The Personality of American Cities Part 24

Now the fullness of that disaster--which was not more to you at the time than the brilliancy of newspaper dispatches--comes home to you for the first time. In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melancholy ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others beyond in rapid succession. On the side streets, fragments of "party-walls," a bit of crumbling arch, a stout standing chimney remind you of the San Francisco that was and that can never be again. When you go out Market street, you may see where stood the pretentious City Hall--today a stretch of foundation-leveled ruins with a single surviving dome still devoted to the business of the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the disaster you must make your way into San Francisco's wonderful Golden Gate Park, past the single standing marble doorway of the old Towne house--a pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old San Francisco--and straight up to the crest of the high lifted Strawberry Hill. On that hill there stood until the eighteenth of April, 1906, a solid two-storied stone observatory. It seemed to be placed there for all time, but today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome--a half circle of its double row of arches still standing but the weird ruin bringing back the most tragic five minutes that an American city has ever spent. Or if you will go a little farther, an hour on a quick-moving suburban train will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains of Leland Stanford University, that remarkable inst.i.tution whose museum formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's gowns and a _papier-mache_ reproduction of a breakfast once eaten by a member of her family.

It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the quadrangle has been in part eradicated.

For Leland Stanford University today represents one of the bravest attempts ever made in this land to repair an all but irreparable loss.

It has never lost either faith and hope, and so the visitor to its campus today will see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of the buildings of what was one of the "show universities" of the land.

With a patience that must have been infinite, the stones of the old chapel have been sorted out of the ruin--even fragments of the intricate mosaics have been carefully saved--numbered and placed in sequence for re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave and transepts is up again and the tedious work of erecting the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland Stanford has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco--the city that would not be defeated.

To a.n.a.lyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all but impossible.

Incident upon incident will show it in all its phases. For instance, there was in San Francisco on the morning of the earthquake a sober-minded German citizen who had put his all into a new business--a business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of his investment. When Nature awoke from her long sleep and stretching began to rock the city by the Golden Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms and frantic with terror.

"Papa! Papa!" they shrieked. "We are going to die. It is the end of the world--the business is gone. We are going to die!"

He smiled quietly at them.

"Well, what of it?" he asked quietly. "We die together--and in San Francisco."

A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could capitalize sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul in mere dollars and cents. What price could he give for a love and loyalty of that sort?

That was, and still is, the affection that every San Franciscan from the ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost hill gives to his city--it is the thing that makes her one of the few American towns that possess distinctive personality.

A young matron told us of her own experience on the morning of the fire.

"Of course it was exciting," she said, "with the smoke rolling up upon us from downtown, and the rumors repeating themselves that the disaster was world-wide, that Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single bit of it. I bundled my children together and hurried toward the Presidio--my knowledge of army men a.s.sured me that there could be no danger there. I took the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keeping in it.

It still seemed very real and not so very difficult.

"But when those odd little newspapers--that had been printed over in Oakland--came, and I saw the first of their head-lines 'San Francisco in Ruins' then it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and it was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the world and I cried all that night, not for a single loss beyond that of the San Francisco that I had loved. But the next morning they told me how they had telegraphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morning I began planning a new house just as if it had been a pet idea for months and months and months...."

Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great disaster. More than $375,000,000--a sum approximating the cost of the Panama ca.n.a.l--has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now, like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal, the western metropolis calls for cake and sc.r.a.pes up an additional $18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone before." That takes financing--of a high order. It takes something more.

It has taken a real spirit--enthusiasm and love and courage--to build a new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories of the city that was.

20

BELFAST IN AMERICA

Concerning Toronto it may be said that she combines in a somewhat unusual fas.h.i.+on British conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat streets are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as delight the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find them; and yet she has among these "the tallest skysc.r.a.per of the British Empire," although the sixteen stories of its alt.i.tude would be laughed to scorn by many a second-cla.s.s American city.

Still, many a first-cla.s.s American city could hardly afford to laugh at the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the Dominion.

