*****
Philadelphia stands at the east end of Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh is the west gate of that Keystone commonwealth. Yet two peas in a pod were never half so different. Philadelphia stands for conservatism, Pittsburgh for progress. While Philadelphia was climbing to the zenith of her power and influence through the first three-quarters of the last century and reaching her apotheosis in her great Centennial, Pittsburgh was quiet beneath her smoke umbrellas experimenting with that strange new metal, which man called steel. In the day dreams that Philadelphia enjoyed in 1876 Pittsburgh was forgotten.
"I suppose the Pennsylvania railroad must have some place to end at," said a lady from Rittenhouse square, when her attention was called to the city at the junction of the three rivers. And in the next year that lady and many other ladies of the staunch old Quaker town were holding up their hands in holy horror at the news from Pittsburgh. Great riots, the bloodiest that had ever been known, were marking the railroad strike there—why, in a single day the rioters had burned the greatUnion station, every other railroad structure, and every car in the place. That was bad advertising for a town that had none too many friends.
But Pittsburgh was finding herself—she is still in that fascinating process of development. For word was eking out from the rough mountains of western Pennsylvania that a little group of Scotchmen—led by a shrewd ironmaster whom politic folk were already calling "Mr. Carnegie"—had made steel an economic structural possibility. In this day when wood has become a luxury, steel is coming into its own and Pittsburgh is today the most metropolitan city between New York and Chicago. But she is still finding herself. The Survey, financed by Mrs. Russell Sage, and equipped with some of the ablest and fairest minded social workers in America, has called sharp attention to her shortcomings. The Survey did its work thoroughly and it was not the work of a minute or a day or a week or a month. When its report was ready, Pittsburgh smarted. It was the sort of smarting that goes before a cure.
Much has been done already. The man who went to Pittsburgh as recently as ten years ago carried away some pretty definite memories of neglected railroad stations and inferior hotel facilities. He remembered that in Liberty and Penn avenues—two of the chief shopping streets in the city—long trails of freight cars were constantly being shifted by dirty switch engines in among the trolley cars, while farther up these same avenues the Fort Wayne railroad tracks formed two of the nastiest grade crossings in America. When a fine new hotel was finally built away out Fifth avenue, he could sit on its porch and face Pittsburgh's famous farm. The Schenley farm stretched over the hill and far away. Its barns were sharply silhouetted upon the horizon, rail zigzag fences ran up and down the slopes and sometimes one could see cattle outlined against the sky edge.
The farm was a sore spot in Pittsburgh development. It occupied a tract somewhat similar in location to that of Central Park in Manhattan, and the struggling, growing town crawled its way around the obstacle slowly—then grew many miles east once again. Resentment gathered against the farm, and finally a bill was slipped through at Harrisburg imposing double taxes on property held by persons residing out of the United States—a distinct slap at the Schenley estate. When the estate protested, word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn.
So Pittsburgh gained its splendid new park, and a site for one of the finest civic centers in America. The farm has begun to disappear—the University of Pittsburgh is absorbing its last undeveloped slope for an American Acropolis that shall put Athens in the pale. The new Athletic Club, the development of the Hotel Schenley, the great Soldiers' Memorial Hall which Allegheny county has just finished, the even greater Carnegie Institute, the graceful twin-spired cathedral, all are going toward the making of this fine, new civic center, and Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh, and the Pirates social heroes, Forbes Field the finest baseball park in all this land—a wizardry of glass and steel and concrete—is a distinctive feature of this improvement.
The old and the new at PittsburghThe old and the new at Pittsburgh
The freight trains are gone from the downtown shopping streets and the two wicked grade crossings disappeared when the Pennsylvania built its splendid new Union Station. Other fine railroad terminals and new hotels have added to the comfort of the stranger. They are beginning in a faint way to give transfers on the trolley cars, and there is more than a promise that some day wayfarers will not be taxed a penny every time they walk across the bridges that bind the heart of the city. The bridge companies are private affairs, paying from fifteen to twenty percent in annual dividends, and they hang pretty tightly on to their bonanzas. But the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce is after them, and that Chamber is a fairly energetic body. It has already sought the devil in his lair and tried to abolish the smoke nuisance, with some definite results.
A New York girl who has been living in Pittsburgh for the last four years complained that she had never seen but two sunsets there. There is hope for that girl. If the Chamber of Commerce keeps hard at its anti-smoke campaign, she may yet stand on the Point and down the muddy Ohio see something that dimly resembles the glorious dying of the day, as one sees it from the heights of New York city's Riverside Drive.
A keen-eyed man sat in an easy chair in the luxury of the Duquesne Club, and faced the New York man.
