The Personality of American Cities Part 5

VII

It has all quite dazed you. You turn toward Katherine as you ride home with her in the taxicab--s.p.a.ce forbids a description of the horrors and the indignities of the taxicab trust.

"Is it like this--every night?" you feebly ask.

"Every night of the year," she replies. "And typical New Yorkers like it."

That puts a brand-new thought into your mind.

"What is a typical New Yorker?" you demand.

"We are all typical New Yorkers," she laughs.

It is a foolish answer--of course. But the strange part of the whole thing is that Katherine is right. Either there are no typical New Yorkers--as many sane folk solemnly aver--or else every one who tarries in the city through the pa.s.sing of even a single night is a typical New Yorker. How can it be else in a city who is still growing like a girl in her teens, who adds to herself each year in permanent population 135,000 human beings, whose transient population is nightly estimated at over a hundred thousand? They are all typical New Yorkers.

Here is Solomon Strunsky who has just arrived through Ellis Island, scared and forlorn, with his scared and forlorn little family trailing on behind, Solomon Strunsky all but penniless, and the merciless home-sickness for the little faraway town in Polish hills tearing at his heart. Is Solomon Strunsky less a typical New Yorker than the scion of this fine old family which for sixty years lived and died in a red-brick mansion close by Washington square? For in four years Solomon Strunsky will be keeping his own little store in the East Side, in another year he will be moving his brood up to a fine new house in Harlem, an even dozen years from the entrance at Ellis Island and you may be reading the proud patronymic of Strunsky spelled along a signboard upon one of the great new commercial barracks, which, not content with remaining downtown, began the despoliation of Fifth avenue and its adjacent retail district. Can you keep Solomon Strunsky out of the family of typical New Yorkers? We think not.

We think that you cannot exclude the man who through some stroke of fortune has acc.u.mulated money in a smaller city, and who has come to New York to live and to spend it. There are many thousands of him dwelling upon the island of Manhattan; with his families they make a considerable community by itself. They are good spenders, good New Yorkers in that they never complain while the strings of their purses are never tightly tied. They live in smart apartments uptown, at tremendously high rentals, keep at least one car in service at all seasons of the year, dine luxuriously in luxurious eating-places, attend the opera once a week or a fortnight, see the new plays, keep abreast of the showy side of New York. They are typical New Yorkers. In an apartment a little further down the street--which rents at half the figure and comes dangerously near being called a flat--is another family. This family also attends the new plays, although it is far more apt to go a floor or even two aloft, than to meet the speculator's prices for orchestra seats. It also goes to the opera, and the young woman of the house is in deadly earnest when she says that she does not mind standing through the four or five long acts of a Wagnerian matinee, because the nice young ushers let you sit on the floor in the intermissions. But this family goes farther than the drama--spoken or sung. It is conversant with the new books and the new pictures. That same young woman swings the Phi Beta Kappa key of the most difficult inst.i.tution of learning on this continent. And she knows more about the trend of modern art than half of the artists themselves. And yet she "goes to business"--is the capable secretary of a very capable man downtown.

These are typical New Yorkers. So are a family over in the next block--theirs is frankly a flat in every sense of that despised word.

They have not been in the theater in a dozen years, never in one of the big modern restaurants or hotels. Yet the head of that family is a man whose name is known and spoken reverently through little homes all the way across America. He is a worker in the church, although not a clergyman, a militant friend of education, although not an educator, and he believes that New York is the most thoughtful and benevolent city in the world. And if you attempt to argue with him, he will prove easily and smilingly, that he is right and you--are just mistaken. He and his know their New York--a New York of high Christian force and precept--and they, too, are New Yorkers.

So, too, is Bliffkins and the little Bliffkins--although Bliffkins holds property in a bustling Ohio city and votes within its precincts. To tell the truth baldly, the Bliffkinses descend upon New York once each year and never remain more than a fortnight. But they stop at a great hotel and they are great spenders. Floor-walkers, head-waiters, head-ushers know them. Annually, and for a few golden days they are part of New York--typical New Yorkers, if you please. And when they are gone other Bliffkinses, from almost every town across the land, big and little, come to replace them. And all these are typical New Yorkers.

