The Personality of American Cities Part 6

In this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, can be a.s.sembled in this big and pa.s.sing handsome structure and yet be completely independent of each other. The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought after a hard fight, is no tiny toy.

The building was largely a labor of love to those who succeeded in getting the subscriptions for it. Its maintenance is today almost a labor of love for its stockholders are not alone the wealthy bankers and the merchants of the town. Its stock-list is as catholic as its endeavors--and they are legion. It is designed to be eventually a gathering-place for the butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker; all the st.u.r.dy folk who have their homes from Greenpoint to Coney island.

[Ill.u.s.tration: An early Brooklyn Citizen]

"One thing more," you demand. "How about Coney island?"

Coney island is a part of Brooklyn. It is also the most advertised and the most over-rated show place in the whole land. While the older Brooklyn used to drive down to that sand-spit facing the sea for clams and for fish-dinner in the summer days, it is only within the past few years that it has been commercialized and an attempt made to place it upon a business basis. We are inclined to think that the attempt, measured in the long run, has been a failure. It began about ten years ago, when the standard of entertainment at the famous beach had fallen low. A young man, with a gift for the show business, created a great amus.e.m.e.nt park there by the side of the sea.

"People do not come to Coney island to see the ocean," he said. "They come down here for a good time."

It looked as if he was right. His amus.e.m.e.nt park was a great novelty and for a time a tremendous success. It had splendid imitators almost within a stone-throw--its name and its purpose were being copied all the way across the land. Perhaps people did not go to Coney island, after all, to see the cool and lovely ocean.

But after a time the fickle taste of metropolitan New York seemed to change. New Yorkers did not seem to care quite as much for the gay creations of paint and tinsel, the eerie cities that were born anew each night in the glories of electric lighting. Fire came to Coney island--again and again. It scoured the paint and tinsel cities, thrust the highest of their towers, a blackened ruin, to the ground. Pious folk said that G.o.d was scourging Coney island for its contempt for His laws.

And the fact remains that it has not regained the preeminence of its position ten years ago.

We think that a man who had been out of Brooklyn for twenty years and whose recollections of the wonderful beach that forms her southern outpost were recollections of great gardens; of Patrick Gilmore playing inimitable marches in front of one giant hotel and of the incomparable Siedl leading his orchestra beside another, would do better than to return to Coney island. Siedl is dead; so is Gilmore and even the huge wooden hotel that looked down upon him was pulled apart last year to make room for the encroaching streets and houses of a growing Brooklyn.

The paint and the tinsel of Coney island grows tarnished--and that twenty-year exile could find little else than the sea to hold his interest. And the folk who go to Coney island today seem to care very little for the sea--save perhaps as a giant bath-tub.

We think that the absentee of twenty years' standing would do far better to go to Prospect Park. That really superb pleasure-ground, planned through the foresight of a Brooklyn man of half a century ago, remains practically unchanged through the years. It remains one of the great parks, not only of America, but of the entire world. It is the real lion of Brooklyn. It is incomparably finer than its rival, the somewhat neglected Central Park of Manhattan. And alas, Manhattan seems to think so, too, for to Prospect Park it sends each bright summer Sunday not the best but the roughest of its hordes. And Brooklyn sighs when it sees its lovely playground stolen from it.

It is more than playground--Prospect Park. It is history. There are no historic buildings in Brooklyn--unless we except the Dutch Reformed church out in Flatbush--but all of Prospect Park was once a battlefield--the theater of that bitter and b.l.o.o.d.y conflict of July, 1776, when Washington was routed by British strategy and forced to retire from the city that he needed most of all to hold. Through its great meadows Continental and Briton and Hessian once marched with murder in their hearts. In those great meadows today the boys and girls of the Brooklyn of today play tennis; the older men, after the fashion of the Brooklyn of other days, their croquet. And annually down the greensward the little children of Brooklyn march in brilliant June-time pageant.

The Sunday-school parade of Brooklyn is one of the older inst.i.tutions of the town that still survives. Annually and upon the first Thursday afternoon of June the children of all the Sabbath-schools of the borough march out upon its streets. There is not room even in Prospect Park for all of these--for sometimes there are 150,000 of them marching of an afternoon; and the great distances within Brooklyn must also be brought into consideration. But the largest of the individual parades always marches in the park--marches like trained troopers up past the dignitaries in the reviewing stand, and the mayor, and the other city officers, the Governor of the State, not infrequently the President of the United States. There is much music, great excitement--and ice-cream afterwards. Sharp denominational bars are let down and the ice-cream goes to all. And the boys and girls who are to be the men and women of the Brooklyn of tomorrow and who are to face its great problems march proudly by, knowing that the loving eye of father or of mother must be upon them.

The problems of the Brooklyn of tomorrow are not to be carelessly dismissed. Nor is the problem of Brooklyn's future in any way hopeless.

