Walkabout: Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, Part Two

Read Part 1 one this story.

If you go on line to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Eagle archives and enter “trolley accidents,” in the search function, there are 644 entries under that topic, from 1891 to 1950. Granted, not all of them are about trolley accidents in Brooklyn, and some of them are repeated stories about the same incidents. Some are just general mentions or stories about changes needed or implemented, but no matter how you want to cut it, trolley accidents were a rather common occurrence.

Like any mass transit conveyance, trolley cars had mechanical failures and human failures. People were often careless; ordinary citizens of all ages, and employees alike. The trolley companies, and there were a lot of them, all were trying to make a profit, and corners were sometimes cut. In the days before stringent safety laws and strong labor unions, all kinds of things went wrong, often maiming and killing people in the process.

I could tell stories about all kinds of accidents and tragedies that took place in the course of the trolley’s long history in Brooklyn, but I find the period when the trolley and the car had to share the road to be the most interesting. As a transportation of the past literally collided with the transportation of the future, we can reach some insight into our present day transportation situations.

A brief history of mass surface transit was outlined in Part One of this story. The electric trolley car made its debut in Brooklyn in the very late 1880s. By the turn of the 20th century, trolley tracks and overhead electric lines crisscrossed the city, running in almost every neighborhood, and spreading out to those that were not yet served. Trolley cars could hold a fair number of people, did not need to rely on horse power, and could run in all but the most severe weather conditions. The trolley was less work than a bike, and one could ride in relative comfort, without the soot and noise of railroad trains and the new elevated trains.

When trolleys and horse drawn carriages and wagons shared the road, the trolley ran up the middle of most streets, with the horse traffic to the left and right. Then came the automobile, messing everything up. Automobiles often frightened the horses, and cars needed room to get by the carriages and the trolleys on their annoying tracks. At first, when cars could only be afforded by the wealthy, it wasn’t too bad. But when the automobile assembly lines began flooding the market with all kinds of cars – from economy to luxury, and the number of cars on the street began to outnumber the horses and carriages, the world of transportation changed forever.

Along with the cars came the buses. The first bus to run in New York City did so in 1905. It was a gas-powered double decker bus operated along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It was operated by the Fifth Avenue Coach Company. They soon had uptown/downtown and crosstown busses running, along with their horse-drawn trolleys. Two years later, they got rid of their horses, and went totally with the bus. The bus took longer to catch on outside of the heavy Midtown routes, but by the 1920s, the trolley lines began to slowly be replaced by bus lines in all of New York City, including Brooklyn. There were many reasons, but two of them were accidents and the influence of Big Business, more specifically, the auto and oil industries. Also a guy named Robert Moses.

I was drawn to the history of the trolley by one photograph I ran across – one taken on Wednesday July 8, 1931. In it, you can see what appears to be a serious accident. The Nostrand Avenue trolley jumped the track and crashed into a drug store on the corner of Nostrand and Putnam Avenues. Since this was my old neighborhood, the photo made quite an impression. But six people were hurt. It was but one of six trolley crashes in that past month. In two of those accidents, two trolleys collided on the same track, sending dozens of people to the hospital. The trolley was setting itself up for distruction.

When Robert Moses became Parks Commissioner, he began building roads and highways for automobiles. He loved automobiles, although he never drove. He had a limo driver. But he saw the automobile as a vehicle of leisure, where people of means mostly traveled outside of the city on pleasure trips for recreation and revitalization. He never imagined the number of cars that would be on the road, being used for mundane tasks. I doubt he envisioned semi trucks, either. But he was also not a big fan of mass transit, especially rail transit.

He wanted to get rid of trolleys and their pesky tracks and electric lines, and develop wider city streets and highways. Under Moses’ influence, and perhaps in the spirit of “progress,” in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia began mandating the replacement of electric traction vehicles, such as trolleys, with motor buses. One by one, the trolley lines were replaced with buses, and the tracks torn up or paved over. The overhead electric lines were removed, and with the exception of only a few lines, Brooklyn’s trolleys were gone by the dawn of World War II.

For conspiracy lovers, there was also this – the actions of a holding company called the National City Lines. They were a private transit company owned by General Motors, Firestone Tires, Mack Trucks, Phillips Petroleum and Standard Oil of California. Between 1936 and 1950, through smaller local companies they owned, they bought up trolley companies in 56 major cities all across the country, including New York City. Whenever they would buy a surface transit system, they would dismantle it and replace it with buses: GM buses with Firestone tires, running on gasoline, of course.

This was an extension of a plan already in action over at GM. Albert P. Stone, Jr. the long-time chairman of GM during the 1920s had assembled a task force in 1922, charged with the task of replacing America’s light rail lines, which included trolleys, with cars, trucks and buses. If you think this is anti-business paranoia, the documentation exists in GM’s own archives and elsewhere. It was a huge scandal, called the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy. The scandal culminated in an indictment of many companies, and individuals. The end result was a slap on the wrist to all concerned. By that time, the damage was done. The tale may be told in more detail at another time.

Those who advocate light rail and mass transit systems point to this scandal as the nail in the coffin of light rail mass transit. The Streetcar Conspiracy is blamed for helping to turn cities into car-clogged messes, as mass transit needs were shuffled aside for the needs of cars and trucks. Money that could have gone to expanding rail traffic was diverted to highways, roads and bridges.

During the Great Depression, money was allocated to build roads and highways. It did not go to laying tracks for light rails, or subsidizing the building of trolley or light rail facilities. No one tried to improve electric rail transport, but millions were given to buy gas guzzling and air polluting buses. Fingers were pointed at the often sloppily run private trolley companies, but nothing was done to make them better. They just got rid of them. We live with the results of that today.

The New York City Board of Transportation, which was established in 1940, did not control all of the subway lines and surface transportation until 1953, believe it or not. The MTA did not gain control of the outer borough private express bus lines until 2006. By the 1950s, there were only three operating trolley lines in Brooklyn. The last trolleys rolled out for the last time in Brooklyn on Halloween Day, 1956.

During the 1970s, the story of the GM Conspiracy made the news, especially in the cities where the National City Lines decimated rail travel. LA had it much worse than we did, and today is legendary for its lack of widespread mass transit. The details of some of the plans to get rid of trolleys and other light rail lines came to light for the first time. The demise of the trolley cannot all be laid at the feet of the great conspiracy, however. There were many reasons why trolleys died out, and some of them coincidentally occurred when the Scandal was at its height.

The result, no matter what the cause, is a large fleet of buses that cannot get through traffic easily. Thank goodness they switched from gasoline powered engines, or we’d be more polluted than we are now. Anyone who has tried to get down Flatbush Avenue or other busy streets knows how slow buses can be. They also rarely run on time and get bunched up. Light rail lines, especially running out to Brooklyn’s outer reaches, seems like a no brainer as people are pushed further and further out towards the sea, or just try to get around a crowded and popular city. The return of the trolley has been wished for all these many years. But it’s all really expensive, and would mean eminent domain, endless construction, delays, overrun costs and the political will to act. Will it ever happen?

(Trolley accident, July 7, 1931, corner Nostrand and Putnam Avenues, Bedford Stuyvesant. Source: Brooklyn Memories)

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