The Personality of American Cities

by Edward Hungerford

"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 fourteen 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 encircled 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 Rochester. 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.