The changing of conditions, the changing of habits, the changing of inst.i.tutions does not of necessity spell utter ruin. Cosmopolitanism does not mean the end of all things. We have called her dull and emotionless and provincial, and yet many of her residents are quick and appreciative--well-traveled and well-read--anxious to meet the new conditions, to solve the problems that have been entailed. And we have not the slightest doubt that in the long run they will be solved, that Brooklyn will be ready and willing to undertake the great problem that has been thrust upon her--the fusing of her hundreds of thousands of foreign-born into first-rate Americans.

4

WILLIAM PENN'S TOWN

To approach Philadelphia in a humble spirit of absolute appreciation, you must come to her by one of the historic pikes that spread from her like cart-wheel spokes from their hub. You will find one of those old roads easily enough, for they radiate from her in every direction. And when you have found your pike you will discover that it is a fine road, even in these days when there is a "good-roads movement" abroad in the land. You can traverse it into town as best suits your fancy--and your purse. If you are fortunate enough to own an automobile you will find motoring one of the greatest of many joys in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania. If your purse is thin you can have joyous health out of walking the long miles such as is denied to your proud motorist. And if you have neither money nor robust health for hard walking, you will find a trolley line along each of the important pikes. Philadelphia does not close her most gracious avenues of approach to you--no matter who you are or what you are.

Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a September morning waiting to tramp our way, at least to the outskirts of the closely built part of the city. And before we are away from the tavern which has kept us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single parting glance. It has been standing there at the cross-roads of two of the busy pikes of Montgomery county for a full century and a half. In all those years it has not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and fifty years of hospitality for which it does not have to make apologies.

Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort along the roadsides of New England, but we do not know where else you will find them without crossing the Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the Suss.e.x of the older England. Yet around Philadelphia they are plentiful--with their yellow plastered walls, tight green shutters hung against them, their low-ceilinged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the highway. Some of them have quite wonderful signs and all of them have a wonderful hospitality--heritage from the Quaker manner of living.

So from the William Penn Inn one may start after breakfast as one might have started a century ago--to walk his way into the busy town. The four corners where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge--a smooth white house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, and the tavern occupying three of them. The fourth gives to a view of distant fields--and such a view! Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the rich lands down in the valleys, the shrewder genius required to make the more sterile ridge acres yield. And, as you trudge down the pike, the view stays with you for a long while.

At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevitable toll-gate that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from every side. But your payment to the toll-keeper upon the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His smile is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if you would tarry for a little time within the living-room of the toll-house he would tell you stories of the pike--stories that would make it worth the waiting. But--Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and dusty. You pick up your way and off you go.

Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long gra.s.s roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern--it only dates back to 1823--and yet it is typical. Two ma.s.ses of benches on a slightly inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women.

Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here on the morning of First Day.

Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even thought that this is _dilettante_ agriculture. It is merely evidence that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern transportation methods bring his products to the consumer.

Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, this one, like the meeting-house of the Friends back the pike a way, is cursed with modernity. It can only claim sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine host can tell no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after no less a personage. Instead he relates mournfully how a tavern over on the Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap-room telling of the memorable night that the members of the Continental Congress moving from New York to Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anecdotes and a corking name almost make a wayside inn. But the anecdotes are not always easy to find.

After lunch and a good rest the last stages of the journey. The little towns grow more closely together; there are more houses, more intersecting cross-roads. It will be worth your while not to miss the signs upon these. The very names on the sign-posts--Plymouth Meeting, Wheel Pump, Spring House, Bird-in-hand--seem to proclaim that this is a venerable country indeed. More closely do the houses grow together, the farms disappear, an ancient mile-post thrusts itself into your vision.

It is stone, but, after the fashion of these Pennsylvania Dutch, white-washed and readable. It tells you:

P 10-1/2 C.H.

1 M.

But Philadelphia in reality is no ten miles away. For here is Chestnut Hill, the houses numbered, city-fashion and the yellow trolley cars multiplied within the busy highway which has become a city street without you having realized the transition. The smart looking policeman at the corner will tell you that Chestnut Hill is today one of the wards of Philadelphia.

The city at last! You may turn at the top of a long hill and for a final instant confront the country beyond, rolling, fertile, prosperous, the gentle wooded hills giving soft undulation to the horizon. Then look forward and face the busy town. For a long time yet your way shall be down what seems to be the main street of a prosperous village, with its great homes set away back in green lawns from the noisy pavement and the public sidewalk. There are shops but they are distinctly local shops and the churches bear the names of the brisk towns that were submerged in the making of a larger Philadelphia--Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, Germantown.

And down this same busy street history has marched before you. Some of it has been recorded here and there in bronze tablets along the street.

