The Golden Dream (6 page)

Outwardly, Hudson seems to present a solid, conservative front, with citizens toiling one for all and all for one for the betterment of the little community. Actually, the town is sharply divided within itself. The north side of town, for example, is the most desirable, with the east side of East-West Road coming next. (The two main
thoroughfares, East-West Road and North-South Road, come together at the village green.) No one who is anybody would live in the south or the west part of town. As in many small towns, there is another wide social gulf between the men who belong to the Rotary Club and the men who belong to Kiwanis. “Rotary always attracts the bankers and the upper-management men,” says one resident. “Kiwanis is for shopkeepers.” It is impossible to belong to both. The Lions occupy a social level between Rotary and Kiwanis. There had always been a rift between the pupils at the public school and the day students who attended Western Reserve Academy, and when, not long ago, in an effort to be modern-minded, a Montessori school was established, it created a third division. The Akron Firestones helped endow it and sent their children there, and it became very chic to serve on the board of the Montessori school. Soon, however, along Hudson's thriving gossip grapevine word spread that the school was being used for other purposes and that its rooms had from time to time become the scene of after-hours extramarital carryings-on. Police interest was aroused and then for some reason faded. The school, meanwhile, became the target of teen-age vandals, of whom Hudson seemed to have more than its share.

Perhaps when a town such as Hudson becomes so enisled, so encapsulated, so inverted, so smugly proud of its architecture and unusual history, it loses all sight of reality. While maintaining its dreamlike “character,” it begins to live the dream. How else can one account for the things that seem to go so wrong in enclaves like this? Why, for example, when a drug rehabilitation program called Head North was instituted for local high school students, did students from the third and fourth grades of the elementary school show up? Why did a respectable executive start painting murals on vans? Why don't Hudson people pay their bills? Why did an elegant “piping party,” with Scottish bagpipers, end up with guests drunkenly trying to peer under the pipers' kilts? There has even been some odd municipal behavior. Though Hudson is known as a fiscally conservative, even tight-fisted, town—and a town where there are no buildings more than three stories tall—why did the town fathers splurge not long ago on an expensive piece of firefighting equipment with a snorkle that would extend eleven stories into the air?

Is it possible that living in a community that is too perfect, too controlled, can inflict a kind of paranoia on its citizens? Perhaps, in a town where everybody lives like everybody else, one tends to feel
like everyone else—anonymous—and people start to wonder who they are. One former resident of Hudson describes it as “a little like living in colonial Williamsburg, or Disneyland. I began to feel as though I had to get away to summer camp or something, to start making bird feeders and lanyards.” Perhaps, in a community where everything is too rigidly standardized, where there is so little diversity, where there are no real problems, artificial or at least synthetic problems—such as drugs—must be created. In order to create the racial balance that it wanted, for example, Hudson's Montessori school had to import black students from Twinsburg. They have not done too well.

Perhaps it is dangerous to overidentify with a place, its history, its tradition, its architecture. When Levittown, Long Island, was first developed a number of years ago, from a handful of floor plans that were reversed from block to block, it was cheerfully predicted that Levittown would one day be a slum. But this has not happened. Over the years, the once stupefying sameness of Levittown houses has all but disappeared, as Levittown home owners have added to their houses, individualized them with landscaping, knocked down walls and added pools and patios. The “planned” look of Levittown is gone and, today, Levittown is a pleasant, prosperous middle-class suburb where many of the original owners still live and have raised their families.

While Levittown looked to the future, Hudson looks to the past. And the pretty little town—perfect in every detail that meets the eye, a little jewel—has been so admired that the experiment is being tried elsewhere. Eight miles west of Hudson is the little town of Peninsula, which, during Prohibition, was where all the local brothels were. Peninsula has old houses too, which had become run down. Now Peninsula is being restored, renovated, redecorated, and New Englandized—with quaint little Old World shops (a glass blower's shop, for example)—under the supervision of a young interior decorator whose work has found much favor with members of the Firestone family. The object is to turn Peninsula into another Hudson. Already people are saying, “Isn't it cute?”

But at least anything is better, as they say in Hudson, than living in Cleveland, a city that has become virtually unlivable—or Akron, for that matter. In Hudson, the trees are big and leafy, the fields are green and rolling, the houses are freshly painted, and the air is sweet.

