you please. In a general way the older part of the town has a situation
not unlike that of the great metropolis of the continent. For New York's
East river, substitute the Monongahela; for the Hudson, the Allegheny;
and let the Ohio, beginning its long course at the Point--Pittsburgh's
Battery--represent the two harbors of New York. Then you will begin to
get the rough resemblance. To the south of the Monongahela, Pittsburgh's
Brooklyn is Birmingham, set under the half-day shadows of the towering
cliffs of Mount Washington. Allegheny--now a part of the city of
Pittsburgh and beginning to be known semi-officially as the North
Side--corresponds in location with Jersey City.
And the problems that have beset Pittsburgh in her growth have been
almost the very problems that from the first have hampered the growth of
metropolitan New York. If her rivers have been no such stupendous
affairs as the Hudson or the East rivers, the overpowering hills and
mountains that close in upon her on every side have presented barriers
of equal magnitude. To conquer them has been the labor of many tunnels
and of steep inclined railroads, the like of which are not to be seen in
any great city in America. It has been no easy conquest.
As a result of all these things the growth of the city has been uneven
and erratic. Down on the narrow spit of flat-land at the junction of the
two rivers that go to make the Ohio--a location exactly corresponding
with Manhattan island below the City Hall and of even less area--is the
business center of metropolitan Pittsburgh--wholesale and retail stores,
banks, office buildings, railroad passenger terminals, hotels, theaters
and the like. The same causes that made the skyscraper a necessity in
New York have worked a like necessity in the city at the head of the
Ohio.
So it has come to pass that no one lives in Pittsburgh itself, unless
under absolute compulsion. The suburbs present housing facilities for
the better part of its folk--Sewickley and East Liberty vie for greatest
favor with them and there are dozens of smaller communities that crowd
close upon these two social successes. "We can never get a decent census
figure," growls the Pittsburgh man, as he contemplates the size of these
outlying boroughs that go to make the city strong in everything, save in
that popular competitive feature of population. And that very reason
made the merging of the old city of Allegheny a popular issue, indeed.
The fact that Pittsburgh men live outside of Pittsburgh goes to give her
the fourth largest suburban train service in the country. Only New York,
Boston and Philadelphia surpass her in this wise. Even San Francisco has
less. One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest is Cleveland, the
sixth city in the country and outranking Pittsburgh in population. There
is not a single distinctive suburban train run in or out of Cleveland.
From one single terminal in Pittsburgh four hundred passenger trains
arrive and depart in the course of a single business day and ninety-five
percent of these are for the sole benefit of the commuter.
So congested have even these railroad facilities become that the city
cries bitterly all the while for a transit relief and experts have been
at work months and years planning a subway to aid both the steam roads
and the overworked trolley lines. At best it is no sinecure to operate
the trolley cars of Pittsburgh. Combined with narrow streets, uptown and
downtown, are the fearful slopes of the great hills. It takes big cars
to climb those hills, let alone haul the trailers that are a feature of
the Pittsburgh rush-hour traffic. When the New Yorker sees those cars
for the first time he looks again. They are chariots of steel, hardly
smaller than those that thread the subway in his daily trip to and from
Harlem, and when they come toward him they make him think of
locomotives. The heavy car gives a sense of strength and of hill
capability. But the company staggers twice each day under a traffic that
is far beyond its facilities--and it staggers under its political
burdens.
For it is almost as much as your very life is worth to "talk back" to a
street car conductor in Pittsburgh. The conductor is probably an arm of
the big political machine that holds that western Pennsylvania town as
in the hollow of its hand. The conductors get their jobs through their
alderman, and they hold them through their alderman. So if a New York
man forgets that he is four hundred and forty miles from Broadway, and
gets to asserting his mind to the man who is in charge of the car let
him look out for trouble. Chances are nine to one that he will be hauled
up before a magistrate for breaking the peace, and that another arm of
the political machine will come hard upon him.
