Capital Streetcars

by John DeFerrari

  Decommissioned streetcars lined up at the Benning Car Barn in 1963. D.C. Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post.

  Most of the cars never saw active service again. Many sat moldering for years in several D.C. Transit yards and car barns. In widely varying conditions, the cars waited for buyers. In January 1962, the Evening Star reported that used streetcars were “the bargain of the week.” “Anyone can have one for a couple hundred dollars,” D.C. Transit vice-president James H. Flanagan proclaimed, noting that buyers were responsible for hauling them away.221 While a few were converted to diners, country cottages and chicken coops—one was even repurposed as a church—most were sold for scrap. All except for a few historic museum pieces were gone by 1967.

  Removing the vast network of tracks and conduits that snaked through D.C. streets proved to be a much slower and more expensive task. In 1962, the D.C government projected that it would take four years to remove them all, but it actually took much longer. In the meantime, motorists sued D.C. Transit for injuries and damages caused by the tracks, which could be hazardous when slippery and likely contributed to many front-end misalignments. One man sued after his auto bumped over a hole in the street where one of the thousands of conduit access covers should have been in place. The bus company fought all such claims, arguing that they were the city’s responsibility.

  Congress had specified that D.C. Transit and the city jointly fund track removal and align it with the city’s existing schedule for street repaving. While some of the track and conduits were physically removed, many were simply paved over. D.C. officials argued that the steel and concrete conduit structure actually made the streets stronger and that it was better to keep them in place, at least in the short term. In the first few years after streetcars, the city made rapid progress, with about ninety miles of track (three-fifths of the system) being removed or paved over at a cost of $4 million.

  But work began to slow after 1965. The city adopted a policy of only removing track when major reconstruction was planned for the street, leaving much of the remaining rails untouched for years. In 1969, when the Washington Daily News asked D.C. Highway and Traffic director Thomas F. Airis when the track would all be gone, the response was “eventually.”222 Ultimately, U.S. District Court judge Gerhard A. Gesell ruled that the District’s “leisurely, indefinite schedule” for track removal was intolerable in light of the continuing public nuisance the tracks posed. He ordered all remaining track removed or paved over by 1976.

  Old streetcar tracks on Florida Avenue at North Capitol Street are partially paved over in this 1963 photo. D.C. Department of Transportation.

  Cobblestone-paved sections of O and P Streets in Georgetown, which local citizen groups lobbied to save, were the only exception to the judge’s order. These segments remained virtually unaltered for several more decades, and the street gradually settled around them, making them increasingly dangerous. In 2011, the District Department of Transportation undertook a painstaking project to restore these segments as reminders of the city’s once extensive network of street railways. The rails, hatch covers and cobblestones were all removed, cleaned, repaired and replaced in thoroughly reconstructed streets. Completed in 2012, the restored track segments are the only remaining examples of Washington’s unique underground conduit system.223

  Generally considered less of a nuisance than the tracks were the many car barns that graced the ends of former streetcar routes. Some were demolished, including the large car house at the foot of Seventh Street on the Southwest Waterfront, which was torn down as part of the draconian “urban renewal” of that neighborhood. Among the surviving barns are some that are easily overlooked. The humble Eckington car barn at Fifth and T Streets Northeast, dating to 1899, now serves as a U.S. Postal Service vehicle maintenance facility, while the car barn and stable at Fourteenth and Boundary Streets Northwest, built in 1877 and now vacant, served for decades as a commercial laundry.

  Several car barns stand out as distinguished landmarks. One of the best known is the elegant Capital Traction building on M Street in Georgetown. Designed by noted Washington architect Waddy B. Wood (1869–1944), the massive structure was built from 1895 to 1897 and originally intended to be a union station where four privately owned car lines would converge. Walls thirteen feet thick at their base supported loading and unloading of streetcars on several different levels. Yet within months of opening, its function changed, after Capital Traction’s previous headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue was destroyed in the great cable powerhouse fire of 1897. The company soon moved its main offices into the Georgetown station, leaving streetcars and office workers to share the same building for half a century, until the Rosslyn line finally closed in 1949. While vehicle entrances are still plainly visible at street level, the building has housed only offices since 1950. An ornamental pediment over the central bay includes rope-and-pulley motifs recalling the brief cable era when the building was constructed.

  Across town, the Navy Yard car barn at Eighth and M Streets Southeast is another prominent survivor. Designed by Kansas City architect Walter C. Root (1859–1925) and built in 1891, the building’s fanciful, castle-like design reflects the Romanesque Revival style that enlivens many public buildings of that era. It marked the eastern terminus of the original Pennsylvania Avenue line of the Washington & Georgetown Railroad and was also the end point of the last streetcar ride in 1962. At some point after the streetcar era, the structure was painted a bright blue and came to be known as the “Blue Castle.” The Richard Wright Public Charter School is currently its major tenant.

