So you are standing there, waiting for a streetcar on The Embarcadero in front of the iconic Ferry Building in San Francisco, and what happens? Baltimore happens. Your adopted hometown happens, right there in front of you.
First, you notice the extraordinarily well-maintained, brightly-painted streetcar — blue and vanilla and shining in the sun. Then, you notice a small Maryland flag, and a familiar logo — in fact, two familiar logos: One for the city of Baltimore and one for the gone-but-not-forgotten Baltimore Transit Company (BTC).
And then you ask the same question that, turns out, another writer from Baltimore asked — and answered — 12 years ago: “What’s ‘our‘ streetcar doing in San Francisco?”
Answer: It’s being used every day to carry passengers along the Embarcadero and San Francisco’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s not there as a touristy novelty, either. It’s an electrified, integrated part of the city’s excellent public transit system, one that makes a Baltimorean envious.
Streetcar 1063 is a replica of a Baltimore original, a piece of San Francisco’s smart tribute to the history of the streetcar in American cities. Other streetcars in the Market Street Railway system honor those once used in Chicago, Kansas City, Boston, Philadelphia and Cincinnati.
The beauty that honors Baltimore, where a fleet of streetcars ran from 1936 to 1963, is a PCC model painted in its historically correct Alexandria Blue and Picador cream, with an orange stripe and a Pearl gray roof. (For a time in its San Francisco life, the car was painted yellow, a color used in the later years of the Baltimore system.)
Of course, the last Baltimore streetcar went into the barn in 1963.
This is how Market Street Railway describes the factors that led to the demise of our city’s once-thriving system: “National City Lines bought up BTC stock during World War II, assuming operational control in late 1945. Soon after, many of BTC’s 29 streetcar lines started converting to buses (made by NCL owner General Motors). While it is true that 16 of those lines used antique wooden streetcars and had worn out tracks and car barns, it is also true that BTC cancelled an order for 100 [streetcars] in 1946. It is true as well that flight from the inner city to suburbs proceeded faster in postwar Baltimore than in most other U.S. cities. These factors combined to doom Baltimore’s streetcar system.”
Longtime reporter Mark Reutter, writing for Baltimore Brew in 2014, noted that Baltimore’s movers and shakers killed off the streetcars in the 1960s: They didn’t want to see “‘old-fashioned’ trolleys running through their rebuilt downtown, so they demanded the conversion to buses.”
The rails were paved over, a concession to the automobile that benefited suburban commuters more than city residents.
“What we destroyed here in Baltimore,” Reutter wrote, “is exactly the kind of urban-friendly infrastructure that San Francisco used to fashion its smart transit network.”
While visiting the Embarcadero, it was possible to imagine streetcars running along Pratt Street in Baltimore again, delivering passengers to Camden Yards, the Convention Center, the Inner Harbor, Little Italy and beyond — and not just for the sake of nostalgia, but for daily, fuel-efficient transportation.
But, of course, there are no plans for that, and Baltimore’s connection to streetcars would be completely gone if not for the good people who have maintained the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, now in its 60th year.
In 1966, during the time of Baltimore’s last Republican mayor, Theodore R. McKeldin, the city identified the present site of the BSM along the old Falls Road, in the Jones Falls Valley. The museum opened in 1970.
The BSM is having a 60th anniversary celebration on Oct. 2. According to its website, the museum is “in the early planning stages in coordination with the City of Baltimore in developing our new campus vision centered around a restored and repurposed former Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse at 2601 Falls Road.”
I’m glad to hear of such a commitment to keeping the history of streetcars alive. The museum is great. Working streetcars along Pratt Street would be even greater.
Dan Rodricks, formerly of The Baltimore Sun, writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached via danrodricks.com
