Part 2

But no matter what may be true of other towns, the Boston hotels are different. "I like the Quincy House for its sea-fud," said an old legislator from Sandisfield more than forty years ago, and as for the Tremont House, turn the pages of your "American Notes" and recall the praise that Charles Dickens gave that not-to-be-forgotten hostelry. It was one of the very few things in the earlier America that did not seem to excite his entire contempt.

The Tremont House has gone--it disappeared under the advance of modernity in the serpent-like guise of the first subway in America, creeping down in front of it. But other hotels of the old Boston remain a'plenty, the staid Revere House, Parker's, Young's, the Adams House,--ages seem to have mellowed but not lessened their comforts to the traveler. Where else can one find a catalogue of the hotel library hanging beside his dresser when he retires to the privacy of his room, not a library crammed with "best-sellers" like these itinerant institutions on the limited trains, but filled with real books of a far more solid sort--where else such wisdom on tap in a tavern--but Boston? And if the traveler fails to be schooled to such possibilities, we might ask where else in Christendom can he get boiled scrod, or Washington pie, or fish balls, or cod tongues with bacon, or that magna charta of the New England appetite, that Plymouth rock from which has come all the virtues of its sturdy folk, baked beans with brown bread? Eating in Boston is good. In these things it is superlative. And it is pleasing to know that Boston's newest hotel--the Copley-Plaza--perhaps the finest hotel in America, since it has discarded new-fashioned details for the old--observes the traditions of the town in which it truly earns its bread and butter.

And if the traveler have magic sesame, the clubs of the old town may open to him, clubs with spotless integrity and matchless service, all the way from the stately Somerset and the Algonquin through to the democratic City Club--with its more than four thousand enthusiastic members. This last is perhaps the most representative of Boston clubs. Its old house--unfortunately soon to be vacated--stands in Beacon street, within a stone's throw of King's Chapel and Tremont street. It is a rare old house; two houses in fact, lending tenderly to the Boston traditions of delicate bow fronts and severity of ornament. Its rooms are broad and long and low, filled with hospitable tables and comfortable Windsor chairs. In its great fireplace hickory logs crackle and the New England tradition of an ash-bank is preserved to the minutest detail. Its dun-colored walls are lined with rare prints and old photographs--pictures for the most part of that old Boston which was and which never again can be. The dishes that come out from its kitchen are from the best of traditional New England recipes. And as your host leads you out from the dining-room he delves deep into a barrel and brings out two bright red apples. He hands you one.

"We New England folk think that most of the real virtues of life are seated in red apples," he says--and there is something in his way of saying it that makes you believe that he is right.

Another day and he may lead you to still another club--this one down under the roof of one of those solid old stone warehouses with steep-pitched roofs that thrust themselves abruptly out into the harbor-line. It is a yacht club, and its fortress-like windows, shaped like the port-holes of a ship, look direct to a brisk water highway to the open sea. Underneath those very windows is the rush and turmoil of one of the busiest fish markets in the land. There is nothing on either coast, no, not even down in the picturesque Gulf that can compare with this place, which reeks with the odors and where the fishermen handle the cod with huge forks and paint the decks of their staunch little vessels a distinctive color to show the nationality of the folk who man it. We remember that the Portuguese have a whimsical fancy for painting the decks of their little fishing schooners a most unusual blue.

Of Boston harbor an entire book might easily be written--of the quaint craft that still tie to its wharves, the brave show of shipping that passes in and out each day, of Boston Light and that other silent, watchful sentinel which stands upon Minot's Ledge; of the Navy Yard over in Charlestown at which the _Constitution_, most famous of all fighting-ships, rusts out her fighting heart through the long years. And looking down upon that old Navy Yard from Boston itself is Copp's Hill burying-ground, a rich grubbing-place for the seekers of epitaphs and of genealogical lore. We remember once winning the heart of the keeper of the old cemetery and of being permitted to descend to the vault of one of the oldest of Boston families. In the dark place there were three little groups of bones and we knew that only three persons had been buried there.

Above, the sunshine beat merrily down upon Copp's Hill, with its headstones arranged in neat rows along the tidy paths and the elevated trains in an encircling street fairly belying the bullets in the stones--shot there from Bunker Hill a century and a quarter before.... There are many other such burying-grounds in Boston--in the very heart of the city the Granary and King's Chapel burying-ground where a great owl sometimes comes at dusk and opens his eyes wide at the traffic of a great city encircling one of God's acres. And a soul that revels in these things will, perchance, journey to Salem, seventeen miles distant, and see the moldering seaport that once rivaled Boston in her prosperity and that sent her clipper ships sailing around the wide world. There are many delightful side-trips out from Boston--the sail across the tumbling bay to Provincetown, which still boasts a town crier, down to Plymouth or up to Gloucester, with its smart, seaside resorts nearby. And back from Boston there are other moldering towns, filled with fascination and romance. Some of them have hardly changed within the century.

