comfort and of amusement. She is accustomed to good living--her oysters,
her red-snappers, and her scrapple are justly famous. She is accustomed
to good playing. In the summer she has far more than Fairmount Park.
Atlantic City--our American Brighton--is just fifty-six miles distant
both in crow-flight and in the even path of the railroads, and because
of their wonderful high-speed service many Philadelphians commute back
and forth there all summer long.
For the old Red City is a paradise for commuters. Those few blocks
aroundabout Rittenhouse square that her social rulers have set aside as
being elect for city residence, long since have grown all too small for
a great city--the great monotonous home sections north of Market and
west of the Schuylkill are hot and dreary. So he who can, builds a stone
house out in the lovely vicinage of the great city, and when you are far
away from the high tower of the Public Buildings and find two
Philadelphians having joyous argument you will probably find that they
are discussing the relative merits of the "Main Line," the "Central
Division" or the "Reading."
And yet the best of Philadelphia good times come in winter. She is famed
for her dances and her dinners--large and small. She is inordinately
fond of recitals and of exhibitions. She is a great theater-goer. And
local tradition makes one strict demand. In New York if a young man of
good family takes a young girl of good family to the theater he is
expected to take her in a carriage. She may provide the carriage--for
these days have become shameful--but it must be a carriage none the
less. In Philadelphia if a young man of good family takes a young woman
of good family to the theater he must not take her in a carriage, not
even if he owns a whole fleet of limousines. Therein one can perhaps see
something of the dominating distinctions between the two great
communities.
But what Philadelphia loves most of all is a public festival. It does
not matter so very much just what is to be celebrated as long as there
can be a fine parade up Broad street--which just seems to have been
really designed for fine parades. On New Year's Eve while New York is
drinking itself into a drunken stupor, Philadelphia masks and
disguises--and parades. On every possible anniversary, on each public
birthday of every sort she parades--with the gay discordancies of many
bands, with long files of stolid and perspiring policemen or firemen or
civic societies, with rumbling top-heavy floats that mean whatever you
choose to have them mean. Rittenhouse square does not hold aloof from
these festivals. Oh, no, indeed! Rittenhouse square disguises itself as
grandfather or grandmother or as any of the many local heroes and rides
within the parade--more likely upon the floats. The parades are
invariably well done. And the proletariat of Philadelphia comes out from
the side streets and makes a double black wall of humanity for the long
miles of Broad street.
There is something reminiscent of Bourbon France in the way that Bourbon
Rittenhouse square dispenses these festivals unto the rest of the town.
It is all very diaphanous and very artificial but it is very sensuous
and beautiful withal, and perhaps the rest of the town for a night
forgets some of its sordidness and misery. And the picture that one of
these celebrations makes upon the mind of a stranger is indelible.
Like all of such _fêtes_ it gains its greatest glory at dusk. As
twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; it becomes a thing
of shapes and shadows--even the restless crowd is tired and softened.
Then the genius of electricity comes to transform workaday land into
fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen--this time in living
glowing lines of fire. It is time for men to exult, to forget that they
have ever been tired. Such is the setting that modern America can give a
parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it all, the most
commanding figure of his town. Below him the searchlights play and a
million incandescents glow; the shuffling of the crowds, the faint
cadences of the band, the echoes of the cheering crowd come up to him.
But he does not move. His hands, his great bronze hands, are spread in
benediction over the great gay sturdy city which he brought into
existence these long years ago.
5
THE MONUMENTAL CITY
If you approach Philadelphia by dusty highway, it is quite as
appropriate that you come to Baltimore by water highway. A multitude of
them run out from her brisk and busy harbor and not all of them find
their way to the sea. In fact one of the most fascinating of all of them
leads to Philadelphia--an ancient canal dug when the railroad was being
born and in all these years a busy and a useful water-carrier. If you
are a tourist and time is not a spurring object, take the little steamer
which runs through the old canal from the city of William Penn to the
city of Lord Baltimore. It is one of the nicest one-day trips that we
know in all the east--and apparently the one that is the least known.
Few gazetteers or tourist-guides recommend or even notice it. And yet it
remains one of the most attractive single-day journeys by water that we
have ever taken.
If you will only scan your atlas you will find that nature has offered
slight aid to such a single-day voyage. She builded no direct way
herself but long ago man made up the omission. He dug the Chesapeake and
Delaware canal in the very year that railroading was born within the
United States. For remember that in 1829 the dreamers, who many times
build the future, saw the entire nation a great network of
waterways--natural and artificial. They builded the Chesapeake and
Delaware canal bigger than any that had gone before. No mere mule-drawn
barges were to monopolize it. It was designed for river and bay
craft--a highway for vessels of considerable tonnage.
