metropolitanism--with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of
houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different.
There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle
shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that
made the New Englanders think of the pretty Massachusetts and
Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came--a
steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the days of the
Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They
crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social
foundations of the Brooklyn of today.
It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small
colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of
wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational
churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage
and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the
Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever
known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn
Heights--with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper
harbor of New York--the finest residential locality in the land. It was
New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of
the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning--New
England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in
Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans
religiously each Sabbath eve.
The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights,
but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on
Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses--many of
them--have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their
glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread
apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered
degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold
the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is
too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days
there is another steady hegira across the East river--the first
families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper
Manhattan.
There is another reason for this. We have told how Brooklyn sold her
birthright when she threw off her political individuality and made
herself a borough of an enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true
to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour when the
Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the fullness of its mighty work. In
the weaving of that bridge is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies
of Brooklyn--the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer and its
builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and who died a lingering
death before it was completed. Roebling's apartments were upon a high
crest of Brooklyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked down
upon the workmen who were weaving the steel web of the bridge. In the
last hours of his life he could see the creation of his mind, the
structure that was about to be known as one of the eight modern wonders
of the world, being made ready for its task of the long years.
The coming of that first bridge began the transformation of Brooklyn;
although for a long time Brooklyn did not realize it. The New England
element within her population did not even realize it when she gave up
her political identity as a city. Then something else happened. Two
miles to the north of the first bridge another was built--this with its
one arm touching the East Side of Manhattan--the most crowded residence
district in the new world--while its other hand reached that portion of
Brooklyn, formerly known as Williamsburgh. We have already spoken of
Williamsburgh--in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now
part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty years it hung
tenaciously to its personality. Back of it was a great area of regular
streets and small houses known as the Eastern District. The folk who
lived there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh was
different. Its folk were glad to give themselves the name of the old
town, although the pattern of its streets ran closely into the pattern
of the streets of the community which had engulfed it. They held
themselves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, their own
theater, their own clubs, their own churches, their own schools. They
also had the opportunity of seeing the social and the business changes
that the development of the first bridge had wrought in old Brooklyn;
how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to the ferry-house had
lost its gayety and was entering upon decadence.
The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the Brooklyn bridge--only
in sharper measure. It was like a tube lancing the overcrowded mass of
the East Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed before it had
its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded tenements of Rivington and Allen
and Essex and all the other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery
began moving over the new bridge and out to a distant section of
Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had preëmpted Brownsville for their
own. For a time that was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old
race began asking themselves "why go to Brownsville, eight or nine miles
distant, when at the other end of the bridge is a fair land for
settlement?"
So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For a little while it
sought to oppose the change, but an ox might as well pull against the
mighty power of a locomotive, as a community try to defy the working of
economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has been "moving out," her
houses, her churches, many of her pet institutions--going the most part
farther out upon Long island and there rebuilding under many protective
restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly gone. Strange tongues and
strange creeds are heard within her churches. And some of them have been
pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red-brick houses, to
give way to cheap apartments, wrought wondrously and fearfully and
echoing with the babbling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the
transformation stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is
still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, transforming quiet
house-lined streets into noisy ways lined with crowded apartments.
It is only within a comparatively little time that the older Brooklyn
has realized the change that is coming upon her. She has known for years
of the presence of many thousands of Irish and German within her
boundaries. They have been useful citizens in her development and have
done much for her in both a generous and an intelligent fashion. She
holds today great colonies of Norse and of the Swedish--down close to
the waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and her Italian
citizens, taken by themselves, would make the greatest Italian city in
the world. She has the largest single colony of Syrians in the New World
and more than half a million Jews. According to reliable estimates,
three-quarters of her adult population today are foreign-born.
Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a
transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be
recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a
town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily
awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its institutions changing, its
future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant
churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years--and some of
these merely new edifices for old congregations which have been forced
to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that
finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time.
Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has
been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is
dying.
* * * * *
Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, although in Greenwood
she has what is deservedly the most famous cemetery in America. Hold on,
Brooklyn may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town-hall
that is worthy of mention here. They do not call it the town-hall or the
opera-house, but it is known as the Academy of Music and it is an
institution well worth the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy
of Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that stands for good
within the community that we must see how it has come into being.
It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of today were Brooklyn boys
and girls there stood down on Montague street in the oldest part of the
town an elder Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain
great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic-lantern pictures,
the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even real drama or real opera,
although play-acting was frowned upon in the early days of that
barn-like structure. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely.
Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the great actors and
the great singers of yesterday upon the stage of its old Academy; from
that stage it heard its own preachers, heard such orators as Edward
Everett and John B. Gough; crowded into the spacious auditorium at the
Commencement exercises and the amateur dramatics of its boys and girls.
