She is an industrial city, definitely and distinctly. Fortunately she is an industrial city employing a high grade of labor almost exclusively, and yet none the less a town devoted to manufacturing. Once again, do not forget that she has not neglected her social life, and you may read this as you please. You may look away from the broadening work of the ward clubs and of the school-houses and demand if there is an aristocracy in Rochester. The resident of the town will lead you over into its Third ward—a compact community almost within stone-throw of the Four Corners, and shut off from the rest of the vulgar world by a river, a canal and a railroad yard. In that compact community, its tree-lined streets suggesting the byways of some tranquil New England community, is the seat of Rochester social government. The residents of the Third ward are a neighborly folk, borrowing things of one another and visiting about with delightful informality among themselves, and yet their rule is undisputed.
East avenue—the great show street of Rochester—feels that rule. East avenue is lined with great houses, far greater houses than those of the Third ward—many of them built with the profits of "Kodak" stock—yet East avenue represents a younger generation, a generation which seems to have made money rather easily. There has been some intermarriage and some letting down of the bars between the ambitious East avenue and the dominant Third ward—but not much of it. Rochester is far too conservative to change easily or rapidly.
The canal gives Syracuse a Venetian look
She is proud of herself as she is—and rightly so. Her people will sing of her charms by the hours—and rightly so, again. They live their lives and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her movements toward social reform, not even in her parks—although Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion—nor does it reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics—her glory is in her homes. The tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown there. Apartment houses are rarities—there are not more than twenty or thirty in the town—and consequently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and poor, dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land; the chances are that he has market-truck growing in his backyard, a real kitchen-garden. There are thousands of these little homes in the outlying sections of the town, with more pretentious ones lining East avenue and the other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of Rochester are less governed and themselves govern more than in most places of the size. That is the value of the detached house to the city. Detached houses in a city seem to mean good schools, good fire and police service, clean streets, health protection, social progress—Rochester has all of these in profusion.
East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents these ideals of Rochester on dress parade. We rather think, however, that you can read the character of the town better in the side streets. Now a long street, filled with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses does not mean much at a glance—even when the street is parked and filled for a mile with blossoming magnolias, as Oxford street in Rochester is filled. But such a street, together with all the other streets of its sort, means that much of the disappearing charm and loveliness of our American village life is being absorbed right into the heart of a community of goodly size.
Sometimes citizens from other towns running hard amuck Rochester's conservatism call her provincial. She has clung to some of her small town customs longer than her neighbors, but of late she has attempted metropolitanism—they have builded two big new hotels in the place, and the radicals have dared to place a big building or two off Main street—quite a step in a town which has become famous as a one-street town.
But Rochester, like most conservatives, is careless of outside criticism. She points to the big things that she has accomplished. She shows you her streets of the detached houses and her parks—perhaps takes you down to Genesee Valley Park of a summer night when carnival is in the air and the city's band, the city's very own band, if you please, is playing from a great float in midstream, while voices from two or three thousand gaily decorated canoes carry the melodies a long way. She shows you her robust glories, the fair country in which she is situate. For miles upon miles of splendid highways surround her, the Genesee indolent for a time above the Valley Park appeals to the man with a canoe, the great lake to the north gives favorable breezes to the yachtsman. Do you wonder that the Rochesterians know that they dwell in a garden land, and that they are in the open through the fullness of a summer that stretches month after month, from early spring to late autumn? Do you wonder that they really live their lives?