STREETCARS and JUNCTIONS

Some people think I have an abnormal preoccupation with Baltimore streetcars. I don't deny it.  But in the Forties it was just about the only mode of transportation that I experienced. The streetcars were electric and they rode on a rail system throughout the city. Riding them exposed you to all of the senses except taste. The car swayed from side to side, and some people got "car sick." There was the odor of people in the summer, and in the soggy winter, the odor of their musty wet overcoats. While the electric motor was fairly quiet, the clacking of the metal wheels on the metal tracks was incessant. When the motorman stopped the car there was the high-pitched squeal of the braking system. As far as touch was concerned, there was the feel of hard wicker seats or fake leather seat coverings, always cracked with stuffing puffing out. Visually, there were strange people to glance at; people who didn't live in our neighborhood. 

There were the advertising signs that lined the space above the windows. But the sign that sticks most firmly in my memory was the one above the motorman's window:  

NO SMOKING

NO SPITTING

No kidding!! There really was a sign telling passengers that you could not spit while riding.

Streetcars and Junctions

Some words come into your vocabulary, and into your life, at a time when you don’t think much about them as individual words because they arrive attached to such strong ideas. One of those words for me was, and still is, “junction.” The dictionary definition is simple enough: a place where two or more objects, for example, roads or railroad routes, join, meet, or cross. But I never thought of a junction as a meeting or crossing place. For me it was a boundary—an edge to my world—that separated me from a foreign land.

When we wanted to get somewhere we had only two options that did not involve our parents. One was simply to walk to our destination. This limited us to places within about two miles of home, and times when the weather was decent enough to walk in. The second choice involved the streetcar—we usually called it the “trolley.” Baltimore’s streetcar lines could take us anywhere throughout the city in a trip of 30 to 45 minutes at most, at a cost of about a nickel. By the time we were nine or ten years old, my friends and I rode the streetcars without fear of getting lost or stranded, and without dread of the strangers that we rode with.

My earliest memories of streetcars are of the #31 line that ran along Garrison Boulevard. Although my family lived in half a dozen places for the first fifteen years of my life, all of these homes were within a short walk of Garrison Boulevard. We rarely took the streetcar northward on Garrison because we lived within walking distance of the northern end of the line: the “car barn” at Belvedere Avenue. The car barn was the overnight home of the streetcars that ran along the route of the #31, as well as the cars that ran northeast along Belvedere Avenue into the Pimlico and Mount Washington areas.

                                     

                                     

                           This is a 1929 map of the streetcar routes through the northwest section

                            of the City of Baltimore. The route numbers are enclosed in the circles.

By far, the majority of my streetcar trips were in the southern direction along most of the two mile length of Garrison Boulevard to Walbrook Junction, and from there east and south toward downtown Baltimore. The shortest “journey” we would take would be less than a mile to Liberty Heights Avenue, a street filled with small stores and shops. All of our family needs were met there by its two drugstores (Shure’s and Read’s), a grocery store (the A&P), a bank (The Union Trust Company of Maryland) and a barbershop where Mr. Libertini cut my hair. There was a shoe store and a jewelry store, a Kresge’s “5 and 10” where I could get comics or goldfish or toys, and a clothing store and a hardware store. Martha Washington Candies was two doors down from the Car Lou Beauty Shop. It was not until I was in junior high school that I noticed the presence of the Liberty Heights Recreation Center, better known as Knocko’s Pool Room.

The Forest Theatre was on Garrison, just past the intersection with Liberty Heights. There was a record store across from the theatre and, by the late 40s, a TV store with a set in the window that we could watch in the evening.

In the 1940s this is what we had before the creation of shopping malls.

In 1951, in the summer before I started high school, we moved away from Oakford Avenue to an apartment in Windsor Hills. This was a wonderful streetcar opportunity for me, because it enabled me to ride the #35 “jerkwater” line. You can get an idea of the novelty of this streetcar line from the definition of the word “jerkwater:”

1.      remote from population centers and considered insignificant and backward (insult)

2.      lacking consequence or significance

While Windsor Hills was somewhat remote from the population center, my move there was far from lacking in consequence. The #35 streetcar was an antique of sorts, having been built in 1905. It did not have a front or a back—each end was both front and back. The car could be converted almost instantly to go in either direction.

                                                   

The Jerkwater Trolley

From Windsor Hills the #35 streetcar line terminated at Walbrook Junction. The car rode into the little “car barn” at the corner of Clifton Avenue and Garrison Boulevard (I never could get away from Garrison Boulevard!) and discharged its passengers to transfer to lines that went north or east from there. The streetcar driver (he was the “conductor” or “moterman”) picked up his cash box and his change maker, detached his controller, the metal bar with which he altered the power to the electric motor that drove the car, and walked to the other end of the car. He attached his controller, installed his cash box, and was almost ready to reverse his route and head back to Windsor Hills. But first he had to do two things. He had to reverse the wicker seat backs so that the passengers would be facing in the direction of motion of the car. And then he had to change the “trolley.” The “trolley” was actually just the pole that connected the overhead electric power line to the motor that drove the wheels. The word “trolley” had become identical with the whole streetcar itself. There was a trolley at each end of the car, and depending on the direction the car was going, one trolley (at the back end of the car) was connected to the overhead power line and the other was pulled down and tied in place against the roof. A spring on the roof of the car provided the tension that held the trolley to the wire. At the end of the pole was a little metal wheel that rolled along the wire and maintained the electrical contact. To reverse direction of the car, the motorman lowered the trolley that had been in contact with the power line by pulling down on a rope attached to its upper end. The rope was then wound around a holder at that end of the car. At the other end (that would now become the rear of the car), the motorman then released the pole that had not been in use to that point, and connected it to the overhead wire. He was then ready to depart Walbrook Junction, head back through Windsor Hills, and continue on to the other end of his route, a tiny mill town named Dickeyville that went back to the late 1700s. Riding the #35 jerkwater was like riding a (slow) time machine. 

