All sorts of mishaps could result in a streetcar’s plow being “pulled” from its fittings, causing the car to stall and block traffic on that line until the problem was resolved. Summer heat could cause the narrow slot in the middle of the tracks to pinch, which could pull the plow. So could an ice build-up in winter or even trash that worked its way into the slot. A loose plow would have to be freed from its jam and removed from the conduit, using the access panels that were positioned at frequent intervals along the tracks. Workers would attach a new plow to the car, or if it was in bad shape, the car might be towed to a car barn to have its plow reattached. The danger of such mishaps required a constant effort to clean and maintain the tracks and conduits, which posed endless headaches for service personnel.170
A classic example occurred one January day in 1948, when a broken fragment of automobile tire chain got caught in the slot of the streetcar tracks at the end of the Mount Pleasant line. The chain broke the plow off two streetcars as they reached the end of their rush hour run and turned around to return downtown. The Evening Star reported “shivering patrons, late for work, crowded the loading platforms” on Lamont Street, while workers struggled in the cold to replace the plows. They thought that they had things fixed when a third car’s plow was also shorn off by a piece of the chain they hadn’t noticed deep in the conduit. “It took an hour to straighten things out again,” the Star reported.171
Pulled plows were nothing new, but the financial challenges of the postwar era were unprecedented. Inflation took a substantial toll on the company, which found itself exacerbating its problems by requesting multiple fare increases, the base fare rising from ten cents in 1947 to thirteen cents in 1948 and fifteen cents in 1950. The cycle of higher fares and fewer patrons inevitably led to significant service cuts. In January 1948, President Merrill put the best face on it he could, writing in the Washington Post that “in order to financially survive the ‘squeeze’ of higher wages and other costs which occurred in 1947, we have had to cut the ‘fat’ which existed in some operations and more nearly bring them in line with the traffic needs.”172
The biggest of these service cuts was a plan to convert the 10/12 route, known as the Benning line, to buses. This was the former Columbia Railway on H Street Northeast, one of the oldest streetcar routes in the city and still the fourth-busiest line in 1946, when its partial elimination was first proposed. Although heavily traveled, the track on this route was old, not well configured to accommodate PCC cars and took up too much room on the narrow and congested road.173
A PCC car on route 92 travels along Eighth Street Northeast in 1949. Author’s collection.
The Public Utilities Commission at first denied Capital Transit’s request to convert the Benning line, alarmed that such an important line would be slated for decommissioning. Like most city officials, the commissioners still saw streetcars as the “backbone” of mass transit and the best fit for the city’s most densely traveled corridors. But Capital Transit’s lawyers countered with a long list of reasons why the Benning line should be converted, and the Public Utilities Commission eventually relented. The cars finally stopped running on May 1, 1949. Despite notices in the mail and on buses and streetcars, some patrons still could be found standing on New York Avenue the following morning, patiently waiting—in vain—for the cars that had plied that route for more than seventy years.
Despite the declines in ridership and cutbacks in service, the city’s streetcar system remained one of the best in the country. Thanks to the purchase of large numbers of PCC cars in the early 1940s, Capital Transit was well equipped with a modern fleet, and the company made prudent investments to improve their efficiency and reliability. Perhaps the most notable improvement, however, was not a Capital Transit initiative. It was the construction by the District government in the late 1940s of an elaborate underpass beneath Dupont Circle to streamline both automobile traffic and streetcar service along Connecticut Avenue.
With three major avenues (Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire) converging on two other cross streets (Nineteenth and P), Dupont Circle was a perennial traffic bottleneck. Matters were made worse by the fact that streetcar tracks ran around only the west side of the circle, resulting in northbound streetcars running disconcertingly against the flow of automobile traffic.174 City highway officials sought to both ease traffic congestion and eliminate the dangerous streetcar routing by building an underpass to carry Connecticut Avenue beneath the circle.
The mammoth project was first proposed in 1937 but ran into opposition from area merchants and property owners. When the plan was revived in 1941, it still faced the opposition of one of the neighborhood’s most powerful denizens, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson (1884–1948), publisher of the Washington Herald. As the traffic problems mounted and the need for the underpass became more pressing, Patterson, whose mansion was on the quieter east side of the circle, dug in her heels. In 1947, when construction was imminent, she wrote an editorial for the Herald that criticized the planned underpass as “a regular rabbit warren of auto tunnels, street car tunnels, pedestrian tunnels and underground as well as above-ground traffic experiments. We think that is bunk and expensive bunk as well.”175
Progress of construction of the Dupont Circle underpass in July 1949, as seen from the south. D.C. Department of Transportation.
With Patterson’s complaints drowned out by a chorus of local and federal officials supporting the project, construction began in the spring of 1948 (Patterson died from a heart attack that summer) and took almost two years to complete. The complex underpass consisted of two automobile tunnels in the center, surrounded by two separate tunnels for streetcars. The streetcar tunnels were constructed first, with temporary tracks running across the middle of the circle at street level. Once the streetcar tunnels were finished, the temporary tracks were removed and the automobile tunnels were built through the center and covered over. The enormous complex stretched five blocks, from N Street to S Street, and cost almost $5 million.
