The history of the St. Louis streetcar. It covers the cars, power stations, shops, carbarns, routes, services, and more.

The battle between St. Louis and Chicago to be the Midwest's leading city long predates the one between the Cardinals and the Cubs. Chicago won the fight to be considered part of the nation's first transcontinental railroad, and the Gateway City's delay in building a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River kept St. Louis in second place railroad service in the Midwest. But while Chicago had the Pullman Car Company, St. Louis featured more of the most important manufacturers in the rail industry, including American Car & Foundry and the St. Louis Car Company. St. Louis was dotted with historic rail structures ranging from its grand Union Station to depots built just after the Civil War, and a number of its suburbs were born of rail lines serving the area, with streets that still wear the names of the railroads they paralleled. In Trains and Trolleys of St. Louis, you have a ticket to hop aboard and travel across nearly two centuries through what the city built, operated, and preserved for the railroad. Hear the stories of the great-grandfathers who worked the rails, or take a walk down memory lane and a streetcar ride down to Gaslight Square. Local author and locomotive enthusiast Molly Butterworth carefully catalogues the history and significance of St. Louis' connection to its railroad days. Through the years, many of the railroad stations and streetcar stops have gone by the wayside, but their stories have lived on. Read about the ones you can still go enjoy, included in the many wonderful secrets shared among the pages of Trains and Trolleys of St. Louis.

This extensively illustrated, 240-page volume documents the long and colorful history of streetcar transportation in the city of New Orleans. This reprint of a 1965 volume, written by the two leading authorities on the subject, represents the complete work on the subject of New Orleans traction and urban railways. Featured are sections on early city transportation, and the golden era of electric traction (1893-1926), along with technical aspects, trackage, and mileage routes. A series of maps pinpoints, for traction enthusiasts, the locations of tracks no longer extant and provides information on companies that once operated the network of rails. Also included is a special section on the types of cars that were used throughout the traction era. Authors Hennick and Charlton also have collaborated on a companion volume to this work, Street Railways of Louisiana , also published by Pelican.

In the 1850s, Baltimore's 170,000 residents had few options when it came to getting around town. Before the decade's end, however, the omnibus--an urban version of the stagecoach--emerged as Baltimore's first mass-transit vehicle. Horsecars followed, then cable cars, and ultimately electrically powered streetcars. Recognizing the need for cohesion, the city's myriad transit providers merged into a single operator. United Railways and Electric Company, incorporated in 1899, faced the unenviable task of integrating routes being served by inadequate, incompatible, and often obsolete equipment. Over the next seven decades, privately run mass transit in Baltimore survived bankruptcy, a name change, two world wars, the proliferation of private automobiles, a takeover by out-of-town interests, and a plethora of new vehicles. Arguably a unified system of privately operated mass transit was no closer to being a reality in 1970, when it reached the end of the line and was taken over by the state.

That St. Louis Thing is an American story of music, race relations and baseball. Here is over 100 years of the city's famed musical development -- blues, jazz and rock -- placed in the context of its civil rights movement and its political and ecomomic power. Here, too, are the city's people brought alive from its foundation to the racial conflicts in Ferguson in 2014. The panorama of the city presents an often overlooked gem, music that goes far beyond famed artists such as Scott Joplin, Miles Davis and Tina Turner. The city is also the scene of a historic civil rights movement that remained important from its early beginnings into the twenty-first century. And here, too, are the sounds of the crack of the bat during a century-long love affair with baseball.

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri. The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.

Brentwood Borough, established in 1915, spans one of the highest ridges in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, just six miles southeast of Pittsburgh. In the 19th century, three small villages, four inns, and several blacksmith shops clustered along the rural ridge. A popular and primitive roadway, now known as Brownsville Road, connected these three hamlets with the wider world. This major artery carried coaches, wagons, livestock, and even escaping slaves to Pittsburgh. At least one of the four inns was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Many years later, the community established a 28-acre park, complete with shelter house and swimming pool, as well as the later additions of ball fields, tennis courts, and a football stadium. In keeping with its original focus on education, the community has maintained its own school district. Brownsville Road, as a main street, has supported several viable shopping districts. Brentwood is renowned for its annual Fourth of July parade, attracting tens of thousands of spectators each year. Today, Brentwood encompasses 1.45 square miles. The strength of this small community lies with its residents, who value service and commitment. For 100 years, Brentwood has maintained its own distinct character and charm, combining the elements of a modern community with the friendliness of a small town.

