You take out your watch. The process consumes just two minutes for each car. That means thirty cars an hour. In an hour fifteen hundred tons of coal, the capacity of a long and heavily laden train, have been placed in the hold of the waiting vessel. You are familiar, perhaps, with the craft that tie up at the wharves of seaboard towns, and you roughly estimate the capacity of this coal-carrier at some forty-five hundred tons. It is going to take but three hours to fill her great hold, and you find yourself astonished at the result of such computations. You confide that astonishment to your Cleveland man. He smiles at you, benignly.
"That is really not very rapid work," he says, "they put eleven thousand tons of ore into the Corey in thirty-nine minutes up at Superior last year."
And that is the record loading of a vessel for all the world. When the British ship-owners heard of that feat at a port two thousand miles inland, they ceased to deride American docking facilities.
The Cleveland man begins telling you something of this lake traffic in iron ore and soft coal—almost three-quarters of the total tonnage of the lakes. The workable iron deposits of America are today in greatest profusion within a comparatively few miles of the head of Lake Superior—nothing has yet robbed western Pennsylvania and West Virginia of their supremacy as producers of bituminous coal. There is an ideal traffic condition, the condition that lines the railroad cars for forty miles roundabout Pittsburgh. The great cost in handling freight upon the average railroad comes from the fact that it is generally what is known as "one-way" business—that is, the volume of traffic moves in a single direction, necessitating an expensive and wasteful return haul of empty cars. There is no such traffic waste upon the Great Lakes. The ships that go up and down the long water lanes of Erie and Huron and Superior do not worry about ballast for the return. They carry coal from Buffalo, Erie, Ashtabula, Conneaut and Cleveland to Duluth and Superior and they come back with their capacious holds filled with red iron ore. There is your true economy in transportation, and the reflection of it comes in the fact that these ships haul cargo at the rate of .78 of a mill for a ton-mile, which is the lowest freight-rate in the world.
Cleveland built these ships, in fact she still is building the greater part of them. And she thinks nothing of building the largest of these steel vessels in ninety days. Take a second look at that vessel—the coal cars are still pouring their grimy treasure into her hold. She is builded, like all of these new freighters, with a severity that shows the bluff utilitarianism of the shipbuilders of the Great Lakes. None of the finicky traditions of the Clyde rule the minds of the men who today are building the merchant marine of the Lakes. One deckhouse, with the navigating headquarters, is forward; the other, with funnel and the other externals of the ship's propelling mechanism, is at the extreme stern. Amidships your Great Lakes carrier is cargo—and nothing else. No tangle of line or burden of trivials; just a red-walled hull of thick steel plates and a steel-plate deck—broken into thirty-six hatches and of precisely the same shade of red—for these ships are quickly painted by hose-spray. Remember that it is ninety days—from keel-plates to launching. In another thirty days the ship's simple fittings are finished and her engines in her heart are ready to pound from down-Lakes to up-Lakes and back innumerable times.
*****
If we have given some attention in this Cleveland chapter to the traffic of the Great Lakes, it is, as we have already intimated, because the traffic of the Great Lakes has made her the Sixth City. It has also made the most important of her industries, the very greatest of her fortunes. Your Cleveland man will tell you of one of these—before you leave the pier-edge. It was the fortune that an old Lake captain left at his death a little time ago—the fortune a mere matter of some twenty-eight millions of dollars. The old captain knew the Lakes and he had studied their traffic—all his life. But his will directed that his money should not be expended in the building of ships. It provided that at least a quarter of a million of the income should annually go to the purchase of Cleveland real estate. And Cleveland was quick to explain that it was not that the old man loved shipping less, but that he loved Cleveland real estate more. He had the gift of foresight.
If you would see that foresight in his own eyes drive out Euclid avenue—that broad thoroughfare that leads from the old-fashioned Public Square in the heart of the city straight toward the southeast. Euclid avenue gained its fame in other days. Travelers used to come back from Cleveland and tell of the glories of that highway. Alas, today those glories are largely those of memory. The old houses still sit in their great lawns, but the grime of the city's industry has made them seem doubly old and decadent, while Commerce has pushed her smart new shops out among them to the very sidewalk line. Many of these shops are given over to the automobile business—a business which does not hesitate in any of our towns to transform resident streets into commercial. But in Cleveland one may partly forgive the audacity of this particular trade in recognition of its perspicacity. For Euclid avenue, rapidly growing now from an entirely residential street into an entirely business highway, is the great automobile thoroughfare of the East Side of the city. And when you consider that one out of every ten Cleveland families has a motor car, you can begin to estimate the traffic through Euclid avenue.
There is a West Side of Cleveland—you might almost say, of course—but one does not come to know it until he comes to know Cleveland well. The city is builded upon a high plateau that rises in a steep bluff from the very edge of the lake. Through this plateau, at the very bottom of a ravine, wide and deep, the navigable Cuyahoga twists its tortuous way into Lake Erie. It seems as if that ravine must almost have been cut to test the resources of the bridge-builders of America. For it has been their problem to keep the Sixth City from becoming entirely severed by her great water artery. They have solved it by the construction of one huge steel viaduct after another but the West Side remains the West Side—and always somewhat jealous of the East. She knows that the great public buildings of Cleveland—that comprehensive civic center plan to which we shall come in a moment—are fixed for all time upon the East. And so when Cleveland decides to build a great new city hall, the West Side demands and receives the finest market house in all the land.
So it is that it is the East Side that your Cleveland man shows you alone when your time is limited, and so it is that Euclid avenue is the one great thoroughfare of the whole East Side.