Streetcars of St. Louis
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- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- This short video features streetcars operating throughout St. Louis before they were taken out of service in the 1960s. Historic footage is courtesy of Mark D. Goldfeder, President of The St. Louis Railway Enthusiasts, Inc. (SLRE).
Produced and edited by Andrew Raimist.
Music: "Night Train" by Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery and "It Never Entered My Mind" by Miles Davis.
This video was first presented at the Wellston Loop Family Reunion on Saturday, November 21, 2015 at 5930 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, St. Louis, Missouri (the former J.C. Penney Department Store).
The city of St.Louis Missouri sure looked beautiful back in the day and not to mention that the cars looked beautiful back in the day as well.
A shame they're all gone! The Metrolink just isn't the same
Wow this brings back memories. In the 50s and 60s my very poor Grandma lived above Hippy's Market at Chippewa and Texas. Long gone now. She heated the big three room apartment with a wood burning cook stove. When we kids stayed over we all slept together in the "front" room and the street cars rang their bells when they made their stops at the corner. We were all poor but it was a great time to be alive.
I know that area well.. thanks for sharing your memories. Do you have any photos?
I'm an historian. And I look at this with an historian's eye. There's a grip that this stuff still retains on the human psyche.
If we go back an exact century, or at least 100 years, from 1920 to 2020, what do we notice?
That there are two almost perfect halves - 1920 to 1970, and then 1970 to 2020. Each of them 50 years.
The first 50 years were remarkably intact, and by that I mean that much of what existed in 1920 still remained in 1970.
In the next 50 years we took most of it apart and replaced it. With something very different.
And the replacement - because it exists in the era in which we live, we're forced to believe that it is something of value, even of as much value as what was replaced.
I've spent quite a few years listening to people talk. And what they say without really saying it, is that what the 2nd 50 years produced compared to the first 50 years - is crap. It's an embarrassing thing to admit. But there it is.
There was a distinct continuity that glued those first 50 years together. A continuity of design, certainly, but also one of value, and of aesthetics.
Considering how people actually lived, their quality of life, and their relationship with the built environment. Which is what made it a public domain. In which citizens had a relationship with where they lived, and what they lived in.
Many today would think of this as just nostalgia. But buried deep inside that sentiment is something far more nuanced, settled, with a powerful social stamp upon it. All you have to do is take a really good look at a few minutes of this, to get a sense of it.
Of course, I've read all about how Big Auto and Big Rubber and Big Oil took apart public rail transit. It's a well-known story, easy to find for anyone who cares to look. But along with the demolition of car-independent living, alternative ways of getting around (and during a time when classic auto design reached a kind of cultural climax) we completely altered our urban design as well, our street layout, our commercial presentation, and our sense of almost any neighborhood of any kind that remained kid-friendly.
We never designed areas of residential commercial utility to be kid-friendly, actually. They just were, and how they happened to be said something about the kind of society that built it that way.
I spent many years riding streetcars similar to this around an urban inner city core, during a time when that core was being demolished and replaced with glass and steel. It doesn't feel urban any more. It feels like something that could pop up along the Las Vegas strip almost overnight. And that's not urban.
It makes me smile though, remembering back to a time when I was still a pretty young kid, the first time I was riding a streetcar with a friend of mine, and I realized that the driver didn't have a steering wheel. I shouted it out. Turned red-faced at the laughter up and down the car. They didn't know that I'd ridden streetcars quite a few hundreds of times by that point, and it had never entered my mind before.
I feel you're pain brother.
Thanks for writing this
I concur 100%. I lived through those times. Both parents were from north Saint Louis around 14th and St. Louis. Married and moved to 21st and Penrose. As a kid we’d walk up to Sportsman Park and watch the players pull up. Met and talked to Stan Musial numerous times. Hung out in Fairgrounds Park. Rode the street car from the white water tower down to the Fox. They were great times and miss it so much. And yet the kids I talk to today have no interest in my stories. They have no interest in whatever happened before their birth date. It’s beyond sad. It’s tragic.
I R.E.M. er in the forties and fifties riding Grand Ave in south St. Louis to Sportsman Park to watch the Browns and also Cardinals baseball games.