What is the typical New Yorker?

Are the sane folk right when they say that he does not exist? We do not think so. We think that Katherine in all her flippancy was right. They are all typical New Yorkers who sojourn, no matter for how little a time, within her boundaries. We will go farther still. You might almost say that all Americans are typical New Yorkers. For New York is, in no small sense, America. Other towns and cities may publicly scoff her, down in their hearts they slavishly imitate her, her store fronts, her fashions, her hotel and her theater customs, her policemen, even her white-winged street cleaners. They publicly laugh at her--down in their hearts they secretly adore her.

3

ACROSS THE EAST RIVER

Physically only the East river separates Brooklyn from Manhattan island.

The island of Manhattan was and still is to many folk the city of New York. Across that narrow wale of the East river--one of the busiest water-highways in all the world--men have thrust several great bridges and tunnels. Politically Brooklyn and Manhattan are one. They are the most important boroughs of that which has for the past fifteen years been known as Greater New York.

But in almost every other way Manhattan and Brooklyn are nearly a thousand miles apart. In social customs, in many of the details of living they are vastly different, and this despite the fact that the greater part of the male population of Brooklyn daily travels to Manhattan island to work in its offices and shops and you can all but toss a stone from one community into the other. The very fact that Brooklyn is a dwelling place for New York--professional funny-men long ago called it a "bed-chamber"--has done much, as we shall see, toward building up the peculiar characteristics of the town that stands just across the East river from the tip of the busiest little island in the world.

Consider for an instant the situation of Brooklyn. It fills almost the entire west end of Long island--a slightly rolling tract of land between a narrow and unspeakably filthy stream on the north known as Newtown creek and the great cool ocean on the south. This entire tract has for many years been known as Kings county--its name a slight proof of its antiquity. Many years ago there were various villages in the old county--among them Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburgh, Canarsie, Flatbush, Gravesend and Brooklyn. They were Dutch towns, and you can still see some evidences of this in their old houses, although these are disappearing quite rapidly nowadays. Brooklyn grew the most rapidly--from almost the very day of the establishment of the republic.

Robert Fulton developed his steam-ferry and the East river ceased to be the bugaboo it had always been to sailing vessels. Fulton ferry was popular from the first. With the use of steam its importance waxed and soon it was overcrowded. Another ferry came, another and another--many, many others. They were all crowded, for Brooklyn was growing, a close rim of houses and churches and shops all the way along the bank of the East river from the Navy Yard at the sharp crook of the river that the Dutch called the Wallabout, south to the marshy Gowa.n.u.s bay. Upon the river sh.o.r.e, north of the Wallabout, was Williamsburgh, which was also growing and which had been incorporated into a city. But when the horse-cars came and men were no longer forced to walk to and from the ferries or to ride in miserable omnibuses, Brooklyn and Williamsburgh became physically one. Williamsburgh then gave up its charter and its ident.i.ty and became lost in the growth of a greater Brooklyn. That was repeated slowly but surely throughout all Kings county. Within comparatively recent years there came the elevated railroad--at almost the same time the great miracle of the Brooklyn bridge--and all the previous growth of the town was as nothing. For two decades it grew as rapidly as ever grew a "boom-town" in the West. The coming of electric city transportation, the multiplying of bridges, the boring of the first East river tunnel, all helped in this great growth. But the fairy web of steel that John A. Roebling thrust across the busiest part of the East river marked the transformation of Brooklyn--a transformation that did not end when Brooklyn sold her political birthright and became part and parcel of New York. That transformation is still in progress.

We have slipped into history because we have wanted you to understand why Brooklyn today is just what she is. The submerging of these little Dutch villages with their individual customs and traditions has done its part in the making of the customs and traditions of the Brooklyn of today. For Brooklyn today remains a congregation of separate communities. You may slip from one to the other without realizing that you have done more than pa.s.s down a compactly built block of houses or crossed a crowded street.

