Even a small change like this inevitably rankled some patrons, who objected to being shaken down for their fare immediately upon entering a car. It seemed disrespectful. In particular, the direct gaze of the conductor could discomfit women as they attempted to retrieve their fares. But daintiness had never been a strong suit of the streetcar business, and such concerns were swept aside. Payment upon entry quickly became a standard practice. The adoption of fare boxes would ultimately lead to the introduction of metal tokens shortly after World War I. Tokens were much easier to process than paper tickets and would become a standard way to pay mass transit fares for the rest of the twentieth century.
A conductor follows passengers onto a crowded car on the former Columbia Street Railway line on H Street Northeast in the 1910s. Library of Congress.
WASHINGTON’S ODDEST OCCUPATION
Motormen and conductors worked long, grueling hours—often twelve to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week—and many of them faced considerable dangers on a daily basis. In horsecar days, operators had been required to stand on the open platform at the front of the car, exposed to the elements in all kinds of weather. With the advent of faster-moving electric streetcars, the motormen faced worse exposure on these open platforms. Many suffered from hypothermia. In some cities, streetcar unions pushed to eliminate open platforms, but company officials resisted, arguing that the glass front of a closed compartment would become fogged or soiled and prevent operators from clearly seeing where they were going. The struggle for closed vestibules came to the attention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which in 1903 collected signatures on a petition to Congress to ban open platform cars in the District. The drive was successful, and a law requiring closed vestibules on D.C. streetcars passed that same year.
Conductors braved hazards that are unthinkable today. One of the most harrowing was having to work the open cars that were so popular and crowded in the warmer months. Because there was no center aisle, they were obliged to balance themselves on the narrow running board that ran along the side of the car to reach each passenger and collect his or her fare. “Thus the conductor was constantly swinging along this narrow footboard all day, with a fare box in one hand, a punch and bunch of transfers in the other, trying to keep his balance, like a goat on a narrow precipice,” an early streetcar union executive recalled.109
One day in September 1903, twenty-two-year-old William Smallwood, who lived on Benning Road, was working as a conductor on a crowded open car near the far eastern end of the Benning Road line at Chesapeake Junction on the Maryland border. Of course, the streetcars on these suburban stretches used overhead trolley lines, which were mounted on poles that stood between the two sets of incoming and outgoing tracks. Smallwood had just started to make his rounds collecting fares from the many commuters who were headed into the city when he leaned far over the side to get around two men who were standing on the running board. Unfortunately, the fast-moving car passed a trolley pole at that exact moment, and Smallwood was struck in the head and thrown off the car into a ditch. The passengers “gave the alarm, and as quickly as possible the car was stopped and backed to the scene of the accident. Smallwood was unconscious. He was placed on one of the seats and carried to the Casualty Hospital,” where doctors said he “had only the very smallest chance for recovery, as the right side of his skull was crushed.”110 Despite their dangers, the popular cars continued in service for many more years; the last one was not removed from service in Washington until the 1930s.
Passengers, including military servicemen, crowd on to a WRECo open car in July 1918. Note the conductor on the running board at the rear of the car. Maryland Rail Heritage Library.
Perhaps the most dangerous streetcar job was the one the Washington Times called “Washington’s Oddest Occupation,” that of the “pitman,” who spent his days attaching and removing electrical plows to the undersides of streetcars. Pitmen were stationed in “plow pits,” small enclosures just beneath the street surface that were located at a handful of sites around the city where underground conduits ended and overhead trolley lines began. Prominent plow pits were located on Fourth Street in Eckington, at Fifteenth and H Streets Northeast, at the Calvert Street bridge over Rock Creek, at the Navy Yard bridge in Anacostia and on Prospect Street in Georgetown, where the Glen Echo line connected with downtown routes. When a streetcar arrived and rolled to a stop over one of these plow pits, it was the job of the pitman to either attach or detach the plow on the underside of the car as another worker connected or disconnected the trolley pole on top of the car. Once the pitman had completed his task, he would ring a bell to signal the driver to continue on his way.
It was a fairly simple job, carried out hundreds of times a day, but it was fraught with danger. The pitmen worked in proximity to the electrified third rail, as well as numerous other live wires: “Thousands of volts of electricity are chained in those wires which crawl about on every side of the cave [plow pit]. Let a single loose installation occur or a wire be snapped in a storm, and the pit would be instantly charged with a voltage equal to that of the death chair in Sing Sing,” the Washington Times ominously noted.111
In August 1900, the first recorded plow pit fatality occurred when John C. Page, a native of Austin, Texas, who had served in the Spanish-American War, was found electrocuted in his plow pit at Fifteenth and H Street Northeast. The motorman of a streetcar waiting over the pit to have its plow attached became impatient when he heard no bell signaling him to move on. He found Page senseless in the pit. Authorities later determined that Page’s left arm had come in contact with the electric conduit rail. The pitmen were supposed to flip switches to turn the current off when they attached or detached the plow, and electrocutions might occur if the switches weren’t set properly. Similar incidents occurred in 1901, when WRECo employee James Looney was electrocuted in his Prospect Street plow pit in Georgetown, and in 1911, when an Italian immigrant named Tony Scoffetti was electrocuted as his pit flooded with rainwater.