A man, who was a life-long resident of Pittsburgh, once made a protest
to the conductor of a car coming across from Allegheny. The passenger
was in the right and the conductor knew it. But he answered that protest
with a volley of profanity. If that thing had happened in a seaboard
town, the conductor's job would not have been worth the formality of a
resignation. In Pittsburgh a bystander warned--the passenger--and he
saved himself arrest by keeping his mouth shut and getting off the car.
But the Pittsburgh man had not quite lost his sense of justice, and so
he hurried to a certain high officer of the street railroad company.
When he came to the company's offices he was ushered in in high state,
for it so happened that the born Pittsburgh man was a director of that
very corporation. It so happens that street railroad directors do not
ride--like their steam railroad brethren--on passes, and the conductor
did not know that he was playing flip-flap with his job.
"You'll have to fire that man," said the director, in ending his
complaint. "If that had happened at the club I would have punched him in
the head."
The big man who operated the street railroad looked at the director, and
smiled what the lady novelists call a sweet, sad smile.
"Sorry, Ben," said he, "but I know that man. He's one of Alderman
X----'s men, and if we fired him X---- would hang us up on half a dozen
things."
Do you wonder that in the face of such a state of things transit relief
comes rather slowly to Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh men have been trying to worm their way out of their
difficulties for about a century and a half now, for it was 1758 that
saw a permanent settlement started there at the junction of the three
great rivers. Before that had been the memorable fight and defeat of
Braddock--not far from where more recently Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie
have been engaged in a rivalry as to which could erect the higher
skyscraper and most effectually block out the _façade_ of the very
beautiful Court House that the genius of H. H. Richardson designed--more
than a score of years ago. At Braddock's defeat George Washington fought
and it was no less a prophetic mind than that of the Father of His
Country which foresaw and prophesied that Pittsburgh, with proper
transportation facilities, would become one of the master cities of the
country.
Today, when Pittsburgh men grow nervous in one of their chronic fits of
agitation--generally started by some talkative city, such as Chicago and
Duluth, proclaiming herself as the future center of the steel
industry--she gains comfort from the sayings of two Presidents--General
Washington, as just quoted, and the gentleman who sits at the head of
the board of the United States Steel Corporation, who goes out there
from time to time and tells them to be of good cheer, that the center of
the steel business is irrevocably fixed within their town. Pittsburgh
worries much more about the steel business than about the Richardson
Court House, which has just been left high and dry upon a local
Gibraltar because of the desire of the local aldermen to lower Fifth
avenue some eight or ten feet. But who shall say that she should not be
restive about a business that reaches an output in a single twelvemonth
of something over 150,000,000 tons? That is a jewel that is well worth
the keeping.
* * * * *
Philadelphia stands at the east end of Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh is the
west gate of that Keystone commonwealth. Yet two peas in a pod were
never half so different. Philadelphia stands for conservatism,
Pittsburgh for progress. While Philadelphia was climbing to the zenith
of her power and influence through the first three-quarters of the last
century and reaching her apotheosis in her great Centennial, Pittsburgh
was quiet beneath her smoke umbrellas experimenting with that strange
new metal, which man called steel. In the day dreams that Philadelphia
enjoyed in 1876 Pittsburgh was forgotten.
"I suppose the Pennsylvania railroad must have some place to end at,"
said a lady from Rittenhouse square, when her attention was called to
the city at the junction of the three rivers. And in the next year that
lady and many other ladies of the staunch old Quaker town were holding
up their hands in holy horror at the news from Pittsburgh. Great riots,
the bloodiest that had ever been known, were marking the railroad strike
there--why, in a single day the rioters had burned the great Union
station, every other railroad structure, and every car in the place.
That was bad advertising for a town that had none too many friends.
But Pittsburgh was finding herself--she is still in that fascinating
process of development. For word was eking out from the rough mountains
of western Pennsylvania that a little group of Scotchmen--led by a
shrewd ironmaster whom politic folk were already calling "Mr.
