The Personality of American Cities Part 8

For well you may call Baltimore--quite as much as Philadelphia--a city of first things. There are almost too many of these to be recounted here. It is worthy of note, however, that in Baltimore came the first use in America of illuminating gas, which drove out the candle and the oil lamp as relics of a past age. Baltimore's historic playhouse, Peale's Museum, was the first in all the land to be set aglow by the new illuminant. And one may well imagine the glow of pride also that dwelt that memorable evening upon the faces of all the folk who were gathered in that ancient temple of the drama.

And yet there was an earlier "first thing" of even greater importance--the hour of inspiration a century ago when an enemy's guns were trained on that stout old guardian of the town's harbor, Fort McHenry--an engagement to be remembered almost solely by the fact that the "Star Spangled Banner" first lodged itself in the mind of man. But to our minds the greatest of the many, many "first things" of Baltimore was the coming of the railroad. For the first real railroad system in America--the Baltimore & Ohio--was planned by the citizens of the old town--ambitious dreamers each of them--as an offset to those rival cities to the north, Philadelphia and New York, who were creating ca.n.a.ls to develop their commerce--at the expense of the commerce of Baltimore.

So it was that a little group of merchants gathered in the house of George Brown, on the evening of the 12th of February, 1827, a date not to be regarded lightly in the annals of the land. For out of that meeting was to come a new America--a growing land that refused to be bound by high mountains or wide rivers. Not that the little gathering of Baltimore merchants pointed an instant or an easy path to quick prosperity. The path of the Baltimore & Ohio was hedged about for many years with trials and disappointments. It was more than a quarter of a century before it was a railroad worthy of the name, meeting even in part the ideals and dreams of the men who had planned it to bring their city in touch with the Ohio and the other navigable rivers of the unknown West. And at the beginning it was a fog-blinded path that confronted them. Over in England an unknown youth was experimenting with that uncertain toy, the steam locomotive, while a Russian gentleman of known intelligence gravely predicted that a car set with sails to go before the wind upon its rails was the most practical form of transportation. And it is worthy of mention that the earliest of the Baltimore and Ohio steam locomotives was beaten in a neck-and-neck race toward the West by a stout gray horse. The name of the old locomotive is still recorded in the annals of the railroad but that of the gray horse is lost forever.

To know and to love the Baltimore of today, one must know and love the Baltimore of yesterday. He must know her lore, her traditions, her first families--the things that have gone to make the modern city. He must see, as through magic gla.s.ses, the Baltimore of other days, the city that came into her own within a very few years after the close of the American Revolution. His imagination must depict that stout old merchant and banker, Alexander Brown; Evan Thomas, the first president of Baltimore's own railroad; B. H. Latrobe, the first great architect and engineer that a young nation should come to know and whose real memorial is in certain portions of the great Federal Capitol at Washington. He must see Winans, the car-builder, and Peter Cooper, tinkering with the locomotive. He may turn toward less commercial things and find Rembrandt Peale; and if his gla.s.ses be softened by the amber tints of charity he may see a drunkard staggering through the streets of old Baltimore to die finally in a gutter, while some men put their fingers to their lips and whisper that "Mr. Poe's _Raven_ may be literature after all."

It is indeed the old Baltimore that you must first come to know and to love, if you are ever to understand the personality of the Baltimore of today. The new Baltimore is a splendid city. Its fine new homes, its many, many schools and colleges proclaim that here is a center of real culture; its great churches, its theaters, its modern hotels, its broad avenues are worthy of a city of six hundred thousand humans. Druid Hill Park at the back of the new Baltimore is worthy of a city of a million souls. From it you can ride or stroll downtown through Eutaw place, that broad parked avenue which is the full pride of the new Baltimore.

Suddenly you turn to the left, pa.s.s through a few mean streets, the gray pile of the Fifth Regiment armory, known nationally because of the great conventions that have been held beneath its spreading walls, see the nearby tower of Mount Royal station--after that you are in the region of the uptown hotels and theaters--thrusting themselves into the long lines of tight, red-brick houses. These are builded after the fashion of the Philadelphia houses, even as to their white marble door-steps, and yet possess a charm and distinction of their own.

