Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings, dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice, there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has contemplated for its own beautification. In this country it was, at the time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its kind.
When an American city has needed some new public building it has been the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins), and cause those plans to be executed (by their brothers-in-law). This may have been "practical politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement.
No one will dispute the convenience of having public buildings "handy" to one another, but there may still be found, even in Cleveland, men whose feeling for beauty is not so highly developed as their feeling for finance; men who shake their heads at the mention of a group plan; who don't like to "see all that money wasted." I met one or two such. But I will venture the prophecy that, when the Cleveland plan is a little farther advanced, so that the eye can realize the amazing splendor of the thing, as it will ultimately be, there will be no one left in Cleveland to convert.
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
It is a fine and unusual thing, in itself, for an American city to be planning its own beauty fifty years ahead. Cleveland is almost un-American in that! But when the work done—yes, and before it is done—this single great improvement will have transformed Cleveland from an ordinary looking city to one of great distinction.
Fancy emerging from a splendid railway station to find yourself facing, not the little bars and dingy buildings which so often face a station, but a splendid mall, two thousand feet long and six hundred wide, parked in the center and surrounded by fine buildings of even cornice height and harmonious classical design. At one side of the station will stand the public library; at the other the Federal building; and at the far extremity of the mall, the county building and the city hall.
Three of these buildings are already standing. Two more are under way. The plan is no longer a mere plan but is already, in part, an actuality.
When the transformation is complete Cleveland will not only have remade herself but will have set a magnificent example to other cities. By that time she may have ceased to call herself "Sixth City"—for population changes. But if a hundred other cities follow her with group plans, and whether those plans be of greater magnitude or less, it must never be forgotten that Cleveland had the appreciation and the courage to begin the movement in America, not merely on paper but in stone and marble, and that, without regard to population, she therefore has a certain right, to-day, to call herself "First City."