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.
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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?
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.
