Landmarks

FIVE CITIES--George R. Leighton-- Harper ($3.50).

What are the landmarks of America? Guidebooks and histories point to battlefields and the birthplaces of celebrities. But plain citizens who know their own towns know landmarks with less elevated associations: skyscrapers, banks, the saloon where the town boss held office, the hotel where politicians made their deals, the street corner where some brilliant newcomer was shot--the miscellaneous, nondescript, undistinguished scenes of local history which old-timers recognize and visitors pass without seeing.

The task of George Ross Leighton in Five Cities is to restore the old landmarks which civic pride generally conceals. In his book tumbledown factories are landmarks, as well as the homes of the great. His heroes include failures as well as successes, suicides, people who bet on the wrong real estate developments, bankers whose banks have never reopened. He pictures:

Shenandoah. Huddled in a fold in the Pennsylvania hills, with bulbous Greek Catholic church domes rising over wooden houses, this once-prosperous anthracite town is rusty, dingy, mournful, too melodramatic to be desolate. The Shenandoah City Colliery, its windows broken, its stacks smokeless, is a wild ruin; Stief's Cut Rate Drug and Quick Lunch occupies the banking room of the defunct Shenandoah Trust Co. But once John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers, rode triumphantly up Main Street. Joseph Beddal was killed during the strike of 1902 trying to smuggle arms to strikebreakers besieged in the Reading station. In Muff Lawler's saloon on Coal Street, a young detective named McParlan, hired by President Gowen of the Reading, joined the Molly McGuires, later gave testimony that sent ten Mollies to their death. When Gowen committed suicide 13 years later, Shenandoah miners said it was remorse.

Louisville. Hazy and heaped-up, Louisville, Ky., says Author Leighton, is the museum piece among U. S. cities. There are the battered columns of Nicholas Biddle's once great United States Bank: "now the windows are bleared and there's a drunk asleep on the crumbling steps." In the great Gait House, financiers once fought over the Louisville & Nashville; in the lobby General Buckner, Confederate hero and Chicago real-estate speculator, smoked his corncob pipe and fought the reformers. At the Music Hall, 43-year-old William Goebel, ranked by Leighton as the greatest field general among U. S. political reformers, won the Democratic nomination for Governor after an eight-day fight; at the State House in Frankfort eight months later he was shot.

Birmingham. Author Leighton likes Birmingham, Ala. least of his five cities. City of unkept promise, he calls it, with vast natural resources and the lowest per capita public expenditure of any big U. S. city--near the bottom in appropriations for education and public health, near the top in its murder rate. Author Leighton's explanation of its unkept promise: racial conflict, absentee ownership.

Omaha. On the afternoon of August 13, 1859, a railroad lawyer stood on a bluff over the Missouri River and decided that lots in a little village on the other side were safe investments. The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln; the village, Omaha, Neb. Railroads and stockyards made it great; in 1887 real-estate transfers amounted to $31,000,000. It was also corrupt: by 1911 the income of 370 houses of prostitution amounted to $17,760,000 annually. Now the brilliantly lighted "Arcade," that in 1907 housed 300 girls, is closed. In the back room of the Budweiser Saloon on Douglas Street, tough Tom Dennison bossed city politics, fought Mayor Ed Smith, won after Smith had been half-killed trying to stop a lynching.

Seattle. Author Leighton writes woodenly about Birmingham, bitingly about Omaha, lyrically about Seattle. He finds the pioneer spirit, dead in Omaha, still flickering in Seattle; in the talk of the loggers on the Skidroad at Yesler Way, in the logging camps, the history of the wobblies and the Weyerhaeuser fortune, in the remark of a Seattle housewife: "I have got to go over to Olympia tomorrow to help put pressure on the governor."

Civic boosters are likely to damn his book, to complain at the bleakness of the picture he draws. Dilemma of Five Cities is that Author Leighton's enthusiasm for the color and gusto of U. S. life is always at war with his knowledge of the violence of much of U. S. history. But in telling the story in local, rather than national terms, Five Cities suggests that he has tapped one of the richest of unworked U. S. historical mines.

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