TRIUMPHANT DEFEAT
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
--MONTAIGNE.
Following the incorporation of the city, Baltimore grew much as Chicago
was destined to grow more than a century later; within less than thirty
years, when Chicago was a tiny village, Baltimore had become the third
city in the United States: a city of wealthy merchants engaged in an
extensive foreign trade; for in those days there was an American
merchant marine, and the swift, rakish Baltimore clippers were known the
seven seas over.
The story of modern Baltimore is entirely unrelated to the city's early
history. It consists in a simple but inspiring record of regeneration
springing from disaster. It is the story of Chicago, of San Francisco,
of Galveston, of Dayton, and of many a smaller town: a cataclysm, a few
days of despair, a return of courage, and another beginning.
Imagine yourself being tucked into bed one night by your valet or your
maid, as the case may be, calm in the feeling that all was secure: that
your business was returning a handsome income, that your stocks and
bonds were safe in the strong box, that the prosperity of your
descendants was assured. Then imagine ruin coming like lightning in the
night. In the morning you are poor. Your business, your investments,
your very hopes, are gone. Everything is wiped out. The labor of a
lifetime must be begun again.
Such an experience was that of Baltimore in the fire of 1904.
On the sickening morning following the conflagration two Baltimore men,
friends of mine, walked down Charles Street to a point as near the
ruined region as it was possible to go.
"Well," said one, surveying the smoking crater, "what do you think of
it?"
"Baltimore is gone," was the response. "We are off the map."
How many citizens of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton
have known the anguish of that first aftermath of hopelessness! How many
citizens of Baltimore knew it that day! And yet how bravely and with
what magic swiftness have these cities risen from their ruins! Was not
Rome burned? Was not London? And is it not, then, time for men to learn
from the history of other men and other cities that disaster does not
spell the end, but is oftentimes another name for opportunity?
Always, after disaster to a city, come improvements, but because
disaster not only cleans the slate but simultaneously stuns the mind, a
portion of the opportunity is invariably lost. The task of rebuilding,
of widening a few streets, looks large enough to him who stands amidst
destruction--and there, consequently, improvement usually stops. That is
why the downtown boulevard system of Chicago has yet to be completed, in
spite of the fact that it might with little difficulty have been
completed after the Chicago fire (although it is only just to add that
city planning was almost an unknown art in America at that time); and
that also is why the hills of San Francisco are not terraced, as it was
suggested they should be after the fire, but remain to-day inaccessible
to frontal attack by even the maddest mountain goat of a taxi driver.
These matters are not mentioned in the way of criticism: I have only
admiration for the devastated cities and for those who built them up
again. I call attention to lost opportunities with something like
reluctance, and only in the wish to emphasize the fact that our crippled
or destroyed cities do invariably rise again, and that if the next
American city to sustain disaster shall but have this simple lesson
learned in advance, it may thereby register a new high mark in municipal
intelligence and a new record among the rebuilt cities, by making more
sweet than any other city ever made them, the uses of adversity.
The fire of 1904 found Baltimore a town of narrow highways, old
buildings, bad pavements, and open gutter drains. The streets were laid
in what is known as "southern cobble," which is the next thing to no
pavement at all, being made of irregular stones, large and small, laid
in the dirt and tamped down. For bumps and ruts there is no pavement in
the world to be compared with it. There were no city sewers. Outside a
few affluent neighborhoods, the citizens of which clubbed together to
build private sewers, the cesspool was in general use, while domestic
drainage emptied into the roadside gutters. These were made passable, at
crossings, by stepping stones, about the bases of which passed
interesting armadas of potato peelings, floating, upon wash days, in
water having the fine Mediterranean hue which comes from diluted
blueing. Everybody seemed to find the entire system adequate; for, it
was argued, the hilly contours of the city caused the drainage quickly
to be carried off, while as for typhoid and mosquitoes--well, there had
always been typhoid and mosquitoes, just as there had always been these
open gutters. It was all quite good enough.
Then the fire.
And then the upbuilding of the city--not only of the acres and acres
comprising the burned section, in which streets were widened and
skyscrapers arose where fire-traps had been--but outside the fire zone,
where sewers were put down and pavements laid. Nor was the change merely
physical. With the old buildings, the old spirit of _laissez faire_ went
up in smoke, and in the embers a municipal conscience was born. Almost
as though by the light of the flames which engulfed it, the city began
to see itself as it had never seen itself before: to take account of
stock, to plan broadly for the future.
Nor has the new-born spirit died. Only last year an extensive red-light
district was closed effectively and once for all. Baltimore is to-day
free from flagrant commercialized vice. And if not quite all the old
cobble pavements and open-gutter drains have been eliminated, there are
but few of them left--left almost as though for purposes of
contrast--and the Baltimorean who takes you to the Ghetto and shows you
these ancient remnants may immediately thereafter escort you to the
Fallsway, where the other side of the picture is presented.
The Fallsway is a brand-new boulevard of pleasing aspect, the peculiar
feature of which is that it is nothing more or less than a cover over
the top of Jones's Falls, which figured in the early history of
Baltimore as a water course, but which later came to figure as a great,
open, trunk sewer.
Every one in Baltimore is proud of the Fallsway, but particularly so are
the city engineers who carried the work through. While in Baltimore I
had the pleasure of meeting one of these gentlemen, and I can assure you
that no young head of a family was ever more delighted with his new
cottage in a suburb, his wife, his children, his garden, and his collie
puppy, than was this engineer with his boulevard sewer. Like a lover, he
carried pictures of it in his pocket, and like a lover he would assure
you that it was "not like other sewers." Nor could he speak of it
without beginning to wish to take you out to see it--not merely for a
motor ride along the top of it, either. No, his hospitality did not
stop there. When _he_ invited you to a sewer he invited you _in_. And if
you went in with him, no one could make you come out until you wanted
to.
As he told my companion and me of the three great tubes, the walks
beside them, the conduits for gas and electricity, and all the other
wonders of the place, I began to wish that we might go with him, for,
though we have been to a good many places together, this was something
new: it was the first time we had ever been invited to drop into a sewer
and make ourselves as much at home as though we lived there.
My companion, however, seemed unsympathetic to the project.
"Sewers, you know," he said, when I taxed him with indifference, "have
come to have a very definite place in both the literary and the graphic
arts. How do you propose to treat it?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you write about it: Are you going to write about it as a realist,
a mystic, or a romanticist?"
I said I didn't know.
"Well, a man who is going to write of a sewer _ought_ to know," he told
me severely. "You're not up to sewers yet. They're too big for you. If
you take my advice you'll keep out of the sewers for the present and
stick to the gutters."
So I did.