Even Boston does not change rapidly. Thank God for that! She keeps well to the old customs and the old traditions, holds tightly to her ideals. Only in the folk who walk her awkward streets can the discerning man see the new Boston. The old types of Brahmins are outclassed. Some of them still do amazingly well in the professions but these are few. Long ago the steady press of immigration at the port of Boston took political power away from them. Yet the old guard stands resolute. And the impress of its manners is not lost upon the Boston of to-day.

For instance, take the vernacular of the town. Boston has a rather old-fashioned habit of speaking the English language. It came upon us rather suddenly one day as we journeyed out Huntington avenue to the smart new gray and red opera house. The very colorings of the _foyer_ of that house--soft and simple--bespoke the refinement of the Boston to-day.

In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every other one of the big opera houses that are springing up mushroom-fashion across the land, our ears would have been assailed by "Librettos! Get your librettos!" Not so in Boston. At the Boston Opera House the young woman back of the _foyer_ stand calmly announced at clock-like intervals:

"Translations. Translations."

And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians grasped by the hand and seemed to regard as a long-lost friend, did not sip out, "Checks, please."

"Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the hand-grasps of the socially elect.

"The nearer door for those stepping out," announces the guard upon the elevated train and as for the surface trolley-cars, those wonderful green perambulators laden down with more signs than nine ordinary trolley-cars would carry at one time, they do not speak of the newest type in Boston as "Pay-as-you-enter cars," after the fashion of less cultured communities. In the Hub they are known as Prepayment cars--its precision is unrelenting.

All of these things make for the furthering of the charm of Boston. They are tangible assets and even folk from the newer parts of the land are not slow to realize them as such--remember that man from the Middle West who makes a journey once or twice each year to be in the very heart of civilization. There was another Westerner--this man a resident of Omaha, who sent his boy--already a graduate of a pretty well-known university near Chicago--to do some post-graduate work at Harvard. A few weeks later he had a letter from his son. It read something after this fashion:

"It seems absurd, Dad, but Harvard does have some absurd regulations. In fine, they won't let me go out in a shell or boat of any sort upon the river without special written permission from you. Will you fix me up by return mail and we will both try to forget this fool undergraduate regulation, etc...."

That regulation struck Daddy about as it had hit Sonny. But he hastened to comply with the request. When he had finished, he felt that he had turned out quite a document, one that would be enjoyed in the faculty and perhaps framed and hung up in some quiet nook. It read:

"To all whom it may concern:

This is to certify that my son, John Japson Jones, is hereby authorized and permitted to row, swim, dive or otherwise disport himself upon, above or under the waters of the Charles river, Massachusetts bay and waters adjacent to them until especially revoked. Given under my hand and seal at the city of Omaha in the state of Nebraska, on the ....th day of October, 19....

(Signed) JAMES JONES."

Then James Jones awaited the consequences. It was not long after that the letter came from John Japson.

"--How could you do it, Dad?" he demanded. "You don't know these folks. They're not our sort. They don't know humor. They're afraid of it. The only man I dared to show that awful thing to was the janitor and he stuck up his nose. 'Guess your pop must have been a little full,' was his comment."

James Jones decided to come to Boston forthwith. He wanted to see for himself what sort of a community John Japson had strayed into. He did see Boston, Cambridge too, to his heart's content. Boston was his particular delight. Two of its citizens took the gentleman from Omaha well in hand. They showed him the Frog Pond--it was just before the season when they remove the Frog Pond for the season and put down the boardwalks in the Common--and they showed him the crookedest streets of any town upon the American continent. They filled him with beans and with codfish, tickled his palate with the finest Medford rum. He mingled and he browsed and before they were done with him his barbaric soul became enraptured.

"Boston is great," he admitted, frankly. Then, in an afterthought, he added:

"I think that I should like to call her the Omaha of the East."