Today, among other disasters in faraway Cleveland, the Republic
Steel Company throws out iron oxide particles from its great smokestacks in such quantity that an entire stretch of Interstate 77, for miles around the intersection of 480, has been stained a bright, angry red.

Poor Cleveland.

5

Company Town

When the residents of Indian Hill—which, though some would argue the point, is generally conceded to be Cincinnati's most elegant suburban address—were meeting a few years ago to discuss plans for a new village church (Protestant Episcopal), it was assumed that there would be the usual heated arguments over design, choice of building materials, interior details, landscaping, and so on. To everyone's surprise, the proposed plans for the new church were quickly approved, with no serious objections from anyone.

Next on the agenda came the matter of the church burial ground, and suddenly the meeting was in an uproar. To some people it was inconceivable that a new cemetery should even be considered. As one resident put it, “We already
have
a cemetery. Everyone who is anyone has
always
been buried at Spring Grove.”

Spring Grove Cemetery, located many miles from Indian Hill in a not particularly fashionable part of town, is one of Cincinnati's most enduring symbols. Furthermore, it is not a symbol of death but a symbol of substance and permanence. The reluctance to supplement—or, God forfend, part with—Spring Grove Cemetery is not an example of this conservative city's unwillingness to change, either. It is more an example of Cincinnati's fierce insistence on preserving the things it considers beautiful and unique and redolent of tradition.

Spring Grove was conceived as much more than a cemetery. It was to be a botanical and ornithological garden, complete with
lakes, ponds, winding lanes, hilltop vistas, and all manner of trees and flowering shrubbery. English nightingales and other exotic birds were imported for Spring Grove (only the waterfowl survived), and the vast acreage was laid out with the attention that might have been given to a great park. The imposing obelisks and mausoleums of granite and marble are arranged like pieces of monumental sculpture. In spring and summer, when Spring Grove is at its pruned and flowering best, it is one of the city's sights that Cincinnatians take out-of-town visitors to see.

Just as the city's famous Union Terminal, with its vaulting Art Deco façade and fountained avenue of approach, was designed to inform the arriving passenger that he was coming to a Very Important City, Spring Grove was designed to remind the departing Cincinnatian that he was leaving a Very Special Place. Within Spring Grove, there are divisions of class and money that are just as strictly maintained as within the city beyond. Old wealth is contained in one section, newer money in another. The city's German burghers, who were among the early Cincinnati settlers, have their own place, the German Protestants carefully separated from the German Catholics, as they were in life. The mausoleums of the best families have the hilltops with the best views, while modest graves of ordinary folk are confined to the less conspicuous slopes. The conscientious zoning of Spring Grove makes it quite literally a suburb for the departed.

Somewhat like “Proper Bostonians,” with whom they are sometimes compared, the residents of Cincinnati are often called “The Serene Cincinnatians,” and nowhere in the city can the serenity be better sensed than along the shaded gravel pathways of Spring Grove or along the dark, narrow, and spooky lanes that wind wealthily through Indian Hill. Of course, some things ruffle Cincinnati's composure
slightly
—such as when outsiders occasionally confuse it with Cleveland, or liken Indian Hill to Shaker Heights. As far as Cincinnatians are concerned, there is Cincinnati, and then there is the rest of the state. It also irks Cincinnatians when people—especially Easterners—mix Cincinnati up with Keokuk, Peoria, Muncie, or any other sprawling Middle Western metropolis. Cincinnati does not sprawl. It sits, sedately and complacently, in the basin that seems to have been carved out for it at the riverport, surrounded by green hills. Cincinnati, furthermore, does not like to think of itself as Middle Western. “I might call
Omaha
Middle Western,” says one resident, “but after all, we border on
Pennsylvania. Would you call Pennsylvania part of the Middle West?” Emotionally, Cincinnati feels much closer to New York and Europe than it does to Chicago. And, next to clerks at Fifth Avenue stores who have difficulty spelling “Cincinnati” and routinely add an extra
t
when Cincinnatians use their New York charge accounts, the people who annoy Cincinnatians the most are those who telephone from the East and say, “What time is it out there?” “The same as in New York,” is the tart reply. “We have always been on Eastern time.” (Some forty miles west of Cincinnati, to be sure, the country goes on Central time.) If “serenity” can be envisioned mixed with a certain amount of edgy, chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness, that would seem to sum up the city's overall mood.

