Rochester - Syracuse - Buffalo ( Originally Published 1913 ) THE three great cities of western New York Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities across New York state ; and yet their personality is as varied as that of three sisters; lovely but different. Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive ; one of the most distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of " society notes" and the reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by writing long lists of the " among those present." Buffalo leans more to Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the man who comes to dwell there unless he comes labeled with letters of introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit of camaraderie. A man is taken into good society there because of what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her " the Boston of the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real Boston " the Omaha of the East." Take these cities separately and their personality becomes the more pertinent and compelling. Consider them one by one as a traveler sees them on a west-bound train of the New York Central railroad — Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo — and in the same grading they increase in population ; roughly speaking, in a geometrical ratio. Syracuse has a little more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester. Each of them is the result of the Erie canal. There had been famous post-roads across central and western New York before DeWitt Clinton dug his great ditch, and the Mohawk valley together with the little known " lake country " of New York formed one of the earliest passage-ways to the West. But the Erie canal, providing a water level from the Great Lakes to the Hudson river and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous impulse to the state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the three big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and accounted as cities almost before they realized it. The building of the railroads across the state and their merging into great systems was a second step in their transition, while the third can hardly be said to be completed — the planning and construction of a network of inter-urban electric lines that shall again unite the three and what is far more important to each bring a great territory of small cities, villages and rich farms into closer touch with them. In Rochester, a good many years ago, one Sam Patch jumped into the falls of the Genesee. He first planned his spectacular jump for a Sunday, but the citizens of Rochesterville, as the town by the great falls was first known, objected strenuously to such profanation of the Sabbath. So Sam Patch jumped not on a Sunday but on a Friday, which almost any superstitious person might have recognized as an unfortunate change of date; and jumping, he did not survive to jump again. But the point of this incident hinges not on Fridays, but upon Sundays in Rochester. All that was a long time ago, but she has not changed her ideas of Sabbath observance very much since then despite the vast change in Sunday across the land. The citizens of Rochester still go to church on Sunday and they " point with pride " to the big and progressive religious institutions of their community. People in Syracuse, however, have Sunday picnics and outings off into the country, while Buffalo has always been known for its " liberal Sunday," whatever that may mean. Rochester has always frowned upon that sort of thing. She has the same point of view as her Canadian neighbor across Lake Ontario — Toronto — a city which we shall see in a little time. Rochester rather cleaves to the old-fashioned Sabbath; even her noisy beach down at Ontario's edge, which has always served as a sort of Coney island to western New York, has been a thorn in the side of her conservative population. If you want to stop and consider how the old-fashioned Sabbath of your boyhood days still reigns at the city at the falls of the Genesee, recall the fact that in one street that is bordered by some of the town's largest churches the trolley cars are not operated on Sundays. In Philadelphia you will remember they used years ago to stretch ropes across the streets in front of the churches at service times. But imagine the possibilities of that sort of thing in New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco. Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for James Roscoe Day. The Onondaga Indians are the oldest inhabitants, and a great help to the ingenious local artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. He has taken a half-baked Methodist college that stood on a wind-swept and barren hill and by his indomitable ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it into a real university. For Syracuse University is tremendously real to the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term "Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim to college spirit of surpassing dimensions. She does claim individual spirit among her students, however, that is second to none. As a university — as some know a university — the collection of ill-matched architectural edifices that house her is typical; but as an opportunity for popular education to the boys and girls of the rural districts of the state of New York she is monumental, and they come swarming to her in greater numbers each autumn. So much for the hill — they call it Mount Olympus — which holds the university and those things that are the university's. Now for downtown Syracuse; for while the city's newer districts are ranged upon a series of impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her factories are squatted upon the flats at the head of Onondaga lake. We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every self-respecting geography used to print; salt-sheds running off over an indefinite acreage. We were given to understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for existence was as a sort of huge salt cellar for the rest of the nation. Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten that there is a salt industry left, and will tell you glibly of the typewriters, automobiles, steel-tubing and the like that are made in their town in the course of a twelve-month. They will not tell you of one thing, for of that thing you may judge yourself. Life in Syracuse is punctuated by the railroad and the canal. The canal is not so much of an obstruction unless one of the cumbersome lift-bridges sticks and refuses to move up or down, but that railroad ! Every few minutes life in Syracuse comes to an actual standstill because of it. Men whose time is worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour and who grow puffy with over-exertion are violently halted by the passing of switch-engines with trails of box-cars. Appointments are missed. Board meetings at the banks halt for directors — directors who are halted in their turn by the dignified and stately passage of the Canastota Local through the heart of the city. But the old canal is going to go some day — when the State's new barge canal well to the north of the town is completed — and perhaps in that same day Syracuse will have a broad, central avenue replacing the present dirty, foul smelling ditch. Some day, some very big Syracusan will miss an appointment while he stands in Salina street watching the serene Canastota Local drag its way past him. That missed appointment will cost the very big Syracusan a lot of money and there will be a revolution in Syracuse — a railroad revolution. After that the loco-motives will no longer blow their smoky breaths against the fronts of Syracuse's best buildings and grind their way slowly down Washington street from the tunnel to the depot, for the railroad which operates them stands in the forefront of the progressive transportation systems of America, and it is only waiting for Syracuse to take the first definite step of progress. Some day Syracuse — Syracuse delayed — is going to take that step. Only a year or two ago the Chicago Limited held up the carnival parade and therein lies the final paragraph of this telling of Syracuse. She is a festive lass. Each September she rolls up her sleeves, her business men swell the subscription lists, her matrons and her pretty girls bestir themselves, and there is a concert of action that gives Syracuse a harvest week long to be remembered. By day folk go out to the State Fair and see the best agricultural show that New York state has ever known — a veritable agricultural show that endeavors not only to furnish an ample measure of fun, but also endeavors to be a real help to the progressive owners of those rich farms of central and western New York. By night Syracuse is in festival. Do not let them tell you that an American town cannot enter into the carnival spirit and still preserve her graciousness and a certain underlying sense of decorum. Tell those scoffers to go to Syracuse during the week of the State Fair. They will see a demonstration of the contrary — Salina street ablaze with an incandescent beauty, lined with row upon row of eager citizens. The street is cleared to a broad strip of stone carpet down its center and over this carpet rolls float after float. These in a single year will symbolize a single thing. In one September we recall that they represented the nations of the world and that the Queen of Ancient Ireland wore eyeglasses ; but that is as nothing, the policemen in Boston are addicted to straighteners, and Mr. Syracuse and Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse and Master Syracuse stand open-eyed in pleasure and go home very late at night on trolley cars that are as crowded as the trolley cars in very big cities, convinced that there possibly may be other towns but there is only one Syracuse. All of which is exactly as it should be. Syracuse's great hope for her future rests in just such optimism on the part of her people. And in such optimism she has a strong foundation on which to build through coming years. Buffalo is not as frivolous as Syracuse. She cares but little for festivals but speaks of herself in the cold commercial terms of success. If you have ever met a man from Buffalo, when you were traveling, and he began to tell you of his town, you will know exactly what we mean. He undoubtedly began by quoting marvelous statistics, some of them concerning the number of trains that arrived and departed from his native heath in the course of twenty-four hours. When he was through, you had a confused idea that Buffalo was some sort of an exaggerated railroad yard, where you changed cars to go from any one corner of the universe to any other corner. When your time came to see Buffalo for your-self, that confused idea returned to you. Your train slipped for miles through an apparently unending wilderness of branching tracks and dusty freight cars, past grimy round-houses and steaming locomotives, until you were ready to believe that any conceivable number of trains arrived at and departed from that busy town within a single calendar day. If you have approached her by water in the summertime you have seen her as a mighty port, her congestion of water traffic suggesting salt water rather than fresh. When we come to visit the neighboring port of Cleveland we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the inland seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as something more than a railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a melting-pot for the fusing of as large and as difficult a foreign element as is given to any American town to fuse. Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The dull roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of power, is within hearing. That dull roar has been Buffalo's incentive, the lullaby which induced her dreams of industrial as well as of commercial strength. And much has been written of her growing strength in these great lines. To our own minds the real Buffalo is to be found in her typical citizen. If he is really typical of the city at the west gate of the Empire state, you will find him optimistic and energetic to a singular degree, and he needs all his optimism and his energy to combat the problems that come to a town of exceeding growth, just crossing the threshold of metropolitanism. Those problems demand cool heads and stout hearts. Buffalo is just beginning to appreciate that. It is becoming less difficult than of old for them to pull together, to dig deep into their purses if need be, and to plan their city of tomorrow in a generous spirit of cooperation. The Buffalonians have a full measure of enjoyment in their city. They are intensely proud of it and rightfully — do not forget the man who once told you of the number of railroad trains within twenty-four hours — and they are thoroughly happy in and around it. Niagara Falls and a half-dozen of lake beaches on Erie and Ontario are within easy reach, while nearer still is the lovely park of the town — which a goodly corner of America remembers as the site of the Pan-American Exposition, in 1901. The Buffalonians live much of the time outdoors, and that holds true whether they are able to patronize their country clubs or the less pretentious suburban resorts. They play at golf, at baseball, at football, and in the long hard winter months at basketball and hockey and bowling. They organize teams in all these sports — and some others— and then go down to Rochester and enter into amiable contests with the folks who live by the Genesee. Syracuse, too, comes into the fray and these three cities of the western end of the state of New York fight out their natural and healthy rivalry in series upon series of sturdy athletic championships. The bond between them is really very close indeed. Rochester stands halfway between Syracuse and Buffalo and as we have already said, is different from both of them. One difference is apparent even to the man who does not alight from his through train. For no railroad has dared to thrust itself down a main business street in Rochester; in fact she was one of the very first cities in America to remove the deadly grade crossings from her avenues, and incalculable fatalities and near fatalities have been prevented by her wisdom. Many years ago she placed the main line of the New York Central railroad, which crosses close to her heart, upon a great viaduct. When that viaduct was built, a great change came upon the town. The old depot, with its vaulted wooden roof clearing both tracks and street and anchored in the walls of the historic Brackett House; with its ancient white horse switching the cars of earlier days (as it is years and years and years since that white horse went to graze in heavenly meadows) vanished from sight, and a great stone-lined embankment -- high enough and thick enough to be a city wall appeared, as if by magic, while Rochester reveled in a vast new station, big enough and fine enough for all time. At least that was the way the station seemed when it was first built in 1882. But alas, for restless America! They have begun to tear the old station down as this is being written — a larger and still finer structure replaces it. And the folk who pray for the conservatism of our feverish American energy are praying that it will last more than thirty-one years! But in just this way Rochester has grown apace and quite ahead of the facilities which her earlier generations thought would be abundant for all time. The high civic standard that forced the great railroad improvement in the earlier days when most American towns, like Topsy, were " jus' growin' " and giving little thought for the morrow, made Rochester different. It made her seek to better her water supply and in this she succeeded, tap-ping a spring pure lake forty miles back in the high hills and bringing its contents to her by a far-reaching aqueduct. It was a large undertaking for a small city of the earlier days, but the small city was plucky and it today possesses a water supply that is second to none. That same early placed high civic standard made fireproof buildings an actuality in Rochester, years in advance of other towns of the same size. That civic standard has worked wonders for the town by the falls of the Genesee. For one thing it has made her prolific in propaganda of one sort or another. Strange religious sects have come to light within her boundaries. Spiritualism was one of these, for it was in Rochester that the famed Fox sisters heard the mysterious rappings, and it was only a little way outside the town where Joseph Smith asserted that he found the Book of Mormon and so brought a new church into existence. And the ladies who are conducting the " Votes for Women " campaign with such ardor should not forget that it was in Rochester that Susan B. Anthony lived for long years of her life, working not alone for the cause that was close to her heart, but in every way for the good of the town that meant so much to her. Perhaps the most interesting phases of the Rochester civic standard are those that have worked inwardly. She has a new city plan — of course. What modern city has not dreamed these glowing things, of transforming ugly squares into plazas of European magnificence, of making dingy Main and State streets into boulevards? And who shall say that such dreams are idly dreamed? Rochester is not dreaming idly. She has already conceived a wonderful new City Hall, to spring upwards from her Main street, but what is perhaps more interesting to her casual visitors in her new plan is the architectural recognition that it gives to the Genesee. The Genesee is a splendid river — in many ways not unlike the more famous Niagara. You have already known the part it has played in the making of Rochester. Yet the city has seen fit, apparently, to all but ignore it. Main street