iron ore and soft coal--almost three-quarters of the total tonnage of
the lakes. The workable iron deposits of America are today in greatest
profusion within a comparatively few miles of the head of Lake
Superior--nothing has yet robbed western Pennsylvania and West Virginia
of their supremacy as producers of bituminous coal. There is an ideal
traffic condition, the condition that lines the railroad cars for forty
miles roundabout Pittsburgh. The great cost in handling freight upon the
average railroad comes from the fact that it is generally what is known
as "one-way" business--that is, the volume of traffic moves in a single
direction, necessitating an expensive and wasteful return haul of empty
cars. There is no such traffic waste upon the Great Lakes. The ships
that go up and down the long water lanes of Erie and Huron and Superior
do not worry about ballast for the return. They carry coal from Buffalo,
Erie, Ashtabula, Conneaut and Cleveland to Duluth and Superior and they
come back with their capacious holds filled with red iron ore. There is
your true economy in transportation, and the reflection of it comes in
the fact that these ships haul cargo at the rate of .78 of a mill for a
ton-mile, which is the lowest freight-rate in the world.
Cleveland built these ships, in fact she still is building the greater
part of them. And she thinks nothing of building the largest of these
steel vessels in ninety days. Take a second look at that vessel--the
coal cars are still pouring their grimy treasure into her hold. She is
builded, like all of these new freighters, with a severity that shows
the bluff utilitarianism of the shipbuilders of the Great Lakes. None of
the finicky traditions of the Clyde rule the minds of the men who today
are building the merchant marine of the Lakes. One deckhouse, with the
navigating headquarters, is forward; the other, with funnel and the
other externals of the ship's propelling mechanism, is at the extreme
stern. Amidships your Great Lakes carrier is cargo--and nothing else. No
tangle of line or burden of trivials; just a red-walled hull of thick
steel plates and a steel-plate deck--broken into thirty-six hatches and
of precisely the same shade of red--for these ships are quickly painted
by hose-spray. Remember that it is ninety days--from keel-plates to
launching. In another thirty days the ship's simple fittings are
finished and her engines in her heart are ready to pound from down-Lakes
to up-Lakes and back innumerable times.
* * * * *
If we have given some attention in this Cleveland chapter to the traffic
of the Great Lakes, it is, as we have already intimated, because the
traffic of the Great Lakes has made her the Sixth City. It has also made
the most important of her industries, the very greatest of her fortunes.
Your Cleveland man will tell you of one of these--before you leave the
pier-edge. It was the fortune that an old Lake captain left at his death
a little time ago--the fortune a mere matter of some twenty-eight
millions of dollars. The old captain knew the Lakes and he had studied
their traffic--all his life. But his will directed that his money should
not be expended in the building of ships. It provided that at least a
quarter of a million of the income should annually go to the purchase of
Cleveland real estate. And Cleveland was quick to explain that it was
not that the old man loved shipping less, but that he loved Cleveland
real estate more. He had the gift of foresight.
If you would see that foresight in his own eyes drive out Euclid
avenue--that broad thoroughfare that leads from the old-fashioned Public
Square in the heart of the city straight toward the southeast. Euclid
avenue gained its fame in other days. Travelers used to come back from
Cleveland and tell of the glories of that highway. Alas, today those
glories are largely those of memory. The old houses still sit in their
great lawns, but the grime of the city's industry has made them seem
doubly old and decadent, while Commerce has pushed her smart new shops
out among them to the very sidewalk line. Many of these shops are given
over to the automobile business--a business which does not hesitate in
any of our towns to transform resident streets into commercial. But in
Cleveland one may partly forgive the audacity of this particular trade
in recognition of its perspicacity. For Euclid avenue, rapidly growing
now from an entirely residential street into an entirely business
highway, is the great automobile thoroughfare of the East Side of the
city. And when you consider that one out of every ten Cleveland families
has a motor car, you can begin to estimate the traffic through Euclid
avenue.