Carnegie"--had made steel an economic structural possibility. In this
day when wood has become a luxury, steel is coming into its own and
Pittsburgh is today the most metropolitan city between New York and
Chicago. But she is still finding herself. The Survey, financed by Mrs.
Russell Sage, and equipped with some of the ablest and fairest minded
social workers in America, has called sharp attention to her
shortcomings. The Survey did its work thoroughly and it was not the work
of a minute or a day or a week or a month. When its report was ready,
Pittsburgh smarted. It was the sort of smarting that goes before a cure.
Much has been done already. The man who went to Pittsburgh as recently
as ten years ago carried away some pretty definite memories of neglected
railroad stations and inferior hotel facilities. He remembered that in
Liberty and Penn avenues--two of the chief shopping streets in the
city--long trails of freight cars were constantly being shifted by dirty
switch engines in among the trolley cars, while farther up these same
avenues the Fort Wayne railroad tracks formed two of the nastiest grade
crossings in America. When a fine new hotel was finally built away out
Fifth avenue, he could sit on its porch and face Pittsburgh's famous
farm. The Schenley farm stretched over the hill and far away. Its barns
were sharply silhouetted upon the horizon, rail zigzag fences ran up and
down the slopes and sometimes one could see cattle outlined against the
sky edge.
The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. It occupied a tract
somewhat similar in location to that of Central Park in Manhattan, and
the struggling, growing town crawled its way around the obstacle
slowly--then grew many miles east once again. Resentment gathered
against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped through at Harrisburg
imposing double taxes on property held by persons residing out of the
United States--a distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate
protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the
farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn.
So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a site for one of the
finest civic centers in America. The farm has begun to disappear--the
University of Pittsburgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an
American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. The new Athletic
Club, the development of the Hotel Schenley, the great Soldiers'
Memorial Hall which Allegheny county has just finished, the even greater
Carnegie Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are going
toward the making of this fine, new civic center, and Pittsburgh being
Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social heroes, Forbes Field the finest
baseball park in all this land--a wizardry of glass and steel and
concrete--is a distinctive feature of this improvement.
[Illustration: The old and the new at Pittsburgh]
The freight trains are gone from the downtown shopping streets and the
two wicked grade crossings disappeared when the Pennsylvania built its
splendid new Union Station. Other fine railroad terminals and new hotels
have added to the comfort of the stranger. They are beginning in a faint
way to give transfers on the trolley cars, and there is more than a
promise that some day wayfarers will not be taxed a penny every time
they walk across the bridges that bind the heart of the city. The bridge
companies are private affairs, paying from fifteen to twenty percent
in annual dividends, and they hang pretty tightly on to their bonanzas.
But the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce is after them, and that Chamber
is a fairly energetic body. It has already sought the devil in his lair
and tried to abolish the smoke nuisance, with some definite results.
A New York girl who has been living in Pittsburgh for the last four
years complained that she had never seen but two sunsets there. There is
hope for that girl. If the Chamber of Commerce keeps hard at its
anti-smoke campaign, she may yet stand on the Point and down the muddy
Ohio see something that dimly resembles the glorious dying of the day,
as one sees it from the heights of New York city's Riverside Drive.
A keen-eyed man sat in an easy chair in the luxury of the Duquesne Club,
and faced the New York man.
"Are we so bad?" he demanded. "You New York men like to paint us that
way. You judge us falsely. You think that when you come out here you are
going to see a sort of modern Sodom, bowing to all the gods of money and
the gods of the high tariff. You think you are going to fairly revel in
a wide open town, in the full significance of that phrase, and what do
you see?
"You see a pretty solid sort of a Scotch Presbyterian town, where you
cannot even get shaved in your hotel on Sunday, to say nothing of buying
a drink. And as for shows, you can't buy your way into a concert here on
Sunday. Why, some of the elders of my kirk have even looked askance at
Mr. Carnegie for the free recitals that he gives Sabbath afternoons in
that splendid hall of the Institute.
