John Stephenson’s first omnibus, built in 1832. From World on Wheels (1878).
As for Washington, the first omnibuses began operating in early 1830, almost as soon as they appeared in New York. The first line ran along Pennsylvania Avenue from Georgetown to the Navy Yard. The Daily National Intelligencer, Washington’s principal newspaper at the time, ran a letter to the editor in March 1830 praising the new coaches:
Gentlemen:—I am not aware that any notice has as yet been taken on the new Stage which has just been established to ply between Washington and Georgetown, a convenience to the inhabitants of this portion of the District, which cannot fail to make itself felt. The proprietor, whoever he may be, of this useful enterprize, is certainly entitled to the thanks of the community… In the Stage, of which we are speaking, we may ride from the Capitol to the upper end of Georgetown, a distance of more than three miles, for the small sum of twelve and a half cents, when we have hitherto been paying from twenty five to fifty [for a private cab]. It runs at all hours, and is constantly taking up and putting down passengers on the way.4
The new omnibus line was a great success, and soon additional lines competed with it. North–south routes along Seventh Street and Eleventh Street were added, running from the Southwest waterfront to around L Street Northwest. Omnibuses became a common sight, rattling their way along Washington’s muddy, rutted streets, often with some hapless soul standing on the rear step and hanging on for dear life. Many were individually named for famous people or events, and some had elegant paintings of sailing ships or early steam-powered vessels on their sides. Keeping them clean must have been a nightmare.
DISCOMFORTS, INCONVENIENCES AND ANNOYANCES
However happy Washington residents were to gain omnibus service, they, like the inhabitants of other major cities, soon grew weary of the limitations of these spindly coaches. They were cramped, dirty, hard to get in and out of and often late. Overcrowding—a problem that would continue into the modern era—was hard on the horses that pulled the coaches and unpleasant for the riders inside. The layout of the omnibuses also made paying one’s fare a challenging task. One was supposed to pay the driver, who sat on an open bench on top of the passenger compartment, stagecoach-style. A small hole, called the strap hole, was used to pass one’s fare up, and the driver was supposed to make change, if needed, and pass it back down. Unless the omnibus was empty, it was difficult to make one’s way up to the front to pay. And if change was expected, it was a matter of luck whether the right amount would be supplied. The driver, who was out in the elements and busy tending to the horses, might nastily harangue passengers who felt they had been slighted. Fellow passengers, constantly being jostled and jolted by the bumpy ride, were rarely sympathetic. It could all be rather unpleasant.
And that was just for the lucky travelers who managed to get onboard. A young Samuel L. Clemons, visiting Washington for the first time in 1854, complained that
if you should be seized with a desire to go to the Capitol, or somewhere else, you may stand in a puddle of water, with the snow driving in your face for fifteen minutes or more, before an omnibus rolls lazily by; and when one does come, ten to one there are nineteen passengers inside and fourteen outside, and while the driver casts on you a look of commiseration, you have the inexpressible satisfaction of knowing that you closely resemble a very moist dishrag (and feel so, too) at the same time that you are unable to discover what benefit you have derived from your fifteen minutes’ soaking; and so, driving your fists into the inmost recesses of your breeches pockets, you stride away in despair, with a step and a grimace that would make the fortune of a tragedy actor, while your “onery” appearance is greeted with “screams of laftur” from a pack of vagabond boys over the way. Such is life, and such is Washington!5
Competing omnibus drivers could become quite reckless in trying to beat one another to the next fare-paying customer. The city council took up a bill in 1850 to “prohibit racing and several other improper and dangerous practices, which generally result from the rivalry of different lines,” according to the National Intelligencer. Eventually, omnibus drivers were subjected to five-dollar fines for “passing ahead of or in front of, or in any other way to annoy the passengers or drivers of any other omnibus,” but not before an alarming incident occurred in June 1855:
A respectable citizen tells us that in the afternoon of the day before yesterday the driver of the Georgetown omnibus, No. 25, at a point on Fifteenth street, opposite the Treasury Department, drove up to the side of the lead-horse of a three-horse stage, and commenced beating that horse most unmercifully, causing in the melee the running off of both teams, a wheel horse of each to fall, both being dragged some distance. The omnibus was crowded with ladies, who left it. The conduct of the driver was most reprehensible, and endangered the lives not only of the horses, but of the passengers—men, women, and children—in both vehicles.6
Most city dwellers of the early nineteenth century had been raised in rural settings and were accustomed to the quiet civilities of an earlier era. In contrast, all manner of humanity was crammed together in alarmingly tight spaces on the omnibuses, and social niceties quickly fell by the wayside, as it were. The newspapers, for example, ran letters from women distressed at the unsavoriness of riding cheek by jowl with uncouth strangers. One pleaded with the Evening Star’s editors to “intercede with the proprietor of the Washington omnibuses to induce him to instruct his drivers to admit no market baskets on market days, inside of his coaches.” Instead, these customers’ parcels should be stored up on the roof, she suggested. Why? “[S]he has had more than one elegant and expensive dress smeared over so as to destroy its value, by contact with blood, marrow, and loose hanging fat sticking out beyond the edges of over-filled market baskets resting on the floor of an over-crowded omnibus.”7