There is a West Side of Cleveland--you might almost say, of course--but
one does not come to know it until he comes to know Cleveland well. The
city is builded upon a high plateau that rises in a steep bluff from the
very edge of the lake. Through this plateau, at the very bottom of a
ravine, wide and deep, the navigable Cuyahoga twists its tortuous way
into Lake Erie. It seems as if that ravine must almost have been cut to
test the resources of the bridge-builders of America. For it has been
their problem to keep the Sixth City from becoming entirely severed by
her great water artery. They have solved it by the construction of one
huge steel viaduct after another but the West Side remains the West
Side--and always somewhat jealous of the East. She knows that the great
public buildings of Cleveland--that comprehensive civic center plan to
which we shall come in a moment--are fixed for all time upon the East.
And so when Cleveland decides to build a great new city hall, the West
Side demands and receives the finest market house in all the land.
So it is that it is the East Side that your Cleveland man shows you
alone when your time is limited, and so it is that Euclid avenue is the
one great thoroughfare of the whole East Side.
"If you want to know how we've bobbed up, look at here," the Cleveland
man tells you.
You look. A contractor is busy changing a railroad crossing from level
to overhead; a much-needed improvement--despite the fact that it should
have been under-surface rather than overhead--when you come to consider
the traffic that moves through Euclid avenue in all the daylight hours
and far into the night.
"When the old Cleveland and Pittsburgh--it's part of the Pennsylvania,
now--was built, thirty-five or forty years ago, they thought they would
put the line around the town. But the town was up to their line before
they knew it--and they decided ten or a dozen years ago that they would
put a suburban station here." He points to a handsome red brick
structure of modern architecture. "The Pennsylvania folks are
long-headed--almost always. But if they had known that Cleveland was to
become the Sixth City within ten years they never would have put two
hundred thousand dollars in a grade crossing station at Euclid avenue.
The way we've grown has sort of startled all of us."
Today Euclid avenue is a compactly built thoroughfare for miles east of
that Pennsylvania railroad crossing. It is at least two miles and a half
from that crossing to Cleveland's two great educational lions--the Case
School of Applied Science and the Western Reserve University--and they
in turn only mark the beginning of the city's newest and most
fashionable residence district.
Indeed Cleveland has "bobbed up." And her growth within the last quarter
of a century has been more than physical, more than that recorded by
emotionless census-takers. For beneath those grimy old houses on Euclid
avenue and the down town residence streets, beneath the roofs of those
gray and grimy story-and-a-half wooden houses which line far less
pretentious streets for long miles, lies as restless and as hopeful a
civic spirit as any town in America can boast. It makes itself manifest
in many ways--as we shall see. The man who first brought it into a
working force was a resourceful little man who died a little while ago.
But before Tom L. Johnson died he was Mayor of the city; something more;
he was the best liked and the best hated man that Cleveland had ever
known; and he was better liked than he was hated.
In person a plump little man with a ceaseless smile that might have been
stolen from a Raphael cherub, a democratic little man, who knew his
fellows and who could read them, almost unfailingly. And the smile could
change from softness into severity--when Tom L. Johnson wanted a thing
he wanted it mighty hard. And he generally succeeded in getting it. He
could not only read men; he could read affairs. He saw Cleveland coming
to be the Sixth City. And he determined that she should realize the
dignity of metropolitanism in other fashion than in merely census totals
or bank clearances.
[Illustration: Cleveland is proud of her great, broad streets]
Johnson began by going after the street railroad system of the town. He
had had some experience in building and operating street railroads in
other parts of the country, and he set out along paths that were not
entirely unfamiliar to him. It so happened that at the time he began his
crusade Cleveland was quite satisfied with her street railroad service.
Her residents went out to other cities of the land and bragged about how
their big yellow cars ran out to all the far corners of their rapidly
growing city. But Johnson was not criticising the service. He was merely
saying in his gentle insistent way that five cents was too much for a
man to pay to ride upon a street car. He thought three cents was quite
enough. The street railroad company quite naturally thought differently.