  Some ten blocks north of the Navy Yard car barn on Capitol Hill stands the former Metropolitan Railroad car house at Fourteenth and East Capitol Streets Northeast. Also designed by Waddy B. Wood, architect of the Georgetown barn, the facility on East Capitol Street was built in 1896, when the Metropolitan was converting to underground electrical conduit power. The East Capitol Street building became the company’s headquarters and continued as the headquarters of WRECo until it merged with Capital Traction. After streetcar service ended, the sprawling complex sat empty and decaying for nearly two decades until it was remodeled and reopened as the Car Barn Condominium in 1981.

  A fourth car barn is less well known but just as distinguished. The Capital Traction car barn at Fourteenth and Decatur Streets Northwest was completed in 1906, the year after the company extended its popular Fourteenth Street line, which had previously ended at Park Road in Columbia Heights, north to Decatur Street. The elegant building, designed by the prestigious firm of Wood, Dunn and Deming, could accommodate more than 250 streetcars. Considered one of the most attractive car barns in the city, it comes closest of all the remaining car barns to its original purpose: it is now used to house city buses.

  A contemporary view of the Capital Traction Car Barn at Fourteenth and Decatur Streets. Photo by the author.

  Large as these barns are, the most massive surviving remnant of Washington’s streetcar era is not a building at all and has remained largely hidden from public view for decades. It is the elaborate Dupont Circle underpass, which cost millions of dollars and left its neighborhood a mess of construction debris for three years while it was under construction. In the end, the tunnels saw service for a mere eleven years, perhaps vindicating Cissy Patterson’s claim that the “blunderpass” was a waste of time and money. D.C. Transit tried to use the tunnels for buses, but they were not big enough. For about a year or two beginning in 1963, the complex was designated as a fallout shelter, but that quickly came to an end. Many other ideas for reusing the tunnels were proposed over the years, including as an underground mall, a health club and a produce market. Then in 1995, the west-side tunnel reopened as a food court dubbed “Dupont Down Under.” Washington Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey thought the reopening of the tunnel “a delightful occurrence, way overdue,”224 but few customers were willing to venture down into the subterranean cavern, and the food court was shuttered the following year. Most r
ecently, in 2014, the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground signed a lease with the city to reuse parts of the tunnels as a performing arts space. The group aimed to hold its first event in 2015.

  “QUITE A MIRACULOUS IMPROVEMENT”

  Like sports teams, most streetcar systems in the United States had their diehard fans, and D.C. streetcars were no exception. The desire to preserve and celebrate the country’s streetcar heritage first took form in the 1930s, when the cars were still alive but already endangered. The Electric Railroaders’ Association was founded in New York in 1934 by Edwin J. Quinby (1895–1981) with the goal of celebrating streetcars and lobbying on their behalf wherever they were threatened. A local chapter was established in 1938 to champion Washington’s street railways. It organized special charter excursions and was instrumental in getting Capital Transit to save several vintage cars that otherwise likely would have been scrapped. The venerable 1918 car that would run special last-day excursions on each of the D.C. routes was preserved in 1950 at the group’s urging.

  These well-organized fans were the driving force behind the founding of the National Capital Trolley Museum (under a slightly different name) in 1959. Using money out of their own pockets, the museum’s supporters began acquiring old streetcars, and in 1965, they broke ground on a museum site in a scenic park near the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River in Montgomery County, Maryland. Over the next five years, a car barn and museum building were constructed and a meandering track laid out for historic streetcar rides. The trolley museum officially opened in October 1969. Senator Charles McC. Mathias was one of the dignitaries who joined in hammering a golden spike into the tracks at the opening-day ceremonies. Starting with a small collection of mostly European trolleys, the museum’s holdings were greatly augmented in 1970 when O. Roy Chalk was persuaded to dispose of D.C. Transit’s small remaining collection of historic streetcars. Four of the company’s six cars, including the 1918 “last day” car as well as Capital Transit’s first PCC car, were given to the museum. The other two, dating from the 1890s, were donated to the Smithsonian; one is now on permanent display at the National Museum of American History.

  Tragically, one of the cars donated to the trolley museum, the Silver Sightseer, was destroyed by fire as it sat on the track outside the museum’s car barn in late 1970. Arson was suspected. The museum experienced a much bigger fire many years later, in 2003, when one of its car barns went up in smoke along with eight cars (purely an accident this time). Despite these setbacks, the museum has remained a major attraction for streetcar fans and children of all ages for more than four decades, interpreting the streetcar era with rides on its demonstration railway, displaying artifacts and educational exhibits, supporting local schools with classroom lessons and preserving streetcars dating from 1898 to 1972. One old PCC car from the lot that D.C. Transit sold to a Fort Worth department store wound up in the Ozark Mountains. The trolley museum brokered a deal to return it to Washington in 1987. The museum’s collection now includes seven historic cars from the District, two from other American cities and eight from Canada and Europe.

  Montgomery County councilwoman Avis Birely addresses attendees at the groundbreaking for the National Capital Trolley Museum in November 1965. National Capital Trolley Museum.

