Capital Streetcars

by John DeFerrari

  When it opened in September, the Rock Creek was the city’s second electric trolley system. Traversing the natural beauty of the wooded countryside, it promised a healthful respite from the crowded city. The Washington Post reported:

  From the first hill a fine view of Washington and the surrounding country is had. Through woody glens and deep cuts the road gradually climbs till Chevy Chase, the highest elevation in the District is reached. This suburb, which is destined in a short while to rival all competitors, stands at an elevation of 500 feet above the Potomac. When the heat in the city is intense and citizens are sweating, the temperature on the heights along the Rock Creek road is cooled by brisk breezes from the hills of Virginia. Chevy Chase is to be the most attractive village along the route.86

  An article in the trade journal The Electrical World raved about the potential of the elegant new suburb and its convenient streetcar connection:

  It is safe to predict a handsome return for money invested in property in Chevy Chase, as it will, in all probability, be a popular place. The city terminus of the Rock Creek Railway will, without doubt, be in close proximity to the Capitol within one year, and this will afford Congressmen an opportunity to step aboard of an electric car, and in 40 minutes, possibly less, be taken right to the door of their suburban homes, without change of cars. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the time will come when this line will run special palace cars, heated and lighted with electricity, from the Capitol to Chevy Chase without stop, simply for the accommodation of Senators and Representatives.87

  Creating this elite railway (that had so rankled Congressman Henderson) required building extensions to connect it seamlessly to the city’s already established streetcar lines. In particular, the company wanted an eastward extension at the southern end of its line, along U Street, to Seventh Street Northwest, where it could connect with the Metropolitan’s Seventh Street line. However, the pesky ban on overhead trolley wires within the city meant that another form of propulsion was needed.

  In May 1893—two years before the Metropolitan completed its first segment of underground electric conduit—the Rock Creek Railway installed the first such system in the District along its U Street extension. Cars continued to use the overhead wires along Connecticut Avenue and then switched to underground power at Eighteenth and U Streets. There the cars would stop over a “plow pit” and, in less than a minute, would be converted from one power source to the other. The overhead trolley pole would either be extended up to the wires or folded down and stowed on the roof of the car. Down in the pit, a special forked pole with electrical contacts known as a “plow” would be attached to (or removed from) the underside of the car.

  Two electric streetcars of the Rock Creek Railway on Connecticut Avenue, circa 1900. National Capital Trolley Museum.

  The Rock Creek’s prototype underground conduit was of a kind known as the Love Conduit system, designed by Philadelphia engineer John E. Love. The U Street segment was the only D.C. streetcar line that ever used this technology. Underground conduits on other lines, beginning with the Metropolitan in 1895, standardized on a different design, based on the system used in Budapest, Austria-Hungary.

  Newlands seems not to have gotten much involved in these technical details. In fact, he had little interest in running his streetcar line; his focus was on the exclusive new Chevy Chase community. The streetcar was merely a means to get owners to and from their suburban properties. To further enhance access to Chevy Chase, Newlands soon began casting about for a partnership with another streetcar firm. After several potential schemes fizzled out, in 1895 he set his sights on the Washington & Georgetown, the city’s most successful streetcar company.

  One of the unique provisos of the Rock Creek’s charter, as it had been revised in 1891, was that it could acquire other streetcar firms, something none of the city’s other streetcar companies could do. With this unique power in hand, Newlands approached banker Charles C. Glover, who was not only a highly influential member of the board of the W&G but also the owner of extensive real estate holding in upper Northwest. Newlands proposed selling his company outright to the Washington & Georgetown company. Formally speaking, the Rock Creek Railway would “buy” the W&G—because it had the legal authority to do so—but in reality the W&G would take over the smaller line.

