Capital Streetcars Read online

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC 29403

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2015 by John DeFerrari

  All rights reserved

  First published 2015

  e-book edition 2015

  ISBN 978.1.62585.619.7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945064

  print edition ISBN 978.1.46711.883.5

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book, once again, is for Sue.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword, by Ken Rucker

  Preface

  Chapter 1. The City of Magnificent Distances:

  Transit in Washington Before Streetcars, 1800–1862

  Chapter 2. Horses in the Mud:

  The Early Horse-Drawn Streetcar Era, 1862–1888

  Chapter 3. Close Quarters: Riding the Cars, 1862–1888

  Chapter 4. Hard Choices:

  Modernizing the Streetcar System, 1888–1897

  Chapter 5. Grid-Ironing the City:

  The Rise of Streetcar Suburbs, 1868–1899

  Chapter 6. Bigger Crowds and Bigger Cars:

  The New Century’s Challenges, 1900–1918

  Chapter 7. A Vast Amount of Harm:

  The Struggle to Maintain Equal Access, 1900–1920

  Chapter 8. Yesterday’s Technology:

  Competition with Automobiles and Buses, 1920–1940

  Chapter 9. War and Peace:

  The World War II Years and Afterward, 1940–1950

  Chapter 10. Endgame:

  Washington’s Streetcars Disappear, 1950–1962

  Chapter 11. Lost and Found:

  Nostalgia for the Streetcar Era, 1962–2015

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  There was a time when folks rode the rails through the streets of Washington. Beginning during the Lincoln administration in 1862, streetcars carried people around the city. For one hundred years, from Lincoln to Kennedy, streetcars connected the communities of the federal city and enabled the development of communities in the county of Washington. First with horse traction, then cable traction and, lastly, electric traction, the streetcars provided what a 1902 census report called “an imperative social need” by spreading growing urban populations over a much wider area than would have been possible without ever-faster and cleaner street railways. By the 1930s, gasoline-powered buses were providing more flexible transit services, and the automobile beckoned commuters with private, on-demand transportation. After World War II, prosperity accelerated the abandonment of street railways and the expansion of the suburbs served by massive highway development. Sixty years on, many people are looking to urban areas for homes to relieve themselves from long commutes on crowded highways, and revitalization of older communities is welcoming the return of streetcars as symbols of urban renaissance.

  Prior histories have chronicled the era of street railways in the nation’s capital for the traction or railway fan. Now, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C. addresses a larger audience as it explores the economic and social needs met by these railways as well. With vignettes establishing the social and political contexts influencing the actions of the characters who made the development decisions, as well as carefully selected images, this work expands the scholarship available beyond the nuts and bolts of railway construction and management to include the social fabric of life in Washington through the streetcar era.

  KEN RUCKER

  President, National Capital Trolley Museum

  May 2015

  PREFACE

  The streetcar decided where we could live and where we would shop. It gave shape to the city.

  –Jack Eisen, Washington Post, January 28, 1962

  Streetcars had a powerful hold on Washingtonians during their one-hundred-year reign, profoundly shaping the patterns of our lives and the city around us. Where the streetcar went, so went the city’s residents. Along with them came the neighborhood groceries, the dress shops and hardware stores, the mom and pop cafés and restaurants—all the fixtures of our urban existence, strung out along the lengths of their routes. And it was on the streetcars that so many lives intersected. In their heyday, virtually everyone rode them. From day laborers to Supreme Court justices, the cars brought Washingtonians together like nothing else ever had.

  At times, they could be tremendous fun. Several generations of small boys delighted in stealing rides downtown or in causing mischief by setting blasting caps on the rails or jamming the slot rail in the center of the tracks. As one of the capital city’s cheapest forms of entertainment, the much-loved open-air cars of the early twentieth century took thousands of riders on airy jaunts to see baseball games at Griffith Stadium or out across the countryside of Maryland and upper Northwest D.C. To this day, many Washingtonians recall with special fondness riding the Cabin John streetcar out to Glen Echo Park on pleasant summer weekends. Those were experiences of a time and place that will never return.

  Most of the time streetcar rides were far from thrilling. For thousands of commuters, they were merely a practical means of getting from point A to point B. They were often crowded, poorly timed and frustratingly slow. Although integrated by federal law since 1864, streetcars were also a flashpoint in the struggle against discrimination in the early twentieth century. During the dark days of the 1919 riots, African Americans, who depended on the streetcars for transportation as much as everyone else, might have feared for their very lives when stepping aboard.