Joe Garagiola remembers playing baseball with stolen balls and bats while growing up on the Hill. Chuck Berry had run-ins with police before channeling his energy into rock and roll. But not all the boys growing up on the rough streets of St. Louis had loving families or managed to find success. This book reviews a century of history to tell the story of the “lost” boys who struggled to survive on the city’s streets as it evolved from a booming late-nineteenth-century industrial center to a troubled mid-twentieth-century metropolis. To the eyes of impressionable boys without parents to shield them, St. Louis presented an ever-changing spectacle of violence. Small, loosely organized bands from the tenement districts wandered the city looking for trouble, and they often found it. The geology of St. Louis also provided for unique accommodations—sometimes gangs of boys found shelter in the extensive system of interconnected caves underneath the city. Boys could hide in these secret lairs for weeks or even months at a stretch. Bonnie Stepenoff gives voice to the harrowing experiences of destitute and homeless boys and young men who struggled to grow up, with little or no adult supervision, on streets filled with excitement but also teeming with sharpsters ready to teach these youngsters things they would never learn in school. Well-intentioned efforts of private philanthropists and public officials sometimes went cruelly astray, and sometimes were ineffective, but sometimes had positive effects on young lives. Stepenoff traces the history of several efforts aimed at assisting the city’s homeless boys. She discusses the prison-like St. Louis House of Refuge, where more than 80 percent of the resident children were boys, and Father Dunne's News Boys' Home and Protectorate, which stressed education and training for more than a century after its founding. She charts the growth of Skid Row and details how historical events such as industrialization, economic depression, and wars affected this vulnerable urban population. Most of these boys grew up and lived decent, unheralded lives, but that doesn’t mean that their childhood experiences left them unscathed. Their lives offer a compelling glimpse into old St. Louis while reinforcing the idea that society has an obligation to create cities that will nurture and not endanger the young.

The recent development of light rail transit in the Twin Cities has been an undeniable success. Plans for additional lines progress, and our ways of shopping, dining, and commuting are changing dramatically. As we embrace riding the new Hiawatha light rail line, an older era comes to mind—the age when everyone rode the more than 500 miles of track that crisscrossed the Twin Cities. In Twin Cities by Trolley, John Diers and Aaron Isaacs offer a rolling snapshot of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the 1880s to the 1950s, when the streetcar system shaped the growth and character of the entire metropolitan area. More than 400 photographs and 70 maps let the reader follow the tracks from Stillwater to University Avenue to Lake Minnetonka, through Uptown to downtown Minneapolis. The illustrations show nearly every neighborhood in Minneapolis and St. Paul as it was during the streetcar era. At its peak in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Twin City Rapid Transit Company (TCRT) operated over 900 streetcars, owned 523 miles of track, and carried more than 200 million passengers annually. Recounting the rise and fall of the TCRT, Twin Cities by Trolley explores the history, organization, and operations of the streetcar system, including life as a streetcar operator and the technology, design, and construction of the cars. Inspiring fond memories for anyone who grew up in the Twin Cities, Twin Cities by Trolley leads readers on a fascinating and enlightening tour of this bygone era in the neighborhood and the city they call home. John W. Diers has worked in the transit industry for thirty-five years, including twenty-five years at the Twin Cities Metropolitan Transit Commission. He has written for Trains, and has served on the board of the Minnesota Transportation Museum. Aaron Isaacs worked with Metro Transit for thirty-three years. He is the author of Twin City Lines—The 1940s and The Como-Harriet Streetcar Line. He is also the editor of Railway Museum Quarterly.