Beef blood and mutton tallow were not the only dangers threatening the delicate and voluminous skirts worn by women in the 1850s. There was also the issue of tobacco spitting, which apparently was particularly bad in Washington. A female omnibus rider wrote to the National Intelligencer in 1853 to bemoan the problem:
I feel confident that an appeal to the lords will not be in vain; and I am sure, if they will, when they get in an omnibus with their mouths full of the horrid stuff, watch the agonized looks of the ladies, turned from their lips to their dresses, waiting, wondering, in anxious suspense, whose skirts will be the first victim…. I have seen a man get in a crowded omnibus, take his seat opposite to half a dozen expensively dressed ladies, and fill his mouth till you would have thought (knowing he must expectorate presently) that he intended not only to ruin their dresses, but actually to drown them in spit.8
Still, despite these inconveniences, omnibuses were a godsend for many people, so much so that in time omnibus service was seen as an essential public amenity. People who had been used to walking long distances would no longer consider doing so when they could ride to their destination for a small fee. Soon many of the city’s inhabitants were dependent on public transportation and felt helpless when it was not available. The Evening Star in 1851 ran a letter from a reader who was indignant that the Navy Yard omnibuses had stopped running at night. “I myself was at the stand near the Navy Yard gate one evening, before 7 o’clock, and there was no stage in which to ride to the city. Now I think if the proprietors of the line would be a little more accommodating, that they would be patronized by a large number of citizens…. This is only a hint, and should Mr. Vanderwerken take it, he will not lose thereby.”
THE PEOPLE’S CARRIAGES
The Mr. Vanderwerken in question—Gilbert Vanderwerken (1810–1894)—would play a key role in the transition from omnibuses to streetcars in Washington. Born in Waterford, New York, Vanderwerken left home at age seventeen to be an apprentice to a stagecoach builder in Newark, New Jersey. This was just as Brower’s omnibuses were making their first appearance on the streets of New York. Hoping to cash in on the promising new trend, he opened his own coach-bu
ilding business in Newark in about 1830. It went bankrupt during the financial depression of 1837, but undeterred, Vanderwerken moved to Mexico and opened a new coach service between Mexico City and Veracruz. After the Mexican-American War disrupted that enterprise, he and his wife finally moved to Washington in the late 1840s. In 1851, he gained control of the Union Line, which by that time was one of two consolidated omnibus companies operating in the city. Then, in 1855, he and his partner, John E. Reeside, bought out the other line, known as the Citizens Line, and merged the two into a single D.C. omnibus monopoly.
Said to be a very distinguished-looking individual, Vanderwerken was famous (or infamous) as Washington’s omnibus king, making him the first in a series of entrepreneurs that would dominate development of the city’s transit infrastructure. Because of the omnibus business, Vanderwerken was likely also the city’s single largest owner of horses. It has been claimed that sculptor Clark Mills (1810–1883) used one of Vanderwerken’s horses as a model for his famous statue of Andrew Jackson mounted on a rearing horse, erected in Lafayette Square in 1853.9 Vanderwerken’s horses were certainly everywhere in Washington, and many were stabled in a vast facility on M Street in Georgetown, where a shopping mall known as the Shops at Georgetown Park is now located. The stables were well known to Georgetown residents for their odor, if for nothing else.
Design for Gilbert Vanderwerken’s omnibuses. Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
A late nineteenth-century photograph of Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson. The horse was said to be modeled on one raised by Gilbert Vanderwerken. Author’s collection.
Horses were the unrivaled locomotive engines of their day. If public transport were to be improved in any significant way, it would hinge on leveraging the limited abilities of these beasts of burden. The best solution to this problem was to enhance the horses’ carrying capacity by mounting carriages on metal rails, thereby reducing friction and providing a smooth traveling surface. This idea had been around since the late eighteenth century, when the British used it to design a system to haul coal from mines. It wasn’t translated to an urban setting until John Mason’s New York and Harlem Railroad opened along a stretch of Fourth Avenue in the Bowery in 1832. The new railway featured two streetcars, built by John Stephenson, that were very similar in design to omnibuses but much larger. Each could seat thirty in the passenger compartment, with overflow seating on the roof for more intrepid travelers.
Streetcars offered substantial advantages over omnibuses. An average horse can pull a load of no more than three tons on a good road but as much as ten tons on a railed track. With typical streetcars powered by two horses, this was substantial pulling power. Riders enjoyed a smoother ride and more commodious seating, and the rails allowed cars to be designed with much smaller wheels, which made it easier for passengers to get in and out.
