Born in 1947, remember mom taking me & my brother to visit out cousins on McDonald Ave, we’d get on at E. 39th St & Church Ave and get off at McDonald & Church Ave.
Nearly all the private transportation companies had already converted many of their track miles converted to buses because they're cheaper. Also nearly all the private transportation companies were in or near receivership. NCL never purchased the Pacific Electric. Except for a couple of years during WWII, the PE never made a profit on passenger fares.
My older sister got to ride the Church Avenue streetcar before it was decommissioned. So sad that this fully functional infrastructure was dismantled by misinformation from the automobile industry in cities across America. I still remember the streetcar tracks would be exposed periodically at Church and Flatbush avenues since the tracks were covered over and not torn up.
NCL controlled fewer than 50 transit operations. PCL and other vaguely-connected companies controlled a handful more. There were many hundreds of streetcar and interurban systems. NCL was a vulture, not an apex predator. The die was cast by 1920.
Fiorello LaGuardia really hated private transit companies didn't he? He built the IND to replace the IRT elevated railways did he not? And Robert Moses who never saw a plan to generate more auto traffic he didn't like. They made such a beautiful pair!! And I can tell in the 1956 film there were areas of Brooklyn that were already decrepitating and being torn down thanks to the automobile.
I remember recording this story on my VCR. We are from Los Angeles and my father was a huge, huuuuuuuge train geek. He often lamented the loss of the Red Cars. He was tickled to see this story on 60 minutes and I taped it for him and he watched it more than once.
Everything looked so nice back then...clean streets, nice looking cars and normal looking people decently dressed walking without their face in a phone. Compare that with the decay we have today.
Swell video, takes me back in time. I grew up (till age seven) on 39th Street in Brooklyn. We had a trolley that ran up 39th Street to 13th Ave where it turned and squiggled under the elevated Culver Line trains (past the Bocce ball courts) and onto Church Ave. I loved going through the Trolley tunnels (under the intersections) and recall at least three tunnels. We moved in mid 1950's and I ain't rid a Brooklyn trolley since. On July 4th adults would lay bottle rockets in the trolley tracks and light'em. The rockets would scoot along in the track grooves, it was boss.
I grew up on 13th and 44th in the 70s/80s. There used to be a Woolworth on 13th. It closed in teh 80s. I saw "Rocky" at the Beverly theatre. The bank on Mcdonald and Church is still there. The Culver line was taken down and is now new housing.
@@futfut1- far out. Not terribly far from Sunset Park. I remember 13th Ave being a mostly Jewish neighborhood going out towards Maimonides hospital. Contrasting Sunset Parks mostly Puerto Rican residents. Woolworth's was boss. I hung at the 10th Street/5th Ave and 86th Street/5th Ave Woolworths in early and mid 1960's. A banana split cost .39 cents back then. Brooklyn was an ethnically divided borough. After military service I settled in Bay Ridge (predominately Norwegian) for the 1970's/80's. Thanks paesan.
Wow 1956 my late father was 18 years old, we came a long ways since trolleys I guess with these gas prices of today they wisg they kelpt using electric.
Maybe, but back in the day, 90% of Philly’s N-S streets, and 50% of its E-W streets had streetcar lines, so while what is left is great, it’s only a fraction of what was. And streetcars are only as clean as their source of electricity; if coal is powering the agency, then the streetcars are running on coal. The other problem with buses is that they stop too much, many cities are fixing this by installing Busways, where the bus is isolated in its own lane, so it doesn’t face traffic congestion and it also stops less frequently, which gets rid of that problem. BUT, one of the arguments for this is fake: Yes, it’s cheaper to build a busway than a streetcar line, but over time, streetcars that run on rails require less maintenance, have less wear and tear and thus are ultimately less expensive (unless of course you’re San Francisco where it took nearly 7 years to build a busway, going far over budget and ending up costing almost as much as a subway line, if not the subway line SF still hasn’t managed to get open). Yeah, it was a bad decision back then, but remember, like today, as the planet dies, the politicians were only following the people, and like then, the people wanted to drive.
Come now. This was news back then. Enough time had passed that the actions of city fathers and corporations of the time were finally coming to light as documents became available, and the ideas of the time, “Progress” as it were, came into question. It only became fake news, and a conspiracy theory later, within your lifetime probably, when people kept repeating it, posting and forwarding the videos and articles on the subject without ever fact checking the basic premise.
1987. This should be seen for what it is, an historical document and one with outdated information. The fee for riding streetcars was five cents, five cents from the late 19th century well into the 20th. Streetcar service expanded, other services like snow removal along lines continued to be required, but no elected official would dare allow fares to rise (the companies themselves were about as corrupt as one could imagine and so had little public sympathy) as a result, no streetcar company in America turned a profit after the mid-20’s. Yes, like all great conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth in this: A combination of oil, rubber and car companies did get together to form the National Cities transit company (Rosa Park’s famous bus wore it’s yellow and green livery, as did buses and streetcars in LA) and bought up streetcar companies across the nation BUT they bought up companies already in bankruptcy or heading there, not just any rail company. They were vultures picking the bones of the dead, not predators taking down the healthy. Moreover, just as we see today, as the PNW burns like California and NYC has hurricanes like Miami, while there is little political leadership in standing up to those who drive cars today, there was only encouragement to private drivers back then as cities not only let their streetcar companies go, and tore up tracks, they also tore down their cities to make ever more parking, until, like Houston and Lincoln Neb, there was practically no city left to see.
I have never been on a streetcar in Brooklyn nor have I ever seen one in operation-we called them “trolley cars” (I either have not been born yet or I was too young). The closest thing to a streetcar for me were the “electric buses” that ran ran up and down Flushing Avenue,Nostrand Avenue,Lee Avenue, and Tompkins Avenue.
Rain didn't affect their operation any more than it does electric engines on railroads. Ice storms are another matter altogether! In Baltimore we had sweeper cars to clear the tracks of snow in the Winter. They had a large rotating brush on the front angled so as to move the snow off to the side. I was born in 1950, so remember when Baltimore's PCC cars were still running.
I know the Street names and locations but don't remember much. My Grandparents lived on Ditmas Avenue or Dorchester Road on the next street. I remember Ebingers and Macy's and the plushness of the movies which played Cinderfeller with Jerry Lewis.
I was born in 1949...we lived at 1640 and 2330 ocean ave. I remember the trolley cars....Don't recall ever riding in one. I remember Ebingers...do you remember dubrows. Abraham and Strauss store downtown. The roller rink by Ebbets Field...the carousel at Prospect Park. Wish I had a time machine...life today is like never ending twilight zone episode !
