That is the best streetcar video I've ever seen--and I've watched many. Usually they just have film with no narration, you don't know what location you are looking at. Excellent.
Excellent work...as usual. I know next to nothing about the Twin Cities. Your trolley trips are fascinating. They remind me of my youth in Pittsburgh. Keep them coming, please.
I see two different kinds of street car styles. I was 10 in Minneapolis and remember the first time I saw and rode on one of the more modern New ones. They were so cool. And silent compared to the old ones!
Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating!!! Thank you, Aaron. And thanks to the Streetcar History Museum. Glad you got the extension from Brookside to Hopkins and then Excelsior. That right of way is barely detectable now.
If you just had a couple more minutes of video footage on Como Ave from 22nd to 19th, I could have seen my grandmas house where my dad grew up and the old Tuttle Elementary School!
Fantastic footage - thank you! And speaking of the Bottleneck, until I-94 was constructed in the 1960s a statue of Thomas Lowry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lowry) presided over that notorious intersection, appropriately enough. He was the founder of the Twin Cities’ transit system. The Lowry monument was moved to 24th and Hennepin, by Temple Israel.
@@tewam67 what turmoil? They let the city destroy all the public infrastructure because the boomers were led to beleive that highways and cars were the future.
At about 28:50, a car pulls up to the Lake Harriet - 42nd Street crossing as the streetcar approaches. The automobile stops and then immediately rolls backward down the hill. The days of the manual transmission.
How did the streetcars turn? What I mean is, how did they operate the switches ? Did someone have to get out to operate the switch, or was there some way to control it from inside the car. Thanks!
Some of each. Before the 1920s all the track switches had to be turned by hand, either by the crew, or at busy intersection by an assigned switchman. Later, electric switches were installed that were controlled by the motorman as he approached. If the streetcar passed an overhead wire contact with the controller off, the switch didn't change. If the controller was on, it turned the track switch.
This is so neat. 70 years ago, really hard to believe from the quality of the shots. The narration really helps too explaining perspective in real time. I was particularly interested in SW Minneapolis and Edina, I can't imagine where that right of way would be today. They must have built houses on it? Also, I always blamed the buses for the death of streetcars, but as is made clear here the system died from the outside in. It ended Lake Mtka routes in 1932, and Hopkins after that. I didn't know about the Brookside turnaround until watching this. Funny how there are real corridors/borders with the neighborhoods. You really can't see past those barriers to the houses. The tracks are almost wild. Did those areas collect hobos/homeless? Or was there a police presence? Or neither?
To answer part of your question, a lot of the ROWs are still visible. Alleys, back yards etc. If you look close on Google Earth, you will see them. Odd tree lines. Paths. From the barn at Lake Harriet, go SW about half a block and you can see where it turns off to the west. Goes between businesses and looks like an alleyway. At about 44th and Abbott, the line merges with 44th st.
@@karlkissinger5395 You can also see part of the ROW continuing out west through Edina towards Hopkins. If you go on Google Maps satellite view and follow 44th Street until it hits Brookside, imagine the line continuing west and a little north and you will see a line of trees that cuts across the wetlands there south of Meadowbrook Lake. That's the embankment that the streetcars ran on. You can actually explore it on foot until it hits the properties on the other side of the wetlands which must have been built right on top of the old ROW after the streetcars were pulled up. Kind of melancholic for me to see those traces of the extensive public transportation network that we once had in the Twin Cities. Now it takes a decade and a couple billion dollars to build a single line of light rail...feels like we lost our way a bit.
As cool as old streetcars are there really was no practical benefit for them once buses came into existence outside of the fact the streetcars produced no smelly toxic emissions in the cities being they were electric.
This is why the surviving systems typically had right of ways or tunnels. These were places where buses could not be put in. I would also add, streetcars are very quiet. One can stand in the middle of Market St. in San Francisco and because of the streetcars and trolley buses, it is a very quiet main st.
Also they held more people. In the early forties it was estimated that New York city's trams had about two and a half times the capacity of the buses they were replaced with.
The street running ones maybe, but imagine how useful that grade separated right-of-way running from Uptown down around the lakes and out towards Edina/Hopkins/Minnetonka would have been today if it had been preserved (beyond the short section for the museum, of course). No reason that couldn't have been upgraded to modern light rail standard, especially considering now we're spending billions to send light rail out in essentially the same direction.