In every other town in the land five cents was the standard fare, and
any Cleveland man could tell you how much better the car-service was at
home. That company produced vast tables of statistics to prove its
contentions. Tom L. Johnson merely laughed at the statistics and
reiterated that three cents was a sufficient street-car fare for
Cleveland.
The details of that _cause celébre_ are not to be recited here. It is
enough here to say that Tom L. Johnson lived long enough to see
three-cent fares upon the Cleveland cars, and that the conclusion was
not reached until a long and bitter battle had been fought. The
conclusion itself as it stands today is interesting. The owners of the
street railroad stock, the successors of the men who invested their
money on a courageous gamble that Cleveland was to grow into a real city
are assured of a legitimate six percent upon their stock. They cannot
expect more. If the railroad earns more than that fixed six percent its
fares must be reduced. If, on the other hand, it fails to earn six
percent the fares must be raised sufficiently to permit that return. The
fare-steps are simple, a cent at a time, with a cent being charged for a
transfer, or a transfer being furnished free as best may meet the income
need of the railroad.
At present the fare is three cents, transfers being furnished free. A
little while ago the fare was three cents, a cent being charged for the
transfer. That brought an unnecessarily high revenue to the railroad,
and so today while the conductor who issues you a transfer gravely
charges you a cent for it, the conductor who accepts it, with equal
gravity, presents you a cent in return for it. This prevents the
transfers being used as stationery or otherwise frivoled away. For,
while the street car system of Cleveland is among the best operated in
America, it is also one of the most whimsical. Its cars are proof of
that. Some of them are operated on the so-called "pay-as-you-enter"
principle, although Cleveland, which has almost a passion for
abbreviation, calls them the "paye" cars. These cars are still a
distinct novelty in most of our cities. In Cleveland they are almost as
old as Noah's Ark compared with a car in which you pay as you leave--a
most sensible fashion--or a still newer car in which you can pay as you
enter or pay as you leave--a choice which you elect by going to one end
or the other of the vehicle.
But the fact remains that Cleveland has three-cent fares upon her
excellent street railroad system, to say nothing of having control over
her most important utility, the street railroad, which pays six percent
dividends to its owners. The three-cent fare seems standard in
Cleveland. In fact, she is becoming a three-cent city. Small shops make
attractive offers at that low figure, and "three-cent movies" are
springing up along her streets. She has already gone down to Washington
and demanded that the Federal government issue a three-cent piece--to
meet her peculiar needs. So does the spirit of Tom L. Johnson still go
marching on.
It must have been the spirit of Tom L. Johnson that gave Cleveland a
brand-new charter in this year of Grace, 1913. Into this new charter
have been written many things that would have been deemed impossible in
the charter of a large American city even a decade ago. Initiative and
referendum, of course--Johnson and his little band of faithful followers
were not satisfied until they had gone to Columbus a few winters ago
and written that into the new constitution of the state of Ohio--a
department of public welfare to regulate everything from the safety and
morals of "three-cent movies" to the larger questions of public health
and even of public employment, the very sensible short ballot, and even
the newest comer in our family of civic reforms--the preferential
ballot, although at the time that this is being written it is being
sharply contested in the high courts at Columbus. Cleveland rejected the
commission form of government. The fact that a good many other
progressive American towns have accepted it, did not, in her mind,
weigh for or against it. She has never been a city of strong
conventions--witness her refusal to regard the five-cent fare as
standard, simply because other towns had it. Neither has tradition been
permitted to warp her course. A few years ago her citizens decided that
her system of street names was not good enough or expansive enough for a
town that was entering the metropolitan class. So she changed most of
her street names--almost in the passing of a night. In most American
towns that would have been out of the question. Folk cling to street
names almost as they cling to family traditions. But Cleveland folk
seemed to realize instantly that the new system of numbered
cross-streets--with the broad diagonal highways named "roads"--after the
fashion of some English cities--was so far the best that she immediately
gave herself to the new scheme with heart and soul, as seems to be her
way.