In front of one old house, one learns that General Washington conferred with his officers at the eve of the battle of Germantown and on the door-steps of another--set even today in its own deep grounds--Redcoat and Buff struggled in a memorable conflict. For this was the mansion of Judge Chew, transformed in an instant of an autumn day from country-house to fortress. It was from the windows of this old house that six companies of Colonel Musgrave's Fortieth regiment poured down a deadly fire upon Mad Anthony Wayne and his men even as they attempted to set fire to it. The house stood and so stood the Fortieth regiment.

General Washington lost his chance to enter Philadelphia that autumn, and Valley Forge was so writ into the pages of history.

History! It is spread up and down this main street of Germantown, it slips down the side-streets and up the alleys, into the hospitable front-doors of stout stonehouses. Here it shows its teeth in the bullet-holes of the aged wooden fence back of the Johnson house and here is the Logan house, the Morris house, the Wend house, the Concord school and the burying-ground. Any resident of Germantown will tell you what these old houses mean to it, the part they have played in its making.

After Germantown--Philadelphia itself. The road dips down a sudden hill, loses itself in a short tunnel under a black maze of railroad tracks.

Beyond the railroad track the city is solidly built, row upon row of narrow streets lined with small flat-roofed brick houses, the monotony only accentuated by an occasional church-spire or towering factory. In the distance a group of higher buildings--downtown Philadelphia--rising above the tallest of them Father Penn poised on the great tower of the City Hall. No need now for more tramping. The fascination of the open country is gone and a trolley car will take you through tedious city blocks--in Philadelphia they call them squares--almost to the door of that City Hall. They _are tedious_ blocks. Architecturally Philadelphia is the most monotonous city in America with its little red-brick houses.

Dr. S. Weir Mitch.e.l.l who has known it through all the years of his life has called it the "Red City" and rightly, too.

For mile after mile of the older Philadelphia is mile after mile of those flat-roofed red-brick houses. They seemingly must have been made at some mill, in great quant.i.ties and from a limited variety of patterns. For they are almost all alike, with their two or three stories of narrow windows and doors; steps and lintels and cornice of white marble and invariably set close upon the sidewalk line. There is no more generosity than individuality about the typical side streets of Philadelphia.

A single thing will catch your eye about these Philadelphia houses--a small metal device which is usually placed upon the ledge of a second-story window. The window must be my lady's sitting-room, for a closer look shows the device to be a mirror, rather two or three mirrors, so cunningly placed that they will show her folk pa.s.sing up and down or standing upon her doorstep without troubling her to leave her comfortable rocking chair. There must be a hundred thousand of these devices in Philadelphia. They call them "busy-bodies" quite appropriately, and they are as typical of the town as its breakfast sc.r.a.pple and sausage.

Even a slow-moving Philadelphia trolley car eventually accomplishes its purpose and you will find yourself slipping from the older town into the oldest. The trolley car grinds around an open square--Franklin square, the conductor informs you and then tells you that despite its name it is not to be confounded with that aristocrat, Rittenhouse square, nor even with the more democratic Logan square. You see that for yourself. There are mean streets aroundabout this square. Oldest Philadelphia a.s.suredly is not putting her best foot forward.

And yet these sordid streets are not without their fascination. The ugly monotony of flat-roofs is gone. These roofs are high-pitched and bristle with small-paned dormer windows and with chimneys, for the houses that stand beneath them are very, very old indeed. And they are typical of that Georgian architecture that we love to call Colonial. A brave show these houses once must have made--even today a bit of battered rail, a fragment of door or window-casing or fanlight proclaims that once they were quality. Fallen to a low estate, to the housing of Italians or Chinese instead of quiet Quakers, they seem almost to be content that their streets have fallen with them; that few seem to seek them out in this decidedly unfashionable corner of Philadelphia.

"Arch street," calls the conductor and it is time to get out. It is time to thread your way down one of the earliest streets of the old Red City, time to pay your respects at the tomb of him who ranked with Penn, the Proprietor, as the greatest citizen. You can find this tomb easily--any newsboy on the street can point the way to it. He is buried with others of his faith in the quiet yard of Christ church at Fifth and Arch streets. And in order that the pa.s.sing world may sometimes stop to do him the homage of a pa.s.sing thought, a single section of the old brick wall has been cut away and replaced by an iron grating. Through that grating you may see his tomb--a slab of stone sunk flat, for he was an unpretentious man--and on its face read:

"Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790."

Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting-house of the Friends, one of the best-known in all that grave city which their patron founded. It is the meeting-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. And you can still see upon a tablet set in one of its faded brick walls these four lines:

"By General Subscription, For the Free Quakers.

Erected A. D. 1783, Of the Empire 8."

That "Empire 8" has puzzled a good many tourists. In a republic and erected upon the gathering-place of as simple a sect as the Friends it provokes many questions.

"They must have thought it was goin' to be an empire like that French Empire that was started by the war in '75," the aged caretaker patiently will tell you with a shake of the head which shows that he has been asked that very question many times before and never found a really good answer for it.