for Rochester is a famous one-street town crosses it on a solid stone bridge but that bridge is lined with buildings, like the prints you used to see of old London bridge. None of the folk who walk that famous thoroughfare ever see the river. In the new scheme the old rookeries that hang upon the edge of Main street bridge are to be torn away and the river is to come into its own. And Rochester folk feel that that day can come none too soon. But the Rochester civic standard has worked no better for her than in social reforms. The phases of these are far too many to be enumerated here, but one of them stands forth too sharply to be ignored. A few years ago some Rochesterian conceived the idea of making the schools work nights as well as day. He had studied the work of the settlement houses in the larger cities, and while Rochester had no such slums as called for settle ment houses it did have a large population that demanded some interest and attention. For instance, within the past few years a large number of Italians have come there, and although they present no such difficult fusing problem as the Jews of New York, the Polocks of Buffalo or the Huns of Pittsburgh, it is not the Rochester way to ignore in the larger social sense any of the folk who come to her. " We will make the school-houses into clubs, we will make them open forums where people can come evenings and get a little instruction, a little more entertainment, but best of all can speak their minds freely," said this enthusiast. " We will broaden out the idea of the ward clubs." The ward clubs to which he referred were neat and attractive structures situated in residential parts of the town, where folk who lived in their own neat homes and who earned from three to eight thousand dollars a year gather for their dances, their bridges, their small lectures and the like. The enthusiast proposed to enlarge this idea, by the simple process of opening the school-houses evenings. His idea was immensely popular from the first. And within a very few weeks it was in process of fruition. The school-houses — they called them " Social Centers "— were opened and night after night they were filled. It looked as if Rochester had launched another pretty big idea upon the world. That idea, however, has been radically changed, today. One of the professors of the local university threw himself into it, possibly with more enthusiasm than judgment, and was reported in the local prints as having said that the red flag might be carried in street parades along with the Stars and Stripes. That settled it. Rochester is a pretty conservative town, and its folk who live quietly in its great houses sat up and took notice of the professor's remarks. Those great houses had smiled rather complacently at the pretty experiment in the schools. Of a sudden they decided that they were being transformed into incubators for the making of socialists or of anarchists — great houses do not make very discerning discriminations. The professor had kicked over the boat. A powerful church which has taken a very definite stand against Socialism joined with the great houses. The question was brought into local politics. The professor lost his job out at the university, and the school-houses ceased to be open forums. Today they are called " Recreation Centers " and are content with instruction and entertainment, but the full breadth of the idea they started has swept across the country and many cities of the mid-West and the West are adopting it. The Rochester way of doing things is a very good way, indeed. For instance, the city decided a few years ago that it ought to have a fair. It had been many years since it had had an annual fair, and it saw Syracuse and Toronto each year becoming greater magnets because of their exhibitions. Straightway Rochester decided that it would have some sort of fall show, just what sort was a bit of a problem at first. It wanted something far bigger than a county fair, and yet it could hardly ask the state for aid when the state had spent so much on its own show in nearby Syracuse. Then it was that Rochester decided to dig down into its own pockets. It saw a fortunate opening just ahead. The state in abandoning a penal institution had left four-teen or fifteen acres of land within a mile of the center of the city — the famous Four Corners. The city took that land, tore down the great stone wall that had en-circled it, erected some new buildings and transformed some of the older ones, created a park of the entire property and announced that it was going in the show business, itself. It has gone into the show business and succeeded. The Rochester Exposition is as much a part of the city organization as its park board or its health department. Throughout the greater part of the year the show-grounds are a public park, holding a museum of local history that is not to be despised. And for two weeks in each September it comes into its own a great, dignified show, builded not of wood and staff so as to make a memorable season and then be forgotten, but builded of steel and stone and concrete for both beauty and permanency. " Now what are the things that have gone to make these things possible? " you are beginning to say. " What is the nature of the typical Rochesterian? " Putting the thing the wrong way about we should say that the typical Rochesterian is pretty near the typical American. And still continuing in the reversed order of things consider, for an instant, the beginnings of Roches-ter. We have spoken of these three cities of the western end of New York state as the first fruit of the wonderful Erie canal. That is quite true and yet it is also true that before the canal came there was quite a town at the falls of the Genesee, trying in crude fashion to avail itself of the wonderful water-power. And while the canal was still an unfinished ditch, three men rode up from the south Rochester and Fitzhugh and Carroll and surveyed a city to replace the straggling town. That little village had, during the ten brief years of its existence, been known as Falls Town. Col. Rochester gave his own name to the city that he foresaw and lived to see it make its definite beginnings. All that was in the third decade of the last century, and Rochester has yet to celebrate her first centenary under her present name. Her career divides itself into three epochs. In the first of these — from the days of her settlement up to the close of the Civil War she was famed for her flouring mills. She was known the world over as the Flour City, and she held that title until the great wheat farms of the land were moved far to the west. But they still continued to call her by the same name although they spelled it differently now — the Flower City. For a new industry arose within her. America was awakening to a quickened sense of beauty. Flowers and florists were becoming popular, and a group of shrewd men in and around Rochester made the nursery business into a very great industry. In more recent years the nature of her manufactures has broadened her camera factory is the most famous in all the world, optical goods, boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, come pouring out of her in a great tidal stream of enterprise. She is an industrial city, definitely and distinctly. Fortunately she is an industrial city employing a high grade of labor almost exclusively, and yet none the less a town devoted to manufacturing. Once again, do not forget that she has not neglected her social life, and you may read this as you please. You may look away from the broadening work of the ward clubs and of the school-houses and demand if there is an aristocracy in Rochester. The resident of the town will lead you over into its Third ward — a compact community almost within stone-throw of the Four Corners, and shut off from the rest of the vulgar world by a river, a canal and a railroad yard. In that compact community, its tree-lined streets suggesting the byways of some tranquil New England community, is the seat of Rochester social government. The residents of the Third ward are a neighborly folk, borrowing things of one another and visiting about with delightful informality among them-selves, and yet their rule is undisputed. East avenue the great show street of Rochester feels that rule. East avenue is lined with great houses, far greater houses than those of the Third ward — many of them built with the profits of " Kodak " stock yet East avenue represents a younger generation, a generation which seems to have made money rather easily. There has been some intermarriage and some letting down of the bars between the ambitious East avenue and the dominant Third ward but not much of it. Rochester is far too conservative to change easily or rapidly. She is proud of herself as she is and rightly so. Her people will sing of her charms by the hours and rightly so, again. 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. The tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown there. Apartment houses are rarities there are not more than twenty or thirty in the town and consequently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and poor, dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land ; the chances are that he has market-truck growing in his back-yard, a real kitchen-garden. There are thousands of these little homes in the outlying sections of the town, with more pretentious ones lining East avenue and the other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of Rochester are less governed and themselves govern more than in most places of the size. That is the value of the detached house to the city. Detached houses in a city seem to mean good schools, good fire and police service, clean streets, health protection, social progress Rochester has all of these in profusion. East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents these ideals of Rochester on dress parade. We rather think, however, that you can read the character of the town better in the side streets. Now a long street, filled with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses does not mean much at a glance — even when the street is parked and filled for a mile with blossoming magnolias,. as Oxford street in Rochester is filled. But such a street, together with all the other streets of its sort, means that much of the disappearing charm and loveliness of our American village life is being absorbed right into the heart of a community of goodly size. Sometimes citizens from other towns running hard amuck Rochester's conservatism call her provincial. She has clung to some of her small town customs longer than her neighbors, but of late she has attempted metropolitanism they have builded two big new hotels in the place, and the radicals have dared to place a big building or two off Main street — quite a step in a town which has become famous as a one-street town. But Rochester, Iike most conservatives, is careless of outside criticism. She points to the big things that she has accomplished. She shows you her streets of the detached houses and her parks — perhaps takes you down to Genesee Valley Park of a summer night when carnival is in the air and the city's band, the city's very own band, if you please, is playing from a great float in midstream, while voices from two or three thousand gaily decorated canoes carry the melodies a long way. She shows you her robust glories, the fair country in which she is situate. For miles upon miles of splendid highways surround her, the Genesee indolent for a time above the Valley Park appeals to the man with a canoe, the great lake to the north gives favorable breezes to the yachtsman. Do you wonder that the Rochesterians know that they dwell in a garden land, and that they are in the open through the fullness of a summer that stretches month after month, from early spring to late autumn? Do you wonder that they really live their lives?