To tell of a splendid new charter adopted, of the control gained over
her chief utility and necessity, of the progressive social reforms that
she houses, is not alone to tell of the splendid heart and soul that
beats within the walls and roofs of her houses. It is, quite as much, to
tell of a remarkable coöperation, remarkable when you consider that
Cleveland has become a city of more than six hundred thousand humans.
That coöperation may best be illustrated by a single incident:
A retail dealer in hardware recently opened a fine new store out in
Euclid avenue. He opened it as some small cities might open their new
library or their new city hall--with music and a reception. His friends
sent great bouquets of flowers, the concerns from which he bought his
supplies sent more flowers; but the biggest bunch of flowers came from
the men who were his competitors in the same line of business. That was
Cleveland--Cleveland spirit, Cleveland generosity. Perhaps that is the
secret of Cleveland success.
* * * * *
One thing more--the plan for the Cleveland civic center. For the Sixth
City having set her mental house in order is to build for it a physical
house of great utility and of compelling beauty. You may have heard of
the Cleveland civic plan. It is in the possibility that you have not,
that we bring it in for a final word. When Cleveland set out to obtain a
new Federal Post Office and Court House for herself, a few years ago, it
came to her of a sudden that she was singularly lacking in fine public
buildings. It was suggested that she should seek for herself not only a
Federal building but a new Court House and City Hall as well. In the
same breath it was proposed that these be brought into a beautiful and a
practical group. It was an attractive suggestion. In the fertile soil of
Cleveland attractive suggestions take quick root. And so in Cleveland
was born the civic center idea that has spread almost like the
proverbial wildfire all the way across the land.
To create her civic group she moved in a broad and decisive fashion. She
engaged three of the greatest of American architects--A. W. Brunner,
John M. Carrere, D. H. Burnham--two of them poets and idealists, the
third almost the creator of America's most utilitarian type of
building, the modern skyscraper. To these men she gave a broad and
unlocked path. And they created for her, along a broad Mall stretching
from Superior street to the very edge of that mighty cliff that
overlooks the lake, a plan for the housing of her greatest functions.
It is not too much that Cleveland should dream of this Mall as an
American Place de la Concorde. It was not too much when the architects
breathed twenty millions of dollars as the possible cost of this civic
dream. Cleveland merely breathed "Go ahead," and the architects have
gone ahead. The Post Office and the new County Building are already
completed and in use, the City Hall should be completed before 1915
comes to take his place in the history of the world. Other buildings are
to follow, not the least of them a new Union station--although there
will be travelers who will sincerely regret the passing of Cleveland's
stout old stone station, whose high-vaulted train-shed seemed to them in
boyhood days to be the most lofty and wonderful of apartments. The bulk
of this new open square is yet to be cleared of the many buildings that
today occupy it. But that is merely a detail in the development of
Cleveland's greatest architectural ambition.
The civic group can never be more than the outward expression of the
ambitious spirit of a new giant among the metropolitan cities of
America. As such it can be eminently successful. It can speak for the
city whose civic heart it becomes, proclaiming her not merely great in
dollars or in the swarming throngs of her population, but rather great
in strength of character, in charity, in generosity--in all those
admirable things that go to make a town preëminently good and great. And
in these things your Cleveland man will not proclaim his as the Sixth
City, but rather as in the front rank of all the larger communities of
the United States.
12
CHICAGO--AND THE CHICAGOANS
Early in the morning the city by the lake is astir. Before the first
long scouting rays of earliest sunlight are thrusting themselves over
the barren reaches of Michigan--state and lake--Chicago is in action.
The nervous little suburban trains are reaching into her heart from
South, from North and from West. The long trains of elevated cars are
slipping along their alley-routes, skirting behind long rows of the
dirty colorless houses of the most monotonous city on earth, threading
themselves around the loop--receiving passengers, discharging passengers
before dawn has fully come upon the town. The windows of the tedious,
almost endless rows of houses flash into light and life, the trolley
cars in the broad streets come at shorter intervals, in whole companies,
brigades, regiments--a mighty army of trucks and wagons begin to send up
a great wave of noise and of clatter from the shrieking highways and
byways of the city.
