WHERE THE CLIMATES MEET
Here, where the climates meet,
That each may make the other's lack complete--
--SIDNEY LANIER.
Because Baltimore was built, like Rome, on seven hills, and because
trains run under it instead of through, the passing traveler sees but
little of the city, his view from the train window being restricted
first to a suburban district, then to a black tunnel, then to a glimpse
upward from the railway cut, in which the station stands. These facts, I
think, combine to leave upon his mind an impression which, if not
actually unfavorable, is at least negative; for certainly he has
obtained no just idea of the metropolis of Maryland.
Let it be declared at the outset, then, that Baltimore is not in any
sense to be regarded as a suburb of Washington. Indeed, considering the
two merely as cities situated side by side, and eliminating the highly
specialized features of Washington, Baltimore becomes, according to the
standards by which American cities are usually compared, the more
important city of the two, being greater both in population and in
commerce. In this aspect Baltimore may, perhaps, be pictured as the
commercial half of Washington. And while Washington, as capital of the
United States, has certain physical and cosmopolitan advantages, not
only over Baltimore, but over every other city on this continent, it
must not be forgotten that, upon the other hand, every other city has
one vast advantage over Washington, namely, a comparative freedom from
politicians. To be sure, Congress did once move over to Baltimore and
sit there for several weeks, but that was in 1776, when the British
approached the Delaware in the days before the pork barrel was invented.
As a city Baltimore has marked characteristics. Though south of Mason
and Dixon's Line, and though sometimes referred to as the "metropolis of
the South" (as is New Orleans also), it is in character neither a city
entirely northern nor entirely southern, but one which partakes of the
qualities of both; where, in the words of Sidney Lanier, "the climates
meet," and where northern and southern thought and custom meet, as well.
This has long been the case. Thus, although slaves were held in
Baltimore before the Civil War, a strong abolitionist society was formed
there during Washington's first Administration, and the sentiment of the
city was thereafter divided on the slavery question. Thus also, while
the two candidates of the divided Democratic party who ran against
Lincoln for the presidency in 1860 were nominated at Baltimore, Lincoln
himself was nominated there by the Union-Republican party in 1864.
Speaking of the blending of North and South in Baltimore, you will, of
course, remember that the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment was attacked by a
mob as it passed through the city on the way to the Civil War. The
regiment arrived in Baltimore at the old President Street Station, which
was then the main station of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and which, now
used as a freight station, looks like an old war-time woodcut out of
_Harper's Weekly_. It was the custom in those days to hitch horses to
passenger coaches which were going through and draw them across town to
the Baltimore & Ohio Station; but when it was attempted thus to
transport the northern troops a mob gathered and blocked the Pratt
Street bridge over Jones's Falls, forcing the soldiers to leave the cars
and march through Pratt Street, along the water front, where they were
attacked. It is, however, a noteworthy fact that Mayor Brown of
Baltimore bravely preceded the troops and attempted to stop the rioting.
A few days later the city was occupied by northern troops, and the
warship _Harriet Lane_ anchored at a point off Calvert Street, whence
her guns commanded the business part of town. After this there was no
more serious trouble. Moreover, it will be remembered that though
Maryland was represented by regiments in both armies, the State, torn as
it was by conflicting feeling, nevertheless held to the Union.
A pretty sequel to the historic attack on the Sixth Massachusetts
occurred when the same regiment passed through Baltimore in 1898, on its
way to the Spanish War. On this occasion it was "attacked" again in the
streets of the city, but the missiles thrown, instead of paving-stones
and bricks, were flowers.
Continuing the category of contrasts, one may observe that while the
general appearance of Baltimore suggests a northern city rather than a
southern one--Philadelphia, for instance, rather than
Richmond--Baltimore society is strongly flavored with the tradition and
the soft pronunciation of the South; particularly of Virginia and the
"Eastern Shore."
So, too, the city's position on the border line is reflected in its
handling of the negro. Of American cities, Washington has the largest
negro population, 94,446, New York and New Orleans follow with almost as
many, and Baltimore comes fourth with 84,749, according to the last
census. New York has one negro to every fifty-one whites, Philadelphia
one to every seventeen whites, Baltimore one to every six, Washington a
negro to every two and a half whites, and Richmond not quite two whites
to every negro. But, although Baltimore follows southern practice in
maintaining separate schools for negro children, and in segregating
negro residences to certain blocks, she follows northern practice in
casting a considerable negro vote at elections, and also in not
providing separate seats for negroes in her street cars.
