PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO AND INDIANA
Erie is a nice, homelike little city, full of business; and our hotel,
the Lawrence, very good. There was an irate man at the desk this morning.
“Say, what kind of a hotel do you run? That dancing went on until
three o’clock this morning! It’s an outrage!” The clerk was sorry, and
willingly arranged to have the guest put in a quiet room, but he bit
off the end of a cigar viciously and went out still storming about the
disgrace of allowing such a performance in a reputable hotel.
“He ought to take a trip to little old New York if he thinks dancing till
three is late,” said a bystander.
“He’d better go back to the farm and go to roost with the chickens!”
answered another.
From Albany the roads have been wonderful, wide and smooth as a billiard
table all the way. There were stretches of long straight road as in
France—much better than any in France since the first year theirs were
built. One thing that we have already found out; we are seeing our own
country for the first time! It is not alone that a train window gives
one only a piece of whirling view; but the tracks go through the ragged
outskirts of the town, past the back doors and through the poorest land
generally, while the roads become the best avenues of the cities, and go
past the front entrances of farms. And such farms! We had expected the
scenery to be uninteresting! No one with a spark of sentiment for his own
country could remain long indifferent. Well-fenced fields under perfect
cultivation; splendid-looking grazing pastures, splendid-looking cows,
horses, houses, barns. And in every barn, a Ford. And fruits, fruits,
fruits! Miles and miles and miles of grapevines as neatly trimmed and
evenly set in rows as soldiers on parade.
“It looks like Welch’s grape juice!” we said and laughed. It was!
So much for the country. The towns—only the humanizing genius of Julian
Street could ever tell them apart. Small Utica dressed herself in taupe
color, big Syracuse wore red with brown trimmings. The favorite hues
were brown and red, though one or two were fond of gray, but all looked
almost exactly alike. Each had a bustling and brown business center, with
trolley cars swinging around the corners, pedestrians elbowing their way
past big new dry-goods stores’ windows, and automobiles driving up to the
curbs; each had a wide tree-bordered residence avenue, with block-shaped
detached houses, garnished with cupolas and shelf-paper trimmings. The
houses of Utica had deeper gardens than most, and there was a stable at
the rear of nearly every one on the proverbial Genesee Street. Syracuse,
like the cities in Holland, was picturesquely crossed by canals and,
like the thriving commercial center it is, by—this is just our personal
opinion—all the freight trains of the world! It took us almost an hour to
dodge between the continuous parade of box, refrigerator, and flat cars!
Of the salt, for which Syracuse is so celebrated—the marshes were to the
north of our road—we saw not an ounce. Perhaps those millions of freight
cars were all full of it.
For a surprise we came upon Geneva, a perfect little Quaker, sitting on
her own garden lawn at the edge of the road leading west. Facing an old
Puritan church across a square of green, stood a row of little houses
that suggested the setting of a play like “Pomander Walk.” To the moneyed
magnates of the mansions of the lower Hudson, to the retired tradesmen
residing in some of the red and brown residences of the various Genesee
avenues, the demure little square of huddled houses of Geneva might seem
contemptibly mean. Yet the mansions left us cold, while the little houses
indescribably warmed our hearts. It was like the unexpected finding of a
bit of fragile and beautiful old porcelain in a brickyard. We expected to
see the counterpart of one of the heroines of Miss Austen’s novels come
out of one of the quaint little doorways.
We would have liked to find a tea shop on the square, for it was lunch
time and we hated having to turn into Main Street and make our choice
between several unprepossessing hotels. Geneva was certainly a town of
unexpected contrasts. Although the little houses around the corner were
so adorable, the Hotel Seneca from its façade of factory brick, sitting
flat on the street, never for a moment warned us of an interior looking
exactly like the illustrations in _Vogue_! White woodwork, French blue
cut velvet, delicate spindly Adam furniture, a dining-room all white with
little square-paned mirror doors, too attractive! Luncheon was delicious
and well served by waitresses in white dresses, crisp and clean.
Our great surprise has been the excellence of the roads and the hotels,
and our really beautiful and prosperous country. Going through these
miles after miles of perfect vineyards and orchards, these wonderfully
kept farms, it seems impossible to believe that in New York City are
long bread lines, and that in other parts of our great country there is
strife, hunger, poverty and waste.
