Ride of A Lifetime: The Story of St. Louis' Streetcars | 1993 Nine PBS Special

tonight on St Louis Chronicles the people who do remember the street cars are people who are now old but who then were young and we always look at our youth through rose-colored spectacles if you would ask their parents or their grandparents a nickel never a nickel in the pocket is a nickel saved I'm going to walk these are the vehicles St Louis Road into the 20th century for several generations of St louisans the street car took them everywhere to work and school to the ballpark and the movies and always back home again yet there were some born before the electric street cars came who lived long enough to see them go they ran just 77 years [Music] this is the end of the story the 1960s there were just a few surviving street car lines that had made it into the new decade one after another they were abandoned until there was just one the hamont line it ran from downtown turned on to its own private right of way and went on to the Western City limits on May 21st 1966 the long journey was over and the street cars [Music] disappeared it was not a dramatic departure the final days were noted and they were filmed by the street car enthusiasts but most everyone else had given them up long ago still the street cars like a lot of things began to look better and better once they were gone those that you talk to today who remember the street cars are remembering their youth on the street cars I think for kids especially um who who go back who were excuse me who were kids at that time comparing now with then simply says that they had a freedom because of public transit in the city that kids today simply have not got it's also true that times have changed so much that most parents would not want their kids to have the kind of freedom to roam around the city the kids may have had 40 or 50 years ago as a result of public transit but the fact remains is that a particular quality of city life that kids could experience then no longer exists and largely because public transit doesn't [Music] exist [Music] only here and there now can you see the remains of what was a steel skeleton it had shaped and supported a young City bursting at its Frontier [Music] seams in 1859 when many streets were still unpaved horsedrawn Passenger cars were put on Rails a faster and smoother ride than available before but still only an improvement on an ancient form of transportation most people were still [Music] walking in 1986 St Louis tried a mechanical replacement for the horse the cable car but even these vehicles were being physically pulled and often jerked by a cable running beneath the street the real solution came just a few years later motorized street cars with electric power coming from an overhead wire the year the turning point was 1889 [Music] it was really a coming together of a number of things the coming together of an effective electric motor that could uh start and stop without burning out of a control system of rails heavy enough to carry the extra weight uh that an electric car would have over a horse car of developing power Distribution Systems when that was realized from 1889 to about 1896 it was boom time I and not just in St Louis but practically every city in the country because what you had in the electric street railroad for the first time was the kind of Mobility that you could now have with the automobile but in an age when there was no automobile in the age when the horse and cart by and large for most people was as fast as they were likely to travel locally [Music] life changed even on Sundays trolley lines headed far out of the crowded City opening up a world of trees and lakes and parks to a whole new class of people [Music] one fondly remembered street car took people out for a day at creeve cor Lake the route ran through what is now Suburban neighborhoods strip malls office complexes and interstate highways but even in 1950 the last year of its operation this was a refreshing trip through the Open [Music] [Music] Country [Music] this was the fun part of street cars the real business was back in the [Music] city the street cars had come along right on time it was an era of immigration from Europe demands for labor in new Urban Industries in the growing cities there was a growing need for new services and office workers shop clerks telephone operators government employees and they had to be moved quickly and efficiently the pictures look old but this is a city of modern technology electricity telephones elevators raising the city up in the center street cars spreading it out there is however one thing missing if the automobile uh had been developed well developed is the wrong word I'd say made available popularly 10 to 15 years earlier and the street car had been perfected 5 to 10 years later you would not have seen street cars in in cities and if it's an open question whether you would have seen too much public transportation in quite the way that we did see it here in the first half of this Century by that I mean covering every city block every city street would service every three or four or five minutes I think that would have been impossible in those boom years a lot of private companies were putting in hundreds of miles of tracks in the streets first the core of the city was covered but street car lines now connected smaller towns and made them part of the city creating a metropolitan area [Music] on and off the streets the electric cars ran to Webster Groves and Kirkwood they went South to Jefferson Barracks Overland St Charles to Ferguson and floresent Clayton and University City [Music] the people followed the tracks and neighborhoods [Music] grew there was a time when it seemed electric Railways would take you just about anywhere the Illinois Terminal railroad ran its crawlies across the Mississippi River on the McKinley bridge to serve Illinois suburbs heading up to Granite City and Alton this vehicle not an electric trolley but a bus that ran on Rails went from Alton to Grafton where it was turned around for the trip back this in the days before the Great River Road the Interurban trolley lines just kept going throughout Central Illinois and much of the Midwest the interurbans were a very different breed of cat all together but they benefited and then lost from the same circumstances that the electric street railway did that is to say the absence of paved roads and the absence of automobiles in addition they also profited from the unwillingness or the inability of the steam railroads to cover the kinds of distances and serve the kinds of communities that the interurbans did usually a string of small towns and Villages connected with a county seat or maybe a big city somewhere and the Interurban would haul less than carload Freight you know few cans of milk because as soon as the um highways became paved and the farmers had bought their model T's people started deserted the interurbans too and stopped using them for shipping Freight the Illinois Terminal Interurban survived longer than most and even after the rural service was shut down the Metro East Suburban lines were still running independent of the St Louis Street car system [Music] back in the 1890s there were more than a dozen street car companies in St Louis building and overbuilding