The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for James Roscoe Day. The
Onondaga Indians are the oldest inhabitants, and a great help to the
ingenious local artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are
needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. He has taken a
half-baked Methodist college that stood on a wind-swept and barren hill
and by his indomitable ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it
into a real university. For Syracuse University is tremendously real to
the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor
man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four
thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the
farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term
"Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of
cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden
power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim
to college spirit of surpassing dimensions. She does claim individual
spirit among her students, however, that is second to none. As a
university--as some know a university--the collection of ill-matched
architectural edifices that house her is typical; but as an opportunity
for popular education to the boys and girls of the rural districts of
the state of New York she is monumental, and they come swarming to her
in greater numbers each autumn.
So much for the hill--they call it Mount Olympus--which holds the
university and those things that are the university's. Now for downtown
Syracuse; for while the city's newer districts are ranged upon a series
of impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her factories are
squatted upon the flats at the head of Onondaga lake.
We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every self-respecting
geography used to print; salt-sheds running off over an indefinite
acreage. We were given to understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for
existence was as a sort of huge salt-cellar for the rest of the nation.
Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten that there is a
salt industry left, and will tell you glibly of the typewriters,
automobiles, steel-tubing and the like that are made in their town in
the course of a twelvemonth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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