"Are we so bad?" he demanded. "You New York men like to paint us that way. You judge us falsely. You think that when you come out here you are going to see a sort of modern Sodom, bowing to all the gods of money and the gods of the high tariff. You think you are going to fairly revel in a wide open town, in the full significance of that phrase, and what do you see?
"You see a pretty solid sort of a Scotch Presbyterian town, where you cannot even get shaved in your hotel on Sunday, to say nothing of buying a drink. And as for shows, you can't buy your way into a concert here on Sunday. Why, some of the elders of my kirk have even looked askance at Mr. Carnegie for the free recitals that he gives Sabbath afternoons in that splendid hall of the Institute.
"There's your real Pittsburgher, and if some of the boys have chafed a bit under all the restraint that they have had here and gone to the wicked city after a little fling and a little advertising, is that any just reason why it all should be charged against Pittsburgh? Pittsburghhas enough troubles of her own without borrowing any additional ones.
"The trouble is we've been making too much money to notice much about the boys, or give proper attention to some pretty vital civic problems—that's why the rottenness cropped out in the City Councils. It's the taint of the almighty dollar, Mr. New Yorker! Why, Mr. Carnegie made a couple of hundred of us millionaires within a single twenty-four hours. Can you think of any worse blow for an average town?
"He took some of us, who had been working for him a long time, and got us into the business—some for an eighth interest, others for a sixteenth or even a thirty-second. That was great, and we appreciated it, but it kept us fairly tight on ready money for a while, even though Frick and Mellen were standing pat with an offer of a hundred million dollars for the bonds of the steel company. I tell you I was short on ready money myself, and wondering if I could not cut down on my house rent $2,000 a year and get my wife to keep two hired girls instead of three. Then you know what happened. Carnegie himself took over the bonds at a cold two hundred million dollars. Within a week or so I was in New York talking with an architect about building a new house for the missus, and getting passage tickets through to Europe."
The ironmaster called his automobile and bundled the New York man within it.
"We are going down into the slums," he said. "I can show you a single block where thirteen different languages are spoken. That is the new Pittsburgh—taking up one another's burdens, or something of that sort, as they call it. It is queer until you get used to it, and when you get used to it, it makes you feel like going up on the roof and yelling that Pittsburgh is going tobe the greatest city on earth, not just the greatest in tonnage or in dollars.
"That is why we are cottoning to that idea of a civic center out by Schenley Park; that's why we pat Andrew Carnegie on the back when we know that he is giving us the best in pictures and in music in America; that's why Frick is holding back with his horse pasture there in front of Carnegie Institute to build something bigger and better. Don't you get the idea now of the bigger and better Pittsburgh?"
The limousine stopped and the ironmaster beckoned a large, whiskered Russian to it. "Here's a real anarchist," he said, "but he is one of my protégés. He speaks down in a dirty hall in Liberty avenue, near the Wabash terminal, but he's for the new Pittsburgh, and he's for it strong—so we come together after a fashion."
The Russian, who was a teacher, came close to the big automobile and pointed to a woman of his own people—a woman wretchedly poor, who dwelt in one of the hovels which are today Pittsburgh's greatest shame.
"She's reading Byron," he said quietly, "and she has been in America less than six months. She says there is a magnificent comparison between Byron and Tolstoy."
That reminded the ironmaster of an incident.
"After that bad time in 1907," he said, "I chanced into one of Mr. Carnegie's libraries, and the librarian complained to me of the way the books were being ruined. Their backs were being scratched and filled with rust and even shavings. I had an idea on that myself. I went back to our own mill—it was pretty dull there and I was dodging the forlorn place as much as I could. But we were sifting out a gang from the men who were beating at our doors every morning for work, and even then we were carrying twice as many men aswe really needed. I went around back of the furnaces and there were the library books—the men were reading them in the long shifts."
"They weren't reading fiction?" asked the New Yorker.
"Not a bit of it," said the ironmaster. Then he added:
"One of them spoke to me. He was only getting three days a week. 'Mr. Carnegie can give the books,' was his quiet observation, 'and the money to buy them. But we need more than money. Can't he ever give us the leisure to read them without its costing us the money for our food?'
"That, New Yorker, from the mouth of one of those of the new Pittsburgh is the real answer to your question."
They call her the Sixth City, but that is only in a comparative sense, and exclusively in regard to her statistical position in the population ranks of the large cities of our land. For no real citizen of Cleveland will ever admit that his community is less than first, in all of the things that make for the advance of a strong and healthy American town. His might better be called "the City of Boundless Enthusiasm." Your Cleveland man, however, is content to know it as the Sixth City.
