The Central Square and Cathedral of Port au Prince on Market Day
Looking down upon the market from the Cathedral platform
The American residents of Port au Prince complain that visitors of scribbling propensities have given too much space to its comic-opera aspect. It is hard to avoid temptation. The ridiculous is constantly forcing itself into the foreground, innocently unaware of distracting attention from the more serious background. For there is such a background, one which should in all fairness be sketched into any picture of Haiti which makes a pretense of being true to life. If there has been a constant tendency to leave it out, it is probably due to the fact that the average wanderer over the face of the earth finds most “interesting” the incongruous and the ludicrous.
To close our eyes, then, for the moment to the more obvious details, the capital of the Black Republic is by no means the misplaced African village which common report would indicate. Its principal streets are excellently paved with asphalt; scores of automobiles honk their way through its seething streams of black humanity. Even along the water-front the principles of sanitation are enforced. Barefooted “white wings,” distinguished by immense green hats of woven palm-leaves worn on top of their personal headgear, are constantly sweeping the city with their primitive bundle-of-grass brooms. A railroad, incredibly old-fashioned, to be sure, but accommodating a crowded traffic for all that, runs through the heart of the town and connects it with others considerable distances away in both directions. An excellent electric light service covers the city. Its shops make a more or less successful effort to ape their Parisian prototypes; its business offices by no means all succumb to the tropical temptation to sleep through the principal hours of the day. The French left it a legacy of wide streets, though failing, of course, to bequeath it adequate sidewalks. Its architecture is a surprise to the traveler arriving from Cuba; it would be far less so to one who came direct from Key West. Wooden houses with sloping roofs are the general rule, thin-walled structures with huge slatted doors and windows, and built as open as possible to every breeze that blows, as befits the climate. There are neither red tiles, strangely tinted walls, nor Moorish rejas and patios to attract the eye. Indeed, there is little or nothing in the average street vista to arouse the admiration, though there is a certain cause for amusement in the strange juxtaposition of the most primitive African reed huts with the attempts of Paris-educated mulattoes to ape, with improvements of their own, their favorite French châteaux.
Only two buildings in Port au Prince—one might perhaps say in all Haiti—boast window-glass. One is the large and rather imposing cathedral, light yellow both outside and within, flooded with the aggressive tropical sunshine in a way that leaves it none of the “dim and mystic light” befitting such places of worship. The other is the unfinished, snow-white presidential palace, larger and more sumptuous than our own White House. The cathedral looks down upon the blue harbor across a great open square unadorned with a single sprig of vegetation; the palace squats in the vast sun-scorched Champs de Mars, equally bare except for a Napoleonic statue of Dessalines, his tell-tale complexion disguised by the kindly bronze, and attended by a modest and deeply tanned Venus of Melos. The absence of trees in the public squares gives assistance to the wooden houses in proving the city no offshoot of Spanish civilization. The tale runs that the Champs de Mars was once well wooded until a former president ordered it cleared of all possible lurking-places for assassins.
But Port au Prince is by no means unshaded. The better residential part up beyond the glaring parade-ground makes full use of the gorgeous tropical vegetation. Here almost every house is hidden away in its grove of palms, mangos, breadfruit, and a score of other perennial trees, and flowering bushes, ranging all the way from our northern roses to the pale-yellow of blooming cotton-trees and enormous masses of the lavender-purple bougainvillea, crowd their way in between the tree-trunks. Oranges, bananas, and the pear-shaped grape-fruit of Haiti hang almost within reach from one’s window; alligator-pears may be had in their season for the flinging of a club; he who cares to climb high enough can quench his thirst with the cool water of the green cocoanut. The dwellings here are spacious and airy, their ceilings almost double the height of our own, and if they lack some of the conveniences considered indispensable in the North, they have instead splendid swimming-pools and, in many cases, such a view of the lower city, the intensely blue bay, and the wrinkled brown ranges of the southern peninsula as would make up for a far greater scarcity of the stereotyped comforts.
A Cuban residence in a new clearing