One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the savings banks pay 4 per cent.
We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce—machines for loading and unloading ships in the space of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand. Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track, only to snatch the next one and repeat the operation.
Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down into the vessel's hold, snatch them up filled with tons of the precious product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is held by the steamer Corry, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the George F. Perkins, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.
Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel shell more than six hundred feet long, with a little space set aside at the bows for quarters and a little space astern for engines. The deck is a series of enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement. It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States and Canada lies within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."
I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of homes.
Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real beauty—most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity—it is nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.
I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo, and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans. Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.
These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid thoroughfares, but in a different way.