[THE PERSONALITY OF
AMERICAN CITIES]
1
OUR ANCIENT HUB
There are more things forbidden in Boston than in Berlin—and that is saying much. You may be a citizen of a republic, but when you come to the old Bay State town you suddenly realize that you are being ruled. At each park entrance is posted a code of rules and regulations that would take a quarter of an hour to read and digest; in the elevated and trolley cars, in public institutions and churches, even in shops and hotels, the canons laid down for your conduct are sharp in detail and unvarying in command. You may not whistle in a public park, nor loiter within a subway station, nor pray aloud upon the Charlesbank. And for some reason, which seems delightfully unreasonable to a man without the pale, you may not take an elevated ticket from an elevated railroad station. It is to be immediately deposited within the chopping-box before you board your train. As to what might happen to a hapless human who emerged from a station with a ticket still in his possession, the Boston code does not distinctly state.
And yet—like most tightly ruled principalities—Boston's attractiveness is keen even to the unregulated mind. The effect of many rules and sundry regulations seems to be law and order—to an extent hardly reached in any other city within the United States. The Bostonian is occasionally rude; these occasions are almost invariably upon his overcrowded streets and in the public places—until the stranger may begin to wonder if, after all, the street railroad employés have a monopoly of good manners—but he is always just. His mind is judicial. He treats you fairly. And if he knows you, knows your forbears as well, he is courtesy of the highest sort. And there is no hospitality in the land to be compared with Boston hospitality—once you have been admitted to its portals.
Boston's Via Sacre—Tremont Street—and Park Street church
So we have come in this second decade of the twentieth century to speak of the inner cult of the Boston folk as Brahmins. The term is not new. But in the whole land there is not one better applied. For almost as the high caste of mystic India hold themselves aloof from even the mere sight of less favored humans, do these great, somber houses of Beacon street and the rest of the Back Bay close their doors tightly to the stranger. Make no mistake as to this very thing. 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. These folk and many others of their sort head the so-called "Society columns" of the Sunday newspapers. But the real Bostonese do not run to outre stationery or other eccentricities. They live within the tight walls of their somber, simple, lovely old red-brick houses, and thank God that there were days that had the names of Winthrop or Cabot or Adams or Peabody spelled in tinted letters along the horizon.
A. M. Howe, who knows his Boston thoroughly, once told of two old ladies there who always quarreled as to which should have the first look at the Transcript each evening.
"I want to see if anybody nice has died in the Transcript this evening," the older sister would say as she would hear the thud of the paper against the stout outer door,—and after that the battle was on.
We always had suspected Mr. Howe of going rather far in this, until we came to the facts. It seems that there were two old ladies in Cambridge, which—as every one ought to know, is a sort of scholastic annex to Boston—and that they never quarreled—save on the matter of the first possession of the Transcript. On that vexed question they never failed to disagree. The matter was brought to the attention of the owners of the newspaper—and they settled it by sending an extra copy of the Transcript each evening, with their compliments. And that could not have happened anywhere else in this land save on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.