Nowadays, with Union Station closed and obsolete—while the city struggles to find some use for the building, which is considered an architectural prize—the commonest approach to Cincinnati is from the airport. And to the first-time visitor, the physical appearance of the city often comes as a distinct surprise. All at once, around a hilltop curve and through a deep cut in the highway, the city's skyline presents itself, across a series of graceful bridges, as a cluster of solid, yet oddly delicate, spires and towers. The first thing one notices is that there are relatively few new high-rise buildings of steel and glass. The Cincinnati skyline has the appearance of having been there a good long time, which much of it has; it has a finished look. No booms from construction derricks slash across the sky. Cincinnati has had most of this skyline, pretty much as it is today, for the better part of fifty years, and it is in keeping with the city's nature that it sees no reason to alter, amend, or edit what is there. The new Kroger Building is an exception and, looking as though it had been built with squares of blue and white poster board and assembled by a kindergarten class, it is an embarrassment. Its design so offended the city fathers that Kroger, a supermarket chain, was forced to place its building several blocks away from the center of town.

Downtown Cincinnati is a tidy rectangle of no more than a dozen square, walkable, tree-lined blocks containing most of the city's shops, department stores, hotels, and restaurants. Roughly at the center sits Fountain Square, another of the city's proud symbols, with its elaborate Tyler Davidson Memorial Fountain, a forty-three-foot-high monument of ornamental bronze and porphyry, topped by “The Genius of Water”—a draped figure with arms outstretched in an attitude of invocation, from which the fountain's
waters cascade. (Cincinnatians feel as strongly about Fountain Square as they do about Spring Grove Cemetery, and a suggestion several years ago that the fountain be moved elsewhere brought forth a great public outcry.)

Fountain Square is where downtown, daytime Cincinnati strolls and sits in the sun, where secretaries take their paper-bag lunches, where every important civic rally and demonstration takes place. It is Cincinnati's Hyde Park Corner and Place de l'Étoile. When streaking was in vogue several summers ago, Cincinnati's first streakers streaked shamelessly across Fountain Square. Fountain Square is the heart of the city, and it may be the single reason why the core of the city has not deteriorated as the centers of other cities have done. And yet, after five o'clock, Fountain Square and the streets surrounding it are almost deserted. Cincinnati is a town where almost everybody sleeps in one suburb or another.

As is the case in many cities, Cincinnati's best suburbs lie to the east, where commuting motorists will not have to face the sun when they drive to and from work. Here, in areas like Mount Lookout and Hyde Park, Cincinnati becomes a city where thousands of antique gas lamps still illuminate the streets, a city of large parks and splendid houses that perch on bluff tops and hillsides overlooking expanses of lawns and gardens, with sweeping views of the curving Ohio River. Cincinnatians take great pride and a not inconsiderable amount of pleasure from the river, along whose shores their city and its suburbs nestle. For here—at times, at least—the Ohio is still clean enough to be swimmable and the scene of boating and sailing parties. Mrs. Fred Lazarus III, the wife of the department store executive, and her friends can often be seen skimming up and down the river on water skis, or leaping from the decks of the Lazaruses' cabin cruiser into the cloudy water.

In Hyde Park, it is important to have a river view, and it is a great point of argument whether a downriver or an upriver view is better; some people, of course, manage to have both. Cincinnati's views may not be quite so arresting as those of San Francisco (like San Francisco, Cincinnati claims “seven hills”), and its grillwork may not be as elaborate as that of New Orleans, but it is certainly true that Cincinnati's suburbs must be counted among the prettiest in America. This is one reason why Cincinnatians—who admit that their summers are hot and muggy, that their winters are icy and damp, and that their springs are fraught with tornado warnings—insist that they would not live anywhere else. In fact, Cincinnati is
so pleased with its suburban existence that even those who could well afford to do so rarely travel elsewhere. According to the
Summer Social Register
, only seventy-seven “social” families in
both
Cincinnati and nearby Dayton have summer homes or addresses elsewhere, the smallest number of any of the cities the
Register
registers. “When a Cincinnatian travels,” as one woman puts it, “he is always looking forward to coming home.”