Part 1: Streetcars: The Golden Age

The Streetcar has a long history with Baltimore. The first electric railway to see regular usage was in Baltimore. According to Kenneth Jackson on page 107 in his book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, it was first tested August 5, 1885 by Leo Daft. The test was successful, and the line began regular usage on August 10 according to a plaque that was located at the Oak Street car house.

Baltimore was also home to another first. According to Gary Helton on page 104 of his book Baltimore's Streetcars and Buses, Baltimore boasted the first elevated electric railway in America, which began construction in 1893.

Above is a typical Baltimore streetcar from the mid 1950's. The one pictured ran on like #26 on Dundalk Avenue. Photo Courtesy of the Baltimore Transit Company Archives.

Streetcars had served Baltimore for more than 50 years by the time WWII was ending. During the war, the Baltimore Transit company saw ridership peak. More people than ever were taking a streetcar to work, most to places like the Bethlehem steel yard in Sparrows Point and the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft plant in Middle River. The surge in ridership heavily taxed the resources of the BTC according to page 84 of Helton's book. The wartime boom had helped give the streetcars one last shot.

Pictured above is another Baltimore streetcar, here seen climbing Gay Street on its way to Overlea. The City can be seen in the background. Picture Courtesy of the Baltimore Transit Company Archives.

However, after the war was over, a number of factors contributed to the decline of the streetcar in Baltimore. People left urban areas in droves, jobs relocated to cheaper land, and politicians pushed for a car friendly city.

The postwar baby boom economy left a lot of people, including the returning servicemen, with extra money. Automobiles were relatively cheap, and their sales soared. The high rate of car ownership took many riders off streetcars. In addition to owning cars, people that were living in the city started fleeing for more open land. Manifest Destiny and the American Dream were driving people out of the cities faster than ever before.

The FHA, or Federal Housing Administration, made it easier than ever for many people to own a home. As Kenneth Jackson put it on page 203 of Crabgrass Frontier, "No agency of the United States government has had a more pervasive and powerful impact on the American people over the past half-century than the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)." Simply put, it often became easier and cheaper to buy a house than rent one. It made more sense for middle class city residents to own their own home in a suburb that the FHA would make a loan for than to continue renting a home in the city. The commute would not be a boundary now that so many people were purchasing cars.

The loss of city population and the increase in automobile ownership in the old streetcar suburbs of a few decades earlier hurt the Baltimore Transit Company badly. In addition to rider changes, destinations changed as well. Steel plants and aircraft plants that had drawn huge crowds no longer had an employee base to help support the system. New jobs that began springing up in the post war days were moving into cheaper land outside the city, just as people were doing. The incredible expansion seen after the war made it almost impossible for the streetcar system to find riders.

According to an article in the June 2009 article of Urbanite, In 1946, a GM backed conglomerate called National City Lines bought majority shares in the Baltimore Transit Company. According to testimony given in 1973, National City Lines purchased control of the BTC for the express purpose of dismantling urban streetcars. Gary Helton, on page 85 of his book, says that this allegedly created very lucrative and long term markets for the products made by businesses involved in National City Lines: buses, tires, petroleum, glass, and rubber.

City and State politicians also facilitated the demise of the streetcar. Michael Anft & John Ellsberry clain in their Urbanite article that during the 1950's the city's traffic grid was being reworked to get people in and out of the city as fast as possible. City officials were planning for the conversion of a number of city streets to become one-way traffic only, while Maryland State politicians were interested in the rise in tax revenue from the sale of deisel and gasoline from the new cars and buses that were hitting the roads, according to Helton on page 85.

A streetcar in front of the Towson Courthouse sometime after 1948. Photo courtesy of the Baltimore Transit Company Archives.

The last streetcar in Baltimore made its final run in November of 1963, making way for the newly acquired buses that would be the only mass transportation option in Baltimore for the next 20 years.