* * * * *
The traveler coming to the city from the east and by night finds it
indeed a mighty affair. For an hour and a half before his train arrives
at the terminal station, he is making his way through Chicago
environs--coming from dull flat monotonies of sand and brush and pine
into Gary--with its newness and its bigness proclaimed upon its very
face so that even he who flits through at fifty miles an hour may read
both--jolting over main line railroads that cross and recross at every
conceivable angle, snapping up through Hammond and Kensington and Grand
Crossing--to the right and to the left long vistas with the ungainly,
picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking
stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses, the vistas suddenly closed
off by long trails of travel-worn freight-cars, through which the
traveler's train finds its way with a mighty clattering and
reverberating of noisy echoes. This is Chicago--Chicago spreading itself
over miles of absolutely flat shore-land at almost the extreme southern
tip of Lake Michigan--Chicago proudly proclaiming herself as the
business and the transportation metropolis of the land, disdaining such
mere seaport places as New York or Boston or Baltimore or San
Francisco--Chicago with the most wretched approaches on her main lines
of travel of any great city of the world.
If you come to her on at least one of the great railroads that link her
with the Atlantic seaboard, you will get a glimpse of her one redeeming
natural feature, for five or six miles before your train comes to a
final grinding stop at the main terminal--the blue waters of the lake.
This railroad spun its way many years ago on the very edge of the
lake--much to the present-day grief of the town. It gives no grief to
the incoming traveler--to turn from the sordid streets, the quick
glimpses of rows of pretentious but fearfully dirty and uninteresting
houses--to the great open space to the east of Chicago--nature's
assurance of fresh air and light and health to one of the really vast
cluster-holds of mankind. To him the lake is in relief--even in splendid
contrast to the noise, the dirt, the streets darkened and narrowed by
the over-shouldering constructions of man. From the intricate and the
confusing, to the simplicity of open water--no wonder then that Chicago
has finally come to appreciate her lake, that she seizes upon her
remaining free waterfront like a hungry and ill-fed child, that she
builds great hotels and office-buildings where their windows may
look--not upon the town, stretching itself to the horizon on the
prairie, but upon the lake, with its tranquillity and its beauty, the
infinite majesty of a great, silent open place.
* * * * *
In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to divine the real
character of the city. You see it, a great crucible into which the
people of all nations and all the corners of one of the greatest of the
nations are being poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a
window that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, overshadowed by
the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, is the bent figure of a
hatless peasant woman from the south of Europe--seeing her America for
the first time and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of fear
and of amazement. Next to her is a sleek, well-groomed man who may be
from the East--from an Atlantic seaport city, but do not be too sure of
that, for he may have his home over on Michigan avenue and think that
"New York is a pretty town but not in it with Chicago." You never can
tell in the most American and most cosmopolitan of American cities. At a
third window is a man who has come from South Dakota. He has a big ranch
up in that wonderful state. You know that because last night he sat
beside you on a bench in the dingy, busy office of the old Palmer House
and told you of Chicago as he saw it.
"I've a farm up in the South Dakota," he told you, in brief. "This is my
first time East." You started in a bit of surprise at that, for it had
always occurred to you that Chicago was West, that you, born New Yorker,
were reaching into the real West whenever you crossed to the far side of
Main street, in Buffalo. You looked at the ranchman, feeling that he was
joking, and then you took a second look into his tired eyes and knew
that you were talking to no humorist.
"The first real big town that I ever ran into," he said, in his simple
way, "was Sioux City, and I set up and took a little notice on it. It
seemed mighty big, but that was five years ago, and four years ago I
took my stock down to Cudahy in Omaha--and there _was_ a town. You could
walk half a day in Omaha and never come to cattle country. Just houses
and houses and houses--an' you begin to wonder where they find the folks
to fill them. This year I come here with the beef for the first
time--an' you could put Omaha in this town and never know the
difference."