An aerial view of the completed Dupont Circle underpass taken in 1958. At the bottom of the picture, two streetcars can be seen on the underpass’s northern ramp. D.C. Department of Transportation.
While the automobile tunnels weren’t complete until early 1950, the streetcar tunnels had gone into service the previous fall. Washington Post reporter Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer was there to record the first run, when veteran operator Howard Norford was at the controls of PCC car no. 1550. As it stopped at the underground station for press photographers to take note, everyone tried to get Norford to smile. According to Thayer, he “unbent the tiniest fraction.” Then, “with a triumphant ding-dang-ding-DANG he gave No. 1550 the gas and we whizzed along, the underground platform glittering with pearly tiles bordered in sapphire blue, station names lettered with handsome legibility in silver.”176 Patrons of the 40/42 line were universally pleased with the new tunnels. Streetcar trips through the circle were cut by several minutes, and congestion was significantly reduced.
FORCED LISTENING
It was around this same time that Capital Transit embarked on a brief and ultimately unsuccessful experiment with FM radio broadcasts on its streetcars and buses. The odd venture was seen as a potential source of much-needed extra income for the company, but it turned out to inflame the emotions of streetcar riders much more than Capital Transit had bargained for.
It began in 1948, after “transit radio,” as it was called, had been tried in several other American cities. In March, Ben Strouse, manager of local radio station WWDC, proposed installing FM radio receivers and loudspeakers in each of Capital Transit’s buses and streetcars. To gain a new set of captive listeners, the radio station was willing to foot the $175 cost of fitting out each vehicle, as well as pay $6 per vehicle per month to Capital Transit. Strouse was optimistic that streetcar riders would enjoy the new service. “We’ll give them something between jive and symphony—popular classical music,” he told the Evening Star. “Commercials won’
t be more than 30 seconds long and we won’t use more than one commercial every five minutes.”177
Capital Transit approached the idea cautiously, trying it out on a bus on Connecticut Avenue and polling customers for their reactions. About 95 percent of riders liked the piped-in music, and subsequent surveys confirmed broad support for the “music as you ride” service. So the company decided to move forward with it in February 1949, when the first of several hundred Capital Transit buses and streetcars fitted with radio sets began serenading riders through the streets of the city. A Washington Post reporter confirmed that passengers were largely positive about the new service, although the enthusiasm was not unbridled. “This will make you forget your troubles,” said Perry F. Scott, a Maryland businessman. District housewife Dorothy Hall said that she liked to listen to the music when she wasn’t talking and suggested that “some hill-billy music twice a week” be featured. “It’s cheerful and it makes the ride seem shorter,” said Mary Rogers, a housewife from Southeast.178
Although opponents were supposedly fewer, they were far more vocal. Evening Star nightlife commentator Harry MacArthur voiced strong concerns as early as March 1948, when the first test bus hit the streets: “A pox on both of you, C.T.C. [Capital Transit Company] and WWDC-FM. This is an inhuman invasion of privacy. A man has every right to listen to the radio, all right, but a man also has a right to not listen to the radio, as your apartment house manager will tell you if your neighbor complains. Radios in the buses, indeed. Is there to be no right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness around here?”179
Commercial advertising had been displayed in public transit vehicles since the nineteenth century with few complaints, but passengers weren’t obliged to look up at the advertisements. As MacArthur’s comments suggest, the outrage that ensued over “music as you ride” was based on the fact that riders had no way of keeping the audio barrage from entering their heads. Objectors felt that their rights were being violated, and they soon organized a Transit Riders Association to fight the “racket while you ride.”180 Based on their complaints, the PUC held a hearing on transit radio in October 1949 attended by dozens of opponents who aired a wide range of concerns. “What’s to stop a bus company from conniving with the Democrats, the Republicans, the Socialists or the Communists to bombard us with propaganda all day and all night?” one rider asked.181 The PUC, however, was not convinced. It ruled that transit radio posed no safety hazard and was “not inconsistent with” public convenience and comfort.
Opponents responded by redoubling their attacks. The renamed National Citizens Committee Against Forced Reading and Forced Listening brought suit against Capital Transit, arguing that “forced listening” was unconstitutional. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled against the petitioners in May 1952, stating that due process had not been violated and that the music programs did not transgress free speech. The victory for transit radio proved to be short-lived, however, as WWDC and Capital Transit reached a mutual agreement a year later to end the service, which WWDC found unprofitable. Wary of the intense opposition that had developed while the court case was being heard, advertisers had been reluctant to take advantage of the service. “The experiment all in all proved to be a mistake from the standpoint of public relations as well as profit making,” the Evening Star concluded. “The transit company and Radio Station WWDC-FM were wise in calling the whole business off.”182
KID WOLF
Meanwhile, 1949—the year the transit radio experiment began and the Dupont Circle underpass opened—marked the beginning of a profound and ultimately destructive change in how Capital Transit was managed. This happened when the company’s owner, the North American Company, was forced to sell out. North American had been subsidizing the firm with income from its highly profitable PEPCo subsidiary, which supplied the streetcars’ power. The symbiotic relationship of electric power and streetcar companies had been crucial to the viability of many of the country’s privately owned streetcar systems, including Capital Transit. Nevertheless, in 1939, Congress put an end to all that by passing the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which prohibited holding companies from owning both power and transit companies. By the late 1940s, the North American Company could no longer put off divesting its holdings in one or the other firm, and it naturally chose to stick with the profitable electric company. This left Capital Transit in need of a new owner.