There are many of these old houses upon this really fine street, and you crane your neck at the first intersection to catch its name upon the sign-post. "Charles Street" it reads and with a little gladsome memory you recall a bit of verse that you saw a long time ago in the _Baltimore Sun_. It reads somewhat after this fashion:

Its heart is in Mount Vernon square, Its head is in the green wood: Its feet are stretched along the ways Where swarms the foreign brood; A modic.u.m of Bon Marche, That sublimated store-- And Oh, the treasure that we have In Charles street, Baltimore!

I love to watch the moving throng, The afternoon parade; The coaches rolling home to tea, The young man and the maid; The gentlemen who dwell in clubs, The magnates of the town-- Oh, Charles street has a smile for them, And never wears a frown!

The little shops, so cool and sweet; The finesse and the grace Which mark the mercantility Of such a market-place; And then beyond the tempting stores The quietness that runs Into the calm and stately square With marble denizens.

The little and the larger stores Are tempting, to be sure; But they are only half the charm That Charles street holds to lure; For here and there along the way, How sweet the homes befall-- The domicile that holds his Grace, The gentle Cardinal.

The mansions with pacific mien Whose windows say "Come in!"

The touches of colonialness, The farness of the din That rolls a city league away And leaves this dainty street A cool and comfortable spot Where past and present meet.

A measure of la boulevard Before whose windows pa.s.s The madame and the damoisel, The gallant and the la.s.s; The gravest and the most sedate, The young and gay it calls; And, oh, how proper over it-- The shadows of St. Paul's!

Dip down the hill and well away, The southward track it takes, O fickleness, how many quips, How many turns it takes!

But ever in its greensward heart, From head to foot we pour The homage of our love of it-- Dear Charles street, Baltimore!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles Street--Baltimore]

You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very heart of Charles street. It is a little open place, shaped like a Maltese cross rather than a real square or oblong, with a modern apartment house looming up upon it, whose facades of French Renaissance give a slightly Parisian touch to that corner of the square. To the rest of it, bordered with sober, old-time mansions there is nothing Parisian, unless you stand apart and gaze at the Monument, which sends its great shaft some two hundred feet up into the air. There are such columns in Paris.

It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon square, that adds variety to the vistas up and down through Charles street. For eighty years it has stood there, straight and true; for eighty years General Washington has looked down into the gardens of Charles street, upon the children who are playing there, the folk coming home at night. It is the most dominating thing in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-sc.r.a.per habit, and because of it we have always known Baltimore as the Monumental City.

Now turn from the modern Baltimore--right down this street which runs madly off the sharp hill of Mount Vernon square. Charles street, with all of its shops and gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot of the hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat sordid way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station and since you are to see so many great railroad stations before you are done with the cities of America, take a second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It is not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, very old--as far as we know the oldest of all the important stations that are still in use today. From its smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna country--the farther lands beyond--since 1848. And that trainshed, with its stout-pegged wooden-trussed roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone pillars, seems good for another sixty-five years.

Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. Over in another of the older parts of the town you can still find Camden station, which in 1857 was not only proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was ever built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy place indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great fire of a decade ago, but finally forced to close its doors in the face of the compet.i.tion of better located and more elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient cathedral remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Merchants'

Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look east from the Monument square there in front of the Post Office. Across the harbor you can find Fort McHenry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Baltimore does not easily forget.

And here, as you plunge down into the little congested district roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the really old Baltimore. The streets are as rambling and as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their gutters still run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the credit of the town that she is today fast doing away with these. And once in a time you can stand at the open door of an oyster establishment and watch the negroes shocking those bivalves--singing as they work. For just below Baltimore is a great _habitat_ of the oyster as well as of the crab, to say nothing of some more aristocratic denizens--the diamond-back terrapin for instance. Boys with trays--many of them negroes--walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling cold deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are uniformly delicious, and the boys sell them as freely on the streets as the boys down in Staunton and some other Virginia towns sell cold chicken.

Now we are across Jones Falls[B]--that unimpressive stream that gullies through Baltimore--and plunging into Old Town. Other cities may boast their _quartiers_, Baltimore has Old Town. And she clings to the name and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here is indeed the oldest part of Old Town and if we search quietly through its narrow, crowded streets we may still see some of the old inns, dating well back into the eighteenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling in eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when the coaches started forth up the new National Pike to c.u.mberland or distant Wheeling, north to York and Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little old houses of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful gla.s.s that we think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see above our heads in the street cars. But they represent Baltimore's solution of her housing problem.