And so it has come to pa.s.s that Brooklyn has no main street--in the sense that about every other town in the United States, big or little, has a main street. If you wish to call Fulton street, running from the historic Fulton ferry right through the heart of the original city and far out into the open country a main street, you will be forced to admit that it is the ugliest main street of any town in the land: narrow, inconsequential, robbed of its light and air by a low-hanging elevated railroad almost its entire length. And yet right on Fulton street you will find two department-stores unusually complete and unusually well operated. New Yorkers come to them frequently to shop. The two stores seem lost in the dreariness of Fulton street--a very contradiction to that highway.

Yet Brooklyn is a community of contradictions. Here we have called Fulton street a possible main street of Brooklyn, and yet there is a street in the town, for the most part miles removed from it, that is quite as brisk by day and the only street in the borough which has any real activity at night. Like that great main-stem of Manhattan it is called Broadway, and it is a wider and more pretentious street than Fulton, although in its turn also enc.u.mbered with an elevated railroad.

But up and down Broadway there courses a constant traffic; on foot, in automobiles, in trolley-cars. Broadway boasts its own department-stores, some of them sizable, many hundreds of small shops, cheap theaters--and some better--by the score. It is an entertaining thoroughfare and yet we will venture to say that not one in ten thousand of the many transients who come to New York at regular intervals and who know the Great White Way as well as four corners up at home, have ever stepped foot within it. We will go further. Of the two million humans who go to make the population of Brooklyn; a large part, probably half, certainly a third, have never seen its own Broadway.

This speaks volumes for the provincialism of the great community across the East river from Manhattan. Remember all this while that it is a community of communities, self-centered and rather more intent upon the problem of getting back and forth between its homes and Manhattan than on any other one thing in the world. As a rule, people live in Brooklyn because it is less expensive than residence upon the island of Manhattan, more accessible and far more comfortable than the Bronx or the larger cities of New Jersey that range themselves close to the sh.o.r.e of the Hudson river. It is in reality a larger and a better Jersey City or a Hoboken or a Long Island City.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A quiet street on Brooklyn Heights]

And yet, like each of these three, it is something more than a mere housing place for folk who work within congested Manhattan. It, too, is a manufacturing center of no small importance. Despite the transportation obstacles of being divided by one or two rivers from most of the trunk-line railroads that terminate at the port of New York, hundreds of factory chimneys, large and small, proclaim its industrial importance. Its output of manufactures reaches high into the millions each year. And the pay-roll of its factory operatives is annually an impressive figure.

The fact remains, however, that it is a community of communities, each pulling very largely for itself. A smart western town of twenty-five thousand population can center more energy and secure for itself precisely what it wishes more rapidly and more precisely than can this great borough of nearly two million population. Brooklyn has not yet learned the lesson of concentrated effort.

Now consider these communities of old Kings county once again. We have touched upon their location and their growth; let us see the manner of folk who made them grow. About the second decade of the last century a virtual hegira of New England folk began to move toward New York City.

The New England states were the first portion of the land to show anything like congestion, the wonderful city at the mouth of the Hudson was beginning to come into its own--opportunity loomed large in the eyes of the shrewd New Englanders. They began picking up and moving toward New York. And they are still coming, although, of course, in no such volume as in the first half of the nineteenth century.

These New England folk found New York already aping metropolitanism--with its unshaded streets and its tightly built rows of houses. Over on Long island across busy Fulton ferry it was different.

There must have been something in the early Brooklyn, with its gentle shade-trees down the streets and its genial air of quiet comfort that made the New Englanders think of the pretty Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut towns that they had left. For into Brooklyn they came--a steady stream which did not lessen in volume until the days of the Civil War. They gave the place a blood infusion that it needed. They crowded the old Dutch families to one side and laid the social foundations of the Brooklyn of today.

It was New England who founded the excellent private schools and small colleges of Brooklyn, who early gave to her a public-school system of wide reputation. It was New England who sprinkled the Congregational churches over the older Brooklyn, who gave to their pulpits a Talmage and a Storrs, who brought Henry Ward Beecher out from the wilds of the Mid-west and made him the most famous preacher that America has ever known. It was New England who for forty years made Brooklyn Heights--with its exquisite situation on a plateau overlooking the upper harbor of New York--the finest residential locality in the land. It was New England for almost all that time who filled the great churches of the Heights to their capacity Sabbath morning after Sabbath morning--New England who stood for high thought, decent living and real progress in Brooklyn. It was New England that made Brooklyn eat her pork and beans religiously each Sabbath eve.