  Glover was ecstatic about the idea, and in September, the deal was consummated. The merged companies were renamed the Capital Traction Company, and Newlands was given a seat on the new company’s board, which otherwise was made up of former W&G board members. As a result of the merger, passengers were able to transfer at no cost among all of the company’s combined lines. “Think of what we are doing right now—a 15-cent ride for 5 cents!” Glover exclaimed to the Washington Post. “A man may board one of our cars on the Potomac River front and enjoy one continuous ride to the northern limits of the District of Columbia for the small sum of 5 cents, or if he buys [a book of] tickets, for even less. [The newly acquired Rock Creek line] passes through a magnificent strip of country, which is bound to develop in population, and forms the nucleus of a line which may some day involve extensions… And when you consider the price we paid for it it is a right down bargain.”88

  “A VOLCANO IN A STATE OF WRATH”

  As cheering executives shook hands and workmen began painting “Capital Traction Company” on the sides of all of the company’s cars, the new conglomerate went into operation with three different propulsion technologies: overhead trolley wires along upper Connecticut Avenue, a short underground electric conduit along U Street and an extensive cable system on all the rest of its lines. Then, just two years later, the cable system came to a sudden and cataclysmic end when its enormous power station on Pennsylvania Avenue burned to the ground in a spectacular nighttime blaze.

  At about 11:00 p.m. on the night of September 29, 1897, the fire started in the third-floor print shop of William Gettinger, one of the building’s tenants. It was shortly after his employees had all left for the evening, so no one was around to put it out. Within minutes, the five-year-old building was engulfed in flames, its pine floors and large bins of coal serving as so much tinder for the extraordinary bonfire. According to the Washington Times, it was “the fiercest and most brilliant fire in a single structure that has ever occurred in Washington.” The Washington Post reported that a “huge tongue of flame” shot up in the sky as if from “the crater of a volcano in a state of wrath,” lighting up the night sky so intensely that thousands of awestruck bystanders were drawn to the spectacle. The Post’s offices were just across Pennsylvania Avenue, and a Post reporter was one of the first on the scene when the blaze broke out. He went inside with a fireman and witnessed the building’s self-destruction from the third floor of a large stair tower:

  The ruins of the Capital Traction powerhouse, October 1897. D.C. Public Library, Washingtoniana Division.

  [T]he scene of the big machinery room below was spread in full view. Not a man was to be seen, but the engines were running and the big wheels turning, turning with the same monotonous rumble while from the burning floor above huge blazing pieces of woodwork, furniture, glass, and iron crashed down, to be churned into tiny fragments.

  All this time, too, the cars were running, but at 11:20 a big piece of iron crashed into the midst of the revolving wheels and brought all to a sudden stop. A moment afterward the engine machinery room was filled with flames.89

  All of the streetcars powered by the station that were in service across the city were instantly frozen in their tracks as the cables stopped moving. The great powerhouse and its equipment were a total loss. All that remained were fragments of the heavy brick and stone outer walls and the great central smokestack, said to be the tallest structure in the District after the Washington Monument. While the rest of the site was soon cleared of rubble, the smokestack would remain until 1902, when it was finally taken down brick by brick to make way for the new white marble headquarters of the District government.

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p; The young Capital Traction Company displayed astonishing efficiency and resolve in responding to this unparalleled disaster. Even as firemen battled the fierce blaze, Capital Traction employees began working to locate horses that could be used on an emergency basis to pull the cable cars, just as they had done in days past. According to streetcar historian G.F. Cunningham, “Horses and harness were begged and borrowed during the wee hours of the morning. Practically every Washington business concern which used a large number of horses turned over its stock to the Capital Traction Company.”90 By the morning rush hour, horse-drawn cars were operating on all of the affected Capital Traction lines, pulling the trailers that had been attached to the company’s powered cable cars. Former gripmen found it relatively easy to take up the reins of their teams, and given the catastrophe that had just occurred, there were few immediate complaints about the slower, old-fashioned service.

  Capital Traction’s cable cars had been running for just five years. Although they wouldn’t admit it publicly, company executives knew immediately that they would never rebuild the cable system. As soon as the board of directors had a chance to meet, it quickly ratified the decision to convert to electricity.