the system and staying in competition with borrowed money nearly all the major street car lines were already in place in 1899 when United Railways took over most of the operations and the debt street car systems continued to grow in other cities but the ability to expand in St Louis was just about exhausted they were the most precarious financial institutions that you could possibly hope to meet they were never financially successful in terms of operating costs they were in the black almost all the time until about 1919 but when you set off operating costs against their underlying debt structure they were hopelessly mired there was no way they could pay off the underlying debt and they tried very hard to to do so but they couldn't and as soon as competition arrived that was effective their weakened Financial State made them even more vulnerable to the competition than they otherwise would have [Music] been the 1920s a time of prosperity and confidence the automobile age is already well underway the factors that eventually will bring the end of the street cars are now in place people are choosing the convenience and the privacy of the now affordable automobile and in downtown there is a traffic problem and a parking problem and the street cars are stuck in the middle new outlying residential areas are being built with no street car line in sight but with a growing public demand for more and better [Music] roads the street car company couldn't fight back with more street car lines but it did go after riders with motor buses they had come on the scene as competition but they became an essential part of the street car company's operation at that point the extensions to the suburbs came they were bus operated they were reasonably successful but the 20s was a boom time and people were buying automobiles it's true there was only one automobile per family at best but so many of the middle- class Riders were suddenly deserting the street Railways now for private uh automobiles for the journey to work that it began to eat into the Riders [Music] ship [Music] in the battle between public and private transportation there would be no winner for quite some time the Depression hit everybody the transit firm now the St Louis Public Service Company fought another long battle with bankruptcy throughout the 1930s but it came through with some of its best years just ahead [Music] n [Music] it had a fresh start and a clean slate it invested heavily in its infrastructure it bought brand new streamline street cars a couple of hundred of them it bought several hundred very modern buses at the same time and as it turned out it coincided with a period when the Depression was at an end and r ship began to increase a little bit within 2 years uh the war in Europe had caused shortages of all sorts of materials including the steel needed to make automobiles in the quantity that had been uh needed previously and the people who would have otherwise bought automobiles were riding again when the war came and gasoline shortages came and people were disrupted and were moving all over town to their jobs or to be inducted into the service or whatever ridership increased and it increased massively ly during the 40s and all this new equipment was there to serve [Music] them the shortages and the riding habits carried on beyond the war but in the 1950s Prosperity more cars more streets more new homes in the suburbs what was happening and was already in place in the 20s resumed and it resumed in full force by 1950 particularly as Highway building and now got to the point where you were building freeways where City development had got to the point where the inner cities were already beginning to empty out into much lower density suburbs and in St Louis in particular with the city and county split that meant that people were not just leaving the city uh physically they were leaving the city as a tax base as as as a as a jurisdiction which meant they were gone [Music] lost [Music] the old roots which used to make the most money were the roots in the inner city and perhaps the inner cities of the county where you had relatively dense areas of population in any given square mile the new Suburban areas which were opening up were extremely low density you know what it's like a a quarter of an a quarter of an acre for each lot maybe an eighth of an acre of each lot that does not generate traffic at all and that was what they were up against by the late 50s and they knew it [Music] [Music] more and more street car lines were closed in the 1950s the cars were sent off to other cities buses took their places in St Louis there were a number of local bus companies operating in the metropolitan area and the talk now was of the need for bringing them into a single regional transportation system in 1963 the tax supported by state development agency got the job of doing that and deciding what to do with the few street car lines still running it was soon clear what the decision would be the street car city was already history but even then there was the question of what was ahead and how St Louis was going to get [Music] there the subject of a rapid transer system for St Louis is surprisingly important and surprisingly urgent it is the development of a rapid mass transit system that I feel should have first priority among matters to be pushed on a regional basis by state initially had um the notion that they wanted to have some form of Rapid Transit based on rail for which this line and perhaps a couple of other lines which they had operated until 64 might provide a nucleus but the then mayor of St Louis was quite adamant he wanted the cars off the streets east of uh 12th Street and uh that idea simply [Music] died the city traditionally in this country has always been perceived as being a SN of iniquity but there was a period at the end of the 19th century for about 30 or 40 years when many people saw the city differently they saw it in fact as the Temple of civilization what people remember today of the street car is its continuance through the whole of the uh decline of that notion of the city as being the the one the wondrous civilized place and the street raway has been Associated largely in living memory now with Urban decline the technology first used here in 1889 has stood the test of time in cities all over the world it runs mass transit systems and in St Louis it returns with enthusiasm and skepticism and financial difficulties these new trolleys are still competing with the automobile and perhaps unfairly with street car memories which don't tell the whole story they haven't been seen on the streets of St Louis for many years but they haven't really gone away not for those who rode them through good and tough times through War and Peace and from youth to maturity they left their mark on countless people and on the city itself and they did it all in a single [Music] lifetime what's the of trying not I have no will you made your you took [Music] just just the bab arms where your concern so lock the doors and yours cuz you took advantage me yeah took ADV me took advantage of [Music] me

Channel: Nine PBS

Views: 3,382

Keywords: streetcar, trolley, st. louis, history, automobiles, transportation, trains

Id: DCQpotMsy_4

Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023