When I arrived here and came out of the railway station, which was directly across the Monongahela River from the business center, I was impressed by the huge walls of hills that arose on every hand, a great black sheer ridge rising to a height of five or six hundred feet to my right and enclosing this river, on the bosom of which lay steamboats of good size. From the station a pleasingly designed bridge of fair size led to the city beyond, and across it trundled in unbroken lines street-cars and wagons and buggies of all sizes and descriptions. The city itself was already smartly outlined by lights, a galaxy climbing the hills in every direction, and below me as I walked out upon this bridge was an agate stream reflecting the lights from either shore. Below this was another bridge, and upstream another. The whole river for a mile or more was suddenly lit to a rosy glow, a glow which, as I saw upon turning, came from the tops of some forty or fifty stacks belching a deep orange-red flame. At the same time an enormous pounding and crackling came from somewhere, as though titans were at work upon subterranean anvils. I stared and admired. I felt that I was truly adventuring into a new and strange world. I was glad now that I had not found work in Toledo or Cleveland or Buffalo.
The city beyond the river proved as interesting as the river cliffs and forges about the station. As I walked along I discovered the name of the street (Smithfield), which began at the bridge’s end and was lined with buildings of not more than three or four stories although it was one of the principal streets of the business center. At the bridge-head on the city side stood a large smoke-colored stone building, which later I discovered was the principal hotel, the Monongahela, and beyond that was a most attractive and unusual postoffice building. I came to a cross street finally (Fifth Avenue), brightly lighted and carrying unusual traffic, and turned into it. I found this central region to be most puzzlingly laid out, and did not attempt to solve its mysteries. Instead, I entered a modest restaurant in a side street. Later I hunted up a small hotel, where I paid a dollar for a room for the night. I retired, speculating as to how I should make out here. Something about the city drew me intensely. I wished I might remain for a time. The next morning I was up bright and early to look up the morning papers and find out the names of the afternoon papers. I found that there were four: the Dispatch and Times, morning papers, and the Gazette-Telegraph and Leader, afternoon. I thought them most interesting and different from those of other cities in which I had worked.
“Andy Pastor had his right hand lacerated while at work in the 23-inch mill yesterday.”
“John Kristoff had his right wrist sprained while at work in the 140-inch mill yesterday.”
“Joseph Novic is suffering from contused wounds of the left wrist received while at work in the 23-inch mill yesterday.”
“A train of hot metal, being hauled from a mixing-house to open hearth No. 2, was side-swiped by a yard engine near the 48-inch mill. The impact tilted the ladles of some of the cars and the hot metal spilled in a pool of water along the track. Antony Brosak, Constantine Czernik and Kafros Maskar were seriously wounded by the exploding metal.”
Such items arrested my attention at once; and then such names as Squirrel Hill, Sawmill Run, Moon Run, Hazelwood, Wind Gap Road, Braddock, McKeesport, Homestead, Swissvale, somehow made me wish to know more of this region.
The Dispatch was Republican, the Times Democratic. Both were evidently edited with much conservatism as to local news. I made haste to visit the afternoon newspaper offices, only to discover that they were fully equipped with writers. I then proceeded in search of a room and finally found one in Wylie Avenue, a curious street that climbed a hill to its top and then stopped. Here, almost at the top of this hill, in an old yellow stonefront house the rear rooms of which commanded a long and deep canyon or “run,” I took a room for a week. The family of this house rented rooms to several others, clerks who looked and proved to be a genial sort, holding a kind of court on the front steps of an evening.
I now turned to the morning papers, going first to the Times, which had its offices in a handsome building, one of the two or three high office buildings in the city. The city editor received me graciously but could promise nothing. At the Dispatch, which was published in a three-story building at Smithfield and Diamond streets, I found a man who expressed much more interest. He was a slender, soft-spoken, one-handed man. On very short acquaintance I found him to be shrewd and canny, gracious always, exceedingly reticent and uncommunicative and an excellent judge of news, and plainly holding his job not so much by reason of what he put into his paper as by what he kept out of it. He wanted to know where I had worked before I came to Pittsburgh, whether I had been connected with any paper here, whether I had ever done feature stuff. I described my experiences as nearly as I could, and finally he said that there was nothing now but he was expecting a vacancy to occur soon. If I could come around in the course of a week or ten days (I drooped sadly)—well, then, in three or four days, he thought he might do something for me. The salary would not be more than eighteen the week. My spirits fell at that, but his manner was so agreeable and his hope for me so keen that I felt greatly encouraged and told him I would wait a few days anyhow. My friend in Toledo had promised me that he would wire me at the first opening, and I was now expecting some word from him. This I told to this city editor, and he said: “Well, you might wait until you hear from him anyhow.” A thought of my possible lean purse did not seem to occur to him, and I marveled at the casual manner in which he assumed that I could wait.