* * * * *
You arrive at this canal after sailing three hours down the Delaware
river from Philadelphia--past the Navy Yard at League island, the piers
and jetties at Marcus Hook that help to keep navigation open throughout
the winter and many and many a town whose age does not detract from all
its charm. The river widens into a great estuary of the sea. The narrow
procession of inbound and outbound craft files through a thin channel
that finally widens in a really magnificent fairway.
Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the starboard, toward another
of the sleepy little towns that you have been watching all the way down
from Philadelphia--the man who knows and who stands beside you on the
deck will tell you that it is Delaware City--and right there under a
little clump of trees is the beginning of the canal. You can see it
plainly, with its entrance lock and guarding light, and if the day be
Sunday or some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees
watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of a lock--scarcely
eleven inches of raise at the flow of the tide--but it serves to protect
the languid stretch of canal that reaches a long way inland. This
gateway is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Delaware is
one of the few old-time canals that has retained its prestige and its
traffic. An immense freight tonnage passes through it in addition to the
day-boats and the night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Moreover, the motor boats are already finding it of great service as an
important link in the inside water-route that stretches north and south
for a considerable distance along the Atlantic coast.
[Illustration: In Baltimore Harbor]
Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles of the canal and
the man who prefers to take his travel fast has no place upon the
boat. Four miles an hour is its official speed limit and even then the
"wash" of larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But what
of that speed limit with a good magazine in your hands and a slowly
changing vista of open country ever spread before your hungry eyes? You
approach swing-bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp
order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags of little
Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies; heavy Conestoga wagons filled
with farm produce for the towns and cities to the north; sometimes a big
automobile snorting and puffing as if in rage at a few minutes of
enforced delay.
On the long stretches between the bridges the canal twists and turns as
if finding its way, railroad fashion, between increasing slight
elevations. Sometimes it is very wide and the tow-path side--for
sailing-craft are often drawn by mules through it--is a slender
embankment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You meet whole
flotillas of freighters all the way and when edging your way past them
you throw your Philadelphia morning paper into their wheel-houses you
win real thanks. All the way the country changes its variety--and does
not lose its fascination.
So sail to Baltimore. At Chesapeake City you are done with the canal,
just when it may have begun to tire you ever and ever so slightly. Your
vessel drops through a deep lock into the Back creek, an estuary of the
Elk river. The Elk river in turn is an estuary of Chesapeake bay and you
are upon one of the remote tendons of that really marvelous system of
waterways that has its focal point in Hampton Roads and reaches for
thousands of miles into Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North
Carolina.
You sweep through the Elk river and then through the upper waters of the
Chesapeake bay, just born from the yellow flood of the Susquehanna, as
the day dies. As the sun is nearly down, your ship turns sharply, leaves
the Bay and begins the ascent of the Patapsco river. Signs of a nearby
city, a great city if you please, multiply. There are shipbuilding
plants upon distant shores, the glares of foundry cupolas, multiplying
commerce--Baltimore is close at hand.
And so you sail into Baltimore--into that lagoon-like harbor at the very
heart of the town. The steamboats that go sailing further down the
Chesapeake that poke their inquisitive noses into the reaches of the
Pocomoke, the Pianatank, the Nanticoke, the Rappahannock, the
Cocohannock, the Big Wicomico and the Little Wicomico--all of these
water highways of a land of milk and honey and only rivaling one another
in their quiet lordly beauty--sail in and out of Baltimore. There are
many of these steamers as you come into the inner harbor of the city,
tightly tethered together with noses against the pier just as we used to
see horses tied closely to one another at the hitching-rails, at
fair-time in the home town years ago. And they speak the strength of the
manorial city of Lord Baltimore. For the city that sits upon the hills
above her landlocked little harbor draws her strength from a rich
country for many miles roundabout. For many years she has set there,
confident in her strength, leading in progress, firm in resource.
For well you may call Baltimore--quite as much as Philadelphia--a city
of first things. There are almost too many of these to be recounted
here. It is worthy of note, however, that in Baltimore came the first
use in America of illuminating gas, which drove out the candle and the
oil lamp as relics of a past age. Baltimore's historic playhouse,
Peale's Museum, was the first in all the land to be set aglow by the new
illuminant. And one may well imagine the glow of pride also that dwelt
that memorable evening upon the faces of all the folk who were gathered
in that ancient temple of the drama.