This is the #35 streetcar at Walbrook Junction, on its way

back to Dickeyville.

Part of my fascination with Walbrook Junction, and junctions in general, had to do with the streetcar tracks. Along Garrison Boulevard, and along Liberty Heights Avenue, two pairs of shiny steel tracks ran straight down the street. There was a crossing at the intersection of Liberty Heights and Garrison, but otherwise the tracks were uninterrupted. But junctions were much more interesting than straight tracks and crossings. At a junction there was a separate set of rails that curved off in a new direction. The pictures that follow show Walbrook Junction and Gwynn Oak Junction.

               

This is Walbrook junction, around 1950. On the right, the #31 streetcar is approaching the southern end of Garrison Boulevard before it heads downtown. On the left is the edge of the small car barn from which the #35 streetcar headed into Windsor Hills. The tracks coming from the right (behind where the photographer was standing) also split off to the left and circled the car barn. That’s how the #13 streetcar got into position, in the left of the picture, to head back to its eastern route across North Avenue.

                        

This is Gwynn Oak Junction, in 1950, looking east up Liberty Heights Avenue. The #32 streetcar is going to turn to its left (to the right in the photo) and go down Gwynn Oak Avenue to Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. The photo also shows the two main movie theatres in my neighborhood, both of which I could walk to from Oakford Avenue in less than fifteen minutes. The Ambassador is on the left and the Gwynn on the right. The Gwynn showed cowboy movies on Saturdays, along with cartoons, a serial, news of the world and a Three Stooges Comedy. If the photographer turned to his left he would shoot the scene shown in the next picture below.

                                         

          This is another view at Gwynn Oak Junction, looking north up Gwynn Oak Avenue.

Looking back now, I think my fascination with the junctions and their curves had to do with the idea that there were places along the streetcar routes where I thought the motorman could make choices. In reality, of course, the motorman did not exercise those choices. He had a specific route to follow. If you were the motorman of the westbound #13 car approaching Walbrook Junction, you circled the car barn and headed back east along North Avenue. You did not continue straight along the route of the #35 into Windsor Hills; you did not throw the switch that shifted a section of the track and forced the wheels to follow the curve to the right and head north up Garrison Boulevard. You followed the routes that the streetcar company dictated. When a passenger got on the #31 streetcar he could be assured that the car would follow the same route every day.

So, I must have been attracted to the possibility of departing from the rules that were dictated by the map of the routes for the various lines through the city. Was it possible that, like the motorman, I could push a button that would switch my track to a new direction? That would have been a strong attraction to a boy who felt fenced in by the rules that the adult world placed upon him. Of course there were the usual childhood safety rules with their implied consequences:

don’t run into the street (you’ll get run over by a car)

don’t play with matches (you’ll get burned)

don’t climb over fences (you’ll fall and break your neck)

don’t get scratched by a rusty nail (you’ll get lockjaw)

Lockjaw sounded terrible, so we stayed away from rusty nails. It is a real disease; its medical name is tetanus. If you look it up, you find “an acute infectious disease, usually contracted through a penetrating wound, that causes severe muscular spasms and contractions, especially around the neck and jaw.”

One of the unstated rules—one that we just learned from experience—was:

don’t cross the boundaries of your neighborhood.

The problem was: how do you define the boundaries of your neighborhood?

 Looking back seventy years, I think the answer was that my neighborhood boundaries were defined by the streetcar lines, and particularly by the junctions. By and large, my world was bounded by sections of the Baltimore Transit system. I hardly ever went beyond the #35 line on the south. I rarely crossed Gwynn Oak Avenue. The first fifteen years of my life were lived almost entirely in the small triangle bounded by Gwynn Oak Avenue, Liberty Heights Avenue, and Garrison Boulevard. 

These neighborhood boundaries had no fences. They were uncrossable out of fear of the unknown. I did not know anyone who lived across Gwynn Oak Avenue. So far as I knew, no one in my school lived on the “other side.” As for the #35 line, I did not know that anyone lived on the other side. It was like the edge of the known world, to me.

I did go to school with kids who lived on the other side (to the east) of Garrison Boulevard, but I rarely had occasion to go to their neighborhoods. I had enough friends on my side of Garrison. I was not scared when I crossed the Garrison line, but the air did seem somehow different from that on “my side.” It’s hard, especially so many years later, to describe the difference, but whatever it was, it was enough to make me aware that I was out of my neighborhood.

I wonder if my grandchildren have any sense of “neighborhood.” I don’t see how they could. They don’t walk to school, or to after-school activities. They don’t have neighborhood playgrounds or movies. All of their activities require an automobile trip, and most of those ventures are over the Los Angeles Freeways. I doubt if they have ever walked a half-mile in the rain. They certainly have never walked through snow or on ice. Even though I rode the streetcars, I still had to walk to the streets along which their tracks were confined. I knew the sidewalks and the curbs—the feel of the rough concrete.

And sometimes, as I stood on the corner waiting for the trolley, I stared up and down the street at the gleaming steel tracks, and wondered if today, just maybe, the motorman would throw a switch and take me somewhere I had never been.