Postcard of the Day No. 97 - Trolley to the Shore, Norwalk

Another snapshot of long lost transit. This is what was known as an open car on a trip to the coast in the small town of Norwalk, Connecticut. Probably from around 1900. Well patronised - an informal gender segregation seems to be in operation with female passengers occupying the front two thirds of seats while the men are confined to the back. Hats are universally worn. The streetcar styling borrows from the architectural language of the municipal bandstand and the seaside pavilion. Despite some smudgey blemishes and variable print quality, there’s a lot of well defined detail to be seen. The uniformed motorman and his nattily dressed acolytes form a commanding trio at the helm. Behind them, the respectable ladies of the town follow on, their modesty protected by high necklines and low hemlines. Some make little effort to conceal their discomfort at having their likenesses mechanically recorded while others display the frozen expressions that come with long exposure to the camera lens. The Norwalk Street Railway was swallowed up in 1900 by a larger rival which in 1906 leased all operations to the mighty New Haven Railroad - a reminder that rapid turnover of ownership is not unique to our own times. Open sided streetcars, known as toast racks in Britain, were popular across the world and a selection are shown here - from Honolulu to Stockholm, from Malta to Cairo and from Rothesay to San Antonio. 

Postcard of the Day No. 93 – Panorama du Carrefour du Châtelet

Gridlock by the banks of the Seine, conflicting traffic flows observed from above. Horse drawn vehicles and open-top limousines compete for road space while Parisians circulate at will, oblivious to the confusion. Seen from on high, interlocked vehicles form a pleasing abstract composition but there’s little of the extreme visual drama that Soviet photographer, Rodchenko obtained from his vertiginous photos of Moscow trams. Meanwhile in Chicago, below, we have another spectacular vision of traffic mayhem – overloaded trucks and columns of streetcars jostle for position. Mounted police officers observe but don’t intervene – pedestrians cluster on the street corners, few are brave enough to take their chances in the traffic.

Streetcar Propaganda

At first glance these postcards seem to be an expression of an aesthetic impulse to embellish the harsh rectilinear forms of a streetcar with the soft and organic forms of floral decoration. Japanese visual culture places the highest value on refinement but something else appears to be going on here. More sinister and militaristic imagery appears on closer inspection, alongside a profusion of national flags and naval ensigns. Airplane cut-outs could be taken as celebrations of technology but there’s no ambiguity about the slender forms of falling bombs. A formidable armoury has been deployed in floral disguise including aircraft propellers, torpedoes and artillery. The best guess is that this is a souvenir of a morale-raising street procession to remind the local populace of their patriotic duty to submit to the war effort. Which would date these postcards to the early 1940s.

Pacific Electric in Los Angeles

In April last year the Guardian retold the story of the Great American Streetcar Scandal. It’s a depressing tale of unregulated capitalism triumphing over the interests of the consumer and the public realm. A syndicate involving Detroit motor manufacturers, major oil companies and the makers of auto tires assumed ownership of urban streetcar systems across the USA in the immediate post-war years and began the business of eliminating the electric powered streetcar in favour of bus lines with diesel engines running on rubber tyres. By the early 1960s all but a handful of streetcar mass transit systems had been converted to buses much to the satisfaction of the auto industry. This accelerated the trend towards individual vehicle ownership leading to massive congestion on urban roads and rapid deterioration in air quality. Local taxpayers had to fork out for grandiose freeway projects while federal taxes funded a new interstate highway network that had the effect of killing off the last vestiges of long distance rail travel. It remains a textbook case of corporate expansion funded largely by the public purse. The social costs – health impact of atmospheric pollution, limited mobility on the part of low-paid workers, the financial cost of chronic traffic congestion – all passed on to third parties.

The postcard history of Pacific Electric shows the downtown ten storey office block and streetcar terminal that served as the hub of the system and survived to the very end in 1961. The Pacific Electric Building was opened in 1905 to a design by Thornton Fitzhugh. Among the first tenants was the architectural practice Greene and Greene, noted Arts and Crafts designers responsible for the famous Gamble House in Pasadena. Until its closure in 1914, Arcade Depot was the principle station for Los Angeles – Pacific Electric streetcars wait in front. Santa Monica was just under 17 miles from the Pacific Electric Building at the end of what became known as the Santa Monica Air Line. The last two cards are real estate promotional cards issued by Pacific Electric to encourage homebuyers to settle along their routes in the verdant surroundings of Brentwood Park and Beverley Hills. These images offer a distinctly bleak prospect to a potential customer but that didn’t stop them becoming some of the most affluent neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. Beverly Hills had the dubious distinction of being planned as a white-only development, a situation that remained unchallenged until the 1940s when a group of black screen actors mounted a successful legal action.

It would be misleading to leave the impression that Pacific Electric was a philanthropic enterprise. The leading promoter was Henry E Huntington, a businessman of impeccably capitalist instincts. For him, the transport networks were entirely subordinate to his interests in the real estate developments they existed to serve. Profitability declined in the 1930s as the supply of development opportunities dried up. In the absence of any public sector transport authority, the unregulated network was fully exposed to a predatory assault from the auto industry. Indeed the switch from electric traction to diesel engined buses began in the Pacific Electric era. For light relief, watch Harold Lloyd’s efforts to control a Pacific Electric streetcar in the 1924 movie, Girl Shy.

