waiting for the 1814

I suppose it’s a terribly touristy thing to be fascinated by the antique streetcars still in service on San Francisco’s F line. But there’s an undeniable magic about them, especially the Peter Witt trams that originally ran on the streets of Milan (and which still have Italian signage in them).

St. Paul and Minneapolis were great streetcar towns in their time, their time being from 1875, when the first horse-drawn line was established on Washington Avenue downtown, to 1954, when Fred Ossanna and associates finished the pillage of the system begun by Charles Green and the last line was paved over for buses. Indeed, the rush to replace the streetcars was so hasty that the streetcar tracks are often just inches below the surface: Lake Street is in a state of excavation these days, and the old metal tracks are in plain site for the first time in 50 years.

The Minnesota Streetcar Museum operates several cars on the Como-Harriet and Excelsior lines, and we’ve ridden them all. On Father’s Day, I’m planning to have the boys take me on the streetcar ferry on Lake Minnetonka (they’re young enough to take suggestions for this outing, and I have no problem taking advantage of their train obsessions to cover for my own…).

But wouldn’t it be lovely to ride a working streetcar line to work? There’s occasional noise about returning the streetcars to service; like Stanley Gordon West, I’m waiting patiently until they bring the streetcars back.