Cleveland, “the Sixth City”—and she likes to have you know her rating—is certainly prosperous-looking and in many ways beautiful. She has wide, roomy streets with splendid lawns and trees and houses. A few of the older mansions are hideous but enormous, comfortable, and well built. They look like the homes of people with no end of money who are content to live in houses of American architecture’s darkest period because they are used to them and often because their fathers lived in them. There is no suggestion of the upstart in their ugliness. The whole city impresses one as having a nice fat bank account and being in no hurry to spend it. The municipal buildings, however, are superb, and the newer dwelling houses all that money and taste can make them, but almost best of all, I liked the shops.
In a big new one on Euclid Avenue, two elderly ladies with much-befeathered bonnets were ensconced in a double rolling chair like those of the Atlantic City boardwalk. An attentive young man was pushing them about among bronzes and porcelains. Stopping before a shelf of samples he asked: “Are any of these at all like the coffee cups you are looking for, Mrs. Davis?”
Mrs. Davis was so absorbed in the conversation of her friend that the clerk had to repeat his question three times before her purple feathers bobbed toward the coffee cups casually.
“Coffee cups?” she added absently. “I don’t think I care about any today, thank you. But you might drive us through the linen department and the lamp shades. The lamp shades are always so pretty!” she added to her friend, exactly as though, after telling her coachman to drive around the east side of the park, she had remarked upon the beauty of the wistaria.
“Does that lady drive about town in a rolling chair?” I asked of the man waiting upon us.
“Oh, those chairs are ours,” he answered. “We have them so that customers can visit with each other and shop without getting tired. One of the clerks will be glad to push you about in one. It is a very pleasant innovation,” he added, and out of courtesy he did not say for whom.
The Crowd in Less Than a Minute. “Out of the Window” in Cleveland
Cleveland is also the city of three-cent carfares—in fact three cents in Cleveland is almost as good as five cents in other cities. Lemonade three cents, moving pictures three cents, a ball of pop-corn three cents—a whole counter full of small articles in one of the big stores. Let’s all move to Cleveland!
One thing, though, struck us most particularly in the hotels of Utica and Cleveland; the people didn’t match the background. Dining in a white marble room quite faultlessly appointed, there was not a man in evening clothes and not a single woman smartly dressed or who even looked as though she had ever been! Men in unpressed business suits, women in black skirts and white shirtwaists are appropriate to the imitation wood or plaster walls of some of the eating places that we have been in, but in a beautiful hotel like the Statler in Cleveland, and especially in the evening, they spoil the picture.