"Not that it really matters whether we are the fifth or the seventh—or the sixth," he tells you. "Only it all goes to show how we've bobbed up in the last twenty years. You know what we used to be—an inconsiderable lake port up on the north brink of Ohio with Cincinnati down there in the south pruning herself as a real metropolis and calling herself the Queen City. We might call ourselves the Queen City today and stretch no points, but that's a sort of fancy title that's gone out of fashion now. The Sixth City sounds more like the Twentieth Century."
And Cleveland having thus baptized herself, as it were, proceeded to spread her new name to the world. "Cleveland—Sixth City" appeared on the stationery of her business houses; her tailors stitched it in upon the labels of the ready-made suits they sent to all corners of the land; her bakers stamped it on the products of their ovens; big shippers stenciled it over packing-cases; manufacturers even placed it upon the brass-plates of thelathes and other complicated machines they sent forth from their shops. Today when you say "Sixth City" to an American he replies "Cleveland," which is precisely what Cleveland intended he should reply.
Now why has Cleveland taken her new position of sixth among the cities of the land? Ask your Cleveland man that, and he will take you by the elbow and march you straight toward the docks, that not only line her lake front but extend for miles up within the curious twistings of the Cuyahoga river.
"Lake traffic," he will tell you, and begin to quote statistics.
We will spare you most of the statistics. It is meet that you should know, however, that upon the five Great Lakes there throbs a commerce that might well be the envy of any far-reaching, salty sea. To put the thing concretely, the freight portion of this traffic alone reached tremendous totals in 1912. In the navigation months of that year, exactly 47,435,477 tons of iron ore and an even greater tonnage of coal moved upon the Lakes, while the enormous total of 158,000,000 bushels of grain were received at the port of Buffalo. And although there are tens of thousands of sailormen upon the salt seas who have never heard of Cleveland, the business of the port of Cleveland is comparable with that of the port of Liverpool, one of the very greatest and the very busiest harbors in all the world. For four out of every five of the great steel steamships carrying the iron ore and coal cargoes of the lakes are operated from Cleveland. Until the formation of the United States Steel corporation a few years ago she could also say that she owned four out of five of these vessels. And today her indirect interest in them, through the steel corporation, is not small.
As the Cleveland man continues to din these statistics into your ear, you let your gaze wander. Over acrossa narrow slip a gaunt steel framework rises. It holds a cradle, large enough and strong enough to accommodate a single steel railroad "gondola," which in turn carries fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are clamped over the sides of one of these "gondola" cars, which a seemingly tireless switch-engine has just shunted into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to the top of the framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge, three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of the car in an uprising cloud of black dust and drops through a funnel into the expansive hold of the vessel that is moored at the dock. The car is righted; some remaining coal rattles to its bottom. Once again it is overturned and the remaining coal goes through the funnel. When it is righted the second time it is entirely empty. The cradle returns to its low level, the car is unfastened and given a push. It makes a gravity movement and returns to a string of its fellows that have been through a similar process.
You take out your watch. The process consumes just two minutes for each car. That means thirty cars an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of coal, the capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been placed in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are familiar, perhaps, with the craft that tie up at the wharves of seaboard towns, and you roughly estimate the capacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great hold, and you find yourself astonished at the result of such computations. You confide that astonishment to your Cleveland man. He smiles at you, benignly.
"That is really not very rapid work," he says, "they put eleven thousand tons of ore into theCoreyin thirty-nine minutes up at Superior last year."
And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the world. When the British ship-owners heard of thatfeat at a port two thousand miles inland, they ceased to deride American docking facilities.
The Cleveland man begins telling you something of this lake traffic in iron ore and soft coal—almost three-quarters of the total tonnage of the lakes. The workable iron deposits of America are today in greatest profusion within a comparatively few miles of the head of Lake Superior—nothing has yet robbed western Pennsylvania and West Virginia of their supremacy as producers of bituminous coal. There is an ideal traffic condition, the condition that lines the railroad cars for forty miles roundabout Pittsburgh. The great cost in handling freight upon the average railroad comes from the fact that it is generally what is known as "one-way" business—that is, the volume of traffic moves in a single direction, necessitating an expensive and wasteful return haul of empty cars. There is no such traffic waste upon the Great Lakes. The ships that go up and down the long water lanes of Erie and Huron and Superior do not worry about ballast for the return. They carry coal from Buffalo, Erie, Ashtabula, Conneaut and Cleveland to Duluth and Superior and they come back with their capacious holds filled with red iron ore. There is your true economy in transportation, and the reflection of it comes in the fact that these ships haul cargo at the rate of .78 of a mill for a ton-mile, which is the lowest freight-rate in the world.