Thereafter I roamed the city and its environs, and to my delight found it to be one of the most curious and fascinating places I had ever seen. From a stationery store I first secured a map and figured out the lay of the town. At a glance I saw that the greater part of it stretched eastward along the tongue of land that was between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, and that this was Pittsburgh proper. Across the Allegheny, on the north side, was the city of Allegheny, an individual municipality but so completely connected with Pittsburgh as to be identical with it, and connected with it by many bridges. Across the Monongahela, on the south side, were various towns: Mt. Washington, Duquesne, Homestead. I was interested especially in Homestead because of the long and bitter contest between the steel-workers and the Carnegie Company, which for six months and more in 1892 had occupied space on the front page of every newspaper in America.
Having studied my map I explored, going first across the river into Allegheny. Here I found a city built about the base of high granite hills or between ridges in hollows called “gaps” or “runs” with a street or car-line clambering and twisting directly over them. A charming park and boulevard system had been laid out, with the city hall, a public market and a Carnegie public library as a center. The place had large dry-goods and business houses.
On another day I crossed to the south side and ascended by an inclined plane, such as later I discovered to be one of the transportation features of Pittsburgh, the hill called Mt. Washington, from the top of which, walking along an avenue called Grand View Boulevard which skirted the brow of the hill, I had the finest view of a city I have ever seen. In later years I looked down upon New York from the heights of the Palisades and the hills of Staten Island; on Rome from the Pincian Gardens; on Florence from San Miniato; and on Pasadena and Los Angeles from the slopes of Mt. Lowe; but never anywhere have I seen a scene which impressed me more than this: the rugged beauty of the mountains, which encircle the city, the three rivers that run as threads of bright metal, dividing it into three parts, the several cities joined as one, their clambering streets presenting a checkered pattern emphasized here and there by the soot-darkened spires of churches and the walls of the taller and newer and cleaner office buildings.
As in most American cities of any size, the skyscraper was just being introduced and being welcomed as full proof of the growth and wealth and force of the city. No city was complete without at least one: the more, of course, the grander.
Pittsburgh had a better claim to the skyscraper as a commercial necessity than any other American city that I know. The tongue of land which lies between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, very likely not more than two or three square miles in extent, is still the natural heart of the commercial life for fifty, a hundred miles about. Here meet the three large rivers, all navigable. Here, again, the natural runs and gaps of the various hills about, as well as the levels which pursue the banks of the streams and which are the natural vents or routes for railroad lines, street-cars and streets, come to a common center. Whether by bridges from Allegheny, the south bank of the Ohio or the Monongahela, or along the shores of the Allegheny or Monongahela within the city of Pittsburgh itself, all meet somewhere in this level tongue; and here, of necessity, is the business center. So without the tall building, I cannot see how one-tenth of the business which would and should be normally transacted here would ever come about.
CHAPTER LX
Barring two or three tall buildings, the city of Pittsburgh was then of a simple and homelike aspect. A few blackened church spires, a small dark city hall and an old market-place, a long stretch of blast furnaces, black as night, and the lightly constructed bridges over the rivers, gave it all an airy grace and charm.
Since the houses up here were very simple, mostly working-men’s cottages, and the streets back followed the crests of hills twisting and winding as they went and providing in consequence the most startling and effective views of green hills and mountains beyond, I decided that should I be so fortunate as to secure work I would move over here. It would be like living in a mountain resort, and most inexpensively.
