The Trolley Dodger

People were dodging trolleys in LA too, back in the day. Amazing to think we had one of the great mass transit systems, from the Valley to the southern reaches of Orange County, from Santa Monica to San Berdoo. Heck, their motto was truthful — “from the mountains to the sea.”

(And then it was destroyed. Massacred might be a better term. But that’s for a different blog.)

Here’s some great footage (silent only — feel free to add your own sound effects ;) of the early trolleys in Los Angeles, posted by metrolibrarian on YouTube (see about on metro.net). As you’ll see in the first sequence, Los Angeles police are slightly more skilled at their jobs nowadays. ;D

“Hardie Henderson: Champion Base Ball Pitcher” — pitched from 1883-1887 for the Philadelphia Quakers, Baltimore Orioles, Brooklyn Grays (19th-century precursor to the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers), and Pittsburgh Alleghenys.

In a horrible bit of irony, Henderson was killed in February 1903 when he was run over by a train trolley.[1]

Read more at:

• baseball-reference.com
• Wikipedia

[1] See this history of native Philadelphian ballplayers at Google Books.

Found browsing though my pictures directory recently — a great Ebbets Field shot with trolley in foreground. And there are even some Brooklynites dodging it! ;)

Friday in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was this article by Phoebe Neidl, “The Trolleys We Didn’t Dodge”, covering some of the dangerous history of those famous trolleys.

The first electric trolley ride in Brooklyn was on April 19, 1890. The new method of transport allowed people to travel to all corners of the city on the cheap. By 1919, there were 40 different trolley lines in Brooklyn, an abundance that inspired the nickname “trolley dodgers” for Brooklynites (a certain famous baseball team took this as their name and then shortened it to simply The Dodgers).

But the electric lines quickly proved more dangerous and accident-prone than their horse-drawn predecessors. In 1893, subway commissioners called for safety measures to be applied to the new lines, such as speed limits. There was public debate over the trolley system and its dangers versus its advantages. Who was responsible when people were struck and killed by the trolleys? The operators? The owners of the companies?

Via Dodger Thoughts, who also has the story on Peter O’Malley’s visit to Brooklyn over the weekend.