CHAPTER VII
A CITY BUILT OUT OF HAND
All up and down the Delaware, between Trenton and Philadelphia, the “quality folks” in olden times used to build stately homes, with broad acres at their backs and looking lordly, with their Grecian porticos, out from the high banks that command the stream. You may see some of them yet, faded and old and full of family history, most of which was not so important as it seemed to the builders. In the little towns that you pass on the trolley and the Camden and Amboy road, there is a certain Eighteenth Century somnolence, and a dingy pride of priority. They sleep on, as if it were creditable not to be busy. Bordentown, a few minutes’ ride from Trenton, sits complacent amid its memories of the Bonapartes. It is there you change for Roebling.
Roebling—the town, not the plant—to which some attention has been given, is a story in itself. It is an industrial disturbance in the quietude of a sleepy and beauteous country. It is a rattler of the dry bones of tradition, and pretty nearly the last word in corporation communities. Roebling maintains no staff of highbrow sociologists to discuss the things capital should do in order to make labor’s pathway broad and bright. There’s a town superintendent to look after things and he earns his pay.
The town of Roebling was built to help along the making of wire and the wire rope. Making good rope, it is a good town, without any fanciful notions about “welfare work.” The Delaware, flowing by in its beauty, accounts for part of this. But to the Roeblings the Delaware means plentiful water supply and river transportation. To the workmen in the big mills which lie just at the back of the town, and to their families, which grow phenomenally, it means bathing, boating, a cool breeze on stifling midsummer nights, and a panorama that never ceases to be lovely.
In both the city plants, as business grew, building followed building. A compact and populous section had grown up at Trenton. More buildings could not be crowded into the original ground space. More land was needed, and as usual in such cases, men with land to sell all along to the south of the Upper Works, saw the company’s need and had a brain storm about what the footage was worth.
The Roeblings tried a little farther down stream. But down stream didn’t mean down price. So they made a clean job of it. Ten miles down the river was a little old station called Kinkora, where the real estate infection had not appeared. There was land well up above high water, and plenty of it. The Delaware was very cheap down there, as compared with Trenton city water rates, to a concern that used as much water as all the rest of the city put together.
It was a likely place for a wire mill, but if a dozen strangers had struck Kinkora on the same evening the town would have had trouble to find beds for them all. It meant twenty miles rail travel a day for the workmen to live in Trenton. So the Roeblings decided to build. Charles G. Roebling was then alive. The new site and the planning and building of the town were his charge. But, again, they didn’t go looking for any welfare engineers. The whole job of planning plant and town alike was done in the long engineering room of the Roebling offices. At first they called the plant the Kinkora. They do yet, off and on, but the mills were a little below the station, and when the new venture was well under way, and the machinery had begun to squeeze out wire, and perhaps a hundred brick houses of various types had been erected, the place had to have a station of its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad said it was Roebling, and stamped the tickets that way. Kinkora is wearing off. It is still a sleepy little station just up the line. Between it and Roebling there are a mile or so of distance and a whole century of time.
The name “Kinkora” harks back to the year 1000, when King “Brian Boru” of Ireland lost his life at the battle of Clontarf. His palace was named “Kinkora.” In 1836 an ambitious Irishman named Rockefeller (not John D.) conceived the idea of an air line railroad from this spot where Roebling now stands to Atlantic City. In fond remembrance of Erin’s Isle he named the terminus on the Delaware “Kinkora.”
The enterprise itself died an early death.
The Roebling Company has more than 200 acres of land in the new settlement, enough, in all conscience, to accommodate as big a business as almost anyone would want to do, and houses to shelter all its workmen. If the company should ever find it good business to shake the dust of Trenton from its shoes altogether it certainly has a place to go.
From the day when the thing was decided on, no grass grew under anybody’s feet. There was sand along that bucolic and undeveloped river bank, sand that ran well back, getting more and more like loam as you left the river. It was broken and uneven. The freshets of centuries had left hollows here and hummocks there. They were levelled. The knolls—dunes they would call them along Lake Michigan—were scraped down and dumped into the swales, and the excess was thrown into a sedgy morass along the river front, to make it into solid ground and give a clean, healthy shore, which is now one of the chief charms of the place. For the sections where grass was meant to grow—for dooryards and the like—tons upon tons of “top soil” were brought in to give a fertile surface.