Have you ever noticed how cities sometimes seem to have their own
especial colors? Paris is white and green--even more so, I think, than
Washington. Chicago is gray; so is London usually, though I have seen
it buff at the beginning of a heavy fog. New York used to be a brown
sandstone city, but is now turning to one of cream-colored brick and
tile; Naples is brilliant with pink and blue and green and white and
yellow; while as for Baltimore, her old houses and her new are, as
Baedeker puts it, of "cheerful red brick"--not always, of course, but
often enough to establish the color of red brick as the city's
predominating hue. And with the red-brick houses--particularly the older
ones--go clean white marble steps, on the bottom one of which, at the
side, may usually be found an old-fashioned iron "scraper," doubtless
left over from the time (not very long ago) when the city pavements had
not reached their present excellence.
The color of red brick is not confined to the center of the city, but
spreads to the suburbs, fashionable and unfashionable. At one margin of
the town I was shown solid blocks of pleasant red-brick houses which, I
was told, were occupied by workmen and their families, and were to be
had at a rental of from ten to twenty dollars a month. For though
Baltimore has a lower East Side which, like the lower East Side of New
York, encompasses the Ghetto and Italian quarter, she has not tenements
in the New York sense; one sees no tall, cheap flat houses draped with
fire escapes and built to make herding places for the poor. Many of the
houses in this section are instead the former homes of fashionables who
have moved to other quarters of the city--handsome old homesteads with
here and there a lovely, though battered, doorway sadly reminiscent of
an earlier elegance. So, also, red brick permeates the prosperous
suburbs, such as Roland Park and Guilford, where, in a sweetly rolling
country which lends itself to the arrangement of graceful winding roads
and softly contoured plantings, stand quantities of pleasing homes,
lately built, many of them colonial houses of red brick. Indeed, it
struck us that the only parts of Baltimore in which red brick was not
the dominant note were the downtown business section and Mount Vernon
Place.
Mount Vernon Place is the center of Baltimore. Everything begins there,
including Baedeker, who, in his little red book, gives it the asterisk
of his approval, says that it "suggests Paris in its tasteful monuments
and surrounding buildings," and recommends the view from the top of the
Washington Monument.
This monument, standing upon an eminence at the point where Charles and
Monument Streets would cross each other were not their courses
interrupted by the pleasing parked space of Mount Vernon Place, is a
gray stone column, surmounted by a figure of Washington--or, rather, by
the point of a lightning rod under which the figure stands. Other
monuments are known as this monument or that, but when "the monument" is
spoken of, the Washington Monument is inevitably meant. This is quite
natural, for it is not only the most simple and picturesque old monument
in Baltimore, but also the largest, the oldest, and the most
conspicuous: its proud head, rising high in air, having for nearly a
century dominated the city. One catches glimpses of it down this street
or that, or sees it from afar over the housetops; and sometimes, when
the column is concealed from view by intervening buildings, and only the
surmounting statue shows above them, one is struck by a sudden
apparition of the Father of his Country strolling fantastically upon
some distant roof.
Though it may be true that Mount Vernon Place, with its symmetrical
parked center and its admirable bronzes (several of them by Baryé),
suggests Paris, and though it is certainly true that it is more like a
Parisian square than a London square, nevertheless it is in reality an
American square--perhaps the finest of its kind in the United States. If
it were Parisian, it would have more trees and the surrounding buildings
would be uniform in color and in cornice height. It is perhaps as much
like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia as any other, and that
resemblance is of the slightest, for Mount Vernon Place has a quality
altogether its own. It has no skyscrapers or semi-skyscrapers to throw
it out of balance; and though the structures which surround it are of
white stone, brown stone, and red brick, and of anything but homogeneous
architecture, nevertheless a comparative uniformity of height, a
universal solidity of construction, and a general grace about them,
combine to give the Place an air of equilibrium and dignity and
elegance.
Including the Washington Monument, Baltimore has three lofty landmarks,
likely to be particularly noticed by the roving visitor. Of the
remaining two, one is the old brick shot-tower in the lower part of
town, which legend tells us was put up without the use of scaffolding
nearly a hundred years ago; while the other, a more modern, if less
modest structure, proudly surmounts a large commercial building and is
itself capped by the gigantic effigy of a bottle. This bottle is very
conspicuous because of its emplacement, because it revolves, and because
it is illuminated at night. You can never get away from it.
