East avenue--the great show street of Rochester--feels that rule. East avenue is lined with great houses, far greater houses than those of the Third ward--many of them built with the profits of "Kodak" stock--yet East avenue represents a younger generation, a generation which seems to have made money rather easily. There has been some intermarriage and some letting down of the bars between the ambitious East avenue and the dominant Third ward--but not much of it. Rochester is far too conservative to change easily or rapidly. [Illustration: The canal gives Syracuse a Venetian look] She is proud of herself as she is--and rightly so. Her people will sing of her charms by the hours--and rightly so, again. They live their lives and live them well. For when all is said and done, the glory of Rochester is not in her public buildings, her water-power, her fair, her movements toward social reform, not even in her parks--although Rochester parks are superb, for Nature has been their chief architect and she has executed her commission in splendid fashion--nor does it reside in her imposing Main street, nor in her vast manufactories that may be translated into stunning arrays of statistics--her glory is in her homes. The tenement, as we know it in the big cities, and the city house, with its dead cold walls, are practically unknown there. Apartment houses are rarities--there are not more than twenty or thirty in the town--and consequently oddities. Your Rochesterian, rich and poor, dwells in a detached house on his own tract of land; the chances are that he has market-truck growing in his backyard, a real kitchen-garden. There are thousands of these little homes in the outlying sections of the town, with more pretentious ones lining East avenue and the other more elaborate streets. All of these taken together are the real regulators of the town. For the citizens of Rochester are less governed and themselves govern more than in most places of the size. That is the value of the detached house to the city. Detached houses in a city seem to mean good schools, good fire and police service, clean streets, health protection, social progress--Rochester has all of these in profusion. East avenue, in its rather luscious beauty, represents these ideals of Rochester on dress parade. We rather think, however, that you can read the character of the town better in the side streets. Now a long street, filled with somewhat monotonous rows of simple frame houses does not mean much at a glance--even when the street is parked and filled for a mile with blossoming magnolias, as Oxford street in Rochester is filled. But such a street, together with all the other streets of its sort, means that much of the disappearing charm and loveliness of our American village life is being absorbed right into the heart of a community of goodly size.