Posted by Wayne Brasler on December 16, 2002 at 18:06:48:
In the 1940s my Dad drove streetcars for the Public Service Company six days a week. The seventh day he would take me on a streetcar ride. Up Kennerly Avenue from Hamilton at the northwest edge of St. Louis we would walk to a gigantic double cement stairway that led down, down, down to the streetcar tracks and the Suburban Garden Loop where Hodiamont line cars would turn around. The Hodiamont cars were modern. We were waiting for big, red rickety City Limits line car. Along it would come, giggling and bouncing and clanging and on we'd climb. The trolley car would sail out on a vast grass plain, go over a big bridge across the Wabash railroad and head for Pine Lawn not on a street but on wooded right-of-way (the rails are gone, the right-of-way is still there!). The streetcar would take us through Pine Lawn from the intersection of Jennings Station Road and Natural Bridge (Kienlen at the time hit Natural Bridge a bit north of the intersection), wind through what is now Pasadena Hills to the Normandy Wedge at Natural Bridge and Florissant Road, head up the north side of Natural Bridge on an embankment, the veer northwest at Carson Road (now Hanley) headed for Ramona Park. There the line split. The Berkeley dinkey, a double-ended car, shuttled up to Airport Road on what originally was the Florissant line (it became Middleway Avenue, then Hanley, and northward is now Hazelwood Avenue). The Ferguson line headed back east (no shortest-distance-between-two-places going on here) through Kinloch, an African American country village at the time, back toward Florissant Avenue
over what became Suburban Avenue (named for the St. Louis and Suburban Railway which built the Ferguson line). At Florissant the double-tracked line became single tracked and headed down the middle of Florissant to a loop at Wesley Avenue adjacent to the embankment of the Wabash Railroad. I remember festive Saturday afternoons with political candidates giving speeches up on the Wabash station platform and delicious ice cream from a drug store adjacent to the loop. I remember a white traffic signal outside the Ferguson Department Store that let streetcar motormen know the track was clear. I remember on the way the back the single track split into double with the north rail making a wide, gentle swing and the south track making a short, abrupt turn. I believe there was an outdoor market on the south side of the line at Florissant Road. I remember the bustle of the little town of Ferguson and the beautiful fresh air on a spring day. And the great mystery of swinging off Florissant from the bustle of the city right into the darkness of a forest through which the tracks ran before houses began springing up alongside the streetcar route. And I remember in a time of segregation how the trolley line was such a great social leveler. Black and white rode together, all equals for the time they were on the trolley, and convivial too. And I remember in summer in Kinloch the heavenly fragrance of barbecue. My Dad said we'd get off and get some when there was more time but time ran out when the trolley stopped running as the 1950s came in. As an adult, before leaving St. Louis in 1964 for Chicago, I was able to trace the line by auto and find where most of my memories had taken place. But it wasn't the same, not the same at all. The roads were there and here and there you could make out where the streetcars had roamed. But it was just shadowy mist, concrete and level ground where tracks and wire had once been. There was something romantic and mystic about streetcars, which plunged into the woods far from any street or highway.And busses--yuck, no romance at all. When I drive into Ferguson now a lot looks familiar and a lot looks totally different. The town has managed to keep up with the times, and ahead of them, without losing its historic romance. But, oh, to see a big red streetcar rocking its way down Florissant Road just one more time. And to get off at the loop to the sound of a brass band playing on the platform of the Wabash station for a political rally. And to taste that marvelous ice cream, the best I've ever had. Just one more time.