Like the Dodgers, the old trolley car is a symbol of Brooklyn history.
In fact, it was the trolley that gave the borough’s beloved baseball team its name: The old American Association team was called the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, in tribute to the residents’ skill at “dodging” streetcars.
After 40 years of horse-drawn trolleys, Brooklyn saw its first electric street car roll down Coney Island Avenue in 1891.
From then on, it was love at first ride.
By the late 1930s – the trolley cars’ peak – Brooklyn was crisscrossed by more than 200 miles of track that formed 73 street-car lines.
Trolleys caught on in all five boroughs.
But the advent of automobiles and buses eventually doomed the far more efficient trolley. Urban planners like Robert Moses, who built most of New York’s bridges and highways, dismissed trolleys in favor of cars.
It didn’t take long before Mayor Fiorello La Guardia joined in, calling trolleys noisy, old rattletraps.
Corporate giants joined the war on trolleys. General Motors, Firestone tires and a consortium of other firms with vested interests in building buses and cars gobbled up trolley companies around the nation.
By the late 1950s, the trolley was phased out in most cities across the country and replaced with diesel-powered buses that could carry only one-third the number of passengers as the old electric streetcar.
The city’s last trolley line, which ran across the 59th Street Bridge, was shut down in 1957.
Transit historian Don Harold said the truth was that nothing was more efficient than a trolley.
They’re environmentally sound, quiet, relatively cheap and durable. Some of the old Brooklyn trolleys are still used in other cities.
Trolleys are so good, they’ve been making a comeback.
Some cities have invested in gleaming new trolley-type streetcars, while others, like San Francisco, have taken vintage trolleys and refurbished them to evoke a bygone era.
A 42nd Street trolley line was the talk of the town in the Big Apple in the mid-1990s, but the plans never got off the drawing board.
The current plan for a short trolley line in Brooklyn is expected to get far more mileage than that.