Part 15

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word was carried oversea to it that if a good part of the farm were dedicated to the city as a park that bill would be withdrawn.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 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? Pittsburgh has 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 to be 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 as we 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."

11

THE SIXTH CITY

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 the lathes 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 across a 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 the _Corey_ in 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 that feat 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 are building 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 the city 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 all time 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.

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 yellow cars 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.