I rode one of these in the 1950's when I was a kid. Thanks for the memories
Beautiful -- love the music, adds a lot, very evocative. My Dad started with St Louis Public Service in 1947 -- I used to ride the cars & buses with him all the time. Thank you!
Great footage! Sad these no longer exist. Even sadder the city is not even vibrant like the old days. Not sure we’ve moved forward or backward
Its mainly due to the White Flight as well as the crime in the city as well but yes St.Louis Missouri would've been a really great city.
This is so wonderful to see the street cars ,trains and buses going your way ,when you need to get there !
My city looks so different back then
Thanks for the memories. Some of my earliest memories include riding next to my motorman dad, sitting on the sandbox, on the old Creve Coeur line, in the early 1940s. Grandpa was also a motorman. When I was 20, I lived on Olive Street, in Gaslight Square, (when it was a happening place). Daily took the Olive Car downtown to work. Was very sad to see the last cars go out of service in the early 60s. I have a couple of picture books of this era, and a large map of the Public Service Company system dated 1942, real treasures when I’m feeling nostalgic.
I have ridden in these street cars. I was just a kid, maybe six or seven years old and we lived out in the country. We would ride a passenger train from our little part of the world into Union Station and then my mother would catch one of these street cars to go to my Great Aunts house. I don't remember where she lived but it seemed like a long ways to a kid. Great memories and this is a great video. Thank you for sharing it.
I lived on Pershing Ave.
Mom owned an apartment. The trolley ran from the Loop, up into Clayton.
I used to sit at the window and watch.
There must have been a crick, or slick spot or something. Often it would get just past our building, and slide backwards. It would sometimes take a few attempts before making it.
Grandma used to kid me .(of course I don’t remember this).
She was with me when I said my first word. She said I stood up in the chair, pointed out the window and said
“Streetcar ❗️” 🙂
I rode a streetcar in St. Louis the last week they were in operation.
Great shots.. I loved the Street Car system, or what was left of it in the late 40s and though the 50s and early 60s.. My Cousin and I rode the last cars on the Franklin line. I would almost bet that young man boarding a car was him from the way it looks. When I was really young what was left of the St. Charles line ended at around Brown Road on the Rock Road. I recall the old wooden cars that ran along side the Rock Road much of the way to Wellston. I only can say I rode it once. I also had an Aunt and Uncle who lived in Maryland Heights near the Creve Couer Line. Once in a while I got glimpse of the cars running though the country side and a few times recall them turning at the park at the end of the line. I always wanted to ride them but never go too, they took it off before I could. I used to go to a Dentist on Broadway near downtown and nearly every Saturday for years took it to Baden to switch to a bus to Ferguson. I loved the part where it bounced along side the Calvary Cemetery. Many times I rode the Clayton car to the end of the line and back to downtown. Same for the Grand, Broadway, Hodiamont, and a few times on the Jefferson. It was a wonderful way to travel and no bus line can hold a candle to the fixed route trolleys.
I rode the hodiamont the last day. May 1966. Free rides for anyone. Such great memories...and yes a bus was not even close to the streetcar!
I was born in 77, St. Louis looked so much different back then.
acousticedison u7i
Grew up by The Bevo Mill, can barely remember them when I was a little kid in the early 1960's going up and down Gravois.
Thanks for sharing. This brought back memories of riding the streetcar to the doctor's office as a child.
Vvid memories of this era, as dad was a streetcar motorman, we lived near the Suburban Garden loop and by 9 years old or so I was riding all over the city on the streetcars (which in St. Louis were not called trolleys). I was on the last run of the Creve Coeur line and several others. It is difficult today to impart the wonder of riding streetcars through the wilderness where the City Limits, Creve Coeur Lake, Brentwood, Kirkwood and other lines sailed. I was in St. Louis today and noted the last vestiges of the City Limits-Ferguson line north of I-70 have now been erased with the fabled power station at Ferguson Junction, where Berkeley streetcars met Ferguson streetcars, and everything around it heartbreakingly gone.
Streetcars are not trolleys, anyway.
Wayne Brasler I have similar memories. My dad and grandpa were both motormen. I knew the system well in my growing up years.
@@zorroalphonso4354 They can be, but a streetcar can be horse or mule drawn, steam driven, can receive electricity from a conduit between the tracks or from an overhead wire; cable cars are also streetcars.
