The Personality of American Cities Part 12

The greatest charm of St. Michael's does not rest alone within the little paths of her high-walled churchyard. Within the st.u.r.dy church, in the serenity of her sanctuary, in the great square box-pews where sat so many years the elect of Charleston, of the very Southland you might say; in the high-set pulpit and the unusual desk underneath where sat the old time "clark" to read the responses and the notices; even the stately pew, set aside from all the others, in which General Washington sat on the occasion of a memorable visit to the South Carolina town, is the fullness of her charm. If you are given imagination, you can see the brown and white church filled as in the old days with the planters and their families--generation after generation of them, coming first to the church, being baptized in its dove-crowned font at the door and then, years later, being carried out of that center aisle for the final time.

You can see the congregations of half a century ago, faces white and set and determined. You can see one memorable congregation, as it hears the crash of a Federal sh.e.l.l against the heavy tower, and then listen to the gentle rector finishing the implication of the Litany before he dismisses his little flock.

Dear old St. Michael's! The years--the sunny years and the tragic years--set lightly upon her. When war and storm have wrecked her, it has been her children and her children's children who have arisen to help wipe away the scars. In a memorable storm of August, 1885, the great wooden ball at the top of her weather vane, one hundred and eighty-five feet above the street was sent hurtling down to the ground. They will show you the dent it made in the pavement flag. It was quickly replaced.

But within a year worse than cyclone was upon St. Michael's--the memorable earthquake which sank the great tower eight inches deeper into the earth. And only last year another of the fearful summer storms that come now and then upon the place wreaked fearful damage upon the old church. Yet St. Michael's has been patiently repaired each time; she still towers above these disasters--as her quaint weather-vane towers above the town, itself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: St. Michael's churchyard, Charleston--a veritable roster of the Colonial Elect]

After St. Michael's, St. Philip's--although St. Philip's is the real mother church of all Charleston. The old town does not pin her faith upon a single lion. The first time we found our way down Meeting street, we saw a delicate and belfried spire rising above the greenery of the trees in a distant churchyard. The staunch church from which that spire springs was well worth our attention. And so we found our way to St.

Philip's. We turned down Broad street from St. Michael's--to commercial Charleston as its namesake street is to New York--then at the little red-brick library, housed in the same place for nearly three-quarters of a century, we turned again. The south portico of St. Philip's, tall-columned, dignified almost beyond expression, confronted us. And a moment later we found ourselves within a churchyard that ranked in interest and importance with that of St. Michael's, itself.

A shambling negro care-taker came toward us. He had been engaged in helping some children get a kitten down from the upper branches of a tree in the old churchyard. With the intuition of his kind, he saw in us, strangers--manifest possibilities. He devoted himself to attention upon us. And he sounded the praises of his own exhibit in no mild key.

"Yessa--de fines' church in all de South," he said, as he swung the great door of St. Philip's wide open. He seemed to feel, also intuitively, that we had just come from the rival exhibit. And we felt more than a slight suspicion of jealousy within the air.

The negro was right. St. Philip's, Charleston, is more than the finest church in all the South. Perhaps it is not too much to say that it is the most beautiful church in all the land. Copied, rather broadly, from St. Martins-in-the-Fields, London, it thrusts itself out into the street, indeed, makes the highway take a broad double curve in order to pa.s.s its front portico. But St. Philip's commits the fearful Charleston sin of being new. The present structure has only been thrusting its nose out into Church street for a mere eighty years. The old St.

Philip's was burned--one of the most fearful of all Charleston tragedies--in 1834.

"Yessa--a big fire dat," said the caretaker. "They gib two slaves dere freedom for helpin' at dat fire."

But history only records the fact that the efforts to put out the fire in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. It does tell, however, of a negro sailor who, when the old church was threatened by fire on an earlier occasion, climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles from it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a fishing-boat and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It was in our Third Reader--some lurid verses but, alas for the accuracy that should be imparted to the growing mind--it was St. Michael's to whom that widespread glory was given. St. Michael's of the heart of the town once again. No wonder that St. Philip's of the side-street grieves in silence.

In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. Philip's?