  The cars had an impact on almost everyone’s life, and much of the drama of their story comes from all the change they brought. In the mid-nineteenth century, when streetcars were first proposed, many older Washingtonians were upset at the idea of laying railroad tracks down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, splitting the north half of the street from the south. It seemed an outrage. More angst came with the arrival of cars powered by overhead trolley wires, a technology so offensive that it was banned in the downtown part of the city. And not long after that controversy was finally settled, the whole concept of a railed streetcar system was questioned again when automobiles and buses arrived. Technological change fed constant upheaval.

  And yet the transportation wants and needs of most people changed little during this time. They wanted streetcars to be easy to access from their homes, to run on convenient schedules, to be reasonably comfortable to ride, to take passengers to their destinations quickly and efficiently and to be inexpensive to use on a daily basis. In many ways, the history of Washington’s mass transit system, like that of others across the country, is the story of an unending struggle to achieve these confounding, elusive goals. It is also the story of the owners and operators, a long line of local transit barons who were all convinced that they could wring profits from the system one way or another. Few of them ever fully succeeded.

  The trials and tribulations of streetcars, and the joys and frustrations of riding them, were part of everyday life for hometown Washingtonians of the past. My hope is that this book can help readers paint for themselves a fuller picture of that past life.

  WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T

  Capital Streetcars is not the first book about the history of streetcars in the District of Columbia. Two impre
ssive, lavishly illustrated books on the same subject have previously been published: LeRoy O. King’s Jr.’s 100 Years of Capital Traction: The Story of Streetcars in the Nation’s Capital (1972) and Peter C. Kohler’s Capital Transit: Washington’s Street Cars: The Final Era, 1933–1962 (2001). These two encyclopedic reference works provide a wealth of detail about the city’s vast streetcar infrastructure and how it was managed and operated, including precise route locations, schedules and the numbers and types of rolling stock that served them. King, whose father worked for the Capital Traction Company, amassed an extraordinary collection of images and documentation that detailed the operations of the city’s many historic streetcar companies. Kohler’s book offers an extensive year-by-year review of all the important events that occurred in the Capital Transit Company’s history, from its inception in 1933 to the last streetcar trip in 1962. I highly recommend both books and certainly do not aim to compete with either.

  A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  These days, the terms trolley and streetcar are considered interchangeable, but that wasn’t always the case. Washingtonians who were here in the days of streetcars know that they were never called trolleys in those days. Trolleys were specifically the kind of streetcar that drew electric power from overhead wires through a trolley pole, and Washington’s streetcars did this only outside the central part of the city. For that reason, I’ve used the term trolley only when referring to cars drawing power from overhead wires. Otherwise, I have used the term streetcar or just car. I have used these terms interchangeably because that was how they were used historically. To avoid confusion, I have tried to consistently use the term automobile to refer to private motor vehicles. In general, I have attempted to limit the amount of industry jargon, although a certain amount is unavoidable—and even, at times, entertaining!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I could never complete a book of this scope without the help of many people, and I am grateful for the tremendous assistance I received from many quarters. Laura Barry and Anne McDonough of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., provided valuable assistance in locating and examining records of the Capital Traction Company, as well as identifying key historical photographs. The entire staff of the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library provided critical assistance, as they always do, in accessing a variety of newspaper clippings and other key source materials. Matthew Gilmore prepared an excellent custom set of detailed maps of historical streetcar routes. John Muller located and shared several valuable and little-known sources of information. I also received help from Garrett Peck, Bill Rice, Robert Ellis of the National Archives and Records Administration and Kim Williams of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. In addition to these, others helped me specifically to locate and use a wide range of great historical photographs, including Katie Crabb of the D.C. Department of Transportation and Sharon Knecht of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Clark Frazier and Charles Houser graciously allowed me to use photographs they had taken. Derek Gray and Michele Casto of the DCPL Washingtoniana Division assisted with photos from the Washington Star collection, as well as the library’s historical image collection. Jerry McCoy, who always has something new and interesting to contribute, shared his set of streetcar photographs originally collected by Bob Truax and provided scans of several images. Charles Plantholt, treasurer of the Baltimore Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society and archivist of the Maryland Rail Heritage Library, and Alexander D. Mitchell IV, president of the Baltimore Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, offered enthusiastic assistance in tracking down several unique photos from the collections of the Maryland Rail Heritage Library.

  I am particularly indebted to Ken Rucker of the National Capital Trolley Museum, who assisted me in several vital ways, including writing the foreword to this book, providing a number of historic photographs and painstakingly reviewing the draft text. Zachary Schrag and Fran White also read the text or portions of it and provided many useful and incisive comments. The book is far better as a result of their gracious and generous assistance.

