IMPORTANT THING FOR ME post-show 3.5: I just met @jwhittz and had awesome pizza! She's as awesome as one would think from her tumblr AND knows great pizza places. WIN
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jwhittz answered your question âWow, holy crap, hello new people!â
If you've found a decent map of the trolley system from the 30s, I'd love to know where! It's been bugging me for a while.
Oh man DO I.Â
Fuuuuuuck, the trolley system. Â This one doesnât even hit my historical boner, it hits my Iâd love to be able to travel between Queens and Brooklyn without three train changes and two pack mules boner. Â
So, okay, letâs have some historical background to be able to get what weâre looking at, and see more in depth how people got around. Â For context, this is what our subway system looks like now, in Brooklyn:
Okay, so you see the problem? Â No? Â All right, try to figure out how youâd get from any part of Brooklyn over to any part of Queens without going into Manhattan first. Â Say - letâs go from Church Avenue on the 2/5 line over to JFK Airport. Â Or - letâs go from Bay Ridge Ave on the R line, over to Greenpoint Ave on the G. Â Yeah, open that picture up in a separate tab and trace it over with your finger. Â Hard, right? Â One might say almost impossible to do without changing trains like eight times?
The subway system was not set up to connect the outer boroughs, it was set up to connect ease commuting - to connect the âsuburbsâ (Brooklyn and Queens have always been much more residential) with commercial Manhattan.  This didnât used to be a problem, because Brooklyn and Queens had an extensive trolley line, as seen here:
Fuck, look at that mess of transit, itâs beautiful. Â That shit goes everywhere. Â Why doesnât it still look like that, for the love of god. Â (Putting the rest of this under a cut, since it got rather long)
The subway system didnât look exactly the same back in Steve and Buckyâs time - for one thing, there used to be a ton of elevated subway lines, which have almost all been torn down (the JMZ, some stations on the F/G, the LIRR, and a couple others remains, mostly sort of on the outskirts of Brooklyn and Queens, and of course the ghost of the West Side line in Manhattan, now known as the Highline).  These have mostly been replaced by underground lines - for example, the A/C now runs under most of Fulton, replacing the Fulton Street El.Â
There were a whole bunch of competing subway systems, which were later incorporated and bought by the city of New York, to operate under the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Â This is sort of the root of why I know all this shit - in the spirit of shameless self promotion, I learned it all in the course of researching my series Kings County, in trying to understand the historical subway maps I was looking at. Â Side note, that second link is a treasure trove if youâd like to lose hours and hours of your time learning quite in depth about the history of New Yorkâs subway system, and how it developed over the last 150 years or so.
This is a fairly clear and complete map of what the system looked like right before the war - note that the lines are divvied up in color by who was running them at the time, which is why half of NYCâs subway lines are numbers, and half are letters.
Now, because Iâm a fucking nerd, have an overlay of the trolley line with our current subway system.  Apologies that itâs not the best quality - I donât have any graphics editing software, so I was basically fucking around with this in a spreadsheet, and it didnât help that the MTA map bears no resemblance to actual life.  The bridges are lined up and the two Prospect Parks are touching each other, that was as close as I could get. If anyone wants to redo this properly with the images linked above, thatâd be sweet.
So, why did we lose our trolleys? Â Basically graft, corruption and illegal monopolies. Â Like, people got murdered over it. Â Hereâs a good write up about it, but the gist is,
"In the mid 1920s General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tiresânoticing that the privately held, long term electric streetcar franchises all around the U.S. were up for renewalâwanted to expand their business opportunities by forming a 'shill' Holding Company called National City Lines. Using every form of legal and illegal tactics, such as murder, blackmail, and the bribing of elected officials, NCL gained control over forty Streetcar companies around the U.S.
"Their very first victim, was Manhattan's NY Railways, the operator of that borough's profitable electric streetcar system. In a pattern to be repeated all around the U.S., NCL gained control of the streetcar franchise by bribing elected officials, and immediately ripped out the tracks, wires, and streetcars, replacing them with GM busses (formerly their Yellow Coach Div., now called Nova Bus, located in Canada in the very same GM bus factory), burning Standard Oil gasoline (later diesel), and rolling on Firestone tires."
So to this day our options are six trains and a pack mule, buses that come maybe a third of the time theyâre supposed to, and taking a trip into Manhattan in order to get to another part of our own damn borough.
But thatâs a bummer note to leave on, so have some cute lil Brooklyn trolley images from the 1930s:
And a video! Â Itâs so cute! Â (Also is it just me or are most of these streets eerily empty)
Six people to tag: Iâll tag the last six people in my activity: itjustfeels, jwhittz, alwayscatchingkillers, stayawakeanddontpanic, fogsblue, cheesecakevillage, and anyone else who wants to do this.
