[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.
* * * * *