The great churches and the fine houses still stand on Brooklyn Heights, but alas, there are few struggles at the church-doors any more on Sabbath morning. The old houses, the fine, gentle old houses--many of them--have said good-by to their masters, their gayeties and their glories. Some of them have been pulled down to make room for gingerbread apartment structures and some of those that have remained have suffered degradation as lodging- and as boarding-houses. It has been hard to hold the younger generation of fashionable Brooklyn in Brooklyn. Manhattan is too near, too alluring with all of its cosmopolitan airs, and these days there is another steady hegira across the East river--the first families of Brooklyn seeking residence among the smart streets of upper Manhattan.

There is another reason for this. We have told how Brooklyn sold her birthright when she threw off her political individuality and made herself a borough of an enlarged New York. Perhaps it would be more true to say that she mortgaged that birthright the very hour when the Brooklyn bridge, then new, took up the fullness of its mighty work. In the weaving of that bridge is wrapped one of the little-known tragedies of Brooklyn--the immensely human story of Roebling, its designer and its builder, who suffered fatal injuries upon it and who died a lingering death before it was completed. Roebling's apartments were upon a high crest of Brooklyn Heights and the windows of his sick-room looked down upon the workmen who were weaving the steel web of the bridge. In the last hours of his life he could see the creation of his mind, the structure that was about to be known as one of the eight modern wonders of the world, being made ready for its task of the long years.

The coming of that first bridge began the transformation of Brooklyn; although for a long time Brooklyn did not realize it. The New England element within her population did not even realize it when she gave up her political ident.i.ty as a city. Then something else happened. Two miles to the north of the first bridge another was built--this with its one arm touching the East Side of Manhattan--the most crowded residence district in the new world--while its other hand reached that portion of Brooklyn, formerly known as Williamsburgh. We have already spoken of Williamsburgh--in its day a city of some promise but for sixty years now part of Brooklyn. In the greater part of these sixty years it hung tenaciously to its personality. Back of it was a great area of regular streets and small houses known as the Eastern District. The folk who lived there called themselves Brooklyn folk. Williamsburgh was different. Its folk were glad to give themselves the name of the old town, although the pattern of its streets ran closely into the pattern of the streets of the community which had engulfed it. They held themselves a bit by themselves. They had their own shops, their own theater, their own clubs, their own churches, their own schools. They also had the opportunity of seeing the social and the business changes that the development of the first bridge had wrought in old Brooklyn; how Fulton street from the old City Hall down to the ferry-house had lost its gayety and was entering upon decadence.

The Williamsburgh bridge repeated the story of the Brooklyn bridge--only in sharper measure. It was like a tube lancing the overcrowded ma.s.s of the East Side of Manhattan. It had hardly been completed before it had its own hegira. The Jews of the crowded tenements of Rivington and Allen and Ess.e.x and all the other congested narrow streets east of the Bowery began moving over the new bridge and out to a distant section of Brooklyn, known as Brownsville. They had preempted Brownsville for their own. For a time that was all right. Then the wiser men of that wise old race began asking themselves "why go to Brownsville, eight or nine miles distant, when at the other end of the bridge is a fair land for settlement?"

So began changed conditions for Williamsburgh. For a little while it sought to oppose the change, but an ox might as well pull against the mighty power of a locomotive, as a community try to defy the working of economic law. For a decade now Williamsburgh has been "moving out," her houses, her churches, many of her pet inst.i.tutions--going the most part farther out upon Long island and there rebuilding under many protective restrictions. The old Williamsburgh is nearly gone. Strange tongues and strange creeds are heard within her churches. And some of them have been pulled down, along with whole blocks of the gentle red-brick houses, to give way to cheap apartments, wrought wondrously and fearfully and echoing with the babbling of unfamiliar words. Nor has the transformation stopped at Williamsburgh. The invasion has crept, is still creeping into the Eastern District just beyond, transforming quiet house-lined streets into noisy ways lined with crowded apartments.

