If he is really typical of the city at the west gate of the Empire
state, you will find him optimistic and energetic to a singular degree,
and he needs all his optimism and his energy to combat the problems that
come to a town of exceeding growth, just crossing the threshold of
metropolitanism. Those problems demand cool heads and stout hearts.
Buffalo is just beginning to appreciate that. It is becoming less
difficult than of old for them to pull together, to dig deep into their
purses if need be, and to plan their city of tomorrow in a generous
spirit of coöperation.
[Illustration: Rochester is a city of charming homes]
The Buffalonians have a full measure of enjoyment in their city. They
are intensely proud of it and rightfully--do not forget the man who once
told you of the number of railroad trains within twenty-four hours--and
they are thoroughly happy in and around it. Niagara Falls and a
half-dozen of lake beaches on Erie and Ontario are within easy reach,
while nearer still is the lovely park of the town--which a goodly corner
of America remembers as the site of the Pan-American Exposition, in
1901. The Buffalonians live much of the time outdoors, and that holds
true whether they are able to patronize their country clubs or the less
pretentious suburban resorts. They play at golf, at baseball, at
football, and in the long hard winter months at basketball and hockey
and bowling. They organize teams in all these sports--and some
others--and then go down to Rochester and enter into amiable contests
with the folks who live by the Genesee. Syracuse, too, comes into the
fray and these three cities of the western end of the state of New York
fight out their natural and healthy rivalry in series upon series of
sturdy athletic championships. The bond between them is really very
close indeed.
* * * * *
Rochester stands halfway between Syracuse and Buffalo and as we have
already said, is different from both of them. One difference is apparent
even to the man who does not alight from his through train. For no
railroad has dared to thrust itself down a main business street in
Rochester; in fact she was one of the very first cities in America to
remove the deadly grade crossings from her avenues, and incalculable
fatalities and near fatalities have been prevented by her wisdom. Many
years ago she placed the main line of the New York Central railroad,
which crosses close to her heart, upon a great viaduct. When that
viaduct was built, a great change came upon the town. The old depot,
with its vaulted wooden roof clearing both tracks and street and
anchored in the walls of the historic Brackett House; with its ancient
white horse switching the cars of earlier days (as it is years and years
and years since that white horse went to graze in heavenly meadows)
vanished from sight, and a great stone-lined embankment--high enough and
thick enough to be a city wall--appeared, as if by magic, while
Rochester reveled in a vast new station, big enough and fine enough for
all time. At least that was the way the station seemed when it was first
built in 1882. But alas, for restless America! They have begun to tear
the old station down as this is being written--a larger and still finer
structure replaces it. And the folk who pray for the conservatism of our
feverish American energy are praying that it will last more than
thirty-one years!
But in just this way Rochester has grown apace and quite ahead of the
facilities which her earlier generations thought would be abundant for
all time. The high civic standard that forced the great railroad
improvement in the earlier days when most American towns, like Topsy,
were "jus' growin'" and giving little thought for the morrow, made
Rochester different. It made her seek to better her water supply and in
this she succeeded, tapping a spring pure lake forty miles back in the
high hills and bringing its contents to her by a far-reaching aqueduct.
It was a large undertaking for a small city of the earlier days, but the
small city was plucky and it today possesses a water supply that is
second to none. That same early placed high civic standard made
fireproof buildings an actuality in Rochester, years in advance of other
towns of the same size.
That civic standard has worked wonders for the town by the falls of the
Genesee. For one thing it has made her prolific in propaganda of one
sort or another. Strange religious sects have come to light within her
boundaries. Spiritualism was one of these, for it was in Rochester that
the famed Fox sisters heard the mysterious rappings, and it was only a
little way outside the town where Joseph Smith asserted that he found
the Book of Mormon and so brought a new church into existence. And the
ladies who are conducting the "Votes for Women" campaign with such ardor
should not forget that it was in Rochester that Susan B. Anthony lived
for long years of her life, working not alone for the cause that was
close to her heart, but in every way for the good of the town that meant
so much to her.
Perhaps the most interesting phases of the Rochester civic standard are
those that have worked inwardly. She has a new city plan--of course.