Although Capital Transit’s operating expenses exceeded its income, it still had sizable cash reserves that had been accumulated during the war. Company management considered these reserves an important financial cushion, but to outsiders, they looked like ripe fruit when the company came up for sale. The company’s board of directors was also aware of this vulnerability but inexplicably failed to take action. The directors considered using part of the cash reserves to buy back North American’s stock. Their attorneys reviewed the scheme and assured them that it would be perfectly legal, yet they didn’t act. A prominent local real estate investor, H. Grady Gore, then tried to buy the stock himself, but he couldn’t line up the resources to purchase it all; North American refused to sell him only a part of its holdings.183 With other local investors and banks declining to step forward because of the bleak long-term outlook for public transit, the stage was set for a wealthy Florida investor, Louis Elwood Wolfson (1912–2007), to step in and do what he did best.
Wolfson was yet another in the long line of entrepreneurs who has had an outsized influence on mass transportation in the nation’s capital. He wasn’t a native of Washington and lived in the city only briefly after he gained control of Capital Transit. He was a financial tycoon, one of the nation’s first big-time corporate raiders. He ran the numbers on acquiring Capital Transit, noting the cash reserves of $7.5 million and the fact that he could gain control of the company for much less than that—about $2.2 million. He decided to pounce.
Wolfson had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. He grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, where his hardworking father ran a business collecting scrap metal and shipping it overseas at a profit. From an early age, Wolfson developed the personality of a fighter. He boxed under the name “Kid Wolf” as a teenager and was a star football player in high school, winning an athletic scholarship to the University of Georgia. He played varsity football and took courses in banking and finance but left after injuring his shoulder while making a tackle in the 1931 Yale Bowl. He returned to Jacksonville, borrowed $10,000 and, with one of his brothers, started the Florida Pipe & Supply Company, a construction supply firm.184
Wolfson was said to have gotten his first big break when he managed to buy plumbing fixtures from the son of department store magnate J.C. Penney for $275 and resold them piecemeal for $100,000. As his company prospered, Wolfson’s talent for buying undervalued assets and selling them for big profits became his forte. His most notable early deal was the purchase from the federal government in 1946 of the St. John’s River Shipbuilding Company, a facility no longer needed at the end of the war. Bidders on the facility all assumed that they had to continue operating it, as the Federal Maritime Commission had initially required, and their offers accordingly were low. But in a second round of bidding the requirement was inadvertently dropped, and Wolfson jumped in and placed the winning bid. He proceeded to dismantle the shipyard and sell its assets at a substantial profit. There were allegations of wrongdoing and a Congressional investigation, but Wolfson had not broken any law.
With his reputation as a corporate raider already established, Wolfson and a group of his associates offered in June 1949 to buy out North American’s controlling interest in Capital Transit for twenty dollars per share. Although there were no competing offers, Wolfson’s bid still needed approval from both the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. With an eye toward winning approval, Wolfson promised that he wouldn’t make any major changes in the company’s management. “We have no idea of changing the ope
rating policy of the company,” he declared in Jacksonville. “It has always been our ambition to participate in the interest of the company whose management renders such an efficient and useful service to the public.”185
The group that bought Capital Transit: Jack Surarky, E.B. Gerhert, Cecil Wolfson, Louis E. Wolfson and John A.B. Broadwater, photographed in September 1949. D.C. Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post.
ICC examiner Vernon Baker held a hearing in July and subsequently recommended strongly that Wolfson and his cronies not be allowed to buy Capital Transit, arguing that they were not local (as the company’s charter envisioned), had no experience in transit and that the sale would not be in the public interest. However, the ICC overruled his recommendation and approved the sale. Despite further protests from other shareholders, the SEC likewise approved the sale in September, and it was quickly closed before anyone else could mount serious opposition. The die had been cast.
Chapter 10
ENDGAME
WASHINGTON’S STREETCARS DISAPPEAR, 1950–1962
When Louis Wolfson and his associates took over Capital Transit in 1949, the city’s streetcar system had just thirteen more years to live, although nobody knew it at the time. It would not have been shocking news. Streetcar systems had been contracting or shutting down altogether in cities across the country since the 1930s. From 1947 to 1949 alone, streetcar operations had ended in Atlanta, Memphis, Norfolk, Richmond, San Diego, Phoenix and Manhattan. Many more would close in the 1950s. Until this point, Washington’s system had been considered one of the more modern and efficient, thanks in large part to Capital Transit’s conservative business practices and its heavy investment in new PCC cars before and during the war years. But times were changing, and the company was in for a rough ride.
Capital Streetcars Page 17