A pitman rests with his legs dangling in the plow pit at the Columbia Railway Car Barn at Fifteenth Street and Benning Road Northeast. The barn was built in 1895 and demolished in 1971. National Capital Trolley Museum.
But electrocution wasn’t the only hazard. A more gruesome end came to those pitmen who happened to poke their heads up out of the pit at the wrong moment. Such was the case with Edward Cosack, who was working the Anacostia pit one day in January 1902. He had just attached a plow to a southbound car headed over the Navy Yard bridge into the city when he moved over to the adjacent pit on the northbound side of the tracks and looked up to see what was going on, thinking that side was clear. A northbound car was arriving at that very instant. “The car struck him, crushing his skull and lacerating his face and scalp in a frightful manner,” the Washington Post reported. He was killed instantly.
Pitmen might attach and detach the plows hundreds of times in a shift. For this they earned about two dollars per day. The job was hard and lonely, but pitmen made the most of their isolated outposts in the middle of the streets. The plow pit at Eckington was fitted out with a potbellied stove for heat in the winter, as well as a bench, books, magazines, a checkerboard and pictures taped to the walls. When traffic was busy, pitmen might stay down in their pits for most or all of their shifts. On lighter routes, they would come out and wait by the side of the road between cars. Passengers on arriving cars were often fascinated to watch the pitmen scurry out into the middle of the street and disappear in the hole just before the car rode over them. An odd occupation indeed!
WILL YOU DRIVE THAT FRONT CAR?
Streetcar workers had struggled to organize themselves and be treated fairly for as long as street railways had been in the District. Little more than a year after the first horse-drawn cars went into service during the Civil War, operators suffering from steep wartime inflation went on strike for increased wages. Additional strikes occurred throughout the late nineteenth century. As often as not, drivers and
conductors would simply stop their cars in the middle of the street, usually somewhere downtown in the middle of rush hour, as they did at Fourteenth and F Streets Northwest in December 1894 after wages had been cut from $2.00 per day to $1.67. “The drivers slapped on their brakes, tied the reins about the brake handles and stepped off the platforms, followed by the conductors,” the Washington Post reported. “[A]nd then one after another the cars lined up until they extended for several squares in both directions.” President Samuel Phillips of the Metropolitan Railroad was summoned to this chaotic scene to try to resolve the problem. “Will you drive that front car?” he asked an aged driver. “I will not” was the prompt and emphatic reply, according to the Post, which noted that “it was evident that [Phillips] was at a loss as to the next step to take.”112 Despite the high drama, this strike, like most, was soon settled. Without experienced negotiators to aide them, the drivers and conductors squeezed out only a small concession, settling for $1.75 per day, which was still a twenty-five-cent pay cut but was not quite as bad as the original proposal. President Phillips continued to insist that he was losing money and would go bankrupt if he didn’t cut wages.
On the heels of the Metropolitan strike, the first concerted efforts were made to create a union of District streetcar workers. Called the Protective Street Railway Union, it represented streetcar workers for several years, but when the Metropolitan and other lines were consolidated under the Crosby syndicate, the union seems to have been sidelined. It’s unclear when it was formally dissolved.
The next big push for unionization came in 1916, when Rezin Orr (1854–1917), secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway & Motor Coach Employees of America and a veteran of efforts to organize workers in other cities, came to Washington to help create local union chapter 689. In March, Orr sent a committee of newly minted union representatives to Capital Traction and WRECo with a proposed labor agreement that included more pay, shorter hours (i.e., nine or ten hours per day instead of twelve to fifteen) and recognition of the union. The two companies rejected the proposal and began summarily firing union leaders and members from their rolls. The union responded by calling a massive strike to shut down all streetcar service in the District.
The strike generated sensational headlines in the newspapers, and Washingtonians braced themselves for a crippling shutdown of their public transit system. Many feared that violence would erupt among strikers and company representatives, but little trouble ensued. The strike, which began on Sunday, March 5, lasted only until late the following day. The District’s commissioners intervened with a deal to arbitrate differences between the union and the two streetcar companies, and both sides agreed. Workers returned to their jobs as an agreement was hammered out. The companies agreed to modest fixed wage increases, and workers agreed not to strike for one year.
From this point, the city’s two streetcar companies took opposite tacks. Labor relations went remarkably well at the Capital Traction Company, which recognized the union and thenceforward maintained an excellent relationship with it. In fact, no further strikes occurred against Capital Traction for another thirty years. WRECo, on the other hand, under the leadership of president Clarence P. King, stubbornly refused to negotiate with the union or even accept its existence as legitimate.