Vanderwerken was likely the first to try to bring streetcars to the District. An ambitious businessman, he began planning for them nearly as soon as he gained control of the city’s omnibuses. He first petitioned Congress for a street railway from Georgetown to Capitol Hill in December 1852, but his proposal did not have the political backing to make it through. In early 1854, a rival group of New York street railway men, allied with Washington businessman George W. Yerby, began making the rounds with its own proposal. After city officials had been appropriately wined and dined, the New York group’s petition was presented to Congress along with a supporting letter signed by some 1,400 inhabitants living in the vicinity of the proposed line. A letter to the editor published in the Star on February 1 gushed with enthusiasm for the proposal: “These neat and beautiful conveyances will emphatically be the people’s carriages, decidedly preferable to the noisy, heavy and clumsy omnibuses now in use.”10
Support for the New Yorkers’ project was far from unanimous, however. Many longtime Washington residents couldn’t imagine allowing a railroad to run down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, both for safety as well as aesthetic reasons. Detractors soon drew up a petition of their own, urging Congress not to grant a charter to the new railway: “The proposed railroad would be a most serious mutilation of the great national thoroughfare of the metropolis, and an interference with the original plans and designs of the founders and engineers of the city.” Further, a functioning street railway “having on it two continuous lines of cars, one each way, constantly passing, would in effect divide the avenue into two streets, and if not suspend, at least greatly interrupt and impede the free and easy communication between the two opposite sides of the street and sidewalks.”11 A veritable disaster in the making!
The Evening Star quickly published a letter rebutting the concerns expressed in the counter-petition:
One would really suppose, from the phraseology of the document, and the appalling apparitions of deformity and disfiguration which seem to flit across the fancies of these old fogies, that some structure of huge and horrifying proportions was about to be introduced into the limits of our city. And when our citizens are told that this immense structure is to consist of a grooved iron rail, sunk into the earth on an exact level with the surface of the stone pavement—not a hair’s breadth above it—and just as is used in New York and other cities of the Union, to the great and acknowledged convenience of the people, they will be amazed and incensed, if not too much amused, at the ridiculous bugaboo which has been conjured up to frighten them from their propriety.12
The bickering would continue throughout the rest of the decade, delaying the introduction of streetcars in Washington for many years. Meanwhile, other cities rapidly built their own systems: Brooklyn in 1853; Boston in 1856; Philadelphia in 1858; and Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Cincinnati in 1859. It was a matter of when, not if, they would finally come to Washington. Some city maps from the 1850s even showed a streetcar line already running along Pennsylvania Avenue, although none yet existed.
In December 1861, B.B. French, the D.C. commissioner of public buildings, made an exasperated plea to Congress in his annual report: “A street railroad through Pennsylvania Avenue is a necessity which should no longer be disregarded. The great advantages of this mode of communication upon important city thoroughfares have been so fully demonstrated in all the large cities of the Untied States that no argument upon the subject will be required.” He went on to note that repairs on Pennsylvania Avenue would be more expensive than usual that year due to heavy army traffic and suggested that the petitioners to build the street railway would “as a consideration for the privilege, agree to keep the avenue, at least between the Capitol and the President’s square, in good repair,” thus allowing the government to dodge a significant annual expense.
On May 17, 1862—one year into the Civil War—Congress finally agreed, passing a law incorporating the Washington & Georgetown Railroad. The charter specified three lines: an east–west route along Pennsylvania Avenue from Georgetown to the Navy Yard; a north–south route along Seventh Street from Boundary Street (Florida Avenue Northwest) to the Seventh Street wharves in Southwest; and another north–south route along Fourteenth Street from Boundary Street to the Georgetown–Navy Yard line at Pennsylvania Avenue. To ensure the military utility of the new railway, the company’s tracks were to match the width of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Avenue line would connect with the B&O station, located just north of the Capitol.
Curiously, Vanderwerken was not one of the founding incorporators of the new railroad, although he was inextricably linked to it. Perhaps he deliberately stood in the shadows, since he was so closely associated with the fight over the earlier proposals. Whatever the case, the new company soon set to negotiating with Vanderwerken for the purchase of all of his omnibus empire, including cars, horses, stables and all other real property. Although not specified in the law establishing the new company, buying out Vanderwerken’s competing omnibus line (and thus eliminating it as a competitor) seems to have been one of the basic requirements for getting the new streetcar operation u
nderway. Vanderwerken offered all of his assets for a flat $65,000 but ended up agreeing instead to sell horses, cars and personal property for $28,500 and leasing his stables and other real estate for $2,500 per year. The railway company would eventually purchase Vanderwerken’s strategically located stables in Georgetown, which it converted into a car barn and maintenance facility, as well as his Navy Yard stables.
The war years marked a time of upheaval for Vanderwerken, even more so than for most Washingtonians. In September 1861, he created a scandal when he got into a fight with another very prominent Georgetowner, Major George Hill, over the building on Bridge Street where the two were both living at the time. Apparently, Hill, a prominent paper merchant, leased the ground floor as a storeroom, while Vanderwerken and his family lived on the top floor. The two had a longstanding dispute over the terms of Vanderwerken’s lease, and the feud reached a climax one day in September with a pistol fight between Vanderwerken, his son and Hill. Hill fired a few shots but hit no one; in contrast, the elder Vanderwerken fired four times and hit Hill thrice. Vanderwerken was immediately arrested and charged with assault and battery with the intent to kill. His case, which was a sensation in Georgetown at the time, would be tried twice and drag on for many years, but Vanderwerken would finally be acquitted.
Capital Streetcars Page 2