The mill buildings went up first, on a broad space of one hundred acres levelled off for them, and then the town began to grow. That was sixteen years ago, and it has kept on growing. Every year sees a lot of new houses, of various values, and one and all well built and comely. And in all grades they are better houses than a workman, or a mill boss either, can get anywhere else in America for the same money.
That has been the doctrine from the beginning. Charles G. Roebling said at the time something to the effect that every workingman was a free moral agent, and didn’t want to be tied to anybody’s apron-strings, that he wanted a square deal and a chance to live his own life out of business hours, and to get the worth of his money when he spent it. “We purpose,” he said, “to make a fair profit on our investment, but we can do that and still show a man a saving. And we stop there.”
It doesn’t take long to realize that the Roeblings are living up to the original schedule. The rents, the figures on all sorts of commodities at the “village store,” which sells everything from a pork chop to a piano, and the drug store, which is just as “Riker-Hegeman” as any live town could wish, are all below the current price scale in the rest of the country, by a margin sufficient to mean something to a family when they “tote up” at the year’s end.
Electric light, coal and the other things a man has to pay for in any town are charged for here, but it doesn’t take a legislative fight or a big row in the newspapers to keep the price down where a man can afford to pay it. Water is supplied free. The idea is that the man owes the company nothing but good work in return for his pay. After quitting time he’s his own boss. The company tries to make life in the town pleasant enough so that he’ll be glad to live there, and think he has a good job. And it recognizes that life has many sides.
It was in pursuance of the general thesis that when the town opened it had a hotel with a bar. “There’s no use,” they said, “in trying to make a mollycoddle out of a mill man. When he wants a drink he’s going to get it, especially the foreign born. We don’t propose to pick his drinks for him. If he wants whiskey it’s a good sight better for us that he should be able to get it here like a human being than to trail into Trenton and take a chance with the stuff that goes over the bars where a workingman drinks. The whiskey here isn’t gilt-edged, but it’s decent, and it’s worth what it costs.”
Prohibition settled the drink question, but while the cafe lasted in Roebling it kept the men from going to town to battle with the “embalming fluid,” and not showing up for the customary three days. That too was good business.
After the dirt and noise and disorder of a city street, it is like a sedative to slip from the train into the peace and the wide spaces of Roebling. The tidy station is at one side, at the other, beyond the switch tracks, the little gate-house which gives ingress to the mill enclosure—if you have the proper kind of pass. From here a trim concrete walk leads on past the ground of the plant and its fence of tall pickets, toward the river, and the town. As you go, you meet with courtesy. It is not drawing the long bow to say everybody in Roebling—outwardly at least—is civil and good natured. Just beyond the mill grounds you come upon the police office, with trig coppers who seem to have very little to do. Like the shining fire engines, which stand in the adjoining building ready for service either in town or plant, they seem to be maintained chiefly for insurance and ornament. But they are practical organizations at that. The Roebling Company learned what fire was during the war, when two of the biggest buildings in the Upper Works were destroyed.
From this point the streets lead away, broad, clean streets with the best of sidewalks, and drainage. The town has spread out now so that it looks no more like a toy city. The streets are 80 feet wide, with the exception of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, which are 100 feet wide. Trees have been planted which already make it attractive. In front of every house is a dooryard, a patch of green grass to remind a man that God made the world.
Adjoining fire and police houses, there was formerly a trim little bank whose business has expanded to such an extent that it has been enabled to move to the centre of the business section of the town in an attractive and up-to-date building of its own.
The houses, while of widely different types, are for the most part made of brick. In order to avoid fire danger, the minimum of wood is used in all the buildings of the town. The houses are all constructed on the most improved plan of sanitation and hygiene. Through the block, giving access to the back-doors, run clean alleys, wide enough to allow wagons to pass for the delivery of coal, foodstuffs and other commodities, and for the collection of waste. The company is now halting between the erection of an incinerator plant to consume the garbage for its 700 and odd homes, or a “hog farm” as part of its three or four hundred acres, which without difficulty could turn out 1,000 to 2,000 head of swine a year, and further reduce the cost of living. It is possible, too, that it may some day produce its own milk.
There is a marked difference between some of the houses first erected and those of more recent construction. At present the “bungalow” type is in great favor, since it facilitates the labor of housekeeping. More pretentious dwellings, for the men holding important positions in the plant, are sufficient to make a rent-ridden, janitor-jaded, bell-boy bossed New Yorker wonder what he is being punished for. One handsome colonial home just built for a superintendent in one of the wire mills would be a credit to any commuter town.