If you are from the North it were better that you did not ask that question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their day hardly less famous than those of the sister church, went into cannon for the defense of the South. When the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the barren houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the gun-foundry, the supreme sacrifice was made. The bells rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and for a final time. The next day they were unshipping them and one of the silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed.

But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first place, her own graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial elect. Within it stands the humble tomb of him who was the greatest of all the great men of South Carolina--John C. Calhoun--while nightly from her high-lifted spire there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower sent far out to sea for the guidance of the mariner. The ship-pilots along the North Atlantic very well know when they pa.s.s Charleston light-ship, the range between Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway all the distance up to the wharves of Charleston.

There are other great churches of Charleston--some of them very handsome and with a deal of local history cl.u.s.tering about them, but perhaps none of these can approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner of Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, modestly disdaining such a worldly thing as a spire, in a crumbling churchyard whose tombstones have their inscriptions written in French. A few folk find their way to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen attentively to its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the leader of his little flock. But this little chapel is the sole flame of a famous old faith, which still burns, albeit ever so faintly, in the blackness and the shadow of the New World.

That is the real Charleston--the unexpected confronting you at almost every turn of its quiet streets: here across from the shrine of the Huguenots a ruinous building through which white and negro children play together democratically and at will, and which in its day was the Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with; down another byway a tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall in the form of a powder magazine; over in Meeting street the attenuated market with a Greek temple of a hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the slaves still pointed out to folk from the North; farther down on Meeting street the hall of the South Carolina Society, a really exquisite aged building wherein that distinguished old-time organization together with its still older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an appointed day each month and whose polished ballroom floor has felt the light dance-falls of the St. Cecilias.

"The St. Cecilia Society?" you interrupt; "why, I've heard of that."

Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies Charleston--the social life of the place, which is all there is left to it since her monumental tragedy of half a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground.

You are either recognized socially--or else you are not. And the St.

Cecilia Society is the sharply-drawn dividing point. Established somewhere before the beginning of the Revolution it has dominated Charleston society these many years. Invitations to its three b.a.l.l.s each year are eagerly sought by all the feminine folk within the town. And the privilege of being invited to these formal affairs is never to be scorned--more often it is the cause of many heart-burnings.

No one thing shows Charleston the more clearly than the fact that on the following morning you may search the columns of the venerable _News and Courier_ almost in vain for a notice of the St. Cecilia ball. In any other town an event of such importance would be a task indeed for the society editor and all of her sub-editresses. If there was not a flashlight photograph there would be the description of the frocks--a list of the out-of-town guests at any rate. Charleston society does not concede a single one of these things. And the most the _News and Courier_ ever prints is "The ball of the St. Cecilia Society was held last evening at Hibernian Hall," or a two-line notice of similar purport.

Charleston society concedes little or nothing--not even these new-fashioned meal hours of the upstart Northern towns. In Charleston a meal each four hours--breakfast at eight, a light lunch at sharp noon, dinner at four, supper again at eight. These hours were good enough for other days--ergo, they are good enough for these. And from eleven to two and again from five to seven-thirty remain the smart calling hours among the elect of the place. Those great houses do not yield readily to the Present.

Charleston society is never democratic--no matter how Charleston politics may run. Its great houses, behind the exclusion of those high and forbidding walls, are tightly closed to such strangers as come without the right marks of identification. From without you may breathe the hints of old mahogany, of fine silver and china, of impeccable linen, of well-trained servants, but your imagination must meet the every test as to the details. Gentility does not flaunt herself. And if the younger girls of Charleston society do drive their motor cars pleasant mornings through the crowded shopping district of King street, that does not mean that Charleston--the Charleston of the barouche and the closed coupe--will ever approve.

On the April day half a century ago that the first gun blazed defiantly from Fort Sumter and opened a page of history that bade fair to alter the very course of things, Prosperity slipped out of Charleston.

Gentility, Courage, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. The great docks along the front of the splendid harbor stand unused, the warehouses upon them molder. A brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit--Galveston--boasts that she is the second ocean-port of America, with the hundreds of thousands of Texas acres turned from grazing ranges into cotton-field, just behind her. New Orleans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come into existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of tragedies. And the docks along her waterfront grow rusty with disuse.