Cleveland built these ships, in fact she still is building the greater part of them. And she thinks nothing of building the largest of these steel vessels in ninety days. Take a second look at that vessel—the coal cars are still pouring their grimy treasure into her hold. She is builded, like all of these new freighters, with a severity that shows the bluff utilitarianism of the shipbuilders of the Great Lakes. None of the finicky traditions of the Clyde rule the minds of the men who today arebuilding the merchant marine of the Lakes. One deckhouse, with the navigating headquarters, is forward; the other, with funnel and the other externals of the ship's propelling mechanism, is at the extreme stern. Amidships your Great Lakes carrier is cargo—and nothing else. No tangle of line or burden of trivials; just a red-walled hull of thick steel plates and a steel-plate deck—broken into thirty-six hatches and of precisely the same shade of red—for these ships are quickly painted by hose-spray. Remember that it is ninety days—from keel-plates to launching. In another thirty days the ship's simple fittings are finished and her engines in her heart are ready to pound from down-Lakes to up-Lakes and back innumerable times.
*****
If we have given some attention in this Cleveland chapter to the traffic of the Great Lakes, it is, as we have already intimated, because the traffic of the Great Lakes has made her the Sixth City. It has also made the most important of her industries, the very greatest of her fortunes. Your Cleveland man will tell you of one of these—before you leave the pier-edge. It was the fortune that an old Lake captain left at his death a little time ago—the fortune a mere matter of some twenty-eight millions of dollars. The old captain knew the Lakes and he had studied their traffic—all his life. But his will directed that his money should not be expended in the building of ships. It provided that at least a quarter of a million of the income should annually go to the purchase of Cleveland real estate. And Cleveland was quick to explain that it was not that the old man loved shipping less, but that he loved Cleveland real estate more. He had the gift of foresight.
If you would see that foresight in his own eyes drive out Euclid avenue—that broad thoroughfare that leads from the old-fashioned Public Square in the heart of thecity straight toward the southeast. Euclid avenue gained its fame in other days. Travelers used to come back from Cleveland and tell of the glories of that highway. Alas, today those glories are largely those of memory. The old houses still sit in their great lawns, but the grime of the city's industry has made them seem doubly old and decadent, while Commerce has pushed her smart new shops out among them to the very sidewalk line. Many of these shops are given over to the automobile business—a business which does not hesitate in any of our towns to transform resident streets into commercial. But in Cleveland one may partly forgive the audacity of this particular trade in recognition of its perspicacity. For Euclid avenue, rapidly growing now from an entirely residential street into an entirely business highway, is the great automobile thoroughfare of the East Side of the city. And when you consider that one out of every ten Cleveland families has a motor car, you can begin to estimate the traffic through Euclid avenue.
There is a West Side of Cleveland—you might almost say, of course—but one does not come to know it until he comes to know Cleveland well. The city is builded upon a high plateau that rises in a steep bluff from the very edge of the lake. Through this plateau, at the very bottom of a ravine, wide and deep, the navigable Cuyahoga twists its tortuous way into Lake Erie. It seems as if that ravine must almost have been cut to test the resources of the bridge-builders of America. For it has been their problem to keep the Sixth City from becoming entirely severed by her great water artery. They have solved it by the construction of one huge steel viaduct after another but the West Side remains the West Side—and always somewhat jealous of the East. She knows that the great public buildings of Cleveland—that comprehensive civic center plan to which we shall come in a moment—are fixed for alltime upon the East. And so when Cleveland decides to build a great new city hall, the West Side demands and receives the finest market house in all the land.
So it is that it is the East Side that your Cleveland man shows you alone when your time is limited, and so it is that Euclid avenue is the one great thoroughfare of the whole East Side.
"If you want to know how we've bobbed up, look at here," the Cleveland man tells you.
You look. A contractor is busy changing a railroad crossing from level to overhead; a much-needed improvement—despite the fact that it should have been under-surface rather than overhead—when you come to consider the traffic that moves through Euclid avenue in all the daylight hours and far into the night.
"When the old Cleveland and Pittsburgh—it's part of the Pennsylvania, now—was built, thirty-five or forty years ago, they thought they would put the line around the town. But the town was up to their line before they knew it—and they decided ten or a dozen years ago that they would put a suburban station here." He points to a handsome red brick structure of modern architecture. "The Pennsylvania folks are long-headed—almost always. But if they had known that Cleveland was to become the Sixth City within ten years they never would have put two hundred thousand dollars in a grade crossing station at Euclid avenue. The way we've grown has sort of startled all of us."
