Edward Hungerford

“ It makes a pleasant break in the day trip from the capital of New England to the capital of the United States, to spend an hour tramping up and down a broad ship’s deck, or dining in a roomy, sun-filled cabin, while New York itself is as completely ignored as any small way-station along the run. New Yorkers themselves have long since become too accustomed to seeing the long train ferried upon the water-way that separates the two greatest boroughs of the city, to give it more than passing thought. ”

“ Publicity is the great right-arm of the super-store of the America of today. Publicity not in one channel, but in a thousand. Macy's not only helps to dominate the advertising pages of the newspapers of New York and a good many miles round about it, its red star not only gleams in Herald Square, but in these very recent days upon the high-set electric hoardings of Times Square that blaze forth far into the night; it finds its way into the public thought here and there and everywhere. ”

“ Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever. Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings than the old ever had. It does not lack color—by day, the treasures of its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs through Grant avenue—its chief thoroughfare—the swinging lanterns above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted and mysterious rooms along the way—the new Chinatown of San Francisco. ”

“ The real tragedy on the division comes when a Prince grows old and for the first time realizes that he is never to be King. When such tragedy shows its head it is time for the stove committee—the men who gossip in roundhouse corners and the yardmaster’s office—to talk in whispers.
Buffalo is no mean principality in the railroad world—it is near kingdom in itself—miles and miles and still more miles of congested freight yards, tonnage in breath-taking volume rolling in from the wonderful lakes eight months out of the twelve, a nervous traffic that never ceases. ”

“ You can no more entirely remove competition in business than you can the risings and the settings of the great sun. But you can remove the absurd phases, the obvious extravagances of competition—particularly in transport. Remember always, if you will—I purposely reiterate the point—that some fine day you can cease to regard the motor-truck, the inland waterway barge, the interurban trolley, and the steam railroad train as competitors, but rather in the proper sense, each as agents of that great function of life, transportation, and so in some time or place properly correlated. ”

“ Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have grown up and over the old walls—exquisite bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said, stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston does not parade herself. ”

“ The real test of keeping the line open comes when winter descends upon the land, when the heaviest freight traffic of the year comes, together with those forces of nature that sweep off the summer joys of railroading. The mighty battles of the western transcontinentals with the snows of the Rockies have long been known, their miles of snow-sheds making safe crawling bores for through trains under the snow-banks, and the avalanches of the mountain-sides are as familiar to the tourist as the Great Salt Lake or the wonders of the Yellowstone. ”

“ The bright red and yellow wagons and trucks—each bearing its good-luck symbol of the red star—carry Herald Square to the far limits of a far-flung city. The men who ride them are upon the outposts of salesmanship. Yet through system and through organization they are forever closely connected with it. The blood that courses through your [Pg 200] finger-tips comes straight from your heart. The life-blood of understanding, of enthusiasm, of morale, that Macy's outriders bring with them is the life-blood of the humanized machine that functions so steadily there in the heart of Manhattan. ”

“ Minneapolis has all but forgotten the Falls of St. Anthony—despite the fact that they were the very cause of her existence. They are hemmed in by great flouring-mills, great dusty, unceasing engines of industry with a capacity of some eighty thousand barrels a day, and even if you steal your way to them across one of the roadway bridges over the turbulent Mississippi you will find them lost beneath the artificial works that turn their energy to the aid of man. The roar of the great Falls of St. Anthony are the roar of the flouring-mills, their energy, the bread-stuff of the nation. ”

“ Take California; out there the stations almost invariably are clean and brightly painted, the broad lawns that surround them are in the pink of perfection, while the trains that enter and leave the stations are in full keeping with them. Engines, and the passenger-cars behind, are alike clean, fresh-painted, efficient in every detail of their appearance. Paint certainly does wonders. The cherry-red electric trains of the Southern Pacific never seemed brighter or more immaculate. ”