It is only within a comparatively little time that the older Brooklyn has realized the change that is coming upon her. She has known for years of the presence of many thousands of Irish and German within her boundaries. They have been useful citizens in her development and have done much for her in both a generous and an intelligent fashion. She holds today great colonies of Norse and of the Swedish--down close to the waterfront in the neighborhood of the Narrows, and her Italian citizens, taken by themselves, would make the greatest Italian city in the world. She has the largest single colony of Syrians in the New World and more than half a million Jews. According to reliable estimates, three-quarters of her adult population today are foreign-born.

Thus can we record the transformation of a community. It is a transformation which has created many problems, far too many to be recounted here. We have only room to show the nature of the change to a town where grandfathers used to be all in all and which has sleepily awakened to find itself cosmopolitan, its inst.i.tutions changing, its future uncertain. There have not been a dozen important Protestant churches builded in Brooklyn within the past twelve years--and some of these merely new edifices for old congregations which have been forced to pick up and move. And there have been old churches of old faiths that finally have had to give up and close their doors for the final time.

Even the old custom of singing Christmas songs in the public schools has been forbidden. The New England strain of Americanism in Brooklyn is dying.

Brooklyn today has no theater of wide reputation, although in Greenwood she has what is deservedly the most famous cemetery in America. Hold on, Brooklyn may have no theater, but she has a town-hall and a town-hall that is worthy of mention here. They do not call it the town-hall or the opera-house, but it is known as the Academy of Music and it is an inst.i.tution well worth the while of any town. And the Brooklyn Academy of Music is the rallying or focal point for so much that stands for good within the community that we must see how it has come into being.

It seems that when Brooklyn men and women of today were Brooklyn boys and girls there stood down on Montague street in the oldest part of the town an elder Academy of Music and to it they were taken on certain great occasions to hear a splendid lecture with magic-lantern pictures, the Swiss Bell Ringers, or perhaps even real drama or real opera, although play-acting was frowned upon in the early days of that barn-like structure. Eventually, its directors capitulated entirely.

Times were changing. So it was that Brooklyn saw the great actors and the great singers of yesterday upon the stage of its old Academy; from that stage it heard its own preachers, heard such orators as Edward Everett and John B. Gough; crowded into the s.p.a.cious auditorium at the Commencement exercises and the amateur dramatics of its boys and girls.

The old Academy was a part of the social fabric of old Brooklyn.

There comes an end to all temporal things and a winter's morning a full decade ago saw the historic opera house go up in a truly theatrical puff of smoke and flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost an inst.i.tution by which it was as well known as the Navy Yard or Plymouth church--where Beecher had once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague street were cool there were demands that the Academy be rebuilt.

Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel that the old Brooklyn was beginning to pa.s.s. Beecher was dead; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles was burned and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a second Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the Academy was a popular measure, a test as to Brooklyn's ability to preserve at least a vestige of civic unity unto herself.

It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was a time when it seemed as if Brooklyn must give up and become the Cinderella of all the boroughs of the new New York. But it seems that there were other inst.i.tutions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and still is, the Inst.i.tute of Arts and Sciences. This is a sort of civic Chautauqua.

Toward it several thousand men and women each pay five dollars a year for the opportunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same time.

They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, recitals and the like and this inst.i.tute has so fat a purse that the impresario or prima donna is yet to be found who is strong enough to withstand its pleadings.

This inst.i.tute came valiantly to the aid of the Academy project and saved the day. While it has no proprietary interest in the new structure, it is its chief tenant, and the new Academy was planned in detail to meet the needs of this popular educational inst.i.tution. So, while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new has a half-dozen big and comfortable meeting-places. On a single night Brooklyn can snap its fingers at the Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East river, and can gather within its own Temple of Song--a s.p.a.cious and elegant theater which receives the Metropolitan company once a week during the season--can place another great audience in the adjoining Music Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another hall hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell of distant climes and strange peoples; in a lofty ballroom, hold formal reception and dance; and gather in a still smaller hall to hear Professor Something-or-other discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like.