
whether those plans be of greater magnitude or less, it must never be
forgotten that Cleveland had the appreciation and the courage to begin
the movement in America, not merely on paper but in stone and marble,
and that, without regard to population, she therefore has a certain
right, to-day, to call herself "First City."
MICHIGAN MEANDERINGS