“ By night, by day, when an imperial city throbs with the bustle of brisk endeavor, and still when it tries to snatch a few brief feeble hours of rest, in summer, in winter, when the two rivers and the great upper bay of New York harbor are alive with gay pleasure craft, and in the trying hours when a pilot’s path is fraught with the dangers of drifting ice and laid through gray blankets of mist, this great interchange of freight of every sort goes forth. ”

“ In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that same strange town in the clarity of early sunshine, to have this great street or that or that—Market or Geary or Powell—stretching forth as if longing to invite your explorations—here again is the fascination of travel. The big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in quick succession, and for an instant their appeal is strong. But over there is a car of another sort, running on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an endless cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little cars upon those narrow tracks interest you. ”

“ Philadelphia possesses two distinguished city gateways.
But the first big station terminals—in our American sense that a thing big must be bigger than anything else of the same kind in the world—were those erected at Boston and at St. Louis. The first of these handles a traffic far exceeding that of any other terminal ever built; the second has a train-shed that is gigantic and overwhelming; and so each of the cities can, in a measure of truth, claim for itself the largest railroad station ever built. Each has enough of novelty and interest to make it worthy of attention. ”

“ But the Parisians of Colorado are not blind to the summer joys of the wonderful country that lies aroundabout them. They quickly become mountaineers, in the full sense of the word. They can ride—and read riding not as merely cantering in the park but as sitting all day in the saddle of some cranky broncho—they can build fires, cook and live in the open. A Denver society woman is as particular about her khakias as about her evening frocks. When these folk, experienced and well-schooled, go off up into the great hills, they are the envy of all the tourists. ”

“ The men who labor in the railroad shops see little of the romance of the line. Their work is much like that of the men who work in every sort of large shop. Their responsibility is not less than that of the other railroaders, the men to whom 150 or 300 miles of line and out-spread towns are as familiar as the very rooms of their own homes. A flaw in the steel, a careless bit of shopwork, may serve to derail the express at the least foreseen moment, to cause disaster in the ringing way that every railroad man sees at one time or another. ”

“ No American of taste or appreciation would ever go to Minneapolis and miss one wonderful shop there—no huge box-like structure rearing itself from sidewalk edge and vulgarly proclaiming its wares through the brilliancy of immaculate windows of plate-glass, but a shadowy structure, set in a lawn and giving faint but unmistakable hints of the real treasures that it holds. For it is a rare shop, indeed, and a revelation to folk from the seaboard who may imagine that the interior of the land is an intellectual desolation. ”

“ His steel muscles reach across great rivers and deep valleys, his tireless hands have long since burrowed their way through God’s eternal hills. He is here, there, everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the nation.
He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts of land that were untraversed become farms; hillsides yield up their mineral treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no habitation of man a little time before, and the town becomes a city. Commerce is born. The railroad bids death and stagnation begone. It creates. ”

“ If you wish to see the real Old South in Richmond go out to Hollywood cemetery, which is perhaps the greatest of all its landmarks. It is easy of access, very beautiful, although not in the elaborate and immaculate fashion of Greenwood, at Brooklyn, or Mount Auburn, just outside of Boston. But where man has fallen short at Hollywood, Nature has more than done her part. She rounded the lovely hills upon which Richmond might place the treasure-chest of her memories, and then she swept the finest of all Virginia rivers—the James—by those hills. ”

“ There are even humbler positions in the operating service, each of them demanding a fine loyalty and a fair measure of ability. Even the young boy who draws a baggage-truck knows that the path of advancement starts at his very feet; and the humble track-walker feels that a good part of the railroad safety and the railroad responsibility rests upon his broad shoulders. His is also a forlorn task, as he trudges back and forth over a section of line, hammer and wrench in hand, looking for the broken rail or other defect, slight in itself, but capable of infinite harm. ”

“ You rarely read of Boston society—her Brahmin caste—in the columns of her newspapers. There are, of course, distinguished Boston folk whose names ring there many times—a young girl who through her athletic triumphs and her sane fashion of looking at life forms a good example for her sisters across the land; a brilliant broker, with an itching for printer's ink, who places small red devils upon his stationery; a society matron who must always sit in the same balcony seat at the Symphony concerts, and who houses in her eccentric Back Bay home perhaps the finest private art gallery in America. ”

“ Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the railroad’s resistless path.
It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes it is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the Rockies for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a cleft in the hills that his eye had not before detected. ”

“ As twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; it becomes a thing of shapes and shadows—even the restless crowd is tired and softened. Then the genius of electricity comes to transform workaday land into fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen—this time in living glowing lines of fire. It is time for men to exult, to forget that they have ever been tired. Such is the setting that modern America can give a parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it all, the most commanding figure of his town. ”

“ The conductor catches a car step, the “preference” starts forward with all the rattling shakes and bumps peculiar to a long freight train. In a minute or two the red tail-lights are grinning at us from half a mile down the track. Another big freight goes scurrying by us—more market stuff, more meat, more fish for the hungry town, a town which houses 4,000 folk within a single congested tenement square. A third train follows; all refrigerator cars it is too. They come in quick succession, these market trains, to the metropolis. The railroad is doing its part. ”

“ The signs of Montreal point the truth. Half of the street markers must be in English, half in French, just as the city government that places them divides its proceedings, half in one language, half in the other. This even division runs to the street car transfers and notices, the flaring bulletins on sign-boards and dead-walls, even so stolid a British institution as the Harbor Commissioners giving the sides of its brigade of dock locomotives evenly to the rival tongues.
To attend high mass in Notre Dame is to make a memory well-nigh ineffaceable. ”

“ Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded. ”

“ Now you stand with the young engineer at the topmost outlook of the tower in the Municipal Building and look down on the busy town. Before you is that mighty thoroughfare, Broadway—but so lined with towering buildings that you cannot see it, save for a brief space as it passes the greenery of the City Hall Park; behind you is that still mightier highway—the East river. Over that river you see the four bridges—the oldest of them landing at your very feet—and crawling things upon them, which a second glance shows to be trains and trolley-cars and automobiles and wagons in an unending succession. ”

“ In all that time the carnival has progressed until it today is the outward expression of the joyousness of a joyous city. In all that time did we say? There was an interregnum—the Four Years. In the Four Years the little French restaurants were closed, the lights at the Opera extinguished—there could be no Carnival, for Tragedy sat upon the Southland. And in a great house in Lafayette square there sat a man from Massachusetts who ruled with more zeal than kindness. And that man New Orleans has not forgotten—not even in the half-century that has all but healed the sores of the Four Years. ”

“ They live their lives and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her movements toward social reform, not even in her parks—although Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion—nor does it reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics—her glory is in her homes. ”

“ Look uptown, catch the faint patch of dark green that is Central Park, the spires of the cathedral, the wonderful campanile at Madison square. Let your glance swing across the gentle Hudson, over into a New Jersey that is bounded by the ridges of the Orange mountains, then slowly south and even the great towers that thrust themselves into almost every buildable foot of Broadway below the City Hall cannot entirely block your view of the wonderful upper harbor of New York—of the great ships that bring to an imperial city the tribute that is rightfully hers. ”

“ Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston—well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. ”

“ In fact El Paso feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are first-rate advertising attractions for the town—quite discounting mere Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill. But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows angry. ”

“ They are merely gazing at you—and inquiring—inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But if you do possess these things they will open—with as warm and friendly a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market, smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the north. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You have climbed up from the heart of the busy town, past the business section, spreading itself out as business sections of all successful towns must continue to do, past the trim snug little white Colonial houses—that must have been stolen from old Salem or Newburyport—all set among the dark greens of the cedars and the firs, and belying the Northland tales of the tree foliage by the great rose-bushes that bloom all the year round, up on to the place where tradition says the silent chiefs of red men used to gather.... ”

“ Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new—when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond—where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters—lapped its northerly edge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price. Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And Romance and Courtesy do not forget. ”

“ The American Siberia, in truth, save that this Siberia is a near Paradise—a kingdom for exiles where the grass is as green as it is back in the old East, where the trees cast welcome shade and the strange new flowers blossom out smiles of hope. ”