Today Euclid avenue is a compactly built thoroughfare for miles east of that Pennsylvania railroad crossing. It is at least two miles and a half from that crossing to Cleveland's two great educational lions—the Case School of Applied Science and the Western Reserve University—and they in turn only mark the beginning of the city's newest and most fashionable residence district.
Indeed Cleveland has "bobbed up." And her growth within the last quarter of a century has been more than physical, more than that recorded by emotionless census-takers. For beneath those grimy old houses on Euclid avenue and the down town residence streets, beneath the roofs of those gray and grimy story-and-a-half wooden houses which line far less pretentious streets for long miles, lies as restless and as hopeful a civic spirit as any town in America can boast. It makes itself manifest in many ways—as we shall see. The man who first brought it into a working force was a resourceful little man who died a little while ago. But before Tom L. Johnson died he was Mayor of the city; something more; he was the best liked and the best hated man that Cleveland had ever known; and he was better liked than he was hated.
In person a plump little man with a ceaseless smile that might have been stolen from a Raphael cherub, a democratic little man, who knew his fellows and who could read them, almost unfailingly. And the smile could change from softness into severity—when Tom L. Johnson wanted a thing he wanted it mighty hard. And he generally succeeded in getting it. He could not only read men; he could read affairs. He saw Cleveland coming to be the Sixth City. And he determined that she should realize the dignity of metropolitanism in other fashion than in merely census totals or bank clearances.
Cleveland is proud of her great, broad streetsCleveland is proud of her great, broad streets
Johnson began by going after the street railroad system of the town. He had had some experience in building and operating street railroads in other parts of the country, and he set out along paths that were not entirely unfamiliar to him. It so happened that at the time he began his crusade Cleveland was quite satisfied with her street railroad service. Her residents went out to other cities of the land and bragged about how their big yellowcars ran out to all the far corners of their rapidly growing city. But Johnson was not criticising the service. He was merely saying in his gentle insistent way that five cents was too much for a man to pay to ride upon a street car. He thought three cents was quite enough. The street railroad company quite naturally thought differently. In every other town in the land five cents was the standard fare, and any Cleveland man could tell you how much better the car-service was at home. That company produced vast tables of statistics to prove its contentions. Tom L. Johnson merely laughed at the statistics and reiterated that three cents was a sufficient street-car fare for Cleveland.
The details of thatcause celébreare not to be recited here. It is enough here to say that Tom L. Johnson lived long enough to see three-cent fares upon the Cleveland cars, and that the conclusion was not reached until a long and bitter battle had been fought. The conclusion itself as it stands today is interesting. The owners of the street railroad stock, the successors of the men who invested their money on a courageous gamble that Cleveland was to grow into a real city are assured of a legitimate six percent upon their stock. They cannot expect more. If the railroad earns more than that fixed six percent its fares must be reduced. If, on the other hand, it fails to earn six percent the fares must be raised sufficiently to permit that return. The fare-steps are simple, a cent at a time, with a cent being charged for a transfer, or a transfer being furnished free as best may meet the income need of the railroad.
At present the fare is three cents, transfers being furnished free. A little while ago the fare was three cents, a cent being charged for the transfer. That brought an unnecessarily high revenue to the railroad, and so today while the conductor who issues you a transfer gravely charges you a cent for it, the conductor who accepts it, with equal gravity, presents you a cent in return for it. This prevents the transfers being used as stationery or otherwise frivoled away. For, while the street car system of Cleveland is among the best operated in America, it is also one of the most whimsical. Its cars are proof of that. Some of them are operated on the so-called "pay-as-you-enter" principle, although Cleveland, which has almost a passion for abbreviation, calls them the "paye" cars. These cars are still a distinct novelty in most of our cities. In Cleveland they are almost as old as Noah's Ark compared with a car in which you pay as you leave—a most sensible fashion—or a still newer car in which you can pay as you enter or pay as you leave—a choice which you elect by going to one end or the other of the vehicle.
But the fact remains that Cleveland has three-cent fares upon her excellent street railroad system, to say nothing of having control over her most important utility, the street railroad, which pays six percent dividends to its owners. The three-cent fare seems standard in Cleveland. In fact, she is becoming a three-cent city. Small shops make attractive offers at that low figure, and "three-cent movies" are springing up along her streets. She has already gone down to Washington and demanded that the Federal government issue a three-cent piece—to meet her peculiar needs. So does the spirit of Tom L. Johnson still go marching on.