And yet there was an earlier "first thing" of even greater
importance--the hour of inspiration a century ago when an enemy's guns
were trained on that stout old guardian of the town's harbor, Fort
McHenry--an engagement to be remembered almost solely by the fact that
the "Star Spangled Banner" first lodged itself in the mind of man. But
to our minds the greatest of the many, many "first things" of Baltimore
was the coming of the railroad. For the first real railroad system in
America--the Baltimore & Ohio--was planned by the citizens of the old
town--ambitious dreamers each of them--as an offset to those rival
cities to the north, Philadelphia and New York, who were creating canals
to develop their commerce--at the expense of the commerce of Baltimore.
So it was that a little group of merchants gathered in the house of
George Brown, on the evening of the 12th of February, 1827, a date not
to be regarded lightly in the annals of the land. For out of that
meeting was to come a new America--a growing land that refused to be
bound by high mountains or wide rivers. Not that the little gathering of
Baltimore merchants pointed an instant or an easy path to quick
prosperity. The path of the Baltimore & Ohio was hedged about for many
years with trials and disappointments. It was more than a quarter of a
century before it was a railroad worthy of the name, meeting even in
part the ideals and dreams of the men who had planned it to bring their
city in touch with the Ohio and the other navigable rivers of the
unknown West. And at the beginning it was a fog-blinded path that
confronted them. Over in England an unknown youth was experimenting with
that uncertain toy, the steam locomotive, while a Russian gentleman of
known intelligence gravely predicted that a car set with sails to go
before the wind upon its rails was the most practical form of
transportation. And it is worthy of mention that the earliest of the
Baltimore and Ohio steam locomotives was beaten in a neck-and-neck race
toward the West by a stout gray horse. The name of the old locomotive is
still recorded in the annals of the railroad but that of the gray horse
is lost forever.
* * * * *
To know and to love the Baltimore of today, one must know and love the
Baltimore of yesterday. He must know her lore, her traditions, her first
families--the things that have gone to make the modern city. He must
see, as through magic glasses, the Baltimore of other days, the city
that came into her own within a very few years after the close of the
American Revolution. His imagination must depict that stout old merchant
and banker, Alexander Brown; Evan Thomas, the first president of
Baltimore's own railroad; B. H. Latrobe, the first great architect and
engineer that a young nation should come to know and whose real memorial
is in certain portions of the great Federal Capitol at Washington. He
must see Winans, the car-builder, and Peter Cooper, tinkering with the
locomotive. He may turn toward less commercial things and find Rembrandt
Peale; and if his glasses be softened by the amber tints of charity he
may see a drunkard staggering through the streets of old Baltimore to
die finally in a gutter, while some men put their fingers to their lips
and whisper that "Mr. Poe's _Raven_ may be literature after all."
It is indeed the old Baltimore that you must first come to know and to
love, if you are ever to understand the personality of the Baltimore of
today. The new Baltimore is a splendid city. Its fine new homes, its
many, many schools and colleges proclaim that here is a center of real
culture; its great churches, its theaters, its modern hotels, its broad
avenues are worthy of a city of six hundred thousand humans. Druid Hill
Park at the back of the new Baltimore is worthy of a city of a million
souls. From it you can ride or stroll downtown through Eutaw place, that
broad parked avenue which is the full pride of the new Baltimore.
Suddenly you turn to the left, pass through a few mean streets, the gray
pile of the Fifth Regiment armory, known nationally because of the great
conventions that have been held beneath its spreading walls, see the
nearby tower of Mount Royal station--after that you are in the region of
the uptown hotels and theaters--thrusting themselves into the long lines
of tight, red-brick houses. These are builded after the fashion of the
Philadelphia houses, even as to their white marble door-steps, and yet
possess a charm and distinction of their own.
There are many of these old houses upon this really fine street, and you
crane your neck at the first intersection to catch its name upon the
sign-post. "Charles Street" it reads and with a little gladsome memory
you recall a bit of verse that you saw a long time ago in the _Baltimore
Sun_. It reads somewhat after this fashion:
Its heart is in Mount Vernon square,
Its head is in the green wood:
Its feet are stretched along the ways
Where swarms the foreign brood;
A modicum of Bon Marche,
That sublimated store--
And Oh, the treasure that we have
In Charles street, Baltimore!
I love to watch the moving throng,
The afternoon parade;
The coaches rolling home to tea,
The young man and the maid;
The gentlemen who dwell in clubs,
The magnates of the town--
Oh, Charles street has a smile for them,
And never wears a frown!
The little shops, so cool and sweet;
The finesse and the grace
Which mark the mercantility
Of such a market-place;
And then beyond the tempting stores
The quietness that runs
Into the calm and stately square
With marble denizens.
The little and the larger stores
Are tempting, to be sure;
But they are only half the charm
That Charles street holds to lure;
For here and there along the way,
How sweet the homes befall--
The domicile that holds his Grace,
The gentle Cardinal.
