Coast to Coast (6 page)

T
his is the undeniable motto of Pittsburgh, the steel city, which stands at the point where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers join to
form the Ohio; and yet it is one of the most agreeably exciting places in America. I had always thought of Pittsburgh as the smokiest, dirtiest, least enlightened of American cities, a metropolis of industry built upon coal, enmeshed by railway lines and shrouded in gloom. So I first drove over the Pennsylvania hills to Pittsburgh with a sense of virtuous foreboding, dreading its purposeful grime, but morally secure in the knowledge that it was a place I ought to see.

But, astonishingly, things had changed there. We entered the city along a magnificent dual highway, broad and sweeping, embellished with cross-overs and tunnels and elaborate signs; along the banks of the muddy Monongahela, across a cantilever bridge, and into the famous Golden Triangle—the small business centre of great wealth that is the heart of Pittsburgh. We gazed around us incredulously. Far from being smoky, the atmosphere was of a translucent brilliance. Wherever we looked there seemed to be bright new office blocks and growing gardens, and the whole place was bustling cheerily, like a little Manhattan. On the river, towboats chugged by with the washing fluttering. A new building in the centre of the district was sheathed entirely in aluminium; there was a gay new hotel, with flowers in the lobby windows; and a friendly negro carrying a statuette of a baseball player (he had just been awarded it for a good season’s play) directed us to our destination. It can be a dreary business, arriving at an American city, weary from the traffic, dazed with the noise, and confronted by tired and apathetic informants; but Pittsburgh gave us an invigorating welcome.

This was a sign of the times, for the city has undergone a deliberate, self-imposed transformation. There has been a movement among its citizens to change its entire aspect and personality, banishing ugliness and tiredness, substituting colour, pleasure and better health. To jaded English ears this plan may sound a little on the winsome side, but the campaign has been conducted ruthlessly, as befits the place. The Chamber of Commerce says characteristically: “For years Pittsburghers said to themselves about their city ‘It may not be a good place to live, but it’s a good place to make money’. You can still make your money in Pittsburgh, but now you can live the good life here, too.” This is not all brag, and the story of the changes is a remarkable one; for coercion, legislation and strict planning were all necessary in a place profoundly dedicated to the principles of capitalism.

To begin with, the Pittsburghers rid themselves of smoke, with the advice of scientists of the Mellon Institute. (You cannot escape the Mellon steel family in Pittsburgh, and if you are wise you will not make much fun of its ubiquity.) Fifteen years ago life in Pittsburgh was almost
unbearable. The smoke was appalling, tainting everything, so that there was little relish in living. Throughout the States it was known as “The Smoky City” and when its name was mentioned people would screw up their faces in distaste. The smoke came not only from a myriad factories and foundries, but from houses with coal fires, trains with steam locomotives, steam tugs and countless varied smoky machines. Almost all has now been eliminated. Fuels that made much smoke were banned by law, first in the city of Pittsburgh, then in the surrounding districts. There was naturally strong opposition. Some of the most vociferous came from laundry operators, who foresaw a serious drop in business, and sometimes insisted upon maintaining their own small belching chimneys, partly as a protest of principle, partly because (presumably) even a little laundry chimney dirties a few shirts. The railroads, after a show of reluctance, agreed to convert their trains almost entirely to diesel; to their secret delight, I am told, for they had wanted to make the change for years but had been prevented because the custom of coal-producers was so important to them. Stern penalties were imposed upon those who violated the smoke laws, and remarkably soon the place began to look up.

Indeed, some of the effects of the reforms were miraculous. Pittsburgh now gets 60 per cent more sunshine than it used to, and 60 per cent less dust and soot falls on the city. It is warmer, too, for the old horrible pall sometimes reduced the temperature by as much as 10 degrees. The Chamber of Commerce claims that despite the forlorn rearguard actions of the laundrymen, Pittsburghers have saved themselves an annual 41 dollars per head in laundry bills. The city’s air is now sharp and clean; it is queer, like examining a half-cleaned picture, to look about you now in Pittsburgh and see, defacing old buildings, degrading trees, clinging to crevices and corners, blackening bridges and staling factories, engriming all the shores of the Ohio River, the dingy sediment left behind by the smoke.