"There's your real Pittsburgher, and if some of the boys have chafed a
bit under all the restraint that they have had here and gone to the
wicked city after a little fling and a little advertising, is that any
just reason why it all should be charged against Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh
has enough troubles of her own without borrowing any additional ones.
"The trouble is we've been making too much money to notice much about
the boys, or give proper attention to some pretty vital civic
problems--that's why the rottenness cropped out in the City Councils.
It's the taint of the almighty dollar, Mr. New Yorker! Why, Mr. Carnegie
made a couple of hundred of us millionaires within a single twenty-four
hours. Can you think of any worse blow for an average town?
"He took some of us, who had been working for him a long time, and got
us into the business--some for an eighth interest, others for a
sixteenth or even a thirty-second. That was great, and we appreciated
it, but it kept us fairly tight on ready money for a while, even though
Frick and Mellen were standing pat with an offer of a hundred million
dollars for the bonds of the steel company. I tell you I was short on
ready money myself, and wondering if I could not cut down on my house
rent $2,000 a year and get my wife to keep two hired girls instead of
three. Then you know what happened. Carnegie himself took over the bonds
at a cold two hundred million dollars. Within a week or so I was in New
York talking with an architect about building a new house for the
missus, and getting passage tickets through to Europe."
The ironmaster called his automobile and bundled the New York man within
it.
"We are going down into the slums," he said. "I can show you a single
block where thirteen different languages are spoken. That is the new
Pittsburgh--taking up one another's burdens, or something of that sort,
as they call it. It is queer until you get used to it, and when you get
used to it, it makes you feel like going up on the roof and yelling that
Pittsburgh is going to be the greatest city on earth, not just the
greatest in tonnage or in dollars.
"That is why we are cottoning to that idea of a civic center out by
Schenley Park; that's why we pat Andrew Carnegie on the back when we
know that he is giving us the best in pictures and in music in America;
that's why Frick is holding back with his horse pasture there in front
of Carnegie Institute to build something bigger and better. Don't you
get the idea now of the bigger and better Pittsburgh?"
The limousine stopped and the ironmaster beckoned a large, whiskered
Russian to it. "Here's a real anarchist," he said, "but he is one of my
protégés. He speaks down in a dirty hall in Liberty avenue, near the
Wabash terminal, but he's for the new Pittsburgh, and he's for it
strong--so we come together after a fashion."
The Russian, who was a teacher, came close to the big automobile and
pointed to a woman of his own people--a woman wretchedly poor, who dwelt
in one of the hovels which are today Pittsburgh's greatest shame.
"She's reading Byron," he said quietly, "and she has been in America
less than six months. She says there is a magnificent comparison between
Byron and Tolstoy."
That reminded the ironmaster of an incident.
"After that bad time in 1907," he said, "I chanced into one of Mr.
Carnegie's libraries, and the librarian complained to me of the way the
books were being ruined. Their backs were being scratched and filled
with rust and even shavings. I had an idea on that myself. I went back
to our own mill--it was pretty dull there and I was dodging the forlorn
place as much as I could. But we were sifting out a gang from the men
who were beating at our doors every morning for work, and even then we
were carrying twice as many men as we really needed. I went around back
of the furnaces and there were the library books--the men were reading
them in the long shifts."
"They weren't reading fiction?" asked the New Yorker.
"Not a bit of it," said the ironmaster. Then he added:
"One of them spoke to me. He was only getting three days a week. 'Mr.
Carnegie can give the books,' was his quiet observation, 'and the money
to buy them. But we need more than money. Can't he ever give us the
leisure to read them without its costing us the money for our food?'
"That, New Yorker, from the mouth of one of those of the new Pittsburgh
is the real answer to your question."
11
THE SIXTH CITY
They call her the Sixth City, but that is only in a comparative sense,
and exclusively in regard to her statistical position in the population
ranks of the large cities of our land. For no real citizen of Cleveland
will ever admit that his community is less than first, in all of the
things that make for the advance of a strong and healthy American town.
