The Personality of American Cities Part 13

Buffalo is not as frivolous as Syracuse. She cares but little for festivals but speaks of herself in the cold commercial terms of success.

If you have ever met a man from Buffalo, when you were traveling, and he began to tell you of his town, you will know exactly what we mean. He undoubtedly began by quoting marvelous statistics, some of them concerning the number of trains that arrived and departed from his native heath in the course of twenty-four hours. When he was through, you had a confused idea that Buffalo was some sort of an exaggerated railroad yard, where you changed cars to go from any one corner of the universe to any other corner. When your time came to see Buffalo for yourself, that confused idea returned to you. Your train slipped for miles through an apparently unending wilderness of branching tracks and dusty freight cars, past grimy round-houses and steaming locomotives, until you were ready to believe that any conceivable number of trains arrived at and departed from that busy town within a single calendar day.

If you have approached her by water in the summertime you have seen her as a mighty port, her congestion of water traffic suggesting salt water rather than fresh. When we come to visit the neighboring port of Cleveland we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the inland seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as something more than a railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a melting-pot for the fusing of as large and as difficult a foreign element as is given to any American town to fuse. Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The dull roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of power, is within hearing. That dull roar has been Buffalo's incentive, the lullaby which induced her dreams of industrial as well as of commercial strength. And much has been written of her growing strength in these great lines.

To our own minds the real Buffalo is to be found in her typical citizen.

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 cooperation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 st.u.r.dy 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 a.s.serted 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 inst.i.tution 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 ca.n.a.l. That is quite true and yet it is also true that before the ca.n.a.l 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 ca.n.a.l 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 t.i.tle 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 ca.n.a.l 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The ca.n.a.l 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sing 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 skysc.r.a.per 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 coa.r.s.e-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 pa.s.s 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."