She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that they have builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five stories in height, and she will reply that you can still see the house in Church street where President Washington was entertained in royal fashion by her citizens; hint to her of the great ca.n.a.l to the south, and she will ask you if you remember how the blockade runners slipped night after night through the tight chain that the Federal gunboats drew across the entrance of her harbor for four long years; bespeak into her ears the social glories of the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will tell you of the gentle French and English blood that went into the making of her first families. Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price.

Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And Romance and Courtesy do not forget.

9

ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS

The three great cities of western New York--Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo--are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities across New York state; and yet their personality is as varied as that of three sisters; lovely but different.

Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive; one of the most distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of "society notes" and the reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by writing long lists of the "among those present." Buffalo leans more to Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the man who comes to dwell there--unless he comes labeled with letters of introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit of _camaraderie_. A man is taken into good society there because of what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her "the Boston of the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real Boston "the Omaha of the East."

Take these cities separately and their personality becomes the more pertinent and compelling. Consider them one by one as a traveler sees them on a westbound train of the New York Central railroad--Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo--and in the same grading they increase in population; roughly speaking, in a geometrical ratio. Syracuse has a little more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Erie Ca.n.a.l still finds an amiable path through Rochester]

Each of them is the result of the Erie ca.n.a.l. There had been famous post-roads across central and western New York before DeWitt Clinton dug his great ditch, and the Mohawk valley together with the little known "lake country" of New York formed one of the earliest pa.s.sage-ways to the West. But the Erie ca.n.a.l, providing a water level from the Great Lakes to the Hudson river and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous impulse to the state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the three big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and accounted as cities almost before they realized it. The building of the railroads across the state and their merging into great systems was a second step in their transition, while the third can hardly be said to be completed--the planning and construction of a network of inter-urban electric lines that shall again unite the three and--what is far more important to each--bring a great territory of small cities, villages and rich farms into closer touch with them.

In Rochester, a good many years ago, one Sam Patch jumped into the falls of the Genesee. He first planned his spectacular jump for a Sunday, but the citizens of Rochesterville, as the town by the great falls was first known, objected strenuously to such profanation of the Sabbath. So Sam Patch jumped not on a Sunday but on a Friday, which almost any superst.i.tious person might have recognized as an unfortunate change of date; and jumping, he did not survive to jump again. But the point of this incident hinges not on Fridays, but upon Sundays in Rochester. All that was a long time ago, but she has not changed her ideas of Sabbath observance very much since then--despite the vast change in Sunday across the land. The citizens of Rochester still go to church on Sunday and they "point with pride" to the big and progressive religious inst.i.tutions of their community. People in Syracuse, however, have Sunday picnics and outings off into the country, while Buffalo has always been known for its "liberal Sunday," whatever that may mean.

Rochester has always frowned upon that sort of thing. She has the same point of view as her Canadian neighbor across Lake Ontario--Toronto--a city which we shall see in a little time. Rochester rather cleaves to the old-fashioned Sabbath; even her noisy beach down at Ontario's edge, which has always served as a sort of Coney island to western New York, has been a thorn in the side of her conservative population. If you want to stop and consider how the old-fashioned Sabbath of your boyhood days still reigns at the city at the falls of the Genesee, recall the fact that in one street that is bordered by some of the town's largest churches the trolley cars are not operated on Sundays.[C] In Philadelphia you will remember they used years ago to stretch ropes across the streets in front of the churches at service times. But imagine the possibilities of that sort of thing in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco.

[C] A recent rerouting of the trolley cars in Rochester has left this particular street without regular service most of the days of the week. The fact remains, however, that for many years the Park avenue line had its terminal loop through Church street. On the Sabbath that terminal was moved bodily so that churchgoers would not be annoyed. E. H.

Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for James Roscoe Day. The Onondaga Indians are the oldest inhabitants, and a great help to the ingenious local artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. He has taken a half-baked Methodist college that stood on a wind-swept and barren hill and by his indomitable ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it into a real university. For Syracuse University is tremendously real to the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term "Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden power of the inst.i.tution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim to college spirit of surpa.s.sing dimensions. She does claim individual spirit among her students, however, that is second to none. As a university--as some know a university--the collection of ill-matched architectural edifices that house her is typical; but as an opportunity for popular education to the boys and girls of the rural districts of the state of New York she is monumental, and they come swarming to her in greater numbers each autumn.

