This is illustrated in various ways. It is shown, for example, in Atlanta's principal hotels, which are not small-town hotels, or good-enough hotels, but would do credit to any city, however great. The office buildings are city office buildings, and in the downtown section they are sufficiently numerous to look very much at home, instead of appearing a little bit exotic, self-conscious, and lonesome, as new skyscrapers do in so many cities of Atlanta's size. Even the smoke with which the skyscrapers are streaked is city smoke. Chicago herself could hardly produce smoke of more metropolitan texture—certainly not on the Lake Front, where the Illinois Central trains send up their black clouds; for Atlanta's downtown smoke, like Chicago's, comes in large part from railroads piercing the heart of the city. Where downtown business streets cross the railroad tracks, the latter are depressed, the highways passing above on steel bridges resembling the bridges over the Chicago River. The railroad's right of way is, furthermore, just about as wide as the Chicago River, and rows of smoke-stained brick buildings turn their backs upon it, precisely as similar buildings turn theirs upon Chicago's busy, narrow stream. I wonder if all travelers, familiar with Chicago, are so persistently reminded of that portion of the city which is near the river, as I was by that portion of Atlanta abutting on the tracks by which the Seaboard Air Line enters the city.
A reminder of the Chicago River—Atlanta
Generally speaking, railroads in the South have not been so prosperous as leading roads in the North, and with the exception of the most important through trains, their passenger equipment is, therefore, not so good. The Seaboard Air Line, however, runs an all-steel train between Atlanta and Birmingham which, in point of equipment, may be compared with the best limited trains anywhere. The last car in this train, instead of being part sleeping car and part observation car, is a combination dining and observation car—a very pleasant arrangement, for men are allowed to smoke in the observation end after dinner. This is, to my mind, an improvement over the practice of most railroads, which obliges men who wish to smoke to leave the ladies with whom they may be traveling. All Seaboard dining cars offer, aside from regular à la carte service, a sixty-cent dinner known as the "Blue Plate Special." This dinner has many advantages over the usual dining-car repast. In the first place, though it does not comprise bread and butter, coffee or tea, or dessert, it provides an ample supply of meat and vegetables at a moderate price. In the second place, though served at a fixed price, it bears no resemblance to the old-style dining car table d'hôte, but, upon the contrary, looks and tastes like food. The food, furthermore, instead of representing a great variety of viands served in microscopic helpings on innumerable platters and "side dishes," comes on one great plate, with recesses for vegetables. The "Blue Plate Special" furnishes, in short, the chief items in a "good home meal."
This is, perhaps, as convenient a place as any in which to speak of certain points concerning various railroads in the South. The Central of Georgia Railway, running between Atlanta and Savannah, instead of operating Pullmans, has its own sleeping cars. This is the only railroad I know of in the country on which the tenant of a lower berth, below an unoccupied upper, may have the upper closed without paying for it. One likes the Central of Georgia for this humane dispensation. The locomotives of the Western & Atlantic carry as a distinguishing mark a red band at the top of the smokestack. The Southern Railway assigns engineers to individual engines, instead of "pooling power," as is the practice, I believe, on many railroads. Because of this, engineers on the Southern regard the locomotives to which they are regularly assigned, as their personal property, and exercise their individual taste in embellishing them. Brass bands, brass flagstaffs, brass eagles over the headlight, and similar adornments are therefore often seen on the engines of this road, giving the most elaborate of them a carnival appearance, by contrast with the somber black to which most of us are accustomed, and hinting that not all the individuality has been unionized out of locomotive engineers—an impression heightened by the Southern Railway's further pleasant custom of painting the names of its older and more expert engineers upon the cabs of their locomotives.
Some cities are like lumbering old farm horses, plugging along a dusty country road. When another horse overtakes them, if they be not altogether wanting in spirit, they may be encouraged to jog a little faster for a moment, stimulated by example. If, besides being stupid, they are mean, then they want to kick or bite at the speedier animal going by. Some cities are like that, too. If an energetic city overtakes them, they are not spurred on to emulation, but lay back their ears, so to speak. Again, there are tough, sturdy little cities like buckskin ponies. There are skittish cities which seem to have been badly broken. There are old cities with a worn-out kind of elegance, like that of superannuated horses of good breed, hitched to an old-fashioned barouche. There are bad, bucking cities, like Butte, Montana. And here and there are cities, like Atlanta, reminding one of thoroughbred hunters. There is a brave, sporting something in the spirit of Atlanta which makes it rush courageously at big jumps, and clear them, and land clean on the other side, and be off again. Like a thoroughbred, she loves the chase. She goes in to win. She doesn't stop to worry about whether she can win or not. She knows she will. And as the thoroughbred, loving large and astonishing achievement, lacks the humbler virtues of the reliable family carriage horse, Atlanta, it cannot be denied, has "les défauts de ses qualités." For whereas, on the side of dashing performance, Atlanta held a stock fair which, in one year, surpassed any other held in the South, and secured the grand circuit of races, on the other side she is careless about hospitals and charities; and whereas, on the one side, she has raised millions for the building of two new universities (which, by the way, would be much better as one great university, but cannot be, because of sectarian domination), on the other, she is deficient as to schools; and again, whereas she is the only secondary city to have an annual season of Metropolitan grand opera (and to make it pay!) she is behind many other cities, including her neighbors, New Orleans and Savannah, in caring for the public health.
I am by no means sure that the regular spring visit of the Metropolitan Grand Opera Company may be taken as a sign that Atlanta is peculiarly a music-loving community. Indeed, I was told by one Atlanta lady, herself a musician, that the city did not contain more than a thousand persons of real musical appreciation, that a number of these could not afford to attend the operatic performances, and that opera week was, consequently, in reality more an occasion of great social festivity than of devout homage to art.
"Our opera week," she told me, "bears the same relation to the life of Atlanta as Mardi Gras does to that of New Orleans. It is an advertisement for the city, and an excuse for every one to have a good time. Every night after the performance there are suppers and dances, which the opera stars attend. They always seem to enjoy coming here. They act as though they were off on a picnic, skylarking about the hotel, snap-shotting one another, and playing all manner of pranks. And, of course, while they are here they own the town. Caruso draws his little caricatures for the Atlanta girls, and Atlanta men have been dazzled, in successive seasons, by such gorgeous beings as Geraldine Farrar, Alma Gluck, and Maria Barrientos—not only across the footlights of the auditorium, mind you, but at close range; as, for instance, at dances at the Driving Club, with Chinese lanterns strung on the terrace, a full moon above, and—one year—with the whole Metropolitan Orchestra playing dance music all night long!"