Their first battle won, the reformers turned to the rivers. Pittsburgh has always lived under the threat of floods. Year after year, when the rivers rose, the low-lying parts of the city were inundated. Because of this menace, people hesitated to bring new industries to Pittsburgh; and because houses were rotted and damaged by the water, the health of the community was affected. To put an end to all this a committee of businessmen, industrialists and politicians resolved to create a series of controlling dams. Eight of them have been built, and the city is now said to be all but free of serious floods. This is the kind of claim which will almost certainly be followed, within a year or two, by a flood of unparalleled
dimensions; but on paper, at least, the system can lop 10 feet off the crest of any future inundation. The dams stand away from the city, in country backwaters and among quiet hills, high on the tributary rivers that feed the Allegheny and the Monongohela, and they have good American country names—Tionesta, Mahoning, Tygart and Conemaugh, Loyalhanna and Cooked Creek.

Next, Pittsburgh rejuvenated its communications. Its engineers built a great highway into the city from the west; it is twenty-seven miles long, and is so loaded with every kind of improvement and safety device that its cost would probably provide a complete road system for (say) Bhutan. They built another road to connect Pittsburgh with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, one of the great highways of the world, which starts near Philadelphia and crosses the entire State. This mighty thoroughfare thus becomes a direct approach to Pittsburgh from New York and the east. They built a new airport west of the city, with what Pittsburghers like to describe as “the world’s largest, most modern, most beautiful and most functional terminal building”. Functional it undoubtedly is, for besides places for aeroplanes to land it has its own hotel, a cinema, a night club, a couple of beauty shops and several restaurants. Six airlines run services through it. (Pittsburgh is also served by no fewer than seven railways, enough to daunt the most zealous of Socialist doctrinaires, and its river services handle more freight annually than either the Suez or the Panama Canal.)

Next, with smoke cleared, floods minimized, and access made easy, the reformers changed the face of the city. Huge areas of slums and ruinous business buildings were demolished. At the tip of the Golden Triangle, where the three rivers meet, a park was laid out; to complete it, a couple of big river bridges have been demolished and rebuilt, for they were rather in the way. Nearby, in an area that used to be grey and unwholesome, a series of skyscrapers were erected, rather in the style of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. They are surrounded and interspersed by green areas, with trees and fountains; and though they are architecturally uninspired, they look clean and honest, neither of which commendation (I am assured) could always be applied to the old Pittsburgh. In the centre of the business district some more arresting structures have been built. One, forty-one stories high, is coated with stainless steel, and is starkly and powerfully beautiful. Another is faced entirely in aluminium, a circumstance which may be connected with the fact that it is the headquarters of the Aluminum Company of America. On one side of it is a tall glass-house, five stories high, forming a lobby; trees grow inside this massive conservatory, and a variety of shrubbery,
and old retainers, watering the plants, look as if they might easily tip their hats and tell us we must not miss the monkey-puzzle tree, down there by the Richmond gate, past the tea-rooms. Just around the corner, no fewer than twenty-one separate properties have been bought and pulled down to make way for a little park among the skyscrapers. It has trees, an ornamental fountain, and statuary, and underneath it is a garage for 900 cars. (The unwearying publicists, in a moment of lyricism, describe it as “a green oasis for pavement-weary Pittsburghers”). Farther uptown, the planners have completed even more grandiose improvements. In a former slum district they have built a mammoth “civic and cultural centre”. It has an auditorium with a retractable circular roof, to be slid back on summer evenings; an exhibition hall; a concert-hall; and a theatre; and around its perimeter have arisen covies of tall apartment blocks, looking like thin slices of hard cheese.

But all these are simply material improvements. The creators of this new Pittsburgh are determined to achieve a psychological revolution too. They want to instil a new civic pride into Pittsburghers, starting with the children; and in this, alas! in their excesses of local patriotism, they sometimes display an unhappy boastfulness. The American is always at his most arrogant when he is talking of local achievements (and at his silliest, too; a man in Philadelphia once pointed out a bridge to me with the proud if unlikely claim: “In 1928 that bridge there was the second largest single-span bridge in the western hemisphere—
of
its
kind
!”). The educators of Pittsburgh seem to be cherishing a generation dedicated to this kind of pompous and sententious complacency. I saw some booklets produced for Pittsburgh children positively bursting with incentives to jingoism. Sometimes Miss Willard (an imaginary schoolmistress) takes her charges to the summit of a neighbouring hill and discusses the city lying at their feet, paying tribute to the work of the committee of “outstanding leaders” which is making Pittsburgh bigger, better, more beautiful, richer, grander and holier than anywhere else on the face of the earth. Once she foists on the children a list of twenty industrial activities in which the sheer bigness of Pittsburgh is unexcelled. Sometimes an odious child called Sandra intervenes with such remarks as: “And don’t forget that all these projects will make Pittsburgh a more beautiful and convenient place in which to live!” This is not a phenomenon peculiar to Pittsburgh. The parochial pride of Americans is intrusive everywhere; it does little to spread the spread of uniformity, as its advocates claim, but merely transforms (often enough) the pathetic into the irritating.