  Cable technology had turned out to be a dead end. The elaborate mechanical engineering required to install and maintain the system was a nightmare. How much simpler and more elegant, in contrast, were electrical systems that delivered power so efficiently through wires or rails. Once practical electric trolley systems became available, streetcar companies around the country were as anxious to get rid of their cable cars as they had been a few years earlier to acquire them. In that sense, the destruction of the Capital Traction power plant fire must have seemed like a blessing in disguise; it cleared the way for a swift change in direction.

  After the great fire in 1897, horses temporarily pulled cars that were previously used as trailers in cable car trains, as seen in this view of a horse-drawn cable car turning onto Pennsylvania Avenue from Fifteenth Street near the Treasury Department. National Capital Trolley Museum.

  By July 3, 1898, just nine months after the fire, Capital Traction’s lines had all been converted to electric power, the old cable having been removed from the underground conduits and replaced with electrical conductor rails. The company adopted the same system that the Metropolitan had installed, confirming it as the permanent de facto standard for D.C. streetcars. Remarkably, the conversion of the entire cable system was accomplished without any interruption of service. Even the Seventh Street line, which had its own power station, kept its old cable cars running through the conversion process while electric lines were being installed in the live cable conduit. When the former Rock Creek Railway Love Conduit system on U Street was converted and integrated with the larger system in 1899, the system-wide conversion was complete.

  And what of Francis G. Newlands and his cabal of wealthy investors, poised to make a killing on the Chevy Chase project? The venture was considered a success, but for years it paid meager returns. The timing had not been good. A financial panic in 1893 had kept business sluggish, and sales of home sites were practically nonexistent in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War. In fact, stockholders in the Chevy Chase Land Company received no dividends at all for many years. According to Newlands biographer Albert W. Atwood, from 1890 through 1917 disbursements exceeded receipts by $172,000. It was only after World War I that development of upper Northwest really took off and the company started to make substantial profits.91

  Newlands was independently wealthy and could easily afford to be patient with his Chevy Chase venture. He had much larger investments out west, in Nevada and California, that made far greater contributions to his wealth. He had moved to Nevada in 1888, becoming a congressman from that state in 1893 and a senator in 1903. Senator Newlands championed irrigation projects in the West and was an expert on the nation’s railroads. As chairman of the joint committee on transportation, he was at his desk in the Senate office building on Christmas Eve 1917, working on issues of how to put the railroads on a wartime footing, when he suffered a sudden heart attack and died later that evening at his posh Massachusetts Avenue mansion on Sheridan Circle. His contributions to the development of Washington were widely praised. “He was not merely able to foresee, but was able to plan and construct,” the Washington Post observed.92

  Chapter 6

  BIGGER CROWDS AND BIGGER CARS

  THE NEW CENTURY’S CHALLENGES, 1900–1918

  I sing the song of the open car, And the man at the end of the seat, Who never is willing to move along, Or even retract his feet.

  He sticks to his seat, the selfish churl, As if he were stuck with glue, And his whole manner says, as plain as words, “I don’t care a hang for you.”

  Oh, he is a selfish, selfish man, I call him the end-seat hog; He’s the kind of man who would kick a cat Or torture a faithful dog.

  The world will be better when he is dead And laid on a tomb’s dark shelf; I hate and despise him with all my heart, For I want that seat myself.93

  By the turn of the century, the boom era of streetcar expansion was at an end. Henceforth, aside from adjustments and extensions to existing lines, no major new routes would be added to the city’s network. The Gilded Age drive to build streetcar lines out into the wilderness had vanished. In its place were less glamorous issues—how to make the cars run profitably, how to accommodate more and more passengers and how to do it all without jeopardizing comfort and safety.

