Portlander Cameron Booth is mostly known for his blog Transit Maps, which reviews and showcases public transit maps from bygone eras to modern day systems. But for nearly a year now, Booth has been making sure one piece of Portland’s history is not forgotten: street cars. From its beginnings in 1872 to the modern system, Booth has been archiving and cataloging information he finds on his new website, Portland Streetcar History. We hear from Booth to learn more on why he started this project and the importance street cars had in shaping the city.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Cameron Booth wants Portlanders to be more aware of the history beneath their feet or their tires. For about a year now, he’s been helping to ensure that one piece of Portland’s history is not forgotten: street cars. Booth has been archiving and cataloging information he finds on his new website, Portland Streetcar History. He was featured recently on BikePortland. And he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Cameron Booth: Thanks, Dave. It’s nice to be here.
Miller: Was there a golden age for Portland street cars?
Booth: Oh, absolutely. About 1910 to 1920 was probably the absolute heyday of street cars in Portland. There were probably between 35 to 40 different lines crisscrossing the city and serving the city with headways of less than 10 minutes a car. So it was a really comprehensive transportation system.
Miller: So how extensive was it? How far and wide could you travel on street cars in 1915?
Booth: Within the city, you could probably travel as far out as 82nd, in a lot of directions on the east side. It went up into the West Hills, as far north as Kenton, as far south as Sellwood. And then you start getting into the interurban cars after that, which went down to Oregon City, out to Gresham, and further, all the way up to Mount Hood. And then there were a couple of lines that ran down the Willamette River as far as Eugene. Electric rail ran down to Eugene in around that time period as well.
Miller: When you’re talking about going up to Mount Hood or down to Eugene, at a certain point, are these trains? Or would you still call them street cars with sort of embedded tracks that are embedded in the asphalt?
Booth: I guess there’s a difference between the city cars and the interurban cars. And probably the way to define that difference is that the city cars were just within Portland proper and the interurban cars traveled to different cities or areas far removed from Portland. But they’re all electric-powered. That’s the thing that binds them together.
Miller: As opposed to diesel or coal?
Booth: Or as opposed to diesel or steam. They weren’t mainline steam trains.
Miller: How many different companies were there when there were all of these lines?
Booth: So, it’s an interesting question because if you look at them all individually, I’ve cataloged over 60 different street car companies so far. Some of them started and failed really quickly, and others went on for a number of years. But what happened as time went on, these companies would merge with each other. And they’d merge, and merge, and merge until you got down to the one company that everyone remembers as the street car company in Portland, the Portland Railway, Light and Power Company. [That] then turned into the Portland Electric Power Company, which was known as PEPCO. And then that turned into the Portland Traction Company. They were basically the same company, just with different names. And they ran from 1907 through to 1940.
Miller: But before that, it seems like just an entrepreneurial wild west of truly different companies, each running their own lines?
Booth: Each was running their own lines, not offering transfers to the other lines. So if you wanted to catch a street car and you had to change companies, you had to pay a new fare when you got on their car. They were not cooperating with each other at all.
Miller: It’s so different from the way we think about a public transit network now, where it may look like spaghetti, but the strands talk to each other. Here, each line was its own distinct corporate world?
Booth: Yeah, that’s the thing, eventually, economic pressures sort of forced them to merge because it became not very viable to run all these small individual lines separately to each other. There’s economies of scale once you have a larger company that’s taking care of things.
Miller: The big thing that you’ve been doing over the last almost a full year now is pouring through newspaper articles and old maps, and digitizing things, and putting in information you find on your new website, Portland Streetcar History. How much coverage of these lines was there in newspapers of the time?
Booth: Oh, massive, and especially really early on when it was really tied to the expansion of Portland as a city. A lot of these lines were built as part of real estate ventures, where they would get a street car line built out to a suburb and get all the people to come, ride the street car and buy land out there. And then they could live out there and commute back into the city.
You gotta remember that at that time, you either walked, or owned a horse, or you rode the street car. So the street car gave much more mobility to people and it really shaped the way that Portland looks today. It started with Irvington – probably the first street car suburb. And then once that got filled up, they moved further out. And then that suburb got filled up, and then they moved further out, and the street car would follow.
Miller: Follow or sometimes lead?
Booth: Sometimes lead, but there is definitely a synergy between where the street car companies wanted to go and where the development was happening.
Miller: How does the coverage in newspapers, the way writers or people who are quoted in these articles change over time?