Anyway, despite a boorish reputation, Pittsburgh need not rely for its
prestige upon the bi-annual production of ball-bearings. It has a fine symphony orchestra, good libraries, a magnificent medical centre, and many pioneer research institutions. Its annual Carnegie Exhibition is the oldest and largest regular art festival in America. The Mellon Institute has played a brilliant part on the development of American industry, and the design of its classical palace is so infused with intellectual symbolism (even the lift doors have their significances) that in future centuries the seers may well abandon the Pyramid of Cheops, and base their unhinged prognostications upon its measurements and hidden meanings. There is a famous university in Pittsburgh, housed in a skyscraper, and called disconcertingly “The Cathedral of Learning”. There are six art institutes, three theatres, four daily papers and four television stations. The Salk Vaccine was discovered there. The climate of thought is lively, invigorating, and sometimes distinguished; remarkable to consider, when we remember that 200 years ago Pittsburgh was simply a river fort, visited only by soldiers, trappers and adventurers, with scarcely a book and hardly a breath of Symbolism among the lot of them.

So I recommend Pittsburgh, the old Smoky City, to all despondent city-dwellers; to the fatalistic, the irresolute, and distrusters of change; to young men looking for causes; and above all to Londoners, who have suffered so long from fog, grumps and traffic, and who deserve a sunnier, more spacious future (as Sandra would say).

O
nly 400 miles to the east of Pittsburgh (a trifling distance by American standards) lies the island of Nantucket, the old seat of the whaling kings, and a place of diametrically opposing temperament. “See what a real corner of the world it occupies,” wrote Melville in
Moby
Dick.
“How it stands there, away offshore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse.” Nantucket is still a little spiritual kingdom of its own. It is as spare and windswept as ever, far out at sea, its light the first reminder to Atlantic liners that they are in American waters.

To get there you take passage in an elderly ferry steamer sailing out of New Bedford, on the Massachusetts mainland, and spend a long few hours sipping coffee from cardboard cups in the saloon, and watching the line of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard slip by outside. All manner of odd objects are conveyed on this old steamship, crated firmly or veiled in canvas. Cows are slung aboard, and cars, and gallons of milk. If you are travelling in winter, there is a throng of people in heavy
coats and mufflers, returning to the island; all knowing one another, and stopping each other in passage-ways, and swopping gossip on deck. In the corner of the big saloon the manager of the Pacific Bank may be deep in serious conversation with a prosperous burgher, and passers-by will step carefully, knowing that big money is being discussed. A few commercial travellers gather heartily at the coffee-bar to discuss the market for dish-cloths or blotting-paper. Rugged local residents, scarcely dressed by Dior, examine with detailed interest the strangers in gossamer shoes and New York hats. The Nantucketers, islanders by temper as by environment, talk of people from the mainland as “visitors from America”.

The ship arrives, after about five hours’ steaming, in the harbour of the town of Nantucket, perhaps the most perfectly preserved eighteenth-century town in the whole of America. From this elegant little port, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the world’s greatest whaling fleets sailed for the Antarctic. Their crews were familiar with half the world. Often they would water in the Pacific islands, or visit the China coast, or even sail to London for stores and equipment. Many a Nantucket attic contains faded daguerrotypes of Fijian chiefs or magnificent mandarins. Immense fortunes were made by these expeditions, and a number of families, enriched and intermingled, achieved a local hegemony, remaining, to this day, among the social arbiters of Nantucket affairs. Few socially conscious Nantucket households are unable to claim relationship with one or another of these families, and their mansions still dominate Main Street. Most of them are of handsome white clapboard. Three of the finest are of red brick, splendid Georgian town houses, with white classical ornamentation and rich front doors. These three houses, identical and adjacent, once all belonged to a single family, so that within a few hundred yards there were three separate, teeming colonies of Starbucks. There is another fine red Georgian building in the cobbled main square of the town. It is the Pacific Club, once the haunt of the whaling captains, who sat and drank and played cribbage in its low-ceilinged rooms between their prodigous voyages to the other side of the earth. It was once the office of a shipowner, and on its lintel are inscribed the names of his vessels,
Independence
and
Hiawatha
—two of the ships involved in the Boston tea party. They still play cribbage at the Pacific Club, and among the company there is one man—only one—who remembers going a’whaling.

