THE TROLLEY SONG

Ride with me on the trip down memory lane. You'll have your choice of many forms of transportation. 02/23/2016

THE TROLLEY SONG

Judy Garland sang The Trolley Song (Ding-Ding-Ding Went the Trolley) in the movie, Meet Me in St. Louis. Its melody resonated with me as I had ridden many a trolley car while growing up in Hoboken. The sounds of bus horns, ferry boat toots, subway roars and train whistles added to the din of my urban life.

What an array of transportation choices existed there. Passengers arriving at the Erie-Lackawanna railroad terminal could chose to travel to lower Manhattan by either ferry or subway. This terminal included the final destination of a regional Public Service Company’s trolley car system whose rolling stock traveled along an elevated steel structure called the Trestle to Jersey City and beyond. Within the city, trolley car lines ran parallel routes along its two main thoroughfares, sixteen blocks long.

A flock of jitney busses competed with the trolley line along Washington Street. They lined the curb outside the Erie-Lackawanna terminal, easily accessible to passengers arriving by train, subway, ferry or trolley. They only went a distance of one mile, arriving near the city’s other ferry terminal where passengers could ride to locations in Upper Manhattan.

.Jersey City's Journal Square featured three movie theaters as large and luxurious as those in New York’s Time Square, quite accessible to me and my teen pals, thanks to the trolley cars which ran frequently, but not always when we wanted to travel. On one sunny afternoon, tired of waiting for the next trolley to take us home, some friends and I walked down the middle of the trestle along the narrow pathway between the two sets of rails. We encountered two trolley cars along our stroll, one rising and the other descending. I am not certain why the conductors passed us by instead of stopping to apprehend us for our own safety. What a dumb and dangerous thing we did that day.

Few amusement park rides could match the thrill of riding a trolley car down the steeply inclined trestle. The brakes squealed loud and long during the initial descent. At some point, the conductor released the brakes allowing the car to hurtle down the rest of the way at breathtaking speed, rocking and swaying.

During the summer of 1936, the Public Service Company decided to replace the local trolley car line with busses that operated using the same overhead wires. The WPA removed the trolley tracks from the city streets one block at a time at a snails pace. Work crews paved the entire street with asphalt. At the end of the work day, kids scampering over the road paving machinery, transforming the street into a playground. We played Johnny-ride-the-pony, Kick-the-can and roller skated on the best surface for doing so, newly laid unblemished asphalt in a world devoid of automotive traffic.

A few years later, the Public Service Company operated state of the art internal combustion busses that carried passengers from Hoboken through the newly opened Lincoln Tunnel to Times Square. Almost no one used them to ride along Washington Street where our beloved fleet of about 20 jitney busses continued to offer a very cheap alternative to walking. These vehicles were nondescript, dilapidated, in constant need of repair, none of them remotely alike. Over the years, I came to enjoy riding in their broken down third-world chariots because they exuded an innate charm. Most rides only lasted ten minutes at most so comfort was not paramount.

As mentioned, Public Service busses could carry me from my street corner to Times Square in twenty minutes for a mere cost of two bits. Of course, public transportation requires one to dance to their time schedule. God forbid I should miss the last bus to Hoboken which departed at 1 a.m. The next one did not leave until 6 a.m. Ferry service to Hoboken ended at midnight. If I did, I could get home in a roundabout way: Take the 8^th Avenue subway to Penn Station, a Hudson Tube train to Newark, another one back to Journal Square, and a trolley car from there to Hoboken. This consumed many hours. If I made all the connections, I got home just in time to greet those arriving from Times Square on the 6 a.m. bus.

My parents never owned a car. As a very small boy I rode with my mother in the rumble seat of a vehicle driven by my sister's date, my first automobile experience. It was winter time and a cold night. My mother and I crunched down on the floor allowing her to pull the seat down in an effort to prevent us from freezing. Cars never appealed to me thereafter until the summer of 1943 when a young man arrived in town driving a red Cadillac convertible with white upholstery. He spent days escorting every teen-age girl in town up and down Washington Street. He was King of the Jungle! It began to dawn on me that private transportation had some advantages over public transportation.

When I turned sixteen, a friend gave me an opportunity to drive his family’s car down a winding road known as the Viaduct from Union City to Hoboken, a distance of a mile or so. He had unjustified confidence in my ability. Petrified, I drove accordingly,  managing to steer the vehicle down the hill to the Willow Avenue diner on 14^th Street. He jumped out, took over the wheel, and never again granted me an opportunity to kill someone while trying to learn.

My conversion to private transportation began in the summer of 1949 when I bought my first car, a used wreck, while working at a northern New Jersey lake resort area. My first new car didn’t arrive until 1951. Driving it up the Viaduct to Union City made me think back to the day my high school prom date, Joan Lester, and I had to take that old Public Service bus to get to the dance. Now, I could drive her in style. Inasmuch as she eloped in 1946, this dream died.

In retrospect, riding on a bus in one's formal outfit was not tragic. Public transportation should always be vigorously supported despite the inconveniences it sometimes presents. It may be too late. The Public Service Company dismantled the trestle. The company that operated the ferries took them out of service. Buses still carry Hoboken passengers through the traffic-clogged Lincoln Tunnel, but it costs more than a quarter and takes longer than 20 minutes to reach the Big Apple. Those good old days were the best of times.

“Dang Dang Dang” went the trolley.

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