So much for the hill--they call it Mount Olympus--which holds the university and those things that are the university's. Now for downtown Syracuse; for while the city's newer districts are ranged upon a series of impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her factories are squatted upon the flats at the head of Onondaga lake.

We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every self-respecting geography used to print; salt-sheds running off over an indefinite acreage. We were given to understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for existence was as a sort of huge salt-cellar for the rest of the nation.

Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten that there is a salt industry left, and will tell you glibly of the typewriters, automobiles, steel-tubing and the like that are made in their town in the course of a twelvemonth.

They will not tell you of one thing, for of that thing you may judge yourself. Life in Syracuse is punctuated by the railroad and the ca.n.a.l.

The ca.n.a.l is not so much of an obstruction unless one of the c.u.mbersome lift-bridges sticks and refuses to move up or down, but that railroad!

Every few minutes life in Syracuse comes to an actual standstill because of it. Men whose time is worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour and who grow puffy with over-exertion are violently halted by the pa.s.sing of switch-engines with trails of box-cars. Appointments are missed. Board meetings at the banks halt for directors--directors who are halted in their turn by the dignified and stately pa.s.sage of the Canastota Local through the heart of the city.

But the old ca.n.a.l is going to go some day--when the State's new barge ca.n.a.l well to the north of the town is completed--and perhaps in that same day Syracuse will have a broad, central avenue replacing the present dirty, foul-smelling ditch. Some day, some very big Syracusan will miss an appointment while he stands in Salina street watching the serene Canastota Local drag its way past him. That missed appointment will cost the very big Syracusan a lot of money and there will be a revolution in Syracuse--a railroad revolution. After that the locomotives will no longer blow their smoky breaths against the fronts of Syracuse's best buildings and grind their way slowly down Washington street from the tunnel to the depot, for the railroad which operates them stands in the forefront of the progressive transportation systems of America, and it is only waiting for Syracuse to take the first definite step of progress. Some day Syracuse--Syracuse delayed--is going to take that step. Only a year or two ago the Chicago Limited held up the carnival parade--and therein lies the final paragraph of this telling of Syracuse.

She is a festive la.s.s. Each September she rolls up her sleeves, her business men swell the subscription lists, her matrons and her pretty girls bestir themselves, and there is a concert of action that gives Syracuse a harvest week long to be remembered. By day folk go out to the State Fair and see the best agricultural show that New York state has ever known--a veritable agricultural show that endeavors not only to furnish an ample measure of fun, but also endeavors to be a real help to the progressive owners of those rich farms of central and western New York. By night Syracuse is in festival. Do not let them tell you that an American town cannot enter into the carnival spirit and still preserve her graciousness and a certain underlying sense of decorum. Tell those scoffers to go to Syracuse during the week of the State Fair. They will see a demonstration of the contrary--Salina street ablaze with an incandescent beauty, lined with row upon row of eager citizens. The street is cleared to a broad strip of stone carpet down its center and over this carpet rolls float after float. These in a single year will symbolize a single thing. In one September we recall that they represented the nations of the world and that the Queen of Ancient Ireland wore eyegla.s.ses; but that is as nothing, the policemen in Boston are addicted to straighteners, and Mr. Syracuse and Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse and Master Syracuse stand open-eyed in pleasure and go home very late at night on trolley cars that are as crowded as the trolley cars in very big cities, convinced that there possibly may be other towns but there is only one Syracuse.[D]

[D] Let it be recorded in the interest of accuracy that the fall festival of 1913 was not given--much to the disappointment of Mr. Syracuse, Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse and Master Syracuse. It is hoped, however, that the festival has not been permanently abandoned. The loss of its influence would be felt far outside of Syracuse. E. H.

All of which is exactly as it should be. Syracuse's great hope for her future rests in just such optimism on the part of her people. And in such optimism she has a strong foundation on which to build through coming years.