I have a cousin living on Nantucket, a widowed lady whose house was built at the end of the seventeenth century in the original Nantucket settlement, to the west. Early in the i8oo’s the villagers moved to the
site of the present town, where there was better water and a more satisfactory harbour, and my cousin’s house was moved with them. It is a pretty cottage faced with shingles, with old-fashioned open fireplaces and glass panes in the doors of the rooms (the original Nantucketers were Quakers, and these little internal windows were designed to play the part of chastity belts: my cousin covers them with chintz curtains). She is keenly interested in things genealogical, and seems to be related to most of the Nantucket worthies. On the walls of her drawing-room two family trees hang. One, an orthodox up-and-down tree, concerns her English family, and ends with my mother. The other is a characteristic Nantucket tree, semicircular instead of vertical, so that lateral descent may be traced, intricate quirks of relationship, avuncular connexions and obscure cousinships. From this lady I learnt a good deal of the curiously inbred and introspective quality of Nantucket, an aloofness that must baffle and irritate the many tourists who visit the place in summer.

Women dominate the life of Nantucket (perhaps they always have, since the days when most men of virility and character were away with the whaling fleets). The most famous native of Nantucket was a woman. She was Maria Mitchell, the astronomer (closely related, I need hardly say, to my cousin), the daughter of a Quaker bank cashier, who studied astronomy under her father’s tuition, discovered a comet, and became world-famous as one of the first women to practise her profession with distinction. Honours were showered upon her, she is portrayed in the Hall of Fame at New York University, she became Professor of Astronomy at Vassar, and died an unmarried celebrity.

The memory of this remarkable person strongly pervades the intellectual life of Nantucket, for in her memory there was founded a Maria Mitchell Association. It has an excellent little scientific library and an observatory, and is run chiefly by women. For many years now it has maintained a resident astronomer, and when I was there the office was occupied by another distinguished woman, Miss Margaret Harwood. Though she was near the age for retirement, she was a gay and school-girlish sort of person, who shoved her felt hat anyhow on the back of her head‚ and would talk into the small hours if the opportunity arose. She lived in a charming little house next door to the observatory, exchanging data with men of science all over the world, and observing from Nantucket a particular portion of the Milky Way allotted to her by international agreement.

She was not the only prominent professional woman in the place. I was told that the leading lawyer was a woman, and so was one of the most
successful real estate brokers. The only hotel open all the year was owned and managed by two sisters; one of the two papers was edited by a woman; and the new airport (this must surely be unique) was managed. by a woman. Everywhere in Nantucket women seemed to be in the ascendant, and I shall always associate the island with the conversation of intelligent women, just as one thinks of London in terms of taxis and good suits.

My cousin took me for a trip around the island. We were driven by an elderly man with a passionate interest in matters of descent and relationship, so between them my two guides seemed qualified to answer any conceivable query on Nantucket that was sufficiently compounded of the insular and the heraldic. They took me first to a lonely house on the moors, a few miles from the town, to show me some heather. Heather is not indigenous to the United States, and in most parts is regarded as a sort of mystical fancy of legend, like the phœnix or the Holy Grail. In Nantucket, however, some time during the last century, some heather plants accidentally arrived from Britain with a consignment of fir trees, and in a sheltered corner of the island they took root and spread moderately. Their presence was discovered months afterwards, and kept a secret. It became a distinct social asset to know where the heather grew, and a club took existence around the knowledge. To this day the location of the wild heather is not known to many, but at this solitary house on the uplands various species had been cultivated, and grew wanly, not with the splendid flourish of heather at home, but with a hangdog, apologetic air, as if they were doing the best they could, but were homesick for Scotland. The house was shuttered, for the occupants lived there only in summer; it looked cold and inhospitable, and a few slates from the roof had been blown off by the mighty winds that sweep in from the ocean.

Later my guides pointed out to me a moorland ridge beyond which, they said, was “the hidden forest”. Nantucket is an almost treeless island, a lump of land rising bare-backed from the sea; but it appears that at this place there is a sizeable wood. Again the islanders have done their best to keep it secret, so that its isolation will not be disturbed by droves of tourists in the summer. No road reaches the trees, and they are well hidden down in the hollow, generally allowing Nantucket people to be alone there when they wish to commune with their spirits of seclusion. Poor souls, they are annually offended by the influx of holiday visitors, larger each year. The previous summer’s batch had been grosser than ever; it evidently came from the worst quarters of Philadelphia (where the Nantucket authorities had inadvertently bought
advertising space in a peculiarly unsuitable newspaper). “All they did last summer,” one dignified lady complained, “was stand about at the corners of streets,
talking
.” It seemed a harmless sort of tripperism, but was doubtless galling to the energetic islanders.