I remember when the Notre Dame Alumni of St. Louis rented streetcars as party vehicles with cold beer, snacks and stops at Gaslight Square.
Would have been nice to see footage of the shop they worked on these in. It’s now the automotive building of ranken tech. I went there for mechanical and the old Vietnam vet mechanic who got a medal for driving a tanker of rocket propellant through the jungle by himself told us about the buildings history. There used to be a track in the shop where the engines now reside that held “Big Bertha” a diesel train engine that used to be the final for engines class by just pulling one of her pistons from the catwalk around the massive cylinder head. He had one still on the caved in air conditioner and when asked how heavy it was he lifted it and kind of bounced it as if it were a toddler and said “ about 200 pounds” lol. He was a big ol country boy. He also told us about how the workers there had to keep buckets there for the water in their cars radiators in the winter because they didn’t have antifreeze. Imagine showing up for work to drain your radiator on your car into a bucket carrying it into the building putting it by everyone else’s buckets around a big stove so it won’t freeze before starting each work day. If you didn’t your engine block froze and cracked! Yeah I’d say we got it easy now.
Streetcars were a major way to get around St. Louis and other cities until cars took over. I remember being on the one that came to the University City Loop with old City hall in the background.
WOW I used to love riding the streetcars to go downtown with my mom to Famous-Barr, JC Penny's, and Buster Brown's Shoe Store. 💓💕💖💞💞
SO PRACTICAL!!
I loved the streetcar...a dime! took it from overland (midland ave.) downtown St. Louis or to forest park (skating on the ponds there in the winter). thanks for the footage.
Classy times. Thanks
You bet
Fun! I well recall electric streetcars in suburban Clayton when I was a young child in the ‘50s. They did not last long after that. Sadly, I never rode one.
My grandfather was a street car conductor. He was known as Gus Van the streetcar man! I do not know which line he drove. but I do remember riding on them.
I vaguely remember when the last streetcar was removed from service, I had to be 2 or 3 years old. It made me sad to hear it, because I could sense that it was a huge change.., not necessarily for the better. Can't say I remember riding on them, but I do remember seeing them cruising around.
I sure enjoyed this video as I was born in 1953 and was pretty young riding one we made connection with at Grand and Gravois riding it to my pediatircian office in Grandall sqaure on Grand. I remember needing to walk out in to the street to get it. We took a bus to make the connection from the Southhampton neighborhood. My Dad worked and had the one car in our family. My mom stayed home so it was my mom taking me to the visits. I wonder what the Special streetcar was for in the video. I only remember us driving to Cards games on Grand.
St. Louis holds a spot in many American's hearts as emblematic of the turn-of-last-cetury greatness, immortalized in the musical "Meet Me In St. Louis", with the famous "(Clang Clang Clang Went The-) Trolley Song". The streetcar on the Delmar Loop nods to that history, and it might have been a splendid, albeit over-the-top agenda to make the buses of that same design, as there are a couple buses for tourists that are styled as such. It's important, however schlocky and hokey to try to recall those better days, part of the putting a "somewhere" on a place, to avoid the "There's no there, there", emptiness of a city-specific style.
wow. imagine the cost to reinstate a comparable network today when the loop trolley cost like 100 million and goes two miles
probably a half trillion.
That was due to incompetence.
Man, this takes me back so well. I was a kid when they were still running and when the last one ran. I want to say that we on the Wellston run but I could be wrong on that.
The last of the street cars were long gone before I came along. This was the most in-depth video I have seen of them. Thank you.
I remember seeing these as a young kid when we would go downtown St.Louis, however I never got to ride one.
Used to go down on Franklin Ave to shop with my Mother in the 1950s, rode the street then.
My friend's dad was a conductor and we would play with stacks of old transfers. We would buy monthly passes and save the old ones, and when the next month of the same color would come up we would use the old passes by quickly flashing them. How about rocking the street car after school. Getting next to a girl in a crowded streetcar was always fun. Hopping on a streetcar via the rear door when it opened to let people off. Watching the conductor go outside to grab a pole to to put the arm back on the line. GRaduation parties on a rented streetcar,. Threw up eating Switzer's licorice on a streetcar and never ate licorice again. Getting off at Sportsman's Park and watching Stan hit 5 home runs in a double header and Satchel Paige pitch for the Browns....oh yea!
