Riding Denver's Rails by Kevin Pharris

Author:Kevin Pharris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Though warmth could be supplied to the streetcars via electric heaters, air conditioning was more problematic. The riders on this East Colfax streetcar on closing day, June 3, have opened the windows to catch some cool afternoon air. RTD.

Sometimes, before coming home from school, Mary Louise would stop by the drugstore to get a candy bar. She would eat it on the streetcars, and all evidence of her snack would be long gone before she got home…or so she thought!

My mother told me I shouldn’t be buying such things because I would get fat. She couldn’t see me eating on the streetcar, so how had she known I was eating candy bars? I had thought a warm streetcar and some chocolate was perfection itself.

When the family needed to go farther afield, such as Elitch Gardens, they took the car. For her father’s daily commute to the Republic Building (corner of Sixteenth Street and Tremont) and general travel to and from downtown, it was the streetcar that got them there.

Everyone in my family took the streetcar, but I was really the one who used it the most. It gave me the freedom to get out! There was a painted spot on the roadway where you were supposed to stand for the streetcar to pick you up, and cars were not supposed to drive there. When you wanted to get off the streetcar, you pulled a cord. A buzzer would sound, and the conductor would stop for you. That all sounds very congenial, but the conductors were really not very nice sometimes. They were not supposed to fraternize with the passengers at all, so they tended to be very antisocial. I didn’t like them glaring at me.

Joanne L. did not attend one of the Denver Public Schools; she attended St. Mary’s Academy, which used to be located at 1480 Pennsylvania Street, in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

We lived in what is today Cherry Hills Village, a long way south from my father’s work downtown and from my school. During my four years at St. Mary’s Academy, from 1944 until 1948, my father would drive to work each day, dropping me off at school on the way. When the school day was done, I would catch the streetcar at Colfax and Pennsylvania, then transfer at Downing to head south to Cherry Hills Village. I came home that way all four years. It was a great time on the streetcar. They were warm in the winter, which was nice. They were not air conditioned, which meant they could get quite hot in the nicer months, and there were many students on the streetcar with me. Everyone rode the streetcar, all ages, and I felt very safe. Eventually St. Mary’s moved closer to where we lived, so my younger sisters didn’t take the streetcar for their entire high school experience, as I did, so I was lucky.

Jamie M., who now lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, shared her streetcar memories with her children. When one of

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