The mansions with pacific mien
Whose windows say "Come in!"
The touches of colonialness,
The farness of the din
That rolls a city league away
And leaves this dainty street
A cool and comfortable spot
Where past and present meet.
A measure of la boulevard
Before whose windows pass
The madame and the damoisel,
The gallant and the lass;
The gravest and the most sedate,
The young and gay it calls;
And, oh, how proper over it--
The shadows of St. Paul's!
Dip down the hill and well away,
The southward track it takes,
O fickleness, how many quips,
How many turns it takes!
But ever in its greensward heart,
From head to foot we pour
The homage of our love of it--
Dear Charles street, Baltimore!
[Illustration: Charles Street--Baltimore]
You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very heart of Charles
street. It is a little open place, shaped like a Maltese cross rather
than a real square or oblong, with a modern apartment house looming up
upon it, whose façades of French Renaissance give a slightly Parisian
touch to that corner of the square. To the rest of it, bordered with
sober, old-time mansions there is nothing Parisian, unless you stand
apart and gaze at the Monument, which sends its great shaft some two
hundred feet up into the air. There are such columns in Paris.
It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon square, that adds variety
to the vistas up and down through Charles street. For eighty years it
has stood there, straight and true; for eighty years General Washington
has looked down into the gardens of Charles street, upon the children
who are playing there, the folk coming home at night. It is the most
dominating thing in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-scraper
habit, and because of it we have always known Baltimore as the
Monumental City.
* * * * *
Now turn from the modern Baltimore--right down this street which runs
madly off the sharp hill of Mount Vernon square. Charles street, with
all of its shops and gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot
of the hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat sordid
way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station and since you are to
see so many great railroad stations before you are done with the cities
of America, take a second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It
is not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, very old--as
far as we know the oldest of all the important stations that are still
in use today. From its smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the
Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna country--the
farther lands beyond--since 1848. And that trainshed, with its
stout-pegged wooden-trussed roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone
pillars, seems good for another sixty-five years.
Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. Over in another
of the older parts of the town you can still find Camden station, which
in 1857 was not only proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was
ever built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy place
indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great fire of a decade ago, but
finally forced to close its doors in the face of the competition of
better located and more elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient
cathedral remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Merchants'
Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look east from the
Monument square there in front of the Post Office. Across the harbor you
can find Fort McHenry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Baltimore
does not easily forget.
And here, as you plunge down into the little congested district
roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the really old Baltimore. The
streets are as rambling and as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their
gutters still run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the
credit of the town that she is today fast doing away with these. And
once in a time you can stand at the open door of an oyster establishment
and watch the negroes shocking those bivalves--singing as they work. For
just below Baltimore is a great _habitat_ of the oyster as well as of
the crab, to say nothing of some more aristocratic denizens--the
diamond-back terrapin for instance. Boys with trays--many of them
negroes--walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling cold
deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are uniformly delicious,
and the boys sell them as freely on the streets as the boys down in
Staunton and some other Virginia towns sell cold chicken.
Now we are across Jones Falls[B]--that unimpressive stream that gullies
through Baltimore--and plunging into Old Town. Other cities may boast
their _quartiers_, Baltimore has Old Town. And she clings to the name
and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here is indeed the
oldest part of Old Town and if we search quietly through its narrow,
crowded streets we may still see some of the old inns, dating well back
into the eighteenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling
in eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when the coaches
started forth up the new National Pike to Cumberland or distant
Wheeling, north to York and Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little
old houses of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively
residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are
so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful glass that we
think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see
above our heads in the street cars. But they represent Baltimore's
solution of her housing problem.
[B] During the past year Baltimore has made a very
creditable progress toward building an important commercial
street over Jones Falls; thus transforming it into a hidden,
tunneled sewer. Residents of the city will not soon forget,
however, that it was at Jones Falls that the engines of the
New York Fire Department took their stand and halted the
great fire of 1904. E. H.
For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apartments. She has, like
her Quaker neighbor to the north, mile upon mile of little red-brick
houses, all these also with white door-steps--marble many times, and in
other times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh paintings. In
these little houses Baltimore lives. You may find here and there some
one of them no more than ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories
high, but it is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the rent
of it is ridiculously low--compared even with the lower-priced
apartments and the tenements of New York. That low rent, combined with
the profuse and inexpensive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap
place in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the democracy of
her boulevards makes her a very comfortable place of residence--even for
a poor man. And you may live within your little house and of a summer
evening sit upon your "pleasure porch" as comfortably as any prince.