It must have been the spirit of Tom L. Johnson that gave Cleveland a brand-new charter in this year of Grace, 1913. Into this new charter have been written many things that would have been deemed impossible in the charter of a large American city even a decade ago. Initiative and referendum, of course—Johnson and his little band of faithful followers were not satisfied until they had gone to Columbus a few winters agoand written that into the new constitution of the state of Ohio—a department of public welfare to regulate everything from the safety and morals of "three-cent movies" to the larger questions of public health and even of public employment, the very sensible short ballot, and even the newest comer in our family of civic reforms—the preferential ballot, although at the time that this is being written it is being sharply contested in the high courts at Columbus. Cleveland rejected the commission form of government. The fact that a good many other progressive American towns have accepted it, did not, in her mind, weigh for or against it. She has never been a city of strong conventions—witness her refusal to regard the five-cent fare as standard, simply because other towns had it. Neither has tradition been permitted to warp her course. A few years ago her citizens decided that her system of street names was not good enough or expansive enough for a town that was entering the metropolitan class. So she changed most of her street names—almost in the passing of a night. In most American towns that would have been out of the question. Folk cling to street names almost as they cling to family traditions. But Cleveland folk seemed to realize instantly that the new system of numbered cross-streets—with the broad diagonal highways named "roads"—after the fashion of some English cities—was so far the best that she immediately gave herself to the new scheme with heart and soul, as seems to be her way.
To tell of a splendid new charter adopted, of the control gained over her chief utility and necessity, of the progressive social reforms that she houses, is not alone to tell of the splendid heart and soul that beats within the walls and roofs of her houses. It is, quite as much, to tell of a remarkable coöperation, remarkable when you consider that Cleveland has become a city of morethan six hundred thousand humans. That coöperation may best be illustrated by a single incident:
A retail dealer in hardware recently opened a fine new store out in Euclid avenue. He opened it as some small cities might open their new library or their new city hall—with music and a reception. His friends sent great bouquets of flowers, the concerns from which he bought his supplies sent more flowers; but the biggest bunch of flowers came from the men who were his competitors in the same line of business. That was Cleveland—Cleveland spirit, Cleveland generosity. Perhaps that is the secret of Cleveland success.
*****
One thing more—the plan for the Cleveland civic center. For the Sixth City having set her mental house in order is to build for it a physical house of great utility and of compelling beauty. You may have heard of the Cleveland civic plan. It is in the possibility that you have not, that we bring it in for a final word. When Cleveland set out to obtain a new Federal Post Office and Court House for herself, a few years ago, it came to her of a sudden that she was singularly lacking in fine public buildings. It was suggested that she should seek for herself not only a Federal building but a new Court House and City Hall as well. In the same breath it was proposed that these be brought into a beautiful and a practical group. It was an attractive suggestion. In the fertile soil of Cleveland attractive suggestions take quick root. And so in Cleveland was born the civic center idea that has spread almost like the proverbial wildfire all the way across the land.
To create her civic group she moved in a broad and decisive fashion. She engaged three of the greatest of American architects—A. W. Brunner, John M. Carrere, D. H. Burnham—two of them poets and idealists, the third almost the creator of America's most utilitariantype of building, the modern skyscraper. To these men she gave a broad and unlocked path. And they created for her, along a broad Mall stretching from Superior street to the very edge of that mighty cliff that overlooks the lake, a plan for the housing of her greatest functions.
It is not too much that Cleveland should dream of this Mall as an American Place de la Concorde. It was not too much when the architects breathed twenty millions of dollars as the possible cost of this civic dream. Cleveland merely breathed "Go ahead," and the architects have gone ahead. The Post Office and the new County Building are already completed and in use, the City Hall should be completed before 1915 comes to take his place in the history of the world. Other buildings are to follow, not the least of them a new Union station—although there will be travelers who will sincerely regret the passing of Cleveland's stout old stone station, whose high-vaulted train-shed seemed to them in boyhood days to be the most lofty and wonderful of apartments. The bulk of this new open square is yet to be cleared of the many buildings that today occupy it. But that is merely a detail in the development of Cleveland's greatest architectural ambition.
The civic group can never be more than the outward expression of the ambitious spirit of a new giant among the metropolitan cities of America. As such it can be eminently successful. It can speak for the city whose civic heart it becomes, proclaiming her not merely great in dollars or in the swarming throngs of her population, but rather great in strength of character, in charity, in generosity—in all those admirable things that go to make a town preëminently good and great. And in these things your Cleveland man will not proclaim his as the Sixth City, but rather as in the front rank of all the larger communities of the United States.
