CHAPTER V
DETROIT THE DYNAMIC
Because Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit are, in effect, situated upon Lake Erie, and because they are cities of approximately the same size, and because of many other resemblances between them, they always seem to me like three sisters living amicably in three separate houses on the same block.
As I personify them, Buffalo, living at the eastern end of the block, is the smallest sister. She has, I fear, a slight tendency to be anemic. Her husband, who was in the shipping business, is getting old. He has retired and is living in contentment in the old house, sitting all day on the side porch, behind the vines, with his slippers cocked up on the porch rail, smoking cigars and reading his newspapers in peace.
Cleveland is the fat sister. She is very rich, having married into the Rockefeller family. She is placid, satisfied, dogmatically religious, and inclined to platitudes and missionary work. Her house, in the middle of the block, is a mansion of the seventies. It has a cupola and there are iron fences on the roof, as though to keep the birds from falling off. The lawn is decorated with a pair of iron dogs. But there are plans in the old house for a new one.
The first two sisters have a kind of family resemblance which the third does not fully share. Detroit seems younger than her sisters. Indeed, you might almost mistake her for one of their daughters. The belle of the family, she is married to a young man who is making piles of money in the automobile business—and spending piles, too. Their house, at the western end of the block, is new and charming.
I am half in love with Detroit. I may as well admit it, for you are sure to find me out. She is beautiful—not with the warm, passionate beauty of San Francisco, the austere mountain beauty of Denver, nor the strange, sophisticated, destroying beauty of New York, but with a sweet domestic kind of beauty, like that of a young wife, gay, strong, alert, enthusiastic; a twinkle in her eye, a laugh upon her lips. She has temperament and charm, qualities as rare, as fascinating, and as difficult to define in a city as in a human being.