What modern city has not dreamed these glowing things, of transforming
ugly squares into plazas of European magnificence, of making dingy Main
and State streets into boulevards? And who shall say that such dreams
are idly dreamed? Rochester is not dreaming idly. She has already
conceived a wonderful new City Hall, to spring upwards from her Main
street, but what is perhaps more interesting to her casual visitors in
her new plan is the architectural recognition that it gives to the
Genesee. The Genesee is a splendid river--in many ways not unlike the
more famous Niagara. You have already known the part it has played in
the making of Rochester. Yet the city has seen fit, apparently, to all
but ignore it. Main street--for Rochester is a famous one-street
town--crosses it on a solid stone bridge but that bridge is lined with
buildings, like the prints you used to see of old London bridge. None of
the folk who walk that famous thoroughfare ever see the river. In the
new scheme the old rookeries that hang upon the edge of Main street
bridge are to be torn away and the river is to come into its own. And
Rochester folk feel that that day can come none too soon.
But the Rochester civic standard has worked no better for her than in
social reforms. The phases of these are far too many to be enumerated
here, but one of them stands forth too sharply to be ignored. A few
years ago some Rochesterian conceived the idea of making the schools
work nights as well as day. He had studied the work of the settlement
houses in the larger cities, and while Rochester had no such slums as
called for settlement houses it did have a large population that
demanded some interest and attention. For instance, within the past few
years a large number of Italians have come there, and although they
present no such difficult fusing problem as the Jews of New York, the
Polocks of Buffalo or the Huns of Pittsburgh, it is not the Rochester
way to ignore in the larger social sense any of the folk who come to
her.
"We will make the school-houses into clubs, we will make them open
forums where people can come evenings and get a little instruction, a
little more entertainment, but best of all can speak their minds
freely," said this enthusiast. "We will broaden out the idea of the ward
clubs."
The ward clubs to which he referred were neat and attractive structures
situated in residential parts of the town, where folk who lived in their
own neat homes and who earned from three to eight thousand dollars a
year gather for their dances, their bridges, their small lectures and
the like. The enthusiast proposed to enlarge this idea, by the simple
process of opening the school-houses evenings. His idea was immensely
popular from the first. And within a very few weeks it was in process of
fruition. The school-houses--they called them "Social Centers"--were
opened and night after night they were filled. It looked as if Rochester
had launched another pretty big idea upon the world.
That idea, however, has been radically changed, today. One of the
professors of the local university threw himself into it, possibly with
more enthusiasm than judgment, and was reported in the local prints as
having said that the red flag might be carried in street parades along
with the Stars and Stripes. That settled it. Rochester is a pretty
conservative town, and its folk who live quietly in its great houses sat
up and took notice of the professor's remarks. Those great houses had
smiled rather complacently at the pretty experiment in the schools. Of
a sudden they decided that they were being transformed into incubators
for the making of socialists or of anarchists--great houses do not make
very discerning discriminations.
The professor had kicked over the boat. A powerful church which has
taken a very definite stand against Socialism joined with the great
houses. The question was brought into local politics. The professor lost
his job out at the university, and the school-houses ceased to be open
forums. Today they are called "Recreation Centers" and are content with
instruction and entertainment, but the full breadth of the idea they
started has swept across the country and many cities of the mid-West and
the West are adopting it.
The Rochester way of doing things is a very good way, indeed. For
instance, the city decided a few years ago that it ought to have a fair.
It had been many years since it had had an annual fair, and it saw
Syracuse and Toronto each year becoming greater magnets because of their
exhibitions. Straightway Rochester decided that it would have some sort
of fall show, just what sort was a bit of a problem at first. It wanted
something far bigger than a county fair, and yet it could hardly ask the
state for aid when the state had spent so much on its own show in nearby
Syracuse.
Then it was that Rochester decided to dig down into its own pockets. It
saw a fortunate opening just ahead. The state in abandoning a penal
institution had left fourteen or fifteen acres of land within a mile of
the center of the city--the famous Four Corners. The city took that
land, tore down the great stone wall that had encircled it, erected some
new buildings and transformed some of the older ones, created a park of
the entire property and announced that it was going in the show
business, itself. It has gone into the show business and succeeded. The
Rochester Exposition is as much a part of the city organization as its
park board or its health department. Throughout the greater part of the
year the show-grounds are a public park, holding a museum of local
history that is not to be despised. And for two weeks in each September
it comes into its own--a great, dignified show, builded not of wood and
staff so as to make a memorable season and then be forgotten, but
builded of steel and stone and concrete for both beauty and permanency.
* * * * *
"Now what are the things that have gone to make these things possible?"
you are beginning to say. "What is the nature of the typical
Rochesterian?"