Early in the morning the city by the lake is astir. Before the first long scouting rays of earliest sunlight are thrusting themselves over the barren reaches of Michigan—state and lake—Chicago is in action. The nervous little suburban trains are reaching into her heart from South, from North and from West. The long trains of elevated cars are slipping along their alley-routes, skirting behind long rows of the dirty colorless houses of the most monotonous city on earth, threading themselves around the loop—receiving passengers, discharging passengers before dawn has fully come upon the town. The windows of the tedious, almost endless rows of houses flash into light and life, the trolley cars in the broad streets come at shorter intervals, in whole companies, brigades, regiments—a mighty army of trucks and wagons begin to send up a great wave of noise and of clatter from the shrieking highways and byways of the city.
*****
The traveler coming to the city from the east and by night finds it indeed a mighty affair. For an hour and a half before his train arrives at the terminal station, he is making his way through Chicago environs—coming from dull flat monotonies of sand and brush and pine into Gary—with its newness and its bigness proclaimed upon its very face so that even he who flits through at fifty miles an hour may read both—jolting over main line railroads that cross and recross at every conceivable angle, snapping up through Hammond and Kensington and Grand Crossing—to the right and to the left long vistas with the ungainly, picturesque outlines of steel mills with upturned rows of smoking stacks, of gas-holders and of packing-houses, the vistas suddenly closed off by long trails of travel-worn freight-cars, through which the traveler's train finds its way with a mighty clattering and reverberating of noisy echoes. This is Chicago—Chicago spreading itself over miles of absolutely flat shore-land at almost the extreme southern tip of Lake Michigan—Chicago proudly proclaiming herself as the business and the transportation metropolis of the land, disdaining such mere seaport places as New York or Boston or Baltimore or San Francisco—Chicago with the most wretched approaches on her main lines of travel of any great city of the world.
If you come to her on at least one of the great railroads that link her with the Atlantic seaboard, you will get a glimpse of her one redeeming natural feature, for five or six miles before your train comes to a final grinding stop at the main terminal—the blue waters of the lake. This railroad spun its way many years ago on the very edge of the lake—much to the present-day grief of the town. It gives no grief to the incoming traveler—to turn from the sordid streets, the quick glimpses of rows of pretentious but fearfully dirty and uninteresting houses—to the great open space to the east of Chicago—nature's assurance of fresh air and light and health to one of the really vast cluster-holds of mankind. To him the lake is in relief—even in splendid contrast to the noise, the dirt, the streets darkened and narrowed by the over-shouldering constructions of man. From the intricate and the confusing, to the simplicity of open water—no wonder then that Chicago has finally come to appreciate her lake, that sheseizes upon her remaining free waterfront like a hungry and ill-fed child, that she builds great hotels and office-buildings where their windows may look—not upon the town, stretching itself to the horizon on the prairie, but upon the lake, with its tranquillity and its beauty, the infinite majesty of a great, silent open place.
*****
In the terminal stations of the city you first begin to divine the real character of the city. You see it, a great crucible into which the people of all nations and all the corners of one of the greatest of the nations are being poured. Pressing her nose against the glass of a window that looks down into surpassingly busy streets, overshadowed by the ungainly bulk of an elevated railroad, is the bent figure of a hatless peasant woman from the south of Europe—seeing her America for the first time and almost shrinking from the glass in a mixture of fear and of amazement. Next to her is a sleek, well-groomed man who may be from the East—from an Atlantic seaport city, but do not be too sure of that, for he may have his home over on Michigan avenue and think that "New York is a pretty town but not in it with Chicago." You never can tell in the most American and most cosmopolitan of American cities. At a third window is a man who has come from South Dakota. He has a big ranch up in that wonderful state. You know that because last night he sat beside you on a bench in the dingy, busy office of the old Palmer House and told you of Chicago as he saw it.
"I've a farm up in the South Dakota," he told you, in brief. "This is my first time East." You started in a bit of surprise at that, for it had always occurred to you that Chicago was West, that you, born New Yorker, were reaching into the real West whenever you crossed to the far side of Main street, in Buffalo. You looked at the ranchman, feeling that he was joking, andthen you took a second look into his tired eyes and knew that you were talking to no humorist.
"The first real big town that I ever ran into," he said, in his simple way, "was Sioux City, and I set up and took a little notice on it. It seemed mighty big, but that was five years ago, and four years ago I took my stock down to Cudahy in Omaha—and therewasa town. You could walk half a day in Omaha and never come to cattle country. Just houses and houses and houses—an' you begin to wonder where they find the folks to fill them. This year I come here with the beef for the first time—an' you could put Omaha in this town and never know the difference."
