Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. Over in another of the older parts of the town you can still find Camden station, which in 1857 was not only proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was ever built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy place indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great fire of a decade ago, but finally forced to close its doors in the face of the competition of better located and more elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient cathedral remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Merchants' Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look east from the Monument square there in front of the Post Office. Across the harbor you can find Fort McHenry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Baltimore does not easily forget.
And here, as you plunge down into the little congested district roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the really old Baltimore. The streets are as rambling and as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their gutters still run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the credit of the town that she is today fast doing away with these. And once in a time you can stand at the open door of an oyster establishment and watch the negroes shocking those bivalves—singing as they work. For just below Baltimore is a great habitat of the oyster as well as of the crab, to say nothing of some more aristocratic denizens—the diamond-back terrapin for instance. Boys with trays—many of them negroes—walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling cold deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are uniformly delicious, and the boys sell them as freely on the streets as the boys down in Staunton and some other Virginia towns sell cold chicken.
Now we are across Jones Falls[B]—that unimpressive stream that gullies through Baltimore—and plunging into Old Town. Other cities may boast their quartiers, Baltimore has Old Town. And she clings to the name and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here is indeed the oldest part of Old Town and if we search quietly through its narrow, crowded streets we may still see some of the old inns, dating well back into the eighteenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling in eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when the coaches started forth up the new National Pike to Cumberland or distant Wheeling, north to York and Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little old houses of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful glass that we think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see above our heads in the street cars. But they represent Baltimore's solution of her housing problem.
[B] During the past year Baltimore has made a very creditable progress toward building an important commercial street over Jones Falls; thus transforming it into a hidden, tunneled sewer. Residents of the city will not soon forget, however, that it was at Jones Falls that the engines of the New York Fire Department took their stand and halted the great fire of 1904. E. H.
For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apartments. She has, like her Quaker neighbor to the north, mile upon mile of little red-brick houses, all these also with white door-steps—marble many times, and in other times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh paintings. In these little houses Baltimore lives. You may find here and there some one of them no more than ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories high, but it is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the rent of it is ridiculously low—compared even with the lower-priced apartments and the tenements of New York. That low rent, combined with the profuse and inexpensive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap place in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the democracy of her boulevards makes her a very comfortable place of residence—even for a poor man. And you may live within your little house and of a summer evening sit upon your "pleasure porch" as comfortably as any prince.
In Baltimore it is always a "pleasure porch," thus proclaiming her as a real gateway to the old South—the South of flavor and of romance. In Baltimore, you always say "Baltimore City," probably in distinction to Baltimore county, which surrounds it, and your real Baltimorean delights to speak of his morning journal as "that Sun paper." The town clings conservatively to its old tricks of speech, and if you pick up that newspaper you will perhaps find the advertisement of an auctioneer preparing to sell the effects of some family "declining housekeeping."
That same fine conservatism is reflected in her nomenclature—first as you see it upon the shop signs and the door-plates. She has not felt the flood of foreign invasion as some of our other cities have felt it. She is not cosmopolitan—and she is proud of that. And the names that one sees along her streets are for the most part the good names of English lineage. Even the names of the streets themselves are proof of that—Alpaca and April alleys, Apple, and Apricot courts, Crab court, Cuba street, China street—which takes one back to the days of the famous clipper ships which sailed from the wharves of Baltimore—Featherbed lane, Johnny-cake road, Maidenchoice lane, Pen Lucy avenue, Sarah Ann street—who shall say that conservatism does not linger in these cognomens? And what shall one say of conservatism and Baltimore's devotion to Charles street, sending that famous thoroughfare up through the county to the north as Charles Street avenue and then as Charles Street Avenue extension?
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Do not mistake Baltimore conservatism for a lack of progress. You can hardly make greater mistake. For Baltimore today is constantly planning to better her harbor, to improve the beginning that she has already made in the establishment of municipal docks—her jealousy of a certain Virginia harbor far to the south is working much good to herself. She is constantly bettering her markets—today they are not only among the most wonderful but the most efficient in the whole land. And today she is planning a great common terminal for freight right within her heart—a sizable enterprise to be erected at a cost of some ten millions of dollars. For she is determined that her reputation for giving good living to her citizens and at a low cost shall be maintained. She realizes that much of that cost is the cost of food distribution, and while almost every other city in the land is floundering and experimenting she is going straight ahead—with definite progress in view. Such purpose and such plans make first-rate aids to conservatism.
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