The old Academy was a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn.
There comes an end to all temporal things and a winter's morning a full
decade ago saw the historic opera house go up in a truly theatrical puff
of smoke and flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost an
institution by which it was as well known as the Navy Yard or Plymouth
church--where Beecher had once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague
street were cool there were demands that the Academy be rebuilt.
Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel that the old Brooklyn was
beginning to pass. Beecher was dead; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles
was burned and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a second
Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the Academy was a popular
measure, a test as to Brooklyn's ability to preserve at least a vestige
of civic unity unto herself.
It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was a time when it seemed
as if Brooklyn must give up and become the Cinderella of all the
boroughs of the new New York. But it seems that there were other
institutions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and still is,
the Institute of Arts and Sciences. This is a sort of civic Chautauqua.
Toward it several thousand men and women each pay five dollars a year
for the opportunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same time.
They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, recitals and the like and
this institute has so fat a purse that the impresario or prima donna is
yet to be found who is strong enough to withstand its pleadings.
This institute came valiantly to the aid of the Academy project and
saved the day. While it has no proprietary interest in the new
structure, it is its chief tenant, and the new Academy was planned in
detail to meet the needs of this popular educational institution. So,
while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new has a half-dozen
big and comfortable meeting-places. On a single night Brooklyn can snap
its fingers at the Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East
river, and can gather within its own Temple of Song--a spacious and
elegant theater which receives the Metropolitan company once a week
during the season--can place another great audience in the adjoining
Music Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another hall
hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell of distant climes
and strange peoples; in a lofty ballroom, hold formal reception and
dance; and gather in a still smaller hall to hear Professor
Something-or-other discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like.
In this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, can be
assembled in this big and passing handsome structure and yet be
completely independent of each other. The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought
after a hard fight, is no tiny toy.
The building was largely a labor of love to those who succeeded in
getting the subscriptions for it. Its maintenance is today almost a
labor of love for its stockholders are not alone the wealthy bankers and
the merchants of the town. Its stock-list is as catholic as its
endeavors--and they are legion. It is designed to be eventually a
gathering-place for the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker; all
the sturdy folk who have their homes from Greenpoint to Coney island.
* * * * *
[Illustration: An early Brooklyn Citizen]
"One thing more," you demand. "How about Coney island?"
Coney island is a part of Brooklyn. It is also the most advertised and
the most over-rated show place in the whole land. While the older
Brooklyn used to drive down to that sand-spit facing the sea for clams
and for fish-dinner in the summer days, it is only within the past few
years that it has been commercialized and an attempt made to place it
upon a business basis. We are inclined to think that the attempt,
measured in the long run, has been a failure. It began about ten
years ago, when the standard of entertainment at the famous beach had
fallen low. A young man, with a gift for the show business, created a
great amusement park there by the side of the sea.
"People do not come to Coney island to see the ocean," he said. "They
come down here for a good time."
It looked as if he was right. His amusement park was a great novelty and
for a time a tremendous success. It had splendid imitators almost within
a stone-throw--its name and its purpose were being copied all the way
across the land. Perhaps people did not go to Coney island, after all,
to see the cool and lovely ocean.
But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New York seemed to
change. New Yorkers did not seem to care quite as much for the gay
creations of paint and tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each
night in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney
island--again and again. It scoured the paint and tinsel cities, thrust
the highest of their towers, a blackened ruin, to the ground. Pious folk
said that God was scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws.
And the fact remains that it has not regained the preëminence of its
position ten years ago.
We think that a man who had been out of Brooklyn for twenty years and
whose recollections of the wonderful beach that forms her southern
outpost were recollections of great gardens; of Patrick Gilmore playing
inimitable marches in front of one giant hotel and of the incomparable
Siedl leading his orchestra beside another, would do better than to
return to Coney island. Siedl is dead; so is Gilmore and even the huge
wooden hotel that looked down upon him was pulled apart last year to
make room for the encroaching streets and houses of a growing Brooklyn.
The paint and the tinsel of Coney island grows tarnished--and that
twenty-year exile could find little else than the sea to hold his
interest. And the folk who go to Coney island today seem to care very
little for the sea--save perhaps as a giant bath-tub.
We think that the absentee of twenty years' standing would do far better
to go to Prospect Park. That really superb pleasure-ground, planned
through the foresight of a Brooklyn man of half a century ago, remains
practically unchanged through the years. It remains one of the great
parks, not only of America, but of the entire world. It is the real lion
of Brooklyn. It is incomparably finer than its rival, the somewhat
neglected Central Park of Manhattan. And alas, Manhattan seems to think
so, too, for to Prospect Park it sends each bright summer Sunday not the
best but the roughest of its hordes. And Brooklyn sighs when it sees its
lovely playground stolen from it.