Putting the thing the wrong way about we should say that the typical
Rochesterian is pretty near the typical American. And still continuing
in the reversed order of things consider, for an instant, the beginnings
of Rochester. We have spoken of these three cities of the western end of
New York state as the first fruit of the wonderful Erie canal. That is
quite true and yet it is also true that before the canal came there was
quite a town at the falls of the Genesee, trying in crude fashion to
avail itself of the wonderful water-power. And while the canal was still
an unfinished ditch, three men rode up from the south--Rochester and
Fitzhugh and Carroll--and surveyed a city to replace the straggling
town. That little village had, during the ten brief years of its
existence, been known as Falls Town. Col. Rochester gave his own name to
the city that he foresaw and lived to see it make its definite
beginnings. All that was in the third decade of the last century, and
Rochester has yet to celebrate her first centenary under her present
name.
Her career divides itself into three epochs. In the first of these--from
the days of her settlement up to the close of the Civil War--she was
famed for her flouring-mills. She was known the world over as the Flour
City, and she held that title until the great wheat farms of the land
were moved far to the west. But they still continued to call her by the
same name although they spelled it differently now--the Flower City. For
a new industry arose within her. America was awakening to a quickened
sense of beauty. Flowers and florists were becoming popular, and a group
of shrewd men in and around Rochester made the nursery business into a
very great industry. In more recent years the nature of her manufactures
has broadened--her camera factory is the most famous in all the world,
optical goods, boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, come pouring out of
her in a great tidal stream of enterprise.
She is an industrial city, definitely and distinctly. Fortunately she is
an industrial city employing a high grade of labor almost exclusively,
and yet none the less a town devoted to manufacturing. Once again, do
not forget that she has not neglected her social life, and you may read
this as you please. You may look away from the broadening work of the
ward clubs and of the school-houses and demand if there is an
aristocracy in Rochester. The resident of the town will lead you over
into its Third ward--a compact community almost within stone-throw of
the Four Corners, and shut off from the rest of the vulgar world by a
river, a canal and a railroad yard. In that compact community, its
tree-lined streets suggesting the byways of some tranquil New England
community, is the seat of Rochester social government. The residents of
the Third ward are a neighborly folk, borrowing things of one another
and visiting about with delightful informality among themselves, and yet
their rule is undisputed.
East avenue--the great show street of Rochester--feels that rule. East
avenue is lined with great houses, far greater houses than those of the
Third ward--many of them built with the profits of "Kodak" stock--yet
East avenue represents a younger generation, a generation which seems to
have made money rather easily. There has been some intermarriage and
some letting down of the bars between the ambitious East avenue and the
dominant Third ward--but not much of it. Rochester is far too
conservative to change easily or rapidly.
[Illustration: The canal gives Syracuse a Venetian look]
She is proud of herself as she is--and rightly so. Her people will sing
of her charms by the hours--and rightly so, again. They live their lives
and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of
Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her
movements toward social reform, not even in her parks--although
Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect
and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion--nor does it
reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that
may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics--her glory is in
her homes. The tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city
house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown there.
Apartment houses are rarities--there are not more than twenty or thirty
in the town--and consequently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and
poor, dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land; the chances
are that he has market-truck growing in his backyard, a real
kitchen-garden. There are thousands of these little homes in the
outlying sections of the town, with more pretentious ones lining East
avenue and the other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together
are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of Rochester are
less governed and themselves govern more than in most places of the
size. That is the value of the detached house to the city. Detached
houses in a city seem to mean good schools, good fire and police
service, clean streets, health protection, social progress--Rochester
has all of these in profusion.
East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents these ideals of
Rochester on dress parade. We rather think, however, that you can read
the character of the town better in the side streets. Now a long street,
filled with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses does not
mean much at a glance--even when the street is parked and filled for a
mile with blossoming magnolias, as Oxford street in Rochester is filled.
But such a street, together with all the other streets of its sort,
means that much of the disappearing charm and loveliness of our American
village life is being absorbed right into the heart of a community of
goodly size.
Sometimes citizens from other towns running hard amuck Rochester's
conservatism call her provincial. She has clung to some of her small
town customs longer than her neighbors, but of late she has attempted
metropolitanism--they have builded two big new hotels in the place, and
the radicals have dared to place a big building or two off Main
street--quite a step in a town which has become famous as a one-street
town.
But Rochester, like most conservatives, is careless of outside
criticism. She points to the big things that she has accomplished. She
shows you her streets of the detached houses and her parks--perhaps
takes you down to Genesee Valley Park of a summer night when carnival is
in the air and the city's band, the city's _very own band_, if you
please, is playing from a great float in midstream, while voices from
two or three thousand gaily decorated canoes carry the melodies a long
way. She shows you her robust glories, the fair country in which she is
situate. For miles upon miles of splendid highways surround her, the
Genesee indolent for a time above the Valley Park appeals to the man
with a canoe, the great lake to the north gives favorable breezes to
the yachtsman. Do you wonder that the Rochesterians know that they dwell
in a garden land, and that they are in the open through the fullness of
a summer that stretches month after month, from early spring to late
autumn? Do you wonder that they really live their lives?