Booth: It definitely changed. The attitude towards street cars as a whole changed over time. At the beginning, everyone was very excited because of the mobility and the opportunities that they presented. But then, obviously, as the automobile came along and the city got bigger, the street cars got less reliable and probably not as well maintained. I think money was always tight for the street car companies. It was not easy to make money as a street car company.
So by the end, there’s very much an attitude ... In 1936-1937, they got rid of a lot of street car lines. At that time, there was a modernization and they replaced the street cars with trolley buses and gas buses. And the newspaper articles were basically just like, thank goodness those old-fashioned, terrible old street cars are going and we’re gonna have super cool new buses.
Miller: It is fascinating to think about buses being the exciting new technology, the technology of the future.
Booth: Yeah, they were larger inside, they had more comfortable seats, the ride was smoother. A lot of the old street cars had pretty rough rides by the end. The rails weren’t maintained very well and they were pretty bumpy.
Miller: They could also go anywhere. They weren’t tied to a track.
Booth: They could go anywhere. They weren’t tied to a track and that was a big thing for the companies who were operating those buses – “If there’s road work, we can reroute around it, or we can set up new routes if these old ones aren’t working properly.”
Miller: One of the things that I found that I had no idea about, that I found on your site, [was] that there were never-realized plans for an elevated street car line in Portland. What can you tell us about that dream?
Booth: I literally came across that for the first time last week. I had never heard mention of this plan at all up to this point. Basically, in 1933, a civil engineer came up with a pretty comprehensive transportation plan for all of Portland. It involved mainline railroads, freight railroads and trucking, but also had this plan of modernizing the street car system by basically building an elevated loop. It would run on 2nd Avenue on the west side, over the Hawthorn Bridge, up 3rd Avenue on the east side and back over the Steel Bridge.
Miller: Like Chicago has. I mean, their famous L.
Booth: Yeah, it’s basically like the L but with smaller trains, because it’s just running street cars instead of big trains like the L does. All the cars out to the east side would be distributed using this loop and all the cars on the west side would just come downtown and meet with that loop. That was the plan. And his plan was gonna pay for itself by creating efficiencies. But the price tag was enormous. In modern money, it was like $370 million or something like that.
So they talked about it for a while. He went to the city council and made some presentations. But then it kind of faded away, but that was the idea. It was like, “Hey, if we’re gonna hang on to these street cars as a transportation technology, this is my idea to modernize it and make it more efficient.” And it didn’t happen. I’m kind of glad because I think it would look kind of weird.
Miller: There are definitely some places where I’ve seen what I have always assumed are old street car tracks embedded in the road. In the Pearl – I feel like I’ve seen it around there. Have others just been covered over? Are they there but hidden?
Booth: For the most part, yes. It was cheaper for the street car company to just cover them up. Every so often around town, you’ll definitely see them. If you’re ever on North Mississippi Avenue, they’re very obvious right there. It’s a very distinctive kind of laddering pattern in the road because the road sinks down over the ties and the rails. So, Mississippi Avenue is a great example.
If you’re heading up towards St. Johns on Lombard, there’s a couple of places you can see it there. It’s a very famous bit of exposed track right by Lone Fir Cemetery on 26th and Morrison. It’s a double track. And it looks like it goes straight into someone’s garage because there used to be a private right of way, which took it from Morrison down to Belmont, that ran through there, just jogged down one street. But there’s a house there now. So it looks like the tracks go straight into someone’s garage.
Miller: Just hearing you describe this makes me think that you have specialized in a pretty unique way to understand a city. What do you think you can understand about Portland by focusing on this transportation piece of its past?
Booth: It’s shaped Portland. I don’t think you can overstate exactly how much, the way Portland looks now, is due to the street car. If you go down along Belmont, Alberta, Mississippi or all these streets that we now consider to be the cool neighborhoods of Portland, they’re all street car suburbs. They’ve all got street car commercial architecture along their street from that time period where the street cars were at their heyday. Literally, Portland is the way it is because of the street car.
Miller: Is there a line that you most wish you could have ridden?
Booth: That’s a really good question. Probably, I would have loved to take the Council Crest line. I think that is the most famous line. You’re riding all the way up there on the West Hills, looping around where Council Crest Park is now. There used to be an amusement park, run by the street car company, up at Council Crest, with roller coasters, flume rides and observation towers. That was built by the street car company to get people to ride the streetcars on weekends … Oaks park as well.
Miller: Cameron Booth, we are out of time, but thanks so much. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Booth: Absolutely.
Miller: That’s Cameron Booth. He is the founder of the Transit Maps site and the newer website, Portland Streetcar History.
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