It is more than playground--Prospect Park. It is history. There are no
historic buildings in Brooklyn--unless we except the Dutch Reformed
church out in Flatbush--but all of Prospect Park was once a
battlefield--the theater of that bitter and bloody conflict of July,
1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy and forced to
retire from the city that he needed most of all to hold. Through its
great meadows Continental and Briton and Hessian once marched with
murder in their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys and girls
of the Brooklyn of today play tennis; the older men, after the fashion
of the Brooklyn of other days, their croquet. And annually down the
greensward the little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time
pageant.
The Sunday-school parade of Brooklyn is one of the older institutions of
the town that still survives. Annually and upon the first Thursday
afternoon of June the children of all the Sabbath-schools of the borough
march out upon its streets. There is not room even in Prospect Park for
all of these--for sometimes there are 150,000 of them marching of an
afternoon; and the great distances within Brooklyn must also be brought
into consideration. But the largest of the individual parades always
marches in the park--marches like trained troopers up past the
dignitaries in the reviewing stand, and the mayor, and the other city
officers, the Governor of the State, not infrequently the President of
the United States. There is much music, great excitement--and ice-cream
afterwards. Sharp denominational bars are let down and the ice-cream
goes to all. And the boys and girls who are to be the men and women of
the Brooklyn of tomorrow and who are to face its great problems march
proudly by, knowing that the loving eye of father or of mother must be
upon them.
The problems of the Brooklyn of tomorrow are not to be carelessly
dismissed. Nor is the problem of Brooklyn's future in any way hopeless.
The changing of conditions, the changing of habits, the changing of
institutions does not of necessity spell utter ruin. Cosmopolitanism
does not mean the end of all things. We have called her dull and
emotionless and provincial, and yet many of her residents are quick and
appreciative--well-traveled and well-read--anxious to meet the new
conditions, to solve the problems that have been entailed. And we have
not the slightest doubt that in the long run they will be solved, that
Brooklyn will be ready and willing to undertake the great problem that
has been thrust upon her--the fusing of her hundreds of thousands of
foreign-born into first-rate Americans.
4
WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN
To approach Philadelphia in a humble spirit of absolute appreciation,
you must come to her by one of the historic pikes that spread from her
like cart-wheel spokes from their hub. You will find one of those old
roads easily enough, for they radiate from her in every direction. And
when you have found your pike you will discover that it is a fine road,
even in these days when there is a "good-roads movement" abroad in the
land. You can traverse it into town as best suits your fancy--and your
purse. If you are fortunate enough to own an automobile you will find
motoring one of the greatest of many joys in the southeastern corner of
Pennsylvania. If your purse is thin you can have joyous health out of
walking the long miles such as is denied to your proud motorist. And if
you have neither money nor robust health for hard walking, you will find
a trolley line along each of the important pikes. Philadelphia does not
close her most gracious avenues of approach to you--no matter who you
are or what you are.
* * * * *
Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a September morning
waiting to tramp our way, at least to the outskirts of the closely built
part of the city. And before we are away from the tavern which has kept
us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single parting
glance. It has been standing there at the cross-roads of two of the busy
pikes of Montgomery county for a full century and a half. In all those
years it has not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter
or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and fifty years of
hospitality for which it does not have to make apologies.
Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort along the roadsides
of New England, but we do not know where else you will find them without
crossing the Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the Sussex
of the older England. Yet around Philadelphia they are plentiful--with
their yellow plastered walls, tight green shutters hung against them,
their low-ceilinged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone
out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the highway. Some of
them have quite wonderful signs and all of them have a wonderful
hospitality--heritage from the Quaker manner of living.
So from the William Penn Inn one may start after breakfast as one might
have started a century ago--to walk his way into the busy town. The four
corners where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge--a smooth white
house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, and the tavern occupying
three of them. The fourth gives to a view of distant fields--and such a
view! Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the rich lands
down in the valleys, the shrewder genius required to make the more
sterile ridge acres yield. And, as you trudge down the pike, the view
stays with you for a long while.
At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevitable toll-gate
that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from every side. But your payment to
the toll-keeper upon the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His
smile is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if you
would tarry for a little time within the living-room of the toll-house
he would tell you stories of the pike--stories that would make it worth
the waiting. But--Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and
dusty. You pick up your way and off you go.
Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one
into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky
chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the
tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long grass
roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a
long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows
of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of
its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern--it only dates back to
1823--and yet it is typical. Two masses of benches on a slightly
inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women.
Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a
pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do
not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to
the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty
folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here
on the morning of First Day.
Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial
farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash
and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and
holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is
farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even
thought that this is _dilettante_ agriculture. It is merely evidence
that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks
have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives
his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he
prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern
transportation methods bring his products to the consumer.