* * * * *
In Buffalo we stopped at the Statler, a commercial hotel with a much
advertised and really quite faultless service that carries the idea of
personal attention to guests to its highest degree. When you register,
the clerk reads your name and invariably thereafter everyone calls you by
it. In fact they did even more than that. I had wired ahead for rooms and
as soon as I went up to register, the clerk, whose own name was printed
and hung over the desk, said: “Your room is No. 355, Mrs. Post!” I had
no idea where Room 355 was, but I felt as though I must have occupied it
often before—as though in fact it in some personal way belonged to me.
A decidedly pleasant contrast to a certain New York hotel where, after
stopping four months under its roof, the clerks asked a guest her name!
The Buffalo hotel publishes a little pamphlet called the “Statler Service
Codes.” It contains advice to employees, an explanation of what is meant
by good service, a talk about tipping and a talk to patrons. A few of its
sayings, copied at random, are:
“At rare intervals some perverse member of our force disagrees with a
guest. He maintains that _this_ sauce was ordered when the guest says the
other. Or that the boy _did_ go up to the room. Or that it was _a room_
reserved and not dinner for six. Either may be right. But no employee of
this hotel is allowed the privilege of arguing any point with a guest.”
“A door man can _swing_ the door in a manner to assure the guest that
he is in _His Hotel_, or he can _sling_ it in a way that sticks in the
guest’s crop and makes him expect to find at the desk a sputtery pen
sticking in a potato.”
After giving every thought to the guest’s comfort, the end of the little
book also asks fairness on the part of the guests. Such as, not to say
you waited fifteen minutes when you waited barely five; or not to object
if the clerks can’t read your signature if you write in hieroglyphics.
In the morning at the Statler, a newspaper is pushed under your door and
on it is a printed slip saying: “Good morning! This is your paper while
you are in Buffalo.” And when you are ready to leave instead of calling,
“Front! Get 355’s baggage!” the Statler clerk says, “Go up to Mrs. Post’s
room and bring down her things!”
I certainly liked it very much. And I am sure other people must feel the
same.
If the hotel tried to make us pleased with ourselves, we were not allowed
to keep our self-complacence long. When we went to Niagara, we passed a
sort of taxidermist’s museum; its windows at least were full of stuffed
beasts. The proprietor, standing in front of it, tried his best to make
us “step inside and see the mummied mermaid” and his museum of the
greatest educational wonders of the world. When we showed no interest in
his collection he burst out with:
“If you’re going to remain as ignorant about everything you come to, as
you are about this wonderful museum, traveling won’t educate you any!”
Put a little differently, it might have hit a mark. We had ourselves been
saying, only a little while before, that we were undoubtedly missing
lots of interesting things because we did not quite know how or where
to see them. Yet, though we are still ignorant about the “wonders” of
that particular museum, we are not always so indifferent. We have tried
to look out for points of historical value and we have found many things
of great diversion to ourselves. In Utica, for instance, we hung for
hours over the railings of an exhibit of china making by the Syracuse
pottery manufacturers. There is an irresistible fascination in watching
the potter shaping pitchers, and the decorators putting decalcomania on
plates and drawing fine gilt lines. The facility with which experts in
any branch of industry use their hands is a marvel and a delight to me.
I could stand indefinitely and watch a glass-blower, or a potter, or a
blacksmith, or a paper hanger—anyone doing anything superlatively well.
I am not thinking of describing the world’s wonder of wonders, Niagara
Falls, because everyone knows they are less than an hour’s run from
Buffalo, with a splendid wide motor road leading out to them, and because
their stupendous beauty has been described too often.
There were four bridal couples with us in the elevator that took us down
to go under the Falls. One of the brides was apparently concerned about
the unbecomingness of the black rubber mackintosh and hood that everyone
puts on, for her evidently Southern husband said aloud:
“Don’t you fret about it, Nelly, you look real sweet in it, ’deed you
do!” Whereupon each of the other three patted around the edge of the
hood where her hair ought to be, and glanced a little self-consciously
at the arbiter of her own loveliness.