[B] During the past year Baltimore has made a very creditable progress toward building an important commercial street over Jones Falls; thus transforming it into a hidden, tunneled sewer. Residents of the city will not soon forget, however, that it was at Jones Falls that the engines of the New York Fire Department took their stand and halted the great fire of 1904. E. H.

For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apartments. She has, like her Quaker neighbor to the north, mile upon mile of little red-brick houses, all these also with white door-steps--marble many times, and in other times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh paintings. In these little houses Baltimore lives. You may find here and there some one of them no more than ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories high, but it is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the rent of it is ridiculously low--compared even with the lower-priced apartments and the tenements of New York. That low rent, combined with the profuse and inexpensive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap place in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the democracy of her boulevards makes her a very comfortable place of residence--even for a poor man. And you may live within your little house and of a summer evening sit upon your "pleasure porch" as comfortably as any prince.

In Baltimore it is always a "pleasure porch," thus proclaiming her as a real gateway to the old South--the South of flavor and of romance. In Baltimore, you always say "Baltimore City," probably in distinction to Baltimore county, which surrounds it, and your real Baltimorean delights to speak of his morning journal as "that _Sun_ paper." The town clings conservatively to its old tricks of speech, and if you pick up that newspaper you will perhaps find the advertis.e.m.e.nt of an auctioneer preparing to sell the effects of some family "declining housekeeping."

That same fine conservatism is reflected in her nomenclature--first as you see it upon the shop signs and the door-plates. She has not felt the flood of foreign invasion as some of our other cities have felt it. She is not cosmopolitan--and she is proud of that. And the names that one sees along her streets are for the most part the good names of English lineage. Even the names of the streets themselves are proof of that--Alpaca and April alleys, Apple, and Apricot courts, Crab court, Cuba street, China street--which takes one back to the days of the famous clipper ships which sailed from the wharves of Baltimore--Featherbed lane, Johnny-cake road, Maidenchoice lane, Pen Lucy avenue, Sarah Ann street--who shall say that conservatism does not linger in these cognomens? And what shall one say of conservatism and Baltimore's devotion to Charles street, sending that famous thoroughfare up through the county to the north as Charles Street avenue and then as Charles Street Avenue extension?

Do not mistake Baltimore conservatism for a lack of progress. You can hardly make greater mistake. For Baltimore today is constantly planning to better her harbor, to improve the beginning that she has already made in the establishment of munic.i.p.al docks--her jealousy of a certain Virginia harbor far to the south is working much good to herself. She is constantly bettering her markets--today they are not only among the most wonderful but the most efficient in the whole land. And today she is planning a great common terminal for freight right within her heart--a sizable enterprise to be erected at a cost of some ten millions of dollars. For she is determined that her reputation for giving good living to her citizens and at a low cost shall be maintained. She realizes that much of that cost is the cost of food distribution, and while almost every other city in the land is floundering and experimenting she is going straight ahead--with definite progress in view. Such purpose and such plans make first-rate aids to conservatism.

"Baltimore can prove to any one who will give her half a chance, what a good, a dignified, a charming thing it is to be an American town,"

writes one man of her. He knows her well and he does not go by the mark.

Baltimore is good, is dignified, is altogether charming. And she is an American town of the very first rank.

6

THE AMERICAN MECCA

Just as all the roads of old Italy led to Rome so do all the roads of this broad republic lead to Washington--its seat of government. At every season of the year travelers are bound to it. It is in the spring-time, however, that this travel begins to a.s.sume the proportions of the hegira. It is a patriotic trek--essentially. And the slogan "Every true American should see Washington at least once" has been changed by shrewd railroad agents and hotel-keepers to "Every true American should see Washington once a year," although some of the true Americans after one experience with Washington hotel-keepers are apt to say that once in a life-time is quite enough. But the national capital is worth all the hardships, all the extortions large and small. It is a patriotic shrine and, quite incidentally, the most beautiful city in America, if not the world, and so it is that there is not a month in the year that Americans are not pouring through its gateway--the wonderful new Union station.