In March 1917, as the required one-year waiting period ended and just a month before the United States entered World War I, the union struck against WRECo. This time, a protracted struggle ensued. The seven-hundred-man metropolitan police force was mobilized for disturbances, but strikers again remained generally well behaved. On the first day, conductor Harry Hargrove was one of the few arrested. He was charged with “applying language prohibited by law to a strikebreaking conductor,” a rather odd offense. Hargrove was soon released from custody.
This cartoon from the February 8, 1918 edition of the Evening Star reflects the popular animosity toward street railway executives, who seemed out of touch with patrons and employees alike.
At some spots downtown, strikers would swarm around WRECo cars, immobilizing them in their tracks. Service was disrupted across the city, but strikers were never able to entirely stop WRECo from running. King had offered individual contracts to all WRECo employees, and some had signed and agreed to stay on through the strike. King also temporarily hired operators from New York and other cities to run the cars as strikebreakers. He issued a statement “that the company is determined to stand firm and not recede an inch from its position and that this is being done to wipe out the union, and thus forestall further strike possibilities.” The union, at least at first, was not intimidated by his threats.
Washingtonians had always been suspicious of the industrialists who ran the city’s street railways, and most people strongly sympathized with the strikers. The strikebreakers from out of town were seen as unruly and disruptive; patrons who still rode WRECo’s cars claimed that the strikebreakers pocketed the fares they collected. After several days, many of them wearied of their jobs and began leaving town. Fourteen workers deserted seven cars on Eleventh Street one day, complaining that WRECo was making them sleep in its car barns. The impoverished men reportedly paid their fares home to New York and Philadelphia in nickels and dimes.113 King responded by hiring yet more strikebreakers from other cities.
A train of two open streetcars turns onto Pennsylvania Avenue headed toward the Capitol in this summertime postcard scene from the early 1900s. Note the many pedestrians crossing the street wherever they please. Author’s collection.
Postcard view of streetcar traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue in the early 1900s. Author’s collection.
Map of streetcar lines in Washington, D.C., in the 1880s and early 1890s. The routes are overlaid on a contemporary map. Matthew Gilmore.
Postcard view of an eastbound WRECo streetcar on F Street negotiating a bend in the tracks as it crosses Ninth Street. Author’s collection.
A streetcar train on the Fourteenth Street line heads around Thomas Circle shortly after the turn of the century in this postcard view. Author’s collection.
A colorful Capital Transit weekly pass from 1934, the year such passes were introduced, celebrates the Glen Echo amusement park. Author’s collection.
A wartime weekly pass encourages the purchase of savings bonds. More than half of Capital Transit’s riders used weekly passes in the 1930s and 1940s. Author’s collection.
This Capital Transit car was specially painted to encourage women to join the wartime Women’s Auxiliary Transit Service. National Capital Trolley Museum, Leonard Rice Collection.
This circa 1960 photo shows a D.C. Transit streetcar stopping for passengers at Thirteenth and D Streets Northeast. National Capital Trolley Museum.
Fire is potential threat wherever electrical connections may be interrupted, as happened at this switch on Florida Avenue in the late 1950s. Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Joseph Jessel Collection.
A Route 30 streetcar waits for passengers transferring from a bus at the Friendship Heights terminal on Wisconsin Avenue in 1959. Author’s collection.
Two D.C. Transit streetcars wait at the turnaround that marks the terminus of the Route 40/42 line on Mount Pleasant Street in 1961. Author’s collection.
A D.C. Transit streetcar stops at Glen Echo Amusement Park, circa 1960. Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Joseph Jessel Collection.
A D.C. Transit streetcar stops to pick up passengers from the platform on Connecticut Avenue just north of the Dupont Circle underpass, circa 1960. Author’s collection.
A Route 54 streetcar pauses next to the Peace Monument (out of view to the left) on its way to the Navy Yard car barn in the late 1950s. Author’s collection.
Not all routes followed urban streets. This photo shows D.C. Transit’s vintage 1918 streetcar on the Cabin John line in Maryland in September 1959. Author’s collection.
A restored 1890s Capital Traction streetcar takes fans on a ride along G Street downtown in 1958. Photo by Clar
k Frazier.
Another photo of the restored 1890s car, this time seen on Fourth Street Northeast turning on to T Street. The Eckington car barn is just out of view on the right. Photo by Clark Frazier.
D.C. Transit’s vintage 1918 streetcar passes in front of the Howard Theater at Florida Avenue and T Street Northwest on the last day of streetcars in January 1962. Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Joseph Jessel Collection.
Contemporary photo of preserved streetcar tracks on O Street in Georgetown. Photo by the author.
The Capital Traction Car Barn on M Street in Georgetown. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress.
Detail of the stone carving on the front of the Georgetown car barn. Photo by the author.
Contemporary photo of the Navy Yard car barn. Photo by the author.
The former car barn on East Capitol Street Northeast was once WRECo headquarters. It is now the Car Barn condominium. Photo by the author.
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