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 westbound 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.
The Erie Canal still finds an amiable path through 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.[C] 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.
[C] A recent rerouting of the trolley cars in Rochester has left this particular street without regular service most of the days of the week. The fact remains, however, that for many years the Park avenue line had its terminal loop through Church street. On the Sabbath that terminal was moved bodily so that churchgoers would not be annoyed. E. H.
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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.