I descended and took a car which followed the Monongahela upstream to Homestead, and here for the first time had a view of that enormous steel plant which only recently (June to December, 1892) had played such a great part in the industrial drama of America. The details of the quarrel were fairly fresh in my mind: how the Carnegie Steel Company had planned, with the technicalities of a wage-scale readjustment as an excuse, to break the power of the Amalgamated Steel Workers, who were becoming too forceful and who were best organized in their plant, and how the Amalgamated, resenting the introduction of three hundred Pinkerton guards to “protect” the plant, had attacked them, killing several and injuring others, and so permitting the introduction of the State militia, which speedily and permanently broke the power of the strikers. They could only wait then and starve, and so they had waited and starved for six months, when they finally returned to work, such of them as would be received. When I reached there in April, 1894, the battle was already fifteen months past, but the feeling was still alive. I did not then know what it was about this town of Homestead that was so depressing, but in the six months of my stay here I found that it was a compound of a sense of defeat and sullen despair. The men had not forgotten. Even then the company was busy, and had been for months, importing Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, to take the places of the ousted strikers. Whole colonies were already here, housed under the most unsatisfactory conditions, and more were coming. Hence the despair of those who had been defeated.
Along the river sprawled for a quarter of a mile or more the huge low length of the furnaces, great black bottle-like affairs with rows of stacks and long low sheds or buildings paralleling them, sheds from which came a continuous hammering and sputtering and the glow of red fire. The whole was shrouded by a pall of gray smoke, even in the bright sunshine. Above the plant, on a slope which rose steeply behind it, were a few moderately attractive dwellings grouped about two small parks, the trees of which were languishing for want of air. Behind and to the sides of these were the spires of several churches, those soporifics against failure and despair. Turning up side streets one found, invariably, uniform frame houses, closely built and dulled by smoke and grime, and below, on the flats behind the mill, were cluttered alleys so unsightly and unsanitary as to shock me into the belief that I was once more witnessing the lowest phases of Chicago slum-life, the worst I had ever seen. The streets were mere mud-tracks. Where there were trees (and there were few) they were dwarfed and their foliage withered by a metallic fume which was over all. Though the sun was bright at the top of the hill, down here it was gray, almost cloudy, at best a filtered dull gold haze.
The place held me until night. I browsed about its saloons, of which there was a large number, most of them idle during the drift of the afternoon. The open gates of the mill held my interest also, for through them I could see furnaces, huge cranes, switching engines, cars of molten iron being hauled to and fro, and mountains of powdered iron ore and scrap iron piled here and there awaiting the hour of new birth in the smelting vats. When the sun had gone down, and I had watched a shift of men coming out with their buckets and coats over their arms, and other hundreds entering in a rush, I returned to the city with a sense of the weight and breadth and depth of huge effort. Here bridges and rail and plate steel were made for all the world. But of all these units that dwelt and labored here scarce a fraction seemed even to sense a portion of the meaning of all they did. I knew that Carnegie had become a multi-millionaire, as had Phipps and others, and that he was beginning to give libraries, that Phipps had already given several floral conservatories, and that their “lobbies” in Congress were even then bartering for the patronage of the government on their terms; but the poor units in these hovels at Homestead—what did they know?
On another day I explored the east end of Pittsburgh, which was the exclusive residence section of the city and a contrast to such hovels and deprivations as I had witnessed at Homestead and among the shacks across the Monongahela and below Mt. Washington. Never in my life, neither before nor since, in New York, Chicago or elsewhere, was the vast gap which divides the rich from the poor in America so vividly and forcefully brought home to me. I had seen on my map a park called Schenley, and thinking that it might be interesting I made my way out a main thoroughfare called (quite appropriately, I think) Fifth Avenue, lined with some of the finest residences of the city. Never did the mere possession of wealth impress me so keenly. Here were homes of the most imposing character, huge, verandaed, tree-shaded, with immense lawns, great stone or iron or hedge fences and formal gardens and walks of a most ornate character. It was a region of well-curbed, well-drained and well-paved thoroughfares. Even the street-lamps were of a better design than elsewhere, so eager was a young and democratic municipality to see that superior living conditions were provided for the rich. There were avenues lined with well-cropped trees, and at every turn one encountered expensive carriages, their horses jingling silver or gold-gilt harness, their front seats occupied by one or two footmen in livery, while reclining was Madam or Sir, or both, gazing condescendingly upon the all too comfortable world about them.