Later, the young Southerner linked his arm in that of his bride lest she
go too close to that terrific torrent of drenching water. The other three
pairs walked gingerly through the soaking rock galleries in three closely
huddled units. And the rest of us looked at them with that smiling
interest that one irresistibly feels for happy young couples on their
honeymoon.
On Sunday evening in Buffalo a man who looked as though he had been
lifted out of a yellow flour barrel had come into the lobby of the hotel.
We could not tell whether he was black or white or even human. A clerk,
seeing us staring, remarked casually: “Oh, he’s just a motorist who has
come from Cleveland. Gives you some idea of the roads, doesn’t it?”
We started the next day therefore in a rather disturbed frame of mind,
and soon saw how on a Sunday, when every motorist is out, he had looked
as he did. Even on Monday the dust was so thick that the wind blew it in
great yellow clouds, sometimes making it impossible to see ahead. But
most of the way it blew to the left of us, leaving us fairly clean and
not enveloping us unless we had to pass another car going our own way.
As we had gone out to the Falls in the morning, we did not leave Buffalo
until about two o’clock, but in spite of bumpy roads and dust so thick
that it made us swerve a little, we reached Erie easily at a little
after six.
We left Erie the next day at two o’clock and arrived in Cleveland at
seven—which was as fast as the Ohio speed limit of twenty miles an hour
would allow. The road was much the same as it had been the day before.
Forty miles of the whole distance was rather rough and very dusty; the
rest was good, a little of it splendid.
At Mentor, about twenty-three miles before Cleveland, we came to a
number of beautiful places that must have been the out-of-town homes of
Cleveland people. The houses, many of them enormous, were long, low and
white; not farmhouses and not Colonial manor houses, but a most happy
adaptation of the qualities of both; dignified, homelike, imposing and
enchanting.[2]
The remark of the man at the museum in Buffalo irresistibly recurs to
me. We certainly won’t be “educated” if our chauffeur can help it! He is
exactly like the time lock on a safe. Only instead of being set for an
hour, he is set for distance. At Erie, for instance, he throws in his
clutch, “Cleveland”? he asks, and snap! nothing can make him look to the
left or the right of the road in front of him.
“Oh, look! That’s the house where President Garfield——”
Zip! we have passed it!
“Wait a minute, let me see that inscription——”
We are half a mile beyond! We arrive in Cleveland, when click goes the
lock and he stops dead, and nothing will make him go further.
The food at the hotel in Cleveland, also a Statler, was so extraordinary
good that I asked where the maître d’hôtel and his chefs had come from. I
thought that possibly on account of the war they had secured the staff of
Henri’s or Voisin’s or Paillard’s in Paris, and was really surprised to
hear the head chef was from Chicago and the maître d’hôtel from New York.
The dining-room service was quite as good as the food. We did not wait
more than a moment before they brought our first course, and as soon as
we had finished that our plates were whisked away and the second put
before us. Never, even in France, have we had better or more perfectly
cooked chicken casserole, and the hollandaise sauce on the asparagus was
of the exact smooth, golden consistency and flavor that it ought to be,
instead of the various yellow acids, pastes, and eggy mixtures that too
often masquerade under the name. Our waiter brought in crisp, fresh salad
and expertly and quickly made his own dressing. He was in fact a paragon
of his kind, serving all of our meals without that everlasting patting
and fussing and fixing that most waiters go through with until what you
have ordered is so shopworn and handled and cold that it is not fit to
eat. Can anything be more unappetizing than to have a waiter, or two of
them, breathing over your food for half an hour?
Personally I hate hotel service. I hate to be helped. In our own houses
even children of six resent it. I often wonder, why do we submit to
having the piece we don’t want, in the amount we don’t want, put on the
part of the plate we don’t want it on, covering it with sauce if we hate
sauce, or giving us the dryest wisps if we like it otherwise, by a waiter
who bends unpleasantly close? Why do we have everything we eat pinched
between the fork and spoon in that one-handed lobster-claw fashion, and
endure it in silence? All of this is no fault of the waiter who, after
all, is trying to do the best he can in the way that has been taught him.
But why is the service in a hotel so radically different from all good
service in a private house?