* * * * *

The owl still comes on cloudy, troubled nights and sits in a high tree-limb above the quiet graves in the graveyard of King's Chapel. When he comes he sees the tardiest of the Boston men, carrying the green bags, that their daddies and their granddaddies before them carried, as they go slipping down the School street hill. He is a very old owl and he loves the old town--loves each of its austere meeting-houses with their belfried towers, loves the meeting places behind the rows of chimney-pots, the open reaches of the Common and the adjoining Public Gardens, where children paddle in the swan-boats all summer long. He loves the tang and mist of the nearby sea, but best of all he likes the tree-limb in the old graveyard, the part of Boston that stands changeless through the years--that thrusts itself into the very face of modernity with the grimy stone church at its corner and seems to say:

"I am the Past. To the Past, Reverence."

And in Boston Modernity halts many times to make obeisance to the Past.

2

AMERICA'S NEW YORK

I

Before the dawn, metropolitan New York is astir. As a matter of far more accurate fact she never sleeps. You may call her the City of the Sleepless Eye and hit right upon the mark. For at any time of the lonely hours of the night she is still a busy place. Elevated and subway trains and surface cars, although shortened and reduced in number, are upon their ways and are remarkably well filled. Regiments of men are engaged in getting out the morning papers--in a dozen different languages of the sons of men--and another regiment is coming on duty to lay the foundations of the earliest editions of the evening papers. There are workers here and there and everywhere in the City of the Sleepless Eye.

But before the dawn, New York becomes actively astir. Lights flash into dull radiance in the rows of side-street tenement and apartment houses all the way from Brooklyn bridge to Bronx Park. New York is beginning to dress. Other lights flash into short brilliancy before the coming of the dawn. New York is beginning to eat its breakfast. And right afterwards the stations of the elevated and the subway, the corners where the speeding surface cars will sometimes hesitate, become the objects of attack of an army that is marching upon the town. Workaday New York is stretching its arms and settling down to business.

Nor is the awakening city to be confined to the narrow strip of island between the North and East rivers. Over on Long island are Brooklyn, Long Island City, Flushing, Jamaica and a score of other important places now within the limits of Greater New York. Some folk find it more economical to live in these places than in the cramped confines of Manhattan, and so it is hardly dawn before the great bridges and the tubes over and under the East river are doing the work for which they were built--and doing it masterfully.

The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it has been bending to its superhuman task for barely thirty years. In these thirty years it has been constantly reconstructed--but the best devices of the engineers, doubling and tripling the facilities of the original structure, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the communities and the traffic it has to serve. So within these thirty years other bridges and two sets of tunnels have come to span the East river. But the work of the first of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water highway has hardly lessened. The oldest of the bridges, and the most beautiful despite the ugliness of its approaches, still pours Brooklynites into Park Row, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand to the hour.

The overloading of the Brooklyn bridge is repeated in the subway--that hidden giant of New York, which is the real backbone of the island of Manhattan. Built to carry four hundred thousand humans a day, that busy railroad has begun to carry more than a million each working day. How it is done, no one, not even the engineers of the company that operates it, really knows. The riders in the great tube who have to use it during the busiest of the rush hours are willing to hazard a guess, however. It is probable that in no other railroad of the sort would jamming and crowding of this sort be tolerated for more than a week. Yet the patrons of the subway not only tolerate but, after a fashion, they like it. You can ask a New Yorker about it half an hour after his trip down town, sardine-fashion, and he will only say:

"The subway? It's the greatest ever. I can come down from Seventy-second street to Wall street in sixteen minutes, and in the old days it used to take me twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes by the elevated."

There is your real New Yorker. He would be perfectly willing to be bound and gagged and shot through a pneumatic tube like a packet of letters, if he thought that he could save twenty minutes between the Battery and the Harlem river. No wonder then that he scorns a relatively greater degree of comfort in elevated trains and surface cars and hurries to the overcrowded subway.

But New York astir in the morning is more even than Manhattan, the Bronx and the populous boroughs over on Long island. Upon its westerly edge runs the Hudson river--New Yorkers will always persist in calling it the North river--one of the masterly water highways of the land. The busy East river had been spanned by man twice before any man was bold enough to suggest a continuous railroad across the Hudson. Now there are several--the wonderful double tubes of the Pennsylvania railroad leading from its new terminal in the uptown heart of Manhattan--and two double sets of tunnels of a rapid-transit railroad leading from New Jersey both uptown and downtown in Manhattan. This rapid transit railroad--the Hudson & Manhattan, to use its legal name, although most New Yorkers speak of it as the McAdoo Tubes, because of the man who had the courage to build it--links workaday New York with a group of great railroad terminals that line the eastern rim of New Jersey all the way from Communipaw through Jersey City to Hoboken. And the railroads reach with more than twenty busy arms off across the Jersey marshes to rolling hills and incipient mountains. Upon those hills and mountains live nearly a hundred thousand New Yorkers--men whose business interests are closely bound up in the metropolis of the New World but whose social and home ties are laid in a neighboring state. These--together with their fellows from Westchester county, the southwestern corner of Connecticut and from the Long island suburban towns--measure a railroad journey of from ten to thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at night, as but an incident in their day's work. They form the great brigade of commuters, as a rule the last of the working army of New York to come to business.