Nantucket is, of course, almost part and parcel of the ocean; as much in league with the waters as Venice, its very buildings seasoned with tar and the salt winds. There is a fine museum commemorating its whaling days. It is full of bits of ships and jaws of whales; the great deck ovens which they used to reduce the whale blubber to oil; pictures of whalers and sea tragedies (almost an entire whaling fleet was once lost in the ice); gewgaws from distant countries; family trees and logbooks and harpoon spears. There is a fascinating account kept by the wife of a whaling skipper of the arrival of her first child, born at sea at some improbable and uncomfortable latitude; the crew seemed to have treated her very delicately. There are programmes of entertainments mounted by the crews of ships at sea—the first act of
Othello
was staged by one whaler with particular success. A letter from a skipper, in wire-like handwriting, describes a Christmas celebration, when four Nantucket ships met by arrangement in far southern waters, and had an agreeable time. There are cases devoted to scrimshaw, which many consider to be the only important indigenous folk art, Indian handicraft excepted, to have come out of America. Scrimshaw is the sailor’s practice of carving bone and ivory, especially whales’ teeth, into intricate patterns and objects. The museum has innumerable pretty specimens, from walking sticks with knobbly heads to dainty needle cases and birdcages. A favourite product was the ornamented busk used to support the front of a nineteenth-century corset. One of these is inscribed with the lines:

I wanted to buy a model of a clipper ship, and asked my guides if they knew of any for sale on the island. They replied that, oddly enough, there lived on Nantucket a maker of ship models generally considered
to be the best in America, if not in the world; and they directed me to his home. His name is Charles Sayle, and he lives in a small house near the harbour. In the great days of Nantucket that low-lying area of the town was not much in demand among the wealthier sea-captains. Lately it has acquired favour, and there are a number of colourful small houses near the waterfront. Mr. Sayle’s is distinctive because in his garden there is an enormous iron anchor, rescued from a mudbank and carried there by a group of toiling friends. He is a former Gloucester fisherman, like the Yankee watchman, who sailed for many years in schooners and knows much about seamanship. He has a big black bushy beard, and wears sweaters and boots. His workshop is a jumble of half-finished ship models, plans, books, pictures and tools, and he sits on a high stool working with minute implements on infinitesimal pieces of material. When I visited him he was making a model of a fishing boat, four or five inches long, but several other uncompleted models were near at hand. One was a magnificent clipper ship, mastless yet, but already full of grace. He works on a ship when he feels inclined. Sometimes his mood directs him towards a little dory, sometimes to a majestic ocean vessel; and he builds them much as a shipyard builds a real ship. He works from shipbuilders’ plans and from published details of sailing ships (he found especially valuable some publications of the Maritime Museum at Greenwich), and he reckons that one of his models takes him as long to build as the original ship took at the shipyard. His prices are high, for much work goes into his exquisitely finished models, but he is booked up for months in advance, with orders from many parts of America and several places abroad. Mr. Sayle uses a wide variety of woods. The little model whales which he carves as household ornaments have all been made from supplies of ebony retrieved from the wreck of a ship off the island. The waters of Nantucket are treacherous, and there have been countless wrecks; those near the shore have mostly been emptied of their cargoes, but there are sure to be many farther out to sea that contain undiscovered treasures.

There used to be a little railway on Nantucket (its rolling stock ended their days in the war, I believe, helping to serve the American Army at the port of Bordeaux). We followed the course of its track to the eastern extremity of the island, and stood on the shore to look out over the Atlantic. It is a proud boast of the Nantucketers that there is no land between Siasconset, on their eastern coast, and the distant shore of Spain. Indeed, my guides seemed quite moved by the fact, as we stood looking out to sea; partly, perhaps, because of the perpetual golden glitter of Spain, so magical to consider in unfriendly climates, and partly
because no native of Nantucket seems able to look upon the sea without emotion. It plays so intimate a part in all their lives. The bank manager, if you chance to see him on the returning steamer, seems perfectly at home among the rigging as he discusses stock yields and bank-reserve requirements; and even the astronomer told me quite casually of the evening when a hurricane, storming in from the ocean, ripped the dome off her observatory.