  Nothing epitomized the turn-of-the-century streetcar experience like riding in the “open” cars that ran in the warm-weather months. Open cars had been around since the horse-drawn era, but in the late 1890s, after all the city’s lines had been mechanized, they were more common, often serving as trailers in two- or three-car trains. These cars were completely open on both sides, with benches like church pews stretching across the width of the car. Each bench was meant to accommodate up to five people. Passengers boarded and took their seats directly from the platform (right) side of the car, while a wooden bar kept them from attempting to get on or off the other side, in the middle of traffic. Most people were very fond of riding in these cars in good weather.

  Fun as they might be, they posed their own unique hazards for the riding public, some more significant than others. Just as the new open-car season was starting in April 1907, the Evening Star published a tongue-in-cheek essay on “Open Car Etiquette,” facetiously applauding, among other things, the women who sat in the back row and bitterly complained about men who smoked there, even though those seats were meant for smokers. “Why should any particular section of a car be reserved for men, when no particular section is correspondingly reserved for women?” these progressive females wanted to know. Likewise earning mock praise from the Star were the “woman who spatters Somebody’s German Cologne all over herself before leaving home and the man who gets his hair soused in some rancid sort of bay rum at the barber shop,” both of whom inevitably sat at the front of the open cars, where the breeze would waft the objectionable scent over everybody sitting behind them. “The effluvia thus shed upon all of the passengers in the other seats fills them with visions of the islands of lotus and crime,” the Star proclaimed.94

  An open car of the Metropolitan Railroad on East Capitol Street near Ninth Street, circa 1890. National Capital Trolley Museum.

  Far more notorious than these minor discomforts were the “End-Seat Hogs,” people who would board and sit immediately at the end of the bench, where it was easiest to alight, forcing other patrons to climb over them to find their own seats. The peculiar design of the open cars made this problem inevitable. Anyone who voluntarily slid to the inside of the bench risked being trapped by other passengers packing in after them. Naturally, nearly everyone tried to get the end seat if they could, and they complained about the end-seat hogs when they couldn’t. Complaints filled the newspapers in the 1890s and 1900s, both in Washington and other cities around the country. “Men are the offenders; and their bad ha
bits are not easily changed,” wrote one Star subscriber, who had observed “[a]t Glen Echo, at the close of the theatrical performance, when the [cars heading back into town] approach the entrance, there is a mad rush of young men for the seats. They spring upon the running board while the car is in motion, at the risk of their limbs, and occupy all the end seats before the car stops.”95 The Washington Post likewise declared the end-seat hog a universal and despicable presence. “The party entering [the car] may be old or feeble or embarrassed by bundles and packages…It makes no difference. The holder of the end place, no matter of which sex, refuses to make the smallest concession. Young or old, weak or strong, sound or crippled, active or unwieldy, the outsider has to struggle past the obstruction of rowdyism or lose the ride…It is a disgrace to the community—a wonder and a sorrow to the looker-on. It is an exhibition of vulgarity which one would hardly expect to witness in any city claiming to be civilized.”96

  The streetcar companies paid little attention to such day-to-day nuisances, focusing instead on improving the efficiency of their routes. The Capital Traction Company, which had fully electrified in 1898, began simplifying its routes in the early 1900s and improving complicated street crossings, such as the one where New York Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street met near the White House.

  Capital Traction’s competitor, the Oscar T. Crosby syndicate, had acquired almost all of the city’s other streetcar lines between 1895 and 1899 and likewise concentrated on improving its routes. The myriad early streetcar companies, all operating in competition with one another and sometimes offering overlapping service, had been very inefficient. Travel around the city could be complicated and expensive, with no free transfers between lines. The entrepreneurial Colonel George Truesdell, founder of the Eckington line, was named the Crosby syndicate’s president in 1899, and he oversaw streamlining and consolidation of these complex lines, even though the former companies nominally retained their separate identities. In addition to abandoning excess and unprofitable routes, the syndicate also completed installation of underground electric conduits throughout the city, all powered by PEPCo, the electric company it controlled.