Postcard of the Day No. 79 – New York Blizzard

We can trace the photographic origin of today’s card to an 8 by 10 inch glass negative in the collection of the Library of Congress. Taken in the Great Blizzard of 1899 on behalf of the Detroit Publishing Co. and cropped for a postcard that was copyrighted in 1906. Colour was applied and the result has an almost cinematic sense of immediacy. Bright light reflected from the wet paving stones haloes the foreground female figure that strides purposefully into the composition. An elevated train rumbles overhead, a streetcar passes by and snow shovellers are making desultory efforts to clear the street. According to Robert C Reed (in The New York Elevated, 1978, p. 114) the location is midtown on the Sixth Avenue elevated, probably near Herald Square.

Below is another example of a street scene recorded from the sidewalk, this time underneath the elevated tracks in the Bowery. Most street photography on postcards takes a distant, more detached viewpoint and images taken from the sidewalk are relatively unusual. Which is a shame as we get a much more intense documentary feel – a powerful evocation of the sights and sounds of a busy city street. Trains thrash overhead, horse-drawn vehicles and streetcars occupy the roadway and all the long lost detail – shop windows, theatrical poster, cast-iron balustrading and the ties that span the street and brace the twin viaducts supporting the elevated railroad can be examined at leisure. The final card shows a scene that even Edward Hopper may have rejected as excessively dystopian. A street corner where two trains, vertically stacked clatter past with an ear-piercing grinding of metal on metal that can hardly be imagined. Magnificent as it was as an emblem of the metropolitan sublime, it’s easy to see why the presence of the elevated was so greatly resented by those compelled to live and work in its perpetual shadow.

Postcard of the Day No. 65, M & OLRR Station, Marcellus NY

This is the postcard where nobody wanted to be left out – travellers and employees alike made certain that their likenesses would be recorded for posterity. The workers swarmed over the one and only locomotive (a Baldwin-built 2-4-0) with studied nonchalance. The Marcellus and Otisco Lake Railroad was a short branch line that connected with the New York Central at Martisco (an invented conflation of Marcellus and Otisco), a few miles to the north. Passenger services commenced in 1905 but lasted less than a decade, being abandoned in 1914. Freight service continued until final closure in 1959. Marcellus was, and remains a small town of exceptionally neat and tidy appearance in rural New York state, south west of the city of Syracuse. It gave its name to the Marcellus Formation, an extensive range of shale and the largest source of natural gas in the US. Massive amounts of gas are being extracted by fracking although, happily for the residents of Marcellus, most of it takes place far away in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Below are two more cards of transport curiosities with proud operators posed in attendance. A streetcar in San Antonio TX and an electric-powered US Mail Car in Sacramento CA. 

Tunnel Endings

A subterranean curiosity from one of the Twin Cities – twin postcard views of the entrances to (or exits from) the 1500 foot Selby Streetcar tunnel of 1907, operated by the Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company (TCRT) that used to run underneath the city’s cathedral and emerge in what appears to be a leafy suburb and remains so to this day from what can be seen on StreetView. The tunnel has been out of use since at least 1954 and although the approach to the east entrance (shown in the lower view) can still be found, it has been sealed. Despite which, it seems that urban explorers have occasionally penetrated the mystery and returned with photos of the interior. The card below shows another service of the TCRT trundling past Gibbs Lake en route for the resort area at Lake Minnetonka. 

Boston Transit

Two postcard views of the multi-level Dudley Street Terminal in Roxbury showing the tracks of the Washington Street Elevated with streetcar loops at either side and at ground level. A model-makers dream captured from north and southbound directions. Most has been swept away in recent decades but the central section has been adapted for use as a bus depot and appears to retain some of its former distinction.

The story of Boston’s subway is complicated and anyone interested can read about it here. The Scollay Square station shown here was opened in 1898 and after much rebuilding is now known as Government Center. The Tremont Street Subway, the oldest in North America connects it with the location of our last card, Park Street station. This composed and untroubled image contrasts greatly with the spatial complexities existing below the surface that featured in an earlier posting and can be viewed here.

Postcard of the Day No. 31, Traction Terminal, Indianapolis

This postcard was selected by the Danish-born photographer, Peter Sekaer, to send to his friend and colleague, Walker Evans. The card is postmarked in September 1936, less than 6 months after Sekaer completed an extended tour of the southern states, accompanying Evans on an FSA assignment. In that time spent together, Sekaer had clearly developed a good understanding of the type of vernacular imagery that appealed to Evans. The photographs that Sekaer took certainly bear comparison with Evans; they are technically competent and selected and composed with an educated eye. But even when the two men photographed the same location there is a quality of gravitas and evidence of an intensely self-critical faculty in Evans’s work that can’t be detected in Sekaer’s. This is what makes Evans a great photographer.

As for the Traction Terminal, it was built in 1904 and with nine tracks, it was the largest in the world. Electric streetcars ran through the streets of Indianapolis from 1890 to 1953. Plans are under development for the reintroduction of streetcars into the city. To read more about this, please follow the link.