Always as you pass through airy Roebling you encounter some new institution built to make it seem like a regular place. There is a baseball ground which would be a credit to any city, with its tidy green grandstand and its carefully manicured diamond. The Wire Works team is now prominent in one of the State Leagues. There is a recreation building, with billiard and pool tables and the best bowling alleys that can be built. There is a spacious assembly hall, with theatre stage and a scrumptious curtain bearing a picture of the Roebling Brooklyn Bridge. The gallery is commodious. The seats are removable, leaving a ballroom of impressive size, and adjoining rooms are equipped with ranges, refrigerators and dishes for the preparation and service of suppers or of dinners great and small.
Take notice of the hotel, the boarding houses where single men live well and cheaply, of the public school, the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the dispensary. And these last are busy functionaries.
There is very little sickness in Roebling. The sanitation is studiously good, but when you are sick there they look after you, which is also “good business,” and babies are a favorite form of diversion. This is impressively true. You sense it wherever you go. There are children everywhere—good looking wholesome “kids.” And something makes them glad to live here, too.
To be a boy scout in Roebling is about as good fun as a boy could have. For a long time the company gave the boys too much. Then it woke up to the fact that half the sport of being a boy scout was to do things. So the Scouts were told if they wanted to keep the perfectly corking club house on the river bank, with its big meeting room, its open mouthed fireplace, its mounted deer heads, and banners, and books and guns and spears and swords and all the other junk the boy soul loves, they’d have to work for it. Goodness knows they do. The grounds around that shack in spring are turned up like a golf links. What they have done in the way of white birch rustic railings along the winding walks that lead to the grounds would make a Chippewa Indian sick with envy. This year they are to help build a long float from the club house to the water, to launch their canoes on.
To the medical equipment is added a hospital for contagious diseases, standing away out in the fields. And in the outskirts also is land set apart for gardens, where the millworkers have allotted plots of ground for the raising of their own vegetables. The manure from the stables, where sixty horses are kept, helps to make gardening worth while. Even to be a mule in Roebling is comfortable. There are old mules there—you see them just wandering around the paddocks, eating and growing older—that will never see thirty-five or forty again. Nobody ever will send them down the long trail. They have worked hard for the Roebling Company. It will feed them till they simply lie down and die of their own accord.
Feeding—whether mules or people—is habitual. When John A. Roebling first made rope, he had three or four men working with him. They had a table in the shop. As the business has grown, this custom has continued. Today the entire office force at the headquarters in Trenton—some 230 persons of all ranks—gets a dinner every day that for sheer quality cannot be equalled in any of the city hotels. It may be a fad to feed that whole crowd fresh yellow cream brought in every morning from the Roebling farms, but—it’s good business.
The high land on the bluff overlooking the river at Roebling is a park, with trees and benches, and a place where the band can play while the folks sit taking the air on a hot summer night. In a neat enclosure of Roebling wire, convenient to all parts of the town, are tennis courts, for general use. There is a sanitary barber shop, where five shining chairs are always full. Roebling has the best barbered lot of foreign-born workmen in America.
In a town like this are lessons for those who like to try to translate the foreigner for the good of American industry. There are those who cherish a superstition that the foreign workman in the United States lives poorly. In Roebling it is remarked that it is the foreigner who is the best customer in groceries and butcher’s meat. He buys chickens instead of beef brisket, and not one chicken, but two and three. It is he also who buys the Hood River apples and the best grape fruit.
And as for bread—you should see the bakery. “Sunny Jim” would sing to see it—clean and shining, and turning out all kinds of bakestuffs besides the big round red-blond loaves of “European bread,” which they say “has the strength” in it. The baker’s wagon, loaded to the very top of the canvas cover, goes through the town and the workers’ little children run homeward from it with two, three, four loaves altogether as big as themselves. Crescent rolls, which cost a nickel at a French bakery in New York, are sold here for two cents apiece.
So it goes in Roebling. Over on the one side are the negro quarters. They have everything anybody else has including a recreation house—and when they recreate, they just recreate.
If Roebling was an experiment, it is not so any longer. It is full of comfortable people, and in seventy years the Roebling theory as to what a workman wants and how he should be treated has never proved itself more conclusively than here. It is a suggestive fact that in all that time, save for some insignificant incidents, the Roeblings have been free from the nightmare of “labor troubles.” It may be because its workmen have nothing worth while to complain of. Every effort is made to make them comfortable without making them feel like dependents.
It is the outworking of a great business theory. In these times it is of impressive significance.