But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the American fas.h.i.+on--to use that word in its broadest sense.

And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows--not more American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys and the wherefores of this.

We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the Loyalists--"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them--who fled from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its proprietors a century and a half ago.

Those Loyalists laid the foundations of Toronto of today. The munic.i.p.ality of Toronto of today is, as you shall see, most progressive in the very fibers of its being, ranking with such cities as Des Moines and Cleveland and Boston as among the best governed upon the North American continent. Such civic progress was not drawn from the cities of England or of Scotland or of Ireland. And Toronto was a well organized and governed munic.i.p.ality, while Glasgow and Manchester were hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Because in Toronto the old New England town-meeting idea worked to its logical triumph. The Loyalists who had left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely fine clothes or family plate.

To this social foundation of the town came, as stock for her growth through the remaining three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the folk of the north of Ireland. The southern counties of the Emerald Island gave to America and gave generously--to New York and to Boston; to New Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The men from the north of Ireland went to Toronto and the nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario.

And when Toronto became a real city they began to call her the Belfast of America. For such she was. She was a very citadel of Protestantism.

Her folk transplanted, found that they would wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in their austere churches without having the reproachful phrase of "dissenter"

constantly whipped in their faces. Toronto meant toleration. So came the Ulster men to their new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came--a great migrating army. And if you would know the way they took root give heed to a single ill.u.s.tration.

One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little city of Toronto. It thrived--tremendously. News of its success went back to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.

"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that pa.s.sed through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper.

Today the firm has two great stores--one in Toronto and one in Winnipeg--and they are not only among the largest in North America but among the largest in the world.

This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when, after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.

No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started, but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads have shown that it pays to advertise.

There is good reason for this immigration--of course. Canada, with no little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers.

She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs.

The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come to her broad acres and her great cities. The steams.h.i.+p piers, at Quebec and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter, are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York.

They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and progress.

And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west of it draining old England. It is related that one little English village--Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbys.h.i.+re--has been sadly depleted in just this fas.h.i.+on. Eight years ago and it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in America--a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you please--and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so-called middle cla.s.s, even gentlemen of the profession or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming pa.s.sion. It is to cross Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria.

Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.

But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her d.a.m.nable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool--even London itself. The little red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively British as the capped and ap.r.o.ned house-maids upon the street. In the States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fas.h.i.+oned upon the British model--even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a distinctively British inst.i.tution, taken root and apparently come to stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to the c.o.c.kney heart.

Remember also that the city upon the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario is an industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland--alongside of the greatest ports of the world--for Ontario is the lonely sister of the five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men.

They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The street cars are manned by men of delightful c.o.c.kney accent, they drive the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a high degree of intellectual effort.

Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used to munic.i.p.al street railroads and such schemes and the New England town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto may groan under its burden--it is paying over a million dollars this year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a private corporation. But the Englishman of that city merely grunts at the bargains it offers--six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours, ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same price--and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"

Toronto will see that they do better--that is her vision into the future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan ideas of the town--there is another question. Here is a single one of the new puzzling points--the temperance problem. It was not so very long ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her whiskey--and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July--which you will probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne--used to be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have been without saloons today--if it had not been for the English invasion.

For your Englishman regards his beer as food--"skittles and beer" is something more than merely proverbial--and he must have it. He looks complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto--Sunday in an English city is rarely a hilarious occasion--but he must have his beer. Up to the present time he has had it.

But these problems are slight compared with the problem of a.s.similation of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all, and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an enthusiasm of a distinct sort. With all of his anti-American and pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands is undisputed.[H] The Englishman is no small factor in Canadian politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the city of Toronto.

[H] This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.

Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal entertainments a-plenty--dinners, b.a.l.l.s, receptions--a great new castle is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach, Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake.

There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing, canoeing--the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with good health.

In the autumn there is the big fair--officially the Canadian National Exhibition--which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real inst.i.tution. Last year nearly a million persons entered its gates, there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as Australia--there were special excursion rates from all but three of the United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read:

ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION