Читать книгу American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' - Julian Street - Страница 10

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There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

—Montaigne.

Following the incorporation of the city, Baltimore grew much as Chicago was destined to grow more than a century later; within less than thirty years, when Chicago was a tiny village, Baltimore had become the third city in the United States: a city of wealthy merchants engaged in an extensive foreign trade; for in those days there was an American merchant marine, and the swift, rakish Baltimore clippers were known the seven seas over.

The story of modern Baltimore is entirely unrelated to the city's early history. It consists in a simple but inspiring record of regeneration springing from disaster. It is the story of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton, and of many a smaller town: a cataclysm, a few days of despair, a return of courage, and another beginning.

Imagine yourself being tucked into bed one night by your valet or your maid, as the case may be, calm in the feeling that all was secure: that your business was returning a handsome income, that your stocks and bonds were safe in the strong box, that the prosperity of your descendants was assured. Then imagine ruin coming like lightning in the night. In the morning you are poor. Your business, your investments, your very hopes, are gone. Everything is wiped out. The labor of a lifetime must be begun again.

Such an experience was that of Baltimore in the fire of 1904.

On the sickening morning following the conflagration two Baltimore men, friends of mine, walked down Charles Street to a point as near the ruined region as it was possible to go.

"Well," said one, surveying the smoking crater, "what do you think of it?"

"Baltimore is gone," was the response. "We are off the map."

How many citizens of Chicago, of San Francisco, of Galveston, of Dayton have known the anguish of that first aftermath of hopelessness! How many citizens of Baltimore knew it that day! And yet how bravely and with what magic swiftness have these cities risen from their ruins! Was not Rome burned? Was not London? And is it not, then, time for men to learn from the history of other men and other cities that disaster does not spell the end, but is oftentimes another name for opportunity?

Always, after disaster to a city, come improvements, but because disaster not only cleans the slate but simultaneously stuns the mind, a portion of the opportunity is invariably lost. The task of rebuilding, of widening a few streets, looks large enough to him who stands amidst destruction—and there, consequently, improvement usually stops. That is why the downtown boulevard system of Chicago has yet to be completed, in spite of the fact that it might with little difficulty have been completed after the Chicago fire (although it is only just to add that city planning was almost an unknown art in America at that time); and that also is why the hills of San Francisco are not terraced, as it was suggested they should be after the fire, but remain to-day inaccessible to frontal attack by even the maddest mountain goat of a taxi driver.

These matters are not mentioned in the way of criticism: I have only admiration for the devastated cities and for those who built them up again. I call attention to lost opportunities with something like reluctance, and only in the wish to emphasize the fact that our crippled or destroyed cities do invariably rise again, and that if the next American city to sustain disaster shall but have this simple lesson learned in advance, it may thereby register a new high mark in municipal intelligence and a new record among the rebuilt cities, by making more sweet than any other city ever made them, the uses of adversity.

The fire of 1904 found Baltimore a town of narrow highways, old buildings, bad pavements, and open gutter drains. The streets were laid in what is known as "southern cobble," which is the next thing to no pavement at all, being made of irregular stones, large and small, laid in the dirt and tamped down. For bumps and ruts there is no pavement in the world to be compared with it. There were no city sewers. Outside a few affluent neighborhoods, the citizens of which clubbed together to build private sewers, the cesspool was in general use, while domestic drainage emptied into the roadside gutters. These were made passable, at crossings, by stepping stones, about the bases of which passed interesting armadas of potato peelings, floating, upon wash days, in water having the fine Mediterranean hue which comes from diluted blueing. Everybody seemed to find the entire system adequate; for, it was argued, the hilly contours of the city caused the drainage quickly to be carried off, while as for typhoid and mosquitoes—well, there had always been typhoid and mosquitoes, just as there had always been these open gutters. It was all quite good enough.

Then the fire.

And then the upbuilding of the city—not only of the acres and acres comprising the burned section, in which streets were widened and skyscrapers arose where fire-traps had been—but outside the fire zone, where sewers were put down and pavements laid. Nor was the change merely physical. With the old buildings, the old spirit of laissez faire went up in smoke, and in the embers a municipal conscience was born. Almost as though by the light of the flames which engulfed it, the city began to see itself as it had never seen itself before: to take account of stock, to plan broadly for the future.

Nor has the new-born spirit died. Only last year an extensive red-light district was closed effectively and once for all. Baltimore is to-day free from flagrant commercialized vice. And if not quite all the old cobble pavements and open-gutter drains have been eliminated, there are but few of them left—left almost as though for purposes of contrast—and the Baltimorean who takes you to the Ghetto and shows you these ancient remnants may immediately thereafter escort you to the Fallsway, where the other side of the picture is presented.

The Fallsway is a brand-new boulevard of pleasing aspect, the peculiar feature of which is that it is nothing more or less than a cover over the top of Jones's Falls, which figured in the early history of Baltimore as a water course, but which later came to figure as a great, open, trunk sewer.

Every one in Baltimore is proud of the Fallsway, but particularly so are the city engineers who carried the work through. While in Baltimore I had the pleasure of meeting one of these gentlemen, and I can assure you that no young head of a family was ever more delighted with his new cottage in a suburb, his wife, his children, his garden, and his collie puppy, than was this engineer with his boulevard sewer. Like a lover, he carried pictures of it in his pocket, and like a lover he would assure you that it was "not like other sewers." Nor could he speak of it without beginning to wish to take you out to see it—not merely for a motor ride along the top of it, either. No, his hospitality did not stop there. When he invited you to a sewer he invited you in. And if you went in with him, no one could make you come out until you wanted to.

As he told my companion and me of the three great tubes, the walks beside them, the conduits for gas and electricity, and all the other wonders of the place, I began to wish that we might go with him, for, though we have been to a good many places together, this was something new: it was the first time we had ever been invited to drop into a sewer and make ourselves as much at home as though we lived there.

My companion, however, seemed unsympathetic to the project.

"Sewers, you know," he said, when I taxed him with indifference, "have come to have a very definite place in both the literary and the graphic arts. How do you propose to treat it?"

"What do you mean?"

"When you write about it: Are you going to write about it as a realist, a mystic, or a romanticist?"

I said I didn't know.

"Well, a man who is going to write of a sewer ought to know," he told me severely. "You're not up to sewers yet. They're too big for you. If you take my advice you'll keep out of the sewers for the present and stick to the gutters."

So I did.