  A museum is all well and good, but for many local fans the ultimate prize was bringing the cars back to the streets of Washington. Almost as soon as streetcars disappeared, supporters began lobbying for their return. Quickly forgotten were the formidable challenges of operating the streetcar system, including the expense and difficulty of maintaining the District’s unique underground electrical conduits. In their place, the romance of the trolleys flourished as it never had in real life. Like martyred heroes, streetcars gained exaggerated virtues and suffered few if any faults. They were attractive, spacious, comfortable to ride in, quiet, efficient and ran on clean electric energy. Why would anyone not want these marvelous conveyances gliding down their streets?

  But if trolleys were so great, how did it happen that so many cities let them go? For many of the romantics, it was simply too difficult to accept that streetcars, in Washington or any other city, had died a natural death. The only explanation was deliberate, premeditated murder. Powerful interests—namely the nation’s big automobile, oil and tire companies—must have been behind this perfidy. Ever greedy for greater profits and mindless of the long-term damage they were inflicting, these companies were accused of engaging in a diabolical plot to eradicate the humble streetcar and replace it with gas-guzzling, tire-burning, private automobiles.

  Primary evidence of this conspiracy was a suit brought by the Justice Department in 1947 against National City Lines, a transit holding company (which never had any Washington area assets) controlled by General Motors, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone Tire and Rubber. GM and its partners were found guilty of antitrust law violations, chiefly conspiring to monopolize sales of buses, fuel and tires to the transit companies held by National City Lines. As early as the 1950s, streetcar boosters imagined this crime to be a conspiracy to shut down profitable streetcar systems in American cities against the wishes of the public and replace them with buses. According to the theory, the clunky and unsatisfactory buses would ultimately drive people away from public transit altogether and into their private automobiles. As time went by, the enticing theory gained many adherents. It was the basis for the plot of the 1988 Hollywood film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as well as a documentary, Taken for a Ride, that aired on public television in 1996.

  History shows that no such conspiracy ever existed. Perhaps the best explanation is simply that none was needed. General Motors certainly took every opportunity to promote its products and even conspired to corner the market for them in cities where National City Lines operated. But it had no need to foist automobiles on an already adoring public. Most postwar Americans were fervent believers in the joy of owning automobiles and the freedom they brought to drive wherever their owners pleased whenever they wanted. Few had any fondness for the hassles and limitations of public transportation. Public policy mirrored this sentiment, with the federal government investing vast sums in the 1950s and 1960s to support ubiquitous automobile travel with better roads and highways. Streetcars, by contrast, were a quaint relic of the past, a nuisance to be done away with as expeditiously as possible.

  In fact, in the 1970s, the primary legacy of streetcars in the District seemed to be urban blight. A study conducted for the D.C. Office of Planning in 1974 noted that most of the city’s former trolley routes were in steep decline. Business strips like Fourteenth Street, Eleventh Street, Georgia Avenue, U Street and H Street Northeast historically had been built up on the assumption that people would travel to them on streetcars. With the advent of automobiles, these ribbon-like commercial corridors failed because they offered little parking and couldn’t compete with suburban shopping malls. The disappearance of streetcars thus had seemingly left behind swaths of economic ruin.225

  But perhaps the streetcars themselves weren’t really to blame. In 1975, the Washington Post’s architecture critic, Wolf von Eckardt (1918-1995), observed, “It would be quite a miraculous improvement…if we could just get back to the old-fashioned trolley cars that were efficient and fun to ride. They not only got us from one point to another, but they also let us see and enjoy what was in between. Their only sin was that they got in the way of impatient motorists, which was why they were banned in America.” Eckardt supported a “citizens’ proposal” to start running streetcars again on the tracks that still remained downtown as a supplement to the new Metro subway system. According to Eckardt, the citizens’ proposal stated that streetcars were cheaper to run than buses and wouldn’t bunch up as buses did. They would be less noisy, offer a smoother ride and wouldn’t pollute the air.226

  In 1976, the Georgetown Citizens Association made its own proposal to revive streetcars, advocating that the tracks that still ran down the center of M Street in Georg
etown be brought back to life with a trolley that would run from the Key Bridge to the planned subway station in Foggy Bottom. The group thought that paving over the surviving tracks would be a “regressive step in seeking a solution to Georgetown’s traffic problems, destroying what remains of [M Street’s] character.” Reviving streetcars would be a far better alternative. The study concluded that “the facilities are available, the need is more than evident, and the cost would not be prohibitive.”227 But others were not as convinced. The D.C government shrugged off the proposal. Deeming the remaining M Street tracks a safety hazard, the city paved them over in 1977.

  But talk of bringing back the trolleys persisted. Urban planners across the country were taking a fresh look at how streetcars might actually reverse the decline of inner cities. The new buzzword was “light rail,” which sounded more modern and efficient than “trolley” or “streetcar” but usually meant something similar. The first modern light rail system opened in San Diego in 1981. Light rail systems were eventually built in several North American cities, including Sacramento, Buffalo, Baltimore and Portland, Oregon.