The commuter has his own troubles--sometimes. By reason of his self-chosen isolation he may suffer certain deprivations. The servant question is not the least of these. And the extremes of a winter in New York come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight-twenty-two suddenly loses all that reputation for steadiness and sobriety that it has taken half a year to achieve, days when sleepy schooners laden with brick and claiming the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught in the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness of a miniature blizzard freezes terminal switches and signals and tangles traffic inexplicably--days, and nights as well, when the streets of his suburban village are well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremendous minority. And even upon the worst of them he can put the rush and turmoil of the city behind him--in the peace and silence of his country place he can forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear--with the noisy twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano right overhead.

* * * * *

For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work continues. You can gauge it by a variety of conditions--even by the newspapers that are being spread wide open the length of the cars. In the early morning the popular penny papers--the _American_ and the _World_ predominating, with a sprinkling of the _Press_ in between. Two hours later and while these popular penny papers are still being read--they seem to have a particular vogue with the little stenographers and the shopgirls--the more staid journals show themselves. Men who like the solid reading of the _Times_, with its law calendars and its market reports; men of the town who frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of the _Sun_, or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their youth enough to carry them beyond the immensely personal tone of the _Herald_. And in between these, men who sniff at the mere mention of the name of Roosevelt, and who read the _Tribune_ because their daddies and their grand-daddies in their turn read it before them, or frankly business souls who are opening the day with a conscientious study of the _Journal of Commerce_ or the Wall street sheets.

New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And before you have finished a Day of Days in the biggest city of the land you might also see that it goes to lunch with a newspaper in its hand, returns home tired with the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably into the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper.

Just as you stand at the portals of the business part of the town and measure the incoming throng by its favorite papers so can you sieve out the classes of the workers almost by the hours at which they report for duty. In the early morning, in the winter still by artificial light, come those patient souls who exist literally and almost bitterly by the labor of their hands and the sweat of their brows. With them are the cleaners and the elevator crews of the great office-buildings--those tremendous commercial towers that New York has been sending skyward for the past quarter of a century. On the heels of these the first of the workers in the office-buildings, office-boys, young clerks, girl stenographers whose wonderful attire is a reflection of the glories that we shall see upon Fifth avenue later in this day. It is pinching business, literally--the dressing of these young girls. But if their faces are suspiciously pinky or suspiciously chalky, if their pumps and thin silk stockings, their short skirts and their open-necked waists atrocious upon a chill and nasty morning, we shall know that they are but the reflection of their more comfortable sisters uptown. Not all of this rapidly increasing army of women workers in business New York is artificial. Not a bit of it. There are girls in downtown offices whose refinement of dress and deportment, whose exquisite poise, whose well-schooled voices might have come from the finest old New York houses. And these are the girls who revel in their Saturday afternoons uptown--all in the smartness of best bib and tucker--at the matinee or fussing with tea at Sherry's or the Plaza.

An army of office workers pours itself into the business buildings that line Broadway and its important parallel streets all the way from Forty-second street to the Battery--that cluster with increasing discomfort in the narrow tip of Manhattan south of the City Hall. Clerks, stenographers, more clerks, more stenographers, now department heads and junior partners--finally the big fellows themselves, coming down democratically in the short-haul trains of the Sixth avenue elevated that start from Fifty-eighth street or even enduring the discomforts of the subway, for it takes a leisurely sort of a millionaire indeed who can afford to come in his motor car all the way downtown through the press and strain of Broadway traffic. After all these, the Wall street men. For the exchange opens at the stroke of ten of Trinity's clock and five brief and bitter hours of trading have begun.

For four hours this flood of humans pouring out of the ferry-house and the railroad terminals, up from the subway kiosks and out from the narrow stairways of the elevated railroads. The narrow downtown streets congest, again and again. The sidewalks overflow and traffic takes to the middle of the streets. But the great office buildings absorb the major portion of the crowds. Their vertical railroads--eight or ten or twenty or thirty cars--are working to capacity and workaday New York is sifting itself to its task. By ten o'clock the office buildings are aglow with industry--the great machine of business starting below the level of the street and reaching high within the great commercial towers.

II

New York is the City of the Towers.