LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

business district, there were a large number of local lines operating in the other densely populated portions of the city like West Philadelphia. The steam trains served not only the city but also the larger region. The 1870s and 1880s were a period of transition for the railroads; some lines had quite intensive service whereas others still had surprisingly few trains. For example, on its Chestnut Hill branch in 1876, the Philadelphia & Reading offered thirty round trips a day between Center City and Germantown, over twice as many as the Pennsylvania Railroad provided to suburban Bryn Mawr. In addition to having the most service, the Philadelphia & Reading lines serving northwest Philadelphia also had special-fare trains in order to encourage daily commuting. Overall, however, the steam trains were not used by many middle-class Philadelphians for their daily commute in 1880 simply because all of the downtown terminals were a long walk or horse car ride from the business district. By 1893, both major rail systems serving the city had relocated their main facilities to Center City and the daily commute by steam train became more viable for members of the bourgeoisie who could afford the fares.¹⁰

      The electric trolley, introduced in the mid-1890s after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with cable cars, quickly became the typical mode of middle-class transport and eventually the symbol of the late Victorian era. The advent of the trolley caused great excitement in the city as it was a technological marvel; science, in the form of electricity, replaced brute force, in the form of horses, on the streets of the city. In just five years, from 1892 to 1897, trolleys replaced all the horse-drawn streetcars and cable cars in the city. One person caught up in this technological fervor was Mary B. Smith of West Philadelphia, then in her early twenties. She noted in her diary the opening of almost every newly electrified line in the city, including those that were miles from her home and that she probably never used, such as the Twelfth and Sixteenth Streets line in January 1894. Mary’s enthusiasm grew as the wires and poles that were the physical manifestation of this technological marvel came closer to her home. She, her parents, and her siblings would often ride the new trolleys just to sample modernity, taking for the first time routes that had existed as horse-powered lines for years. Here is her record of the day electric service arrived on the line closest to her house: “Trolley cars started on Woodland Avenue. Papa and Lathrop took a ride on them as far as Paschalville. Papa and Mamma took same ride in evening.”¹¹

      Mary’s excitement over the arrival of the trolley was typical of middle-class Philadelphians. Leo Bernheimer, then a high school student living in North Philadelphia, noted in his diary (emphasis in the original): “I rode down in the trolley car this morning for the first time.” Trolleys and the locations they served quickly became emblematic of bourgeois Victorian Philadelphia. ¹²

      By the centennial year, Philadelphia boosters were justifiably proud of their city’s transit infrastructure. One guide boasted that the metropolis had “the best system of street [railway] transportation in the Union.…” A decade later, a similar guide enlarged the claim and Philadelphia was “the most traversed city by railways in this country, if not the world.” Middle-class women and men used these bourgeois corridors in a variety of ways and for a multitude of reasons in the late nineteenth century and, largely without realizing it, helped to radically reshape their vision of the region. We can rediscover this Victorian middle-class metropolis amongst the jumbled streets of the multi-classed city by following bourgeois Philadelphians as they traveled by train, omnibus, streetcar, and trolley. By the 1880s, such trips encompassed a series of middle-class areas in the region: residential neighborhoods, downtown, the surrounding countryside, and the New Jersey coast. In the 1890s, these journeys would add new destinations: suburban homes and amusement parks. ¹³

      The regular travels of John L. Smith nicely illustrate the commute by streetcar of tens of thousands of middle-class Philadelphians in the two decades between the Centennial and the coming of the trolley. In 1880, he lived with his mother in North Philadelphia, and about two and one-quarter miles separated his home from his South Sixth Street shop. He could walk the distance in about an hour, and he did at times, but he usually took the streetcar. Slightly over one-third of the streetcars’ patronage consisted of regular commuters like Smith. Many white members of the “old” middle class—small business-owners and professionals—started to separate their homes from their workplaces at mid-century. Also, like Smith, the vast majority of these Victorian commuters were not suburbanites; they lived within the expansive limits of the city. The largely middle-class neighborhood of North Philadelphia was well served with routes, so Smith had a number of options. It is likely that he usually took the Philadelphia Railway Company’s Ridge Avenue route as it offered the most direct service (on one of the few diagonal streets to disturb the city’s extension of William Penn’s grid) with only short walks at both ends of the ride. On mornings that he was willing to hike the few blocks to Columbia Avenue, he could take a red car of the Philadelphia Traction Company that would leave him within a half block of his office. Philadelphia Traction also offered a number of other routes that came close to Smith’s house that connected with their main east-west lines to Center City.¹⁴

      Another bourgeois neighborhood well served by the streetcars was West Philadelphia. J. Harper Smith, coal merchant and father of diarist Mary, lived with his family in an Italianate semi-detached house at 509 Woodland Terrace, which was on the fringes of development in the 1880s. He worked in rented office space downtown. The nearest line to the family home was the Darby Branch of the Philadelphia Traction Company, which ran on Woodland Avenue, one-half block away to the south. In horsecar days, Smith probably never used this line for his commute to work as he would have had to change cars to reach downtown. The Darby Branch was one of those local lines that served the neighborhoods and operated as a shuttle between Darby and Thirty-Second and Market Streets in West Philadelphia. A five block walk north would take him to Philadelphia Traction’s Chestnut Street line and cars that would leave him almost at the door of his office. When the Darby Branch was electrified in 1894 and the service extended into downtown, he likely switched to the more convenient trolleys. Had he and his family lived a few blocks to the north in the more densely populated area, they would have had as many transit options as John Smith did in North Philadelphia.¹⁵

      Every day, middle-class students used the same corridors to travel throughout the region, and their trips helped to further define the bourgeois metropolis. Most grammar school students walked to school as the institutions drew from the surrounding neighborhood. Mary Smith’s younger brother Lathrop had only to walk a couple blocks to attend the Newton School in West Philadelphia. Once students moved beyond grammar school to attend Central High School, Girls High School, or the Normal School, and (possibly later) the University of Pennsylvania, they usually needed some type of urban transport to reach the facilities. One such student was Leo G. Bernheimer, who often rode the streetcars between his home in North Philadelphia and his classes at Central. Following his graduation from high school, Bernheimer continued to live at home while he attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia. He usually rode to Penn as it was quicker than walking. Early in his first semester he noted that his ride from campus to home “in Lombard (via South) and up 8th [took] about 45 minutes or 50 [compared to] about 75 walking there.” But the cars were not always faster; sometimes delays, missed connections, and traffic jams significantly slowed the trip. Leo complained one morning that he had arrived at college “late though I started soon enough not to be” because of “coal wagons” impeding the trolleys. In the course of his student career, he took just about every possible combination of routes between his home and the campus. ¹⁶

      As Leo Bernheimer’s experiences indicate, in general, the horse-drawn streetcars only slightly increased the commuting range. The cars were typically (but as Bernheimer learned, not always) faster than walking. In addition, because the inter-company transfer privileges varied, sometimes the most direct route could not be taken without paying a second fare. Finally, many streetcar commuters liked to walk whenever possible (or necessary) to save money. The streetcars and later the trolleys helped to develop the inner ring of bedroom communities but could not greatly extend the metropolis. The steam railroads, however, allowed the middle class to radically alter the urban landscape because of the trains’ higher speeds and greater distances between stops.¹⁷

      Starting in the 1870s, continuing through the 1880s, and accelerating in the 1890s, steam railroad commuter

Скачать книгу