Cleveland, “the Sixth City”—and she likes to have you know her rating—is
certainly prosperous-looking and in many ways beautiful. She has wide,
roomy streets with splendid lawns and trees and houses. A few of the
older mansions are hideous but enormous, comfortable, and well built.
They look like the homes of people with no end of money who are content
to live in houses of American architecture’s darkest period because they
are used to them and often because their fathers lived in them. There is
no suggestion of the upstart in their ugliness. The whole city impresses
one as having a nice fat bank account and being in no hurry to spend
it. The municipal buildings, however, are superb, and the newer dwelling
houses all that money and taste can make them, but almost best of all, I
liked the shops.
In a big new one on Euclid Avenue, two elderly ladies with
much-befeathered bonnets were ensconced in a double rolling chair like
those of the Atlantic City boardwalk. An attentive young man was pushing
them about among bronzes and porcelains. Stopping before a shelf of
samples he asked: “Are any of these at all like the coffee cups you are
looking for, Mrs. Davis?”
Mrs. Davis was so absorbed in the conversation of her friend that the
clerk had to repeat his question three times before her purple feathers
bobbed toward the coffee cups casually.
“Coffee cups?” she added absently. “I don’t think I care about any today,
thank you. But you might drive us through the linen department and the
lamp shades. The lamp shades are always so pretty!” she added to her
friend, exactly as though, after telling her coachman to drive around the
east side of the park, she had remarked upon the beauty of the wistaria.
“Does that lady drive about town in a rolling chair?” I asked of the man
waiting upon us.
“Oh, those chairs are ours,” he answered. “We have them so that customers
can visit with each other and shop without getting tired. One of the
clerks will be glad to push you about in one. It is a very pleasant
innovation,” he added, and out of courtesy he did not say for whom.
[Illustration: THE CROWD IN LESS THAN A MINUTE. “OUT OF THE WINDOW” IN
CLEVELAND]
Cleveland is also the city of three-cent carfares—in fact three cents in
Cleveland is almost as good as five cents in other cities. Lemonade three
cents, moving pictures three cents, a ball of pop-corn three cents—a
whole counter full of small articles in one of the big stores. Let’s all
move to Cleveland!
One thing, though, struck us most particularly in the hotels of Utica
and Cleveland; the people didn’t match the background. Dining in a white
marble room quite faultlessly appointed, there was not a man in evening
clothes and not a single woman smartly dressed or who even looked as
though she had ever been! Men in unpressed business suits, women in black
skirts and white shirtwaists are appropriate to the imitation wood or
plaster walls of some of the eating places that we have been in, but in
a beautiful hotel like the Statler in Cleveland, and especially in the
evening, they spoil the picture.
From Cleveland to Toledo the roads are very like those of France, they
have wonderful foundations but badly worn surfaces. Much the best hotel
in Toledo is the Secor, and the restaurant, which made no attempt at
imitating French cooking, was good.
There was a most beautiful art museum in Toledo, a small building pure
Greek in style and set like a jewel against pyramidal evergreens. It is
quite the loveliest thing we have seen.
Because of Ohio’s speed restrictions, twenty miles fastest going and
eight for villages, etc., one must either spend days in crawling across
the state or break the law. As is usually the case with unreasonable
laws, few keep them, or else the motoring Ohioans interpret their
speed laws rather liberally. Of the hundreds of motors we met in Ohio,
especially near Cleveland, which is one of the biggest automobile centers
in the country, scarcely one, even within the city limits, was going less
than twenty-five miles an hour.
However, as it is not courteous for the stranger to dash lawlessly
through at faster than the twelve-mile average prescribed by law, the run
from Toledo to South Bend, a distance of one hundred and sixty-two miles,
will take from twelve to fourteen hours. The road is good, most of it,
but sandwiched between occasional poor stretches.
We lunched at Bryan at the Christman Hotel. It was here that I heard a
new retort courteous. I had dropped a veil; a youth picked it up. I said,
“Thank you.” He replied politely, “Yours truly!”
The Oliver, “Indiana’s finest hotel,” at South Bend is good, clean, well
run, with a Louis Quatorze dining-room in black and white. The black and
white craze is raging here quite as much as in New York.