His might better be called "the City of Boundless Enthusiasm." Your
Cleveland man, however, is content to know it as the Sixth City.
"Not that it really matters whether we are the fifth or the seventh--or
the sixth," he tells you. "Only it all goes to show how we've bobbed up
in the last twenty years. You know what we used to be--an inconsiderable
lake port up on the north brink of Ohio with Cincinnati down there in
the south pruning herself as a real metropolis and calling herself the
Queen City. We might call ourselves the Queen City today and stretch no
points, but that's a sort of fancy title that's gone out of fashion now.
The Sixth City sounds more like the Twentieth Century."
And Cleveland having thus baptized herself, as it were, proceeded to
spread her new name to the world. "Cleveland--Sixth City" appeared on
the stationery of her business houses; her tailors stitched it in upon
the labels of the ready-made suits they sent to all corners of the land;
her bakers stamped it on the products of their ovens; big shippers
stenciled it over packing-cases; manufacturers even placed it upon the
brass-plates of the lathes and other complicated machines they sent
forth from their shops. Today when you say "Sixth City" to an American
he replies "Cleveland," which is precisely what Cleveland intended he
should reply.
Now why has Cleveland taken her new position of sixth among the cities
of the land? Ask your Cleveland man that, and he will take you by the
elbow and march you straight toward the docks, that not only line her
lake front but extend for miles up within the curious twistings of the
Cuyahoga river.
"Lake traffic," he will tell you, and begin to quote statistics.
We will spare you most of the statistics. It is meet that you should
know, however, that upon the five Great Lakes there throbs a commerce
that might well be the envy of any far-reaching, salty sea. To put the
thing concretely, the freight portion of this traffic alone reached
tremendous totals in 1912. In the navigation months of that year,
exactly 47,435,477 tons of iron ore and an even greater tonnage of coal
moved upon the Lakes, while the enormous total of 158,000,000 bushels of
grain were received at the port of Buffalo. And although there are tens
of thousands of sailormen upon the salt seas who have never heard of
Cleveland, the business of the port of Cleveland is comparable with that
of the port of Liverpool, one of the very greatest and the very busiest
harbors in all the world. For four out of every five of the great steel
steamships carrying the iron ore and coal cargoes of the lakes are
operated from Cleveland. Until the formation of the United States Steel
corporation a few years ago she could also say that she owned four out
of five of these vessels. And today her indirect interest in them,
through the steel corporation, is not small.
As the Cleveland man continues to din these statistics into your ear,
you let your gaze wander. Over across a narrow slip a gaunt steel
framework rises. It holds a cradle, large enough and strong enough to
accommodate a single steel railroad "gondola," which in turn carries
fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are clamped over
the sides of one of these "gondola" cars, which a seemingly tireless
switch-engine has just shunted into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to
the top of the framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge,
three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of the car in an
uprising cloud of black dust and drops through a funnel into the
expansive hold of the vessel that is moored at the dock. The car is
righted; some remaining coal rattles to its bottom. Once again it is
overturned and the remaining coal goes through the funnel. When it is
righted the second time it is entirely empty. The cradle returns to its
low level, the car is unfastened and given a push. It makes a gravity
movement and returns to a string of its fellows that have been through a
similar process.
You take out your watch. The process consumes just two minutes for each
car. That means thirty cars an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of
coal, the capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been placed
in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are familiar, perhaps, with the
craft that tie up at the wharves of seaboard towns, and you roughly
estimate the capacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred
tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great hold, and
you find yourself astonished at the result of such computations. You
confide that astonishment to your Cleveland man. He smiles at you,
benignly.
"That is really not very rapid work," he says, "they put eleven thousand
tons of ore into the _Corey_ in thirty-nine minutes up at Superior last
year."
And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the world. When the
British ship-owners heard of that feat at a port two thousand miles
inland, they ceased to deride American docking facilities.