This video is so well done. In the 1950's I took the Gtand Avenue streetcar almost daily. Oh, the memories.
Incredible video. Been looking for more on the subject. I grew up right by where the summit line used to be and people would always tell me about the streetcar that used to be there. I'm so sad I never got the chance to ride it (or go to school on it, I bet that would've been fun)
Amazing film
My dad grew up in North St. Louis through the 1930s and very early 1940s. Then it off to N. Africa to fly in a
B-24 Liberator to bomb Rommel. Then to Venosa, Italy to bomb Hitler. When he returned from the war dad used to take the streetcars to Sportsman Park for a Cardinals game.
I miss those days..
The pink car at 1:26- my mom used to have one just like it!
Nice footage & then we get an extra treat with a little "Miles"
The music of STL jazz greats Jimmy Forrest and Grant Green. And of course East St. Louis's own Miles Davis.
You could ride the street car in safety....how about our Metro where people hop on and off like bunnies....and people wonder....how can we make the Metro more safe....does in take a genius to answer that question....the bullies just move from the playground, to the classroom to the Metro....mocking the system and laughing at the good cirtiizens who can't figure out how to keep the Metro safe....Good Luck...
I just looks like the city was alive.
From what I understand the Wellston was the last car. I was born in 1958 I believe I would have been 8 years old at the time.
We desperately need these back. GM and the rest of the car companies ruined America.
Taking streetcars out of service was a stupid thing to do. I think the ones that conspired to kill the streetcar lines should have been punished severely for it.
Mainly was due to everyone having a car.
Street cars were losing money by the dumpster load back then.
These beatiful streamlined designed streetcars are of course the precursor to St. Louis' Metrobus system. Any thoughts on the design of modern buses? The most current versions are a bright green color, and I believe, electric.
I heard one of our street cars ended up in San Francisco. How appropriate.
I rode the street cars with my Grandmother in the early 1950s. This is great. Thanks. 🖕
Awesome someone had the where with all to record such History, really the videos of the old Gaslight section of Saint Louis ?
all I saw was all the 56 - 57 - 58 Plymouths in this video!! lol
a man of culture
Awesome brother Mopar No Car.
@@CJColvin the Forward Look!
@@Turk380 Oh Yeah!!!!!! And thats when American vehicles used to look beautiful.
Right at 4:15...(Fox & Woolworths)... What is directly across from Woolworths, headed east? That's the corner of Olive & Grand but across from Woolworths.
I was hoping the camera would scan on across with the streetcar.
At 2:55, there is a great shot of a St. Louis motorman using the switch iron to grab the trolley rope from the high trolley rope catcher above the back windows of a PCC car. I'm familiar with Mark Goldfeder.
Some years ago, I bought a large collection of original photos showing St. Louis streetcars all the way back to the horse car era. It includes bus photos back to the late 1920's through the 1950's. Too bad there isn't a way of posting some of them here. You guys would love them.
I rode on ex-St. Louis Public Service PCC cars in San Francisco on some of my early visits. A beautifully restored ex-St. Louis PCC car is operating in San Diego on a Downtown tourist line. It's now painted in San Diego colors.
ruclips.net/video/BtjEO5q8vnE/видео.html
Didn't thy have this music in "Back to the Future"?
I think these images are from the last day of service...
Great video, thanks for posting! I'd love to talk to Mark about some other St. Louis streetcar footage I've seen. Do you know how to get ahold of him?
Justin Tolliver
Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. Andrew Raimist
Blacks and whites 50/50
Maybe back then.
I we t school on bdwy. Car wen it had a conductor. One drove one kept stove going. On othernd apps. 1946
Is the Wellston Loop Family Reunion still active?
Kathleen Kissel
There is a Wellston Loop Facebook group. Lots of people are members and working toward making improvements on the ground.
Kathleen Kissel
Here’s the link:
m.facebook.com/groups/591665764314642
A lot of your comment makes sense however I would place the 1970s in that first half. Other than that okay. Also your message is way too short. Don't be shy express yourself a little more. LOL.
Pole