  Chapter 1

  THE CITY OF MAGNIFICENT DISTANCES

  TRANSIT IN WASHINGTON BEFORE STREETCARS, 1800–1862

  In early Washington, everything was very far from everything else. The ten-mile-square District of Columbia, as laid out by George Washington, began as mostly farmland and wilderness, with two small port towns—Alexandria and Georgetown—to the south and west. Washington City was envisioned as a separate settlement in the middle, on the relatively flat stretch of land where the Potomac and Anacostia (then known as the Eastern Branch) Rivers met, an area largely devoid of any previous development.

  In 1791, George Washington commissioned talented French-born architect Peter Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825) to design the layout for the new city. L’Enfant’s plan, which would be revered by succeeding generations for its commodious public squares and grand diagonal avenues, foresaw development growing not from a single downtown focal point but from several different simultaneous centers of activity.1 Wharves on the banks of the Eastern Branch (where the Navy Yard would be established in 1799) were to serve as the easternmost focal point. This site, one of the earliest centers of employment in Washington, was about one mile to the southeast of where the U.S. Capitol was to be built on Jenkins Hill. The White House was to be sited more than one mile in the opposite direction, to the northwest. And Georgetown, already a separate, well-established town, was about that same distance again northwest of the White House. Thus, the city’s early focal points were spread out over a stretch of several miles. If ever there were a town in need of efficient public transportation, it was this one.

  This circa 1800 watercolor by William Birch of the unfinished Capitol gives a sense of the emptiness of the early city. Library of Congress.

  José Correia da Serra (1750–1823), Portugal’s minister-plenipotentiary to Washington from 1816 to 1820, has been credited with first calling Washington the “City of Magnificent Distances,” a name that elegantly conveys both admiration for the grandly conceived spaces of the L’Enfant Plan and subtle criticism of their emptiness and dispersion.2 The title clearly resonated with the city’s early residents and visitors, many of whom were skeptical of the yawning boulevards, especially Pennsylvania Avenue, which seemed to stretch for such unnecessary and presumptuous lengths.

  There were no easy answers to the problem of transportation in the nascent capital. The vast majority of city residents owned no horses, and still fewer owned carriages. Within Washington City, they mostly lived in houses along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House or on nearby F Street, with a scattering of dwellings on other streets. More buildings were scattered over the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Georgetown, as were houses clustered on Capitol Hill and near the Navy Yard. In 1800, there were just 6,203 people living in Washington City and Georgetown, about half in each town. As in other major cities, these early urban dwellers simply walked everywhere they needed to go. Places that were beyond a comfortable walking distance were not easily accessible. The resulting gaps in the city’s physical development persisted for decades, with the city growing slowly. The 1840 census registered a population of 30,676 for Washington and Georgetown—a big increase over 1800 but still less than one-third of the population of major cities like Baltimore (102,313) or Philadelphia (93,665). When Charles Dickens visited the capital in 1842 and found that the great planned spaces were still largely empty, he penned this famous description:

  It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments
of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features.3

  The earliest attempt to offer a system of public transportation across this vast city-to-be was a twice-a-day stagecoach service begun in May 1800 that ran from the center of Georgetown (at what is now the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue) to William Tunnicliff’s hotel on Capitol Hill, just east of the Capitol building. That business quickly failed; service was too infrequent and too pricey. For another thirty years, Washingtonians who could not afford to hire private hackney cabs, which were expensive, had few transportation options.

  What we now think of as a city bus—a vehicle traveling a set route and carrying multiple passengers for a low fare—didn’t appear until the 1820s. The first such conveyances went into operation in London and Paris. In short order they were dubbed “omnibuses,” from a term originally coined by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and derived from the Latin word meaning “for everyone.” (It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the term would be shortened to just “bus.”)

  Abraham Brower, a New York businessman, is generally credited with introducing omnibuses in America. In 1827, he ran his first public coach along Broadway. Called an “accommodation,” it was an open, two-horse carriage featuring four rows of seats facing one another in two pairs. It was an immediate success, and in 1831, Brower commissioned a young Irish-born coachbuilder named John Stephenson (1809–1893) to construct the first true American omnibus.

  Stephenson’s omnibus went into service on Broadway in 1832. It featured a single enclosed passenger compartment with a row of seats lining each side, a design that would become standard in later nineteenth-century streetcars. Passengers climbed rickety steps to enter a door at the rear. Stephenson soon began making important innovations, such as setting the passenger seats lower—close to the tops of the wheels—and locating the floor space between them in drop wells between the wheels. This resulted in a car that sat about a foot closer to the ground and was much easier to board than earlier coaches. Stephenson received a patent for this invention—signed by President Andrew Jackson—in 1833. His company would go on to become one of the most prominent nineteenth-century makers of streetcars, reportedly producing more than twenty-five thousand vehicles for street railways both in the United States and around the world.