That terminal still opens the eyes of those folk who come trooping down toward the Potomac--old fellows who still remember the last time they went to Washington and the entire country was a-bristle with military camps and bristling guns, little shavers entering for the first time the City of Perpetual Delights, lovelorn bridal couples, excursions from Ohio, round-trips from off back in the Blue Ridge mountains, parties from up in Pennsylvania--the broad concourse of the railroad station at Washington is a veritable parade-ground of latent and varied Americanism.

The members of a self-appointed Reception Committee are waiting for the tourists--just outside the marble portals of the station. Some of them are hotel-runners, others are cab-drivers, but they are all there and their eyes are seemingly unerring. How quickly they detect the stranger who has heard the "true American" slogan for the first time, and who has the return part of his ten-day limit ticket tucked safely away in his shabby old wallet.

"Seein' Washington! A brilliant trip of two hours through the homes of wealth an' fashion, with a lecture explainin' every point of interest an' fame."

Here is the first welcoming cry of the Reception Committee--and seasoned tourist that you are, you do not yield to it. You shake your head in a determined "no" to the barker at the station but a little while later over in Pennsylvania avenue you succ.u.mb. Two dashing young black-haired ladies--slender symphonies in white--are sitting high upon one of the large travel-stained peripatetic grandstands. On another sight-seeing automobile over across the street are two very blondes--in black. You cast your fate upon the ladies with the black hair and the white dresses and climb upon the wagon with them. At intervals you look enviously upon mere pa.s.sers-by. Then the intervals cease. Two young men climb upon the wagon and boldly engage themselves in conversation with the young ladies. At the very moment when you are about to interfere in the name of propriety, you discover that the young ladies seem to like it. At any rate you decide it will be interesting to listen to their conversation and the important young man who is in charge of the grandstand has taken your non-refundable dollar for the trip. Otherwise you might still change in favor of the blondes who are sitting huddled under a single green sunshade and who look bored with themselves.

You sit ... and sit ... and sit. An old lady finds her c.u.mbersome way up on the front seat and fumbles for her dollar. A deaf gentleman perches himself upon the rear bench. After which you sit some more. Three or four more true Americans find their way upon the wagon. You still sit.

An elderly couple crowds in upon your bench. The man has whiskers like Uncle Joe Cannon or a cartoon, but his wife seems to have subdued him, after all these years. The sitting continues. Finally, when patience is all but exhausted, the personal conductor of the car shouts "All aboard"

and the two young ladies in white duck drop off nimbly. For a moment their acquaintances seem non-plussed. Then they understand, for they, too, jump off and follow after.

The chauffeur fumbles with the crank of the top-heavy car. It does not respond readily. The chauffeur perspires and the personal conductor--who will shortly emerge in the role of lecturer--offers advice. The chauffeur softly profanes. Interested spectators gather about and begin to make comments of a personal nature. Finally, when the chauffeur is about to give it all up and you and yours are to be plunged into mortification--you can safely suspect those young blondes on the rival enterprise across the way of laughing in their tight little sleeves at you--the engine begins to snort violently and throb industriously. The chauffeur wipes the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand and smiles triumphantly at the scoffers across the street.

He jumps into his seat briskly, as if afraid that the car might change its mind, and you are off. The ship's company settles into various stages of contentment. Seein' Washington at last.... The lecturer reaches for his megaphone.

But not so fast--this is Washington.

The real start has not yet begun. All these are but preliminaries to the start of the real start. You are not going to b.u.mp into the world of wealth and fashion as quickly as all this. You go along Pennsylvania avenue for another two squares and for twenty minutes more traffic is solicited. The novelty wears off and contentment ceases.

"I don't purpose to pay a dollar for a ride and spend the hull time settin' 'round like a public hack in front of th' hotels," says a bald-headed man and he voices a rising sentiment. He is from Baltimore and he is frankly skeptical of all things in Washington. The lecturer and the chauffeur confer. The performance with the engine crank is given once again and you finally make a real start.

Entertainment begins from that start. But you get history as a preliminary to wealth and fashion, for it so happens that wealth and fashion do not dwell in that part of Pennsylvania avenue.

"Site of first p'lice station in Washington," the young man rattles out through his megaphone. "Oldest hotel in Washington. Washington's Chinatown. Peace Monument. Monument to Albert Pike, Gran' Master of the Southern Masons; only Confederate monument in the city. Home o' Fightin'