After that you confessed, with much pride, that you lived in New York city, and you began. You knew the number of miles of subway from the Bronx over to Brooklyn, and the number of stories in the Woolworth building, all those things, and when you caught your breath, the stockman asked you if Tom Sharkey really had a saloon in your town, and was Steve Brodie still alive, and did New York folks like to go down to the Statue of Liberty on pleasant Sunday afternoons. You answered those questions, and then you told the stockman more—of London, made of dozens of Omahas, where the United States was but a pleasant and withal a somewhat uncertain dream, of Paris the beautiful, and of Berlin the awfully clean. When you were done, you went with the stockman to eat in a basement—that is the Chicago idea of distinction in restaurants—and he took you to a lively show afterwards.
Now you never would have wandered into a Broadway hotel lobby and made the acquaintance of a perfect stranger, dined with him and spent the evening with him—no, not even if you were a Chicagoan and fearfully lonely in New York. It is the Chicago that gets into a New Yorker's veins when he comes within herexpanded limits, it is the unseen aura of the West that creeps as far east as the south tip of Lake Michigan. It made you acknowledge with hearty appreciation the "good mornings" of each man as he filed into the wash-room of the sleeping car in the early morning. You never say "good morning" to strangers in the sleeping cars going from New York over to Boston. For that is the East and that is different.
*****
A Chicago man sits back in the regal comfort of a leather-padded office chair and tells you between hurried bites of the lunch that has been placed upon his desk, of the real town that is sprawled along the Lake Michigan shore.
"Don't know as you particularly care for horse-food," he apologizes, between mouthfuls, "but that's the cult in this neck-o'-woods nowadays."
"The cult?" you inquire, as he plunges more deeply in his bran-mash.
"Precisely," he nods. "We're living in cults out here now. We've got Boston beaten to culture."
He shoves back the remnant of his "health food" luncheon with an expression that surely says that he wishes it was steak, smothered with onions and flanked by an ample-girthed staff of vegetables, and faces you—you New Yorker—with determination to set your path straight.
"Along in the prehistoric ages—which in Chicago means about the time of the World's Fair—we were trying to live up to anything and everything, but particularly the ambition to be the overwhelmingest biggest town in creation, and to make your old New York look like an annexed seaport. We had no cults, no woman's societies, nothing except a lot of men making money hand over fist, killing hogs, and building cars and selling stuff at retail by catalogues. We were not æstheticand we didn't particularly care. We liked plain shows as long as the girls in them weren't plain, and we had a motto that a big lady carried around on a shield. The motto was 'I will,' and translated it meant to the bottom of the sea with New York or St. Louis or any other upstart town that tried to live on the same side of the earth as Chicago. We were going to have two million population inside of two yearsand—"
He dives again into his cultish lunch and after a moment resumes:
"The big lady has lost her job and we've thrown the shield—motto and all—into the lake. We're trying to forget the motto and that's why we've got the cult habit. We're class and we're close on the heels of you New Yorkers—only last winter they began to pass the French pastry around on a tray at my club. We learn quickly and then go you one better. We've finally given Jane Addams the recognition and the support that she should have had a dozen years ago. We're strong and we're sincere for culture—the university to the south of us has had some funny cracks but that is all history. Together with the one to the north of us, they are finally institutions—and Chicago respects them as such.
"Take opera. We used to think it was a fad to hear good music, and only the society folks went to hear it—so that the opera fairly starved to death when it came out here. Now they are falling over one another to get into the Auditorium, and our opera company is not only an institution but you New Yorkers would give your very hearts to have it in your own big opera house."
"You'll build an opera house out here then," you venture, "thebiggest—"
He interrupts.
"Not necessarily the biggest," he corrects, "but as fine as the very best."
The talk changes. You are frankly interested in thecults. You have heard of how one is working in the public schools, how the school children of Chicago work in classrooms with the windows wide open, and you ask him about it.
"It must be fine for the children?" you finally venture.
"It is," he says. "My daughter teaches in a school down Englewood way, and she says that it is fine for the children—but hell on the teachers. They weren't trained to it in the beginning."
You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could not have understood how a man like this—head of a giant corporation employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and influences—would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are beginning to understand the man—the man who is typical of Chicago. You come to know him the more clearly as he tells you of the city that he really loves. He tells you how Sorolla "caught on" over at the Institute—although more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the brilliance of the Spaniard's reception—and how the people who go to the Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and more solid literature all the while. Then—of a sudden, for he realizes that he must be back again into the grind and the routine of his work—he turns to you and says:
"And yesterday we had the big girl and the motto. It was hardly more than yesterday that we thought that population counted, that acreage was a factor in the consummation of a great city."