One evening I asked a man what the bottle meant up there.
"It's a memorial to Emerson," he told me.
"Are they so fond of Emerson down here?"
"I don't know as they are so all-fired fond of him," he answered.
"But they _must_ be fond of him to put up such a big memorial. Why, even
in Boston, where he was born, they have no such memorial as that."
"He put it up himself," said the man.
That struck me as strange. It seemed somehow out of character with the
great philosopher. Also, I could not see why, if he did wish to raise a
memorial to himself, he had elected to fashion it in the form of a
bottle and put it on top of an office building.
"I suppose there is some sort of symbolism about it?" I suggested.
"Now you got it," approved the man.
I gazed at the tower for a while in thought. Then I said:
"Do you suppose that Emerson meant something like this: that human life
or, indeed, the soul, may be likened to the contents of a bottle; that
day by day we use up some portion of the contents--call it, if you like,
the nectar of existence--until the fluid of life runs low, and at last
is gone entirely, leaving only the husk, as it were--or, to make the
metaphor more perfect, the shell, or empty bottle: the container of what
Emerson himself called, if I recollect correctly, 'the soul that maketh
all'--do you suppose he meant to teach us some such thing as that?"
The man looked a little confused by this deep and beautiful thought.
"He _might_ of meant that," he said, somewhat dubiously. "But they tell
me Captain Emerson's a practical man, and I reckon what he _mainly_
meant was that he made his money out of this-here Bromo Seltzer, and he
was darn glad of it, so he thought he'd put him up a big Bromo Seltzer
bottle as a kind of cross between a monument and an ad."
If the bottle tower represents certain modern concepts of what is
suitable in architecture, it is nevertheless pleasant to record the fact
that many honorable old buildings--most of them residences--survive in
Baltimore, and that, because of their survival, the city looks older
than New York and fully as old as either Philadelphia or Boston. But in
this, appearances are misleading, for New York and Boston were a
century old, and Philadelphia half a century, when Baltimore was first
laid out as a town. Efforts to start a settlement near the city's
present site were, it is true, being made before William Penn and his
Quakers established Philadelphia, but a letter written in 1687 by
Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, explains that: "The people there
[are] not affecting to build nere each other but soe as to have their
houses nere the watters for conveniencye of trade and their lands on
each side of and behynde their houses, by which it happens that in most
places there are not fifty houses in the space of thirty myles."[1]
[1] From "Historic Towns of the Southern States."
The difficulty experienced by the Barons Baltimore, Lords Proprietary of
Maryland, in building up communities in their demesne was not a local
problem, but one which confronted those interested in the development of
the entire portion of this continent now occupied by the Southern
States. Generally speaking, towns came into being more slowly in the
South than in the North, and it seems probable that one of the principal
reasons for this may be found in the fact that settlers throughout the
South lived generally at peace with the Indians, whereas the northern
settlers were obliged to congregate in towns for mutual protection.
Thus, in colonial days, while the many cities of New York and New
England were coming into being, the South was developing its vast and
isolated plantations. Farms on the St. Lawrence River and on the
Detroit River, where the French were settling, were very narrow and very
deep, the idea being to range the houses close together on the river
front; but on such rivers as the Potomac, the Rappahannock and the
James, no element of early fear is to be traced in the form of the broad
baronial plantations.
Nevertheless, when Baltimore began at last to grow, she became a
prodigy, not only among American cities, but among the cities of the
world. Her first town directory was published in 1796, and she began the
next year as an incorporated city, with a mayor, a population of about
twenty thousand, and a curiously assorted early history containing such
odd items as that the first umbrella carried in the United States was
brought from India and unfurled in Baltimore in 1772; that the town had
for some time possessed such other useful articles as a fire engine, a
brick theater, a newspaper, and policemen; that the streets were lighted
with oil lamps; that such proud signs of metropolitanism as riot and
epidemic were not unknown; that before the Revolution bachelors were
taxed for the benefit of his Britannic Majesty; and that at fair time
the "lid was off," and the citizen or visitor who wished to get himself
arrested must needs be diligent indeed.