10
STEEL'S GREAT CAPITAL
A man, traveling across the land for the very first time, slips into a
strange town--after dark. It is his first time in the strange town, of
course. Otherwise it would not be strange. He finds his hotel with
little difficulty, for a taxicab takes him to it. He immediately
discovers that it is not more than two squares from the very station at
which he has arrived. Still a friendly taxicab in a strange town is not
an institution at which to scoff, and the man who is very tired is glad
to get into his hotel room and to bed without delay.
He awakes the next morning very early--at least it must be very early
for it is still dark. It is dark indeed as he stumbles his way across
the room to the electric switch. In the sudden radiance that follows, he
sputters at himself for having arisen so early--for he is a man fond of
his lazy sleep in the morning. He fumbles in his pockets and finds his
watch. Ten minutes to nine, it says to him.
"Stopped," says the man, half aloud. "That's another time I forgot to
wind it."
But the watch has not stopped. Insecure in his own mind he lifts it to
his ear. It is ticking briskly. The man is perplexed. He goes to the
window and peeps out from it. A great office building across the way is
gaily alight--a strange performance for before dawn of a September
morning. He looks down into the street. Two long files of brightly
lighted cars are passing through the street, one up, the other down. The
glistening pavements are peopled, the stores are brightly lighted--the
man glances at his watch once again. Eight minutes of nine, it tells him
this time.
He smiles as he gazes down into that busy street.
"This is Pittsburgh," he says.
Later that day that same man stands in another window--of a tall
skyscraper this time--and again gazes down. Suspended there below him is
a seeming chaos. There are smoke and fog and dirt there, through
these--showing ever and ever so faintly--tall, artificial cliffs,
punctured with row upon row of windows, brightly lighted at midday. From
the narrow gorges between these cliffs come the rustle and the rattle of
much traffic. It comes to the man in waves of indefinite sound.
He lifts his gaze and sees beyond these artificial cliffs,
mountains--real mountains--towering, with houses upon their crests, and
steep, inclined railroads climbing their precipitous sides. In these
houses, also, there are lights burning at midday. Below them are great
stacks--row upon row upon row of them, like coarse-toothed combs turned
upside down--and the black smoke that pours up from them is pierced now
and then and again by bright tongues of flame--the radiance of furnaces
that glow throughout the night and day.
"We're mud and dirt up to our knees--and money all the rest of the way,"
says the owner of that office. He is a native of the city. He comes to
the window and points to one of the rivers--a yellow-brown mirrored
surface, scarcely glistening under leaden clouds but bearing long tows
by the dozen--coal barges, convoyed by dirty stern-wheeled steamboats.
"There is one of the busiest harbors in the world," says the Pittsburgh
man. "A harbor which in tonnage is not so far back of your own blessed
New York."
The New Yorker, for this man is a New Yorker, laughs at the very idea of
calling that sluggish narrow river a harbor. They have a real harbor in
his town and real rivers lead into it. This does not even seem a real
river. It reminds him quite definitely of Newtown creek--that slimy,
busy waterway along which trains used to pass in the days when the
Thirty-fourth street ferry was the gateway to Long Island.
"We have tonnage in this town," says the proud resident of Pittsburgh,
"and if you won't believe what I tell you about the water traffic, how
about our neat little railroad business? If you won't listen to our
harbor-master here when I take you down to him, look at the lines of
freight cars for forty miles out every trunk-line railroad that gets in
here. This is the real gathering ground for all the freight
rolling-stock of this land."
And then he falls to telling the native of Manhattan island how all that
traffic has come to pass--how a mere quarter of a century ago the
Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad had offered itself to the historic Erie
for a mere hundred thousand dollars--and had been refused as not worth
while. Today the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is the pet child of the entire
Vanderbilt family of aristocratic railroads, earning more clear profit
to the mile than any other railroad in the world. The Pittsburgh man
makes this all clear to his caller. But the man from New York only looks
out again upon the city in semi-darkness at midday, and thinks of the
towers of his own Manhattan rising high into the clearest blue sky that
one might imagine, and whispers incoherently:
"This Pittsburgh gets me."
Pittsburgh gets some others, too. It gets them from the back country,
green country lads filled with ambition rather than anything else, and
if they have the sticking qualities it makes them millionaires, if that
so happens that such is the scheme of their ambitions. It has made some
other millionaires, almost overnight, as we shall see in a few minutes.
The picking for dollars seems good in the neighborhood of the
confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny.