If what’s going on in the photo is what I think is going on, it’s a bit of a sad day, if you ask me. We’re looking toward the northeast corner of 8th Street and Vermont Ave on September 8, 1950. Those workmen look like they’re ripping up streetcar tracks, which means what we’re seeing is the beginning of the post-war dismantling of LA’s extensive streetcar network. For most of its existence, the streetcars failed to break even, much less make a profit, but gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if we’d found a way to retain them as a valid way to get around Los Angeles?
Bill M. says: “I think they are repairing. I was eating dinner in the Original BBQ on the SW corner in 1960 and watched a LARy car round the corner from eastbound 8th onto southbound Vermont. It was raining and the trolley came off the overhead wire. The conductor pulled down on the cable and reconnected the trolley amid a shower of sparks. I know it was 1960 because we had just watched “The Time Machine” in a theater nearby.”
David H. says: “They are doing repairs in this photo. The LARY tracks were removed many years later. The PE tracks were some of the first to be ripped out.”
saturdaystationagent (on Instagram) said: “Henry Huntington who developed the Pacific Red Car line cared far more about selling the real estate at the ends of the lines he built than the system itself, which perpetually ran at a loss that could be sustained because of the money being made in property development. But when profits from those developments began to decrease in the 1920s coupled by the rise of the automobile, it wasn’t long afterward when the least profitable rail lines were converted to bus routes. Huntington always knew his red cars were just a short-term means to an end.”
This is how that corner looked in February 2023.
The building on the corner is still there, different but still there.
I recall reading that the streetcars were only profitable one year, during WWII, when gas, tires, etc were hard to get.
My understanding is that the streetcars were always about driving development of open land into homes. The streetcar lines were largely set up on a hub and spoke layout with downtown LA being the hub. If you wanted to go from Long Beach to Santa Monica, you had to go through downtown. Or you could drive on surface roads if you had a car.
As the “spoke” lines got built, developers including Stanford, Crocker, Burbank and others bought the land around the rail stops, they subdivided it into home lots and sold it off. Entire tracts of kit homes sprang up across the LA Metro area.
If you had a car, you no longer needed the streetcars to get from Long Beach to Santa Monica! That in turn spurred more development, including shopping (ex: Miracle Mile, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, etc) theaters, and more. You no longer needed to go downtown to shop or see a show.
That would be the Red Car (interurban trolleys) passenger services. The value of those lines for carrying freight varied by locations, but that’s where the real money always is. Moving the monkees hasn’t paid off since before the boom in auto registrations around 1916. But the Yellow Cars (city streetcars) generated a lot of money for Huntington when he was alive. The problems set in as time went on.
In 1950 would they have been tearing up tracks? Or laying new ones or making repairs to existing ones? I suspect these are new tracks going in or repairs in progress.
I really wasn’t sure what they were doing – ripping up, making repairs, or laying new ones.
It’s a unique and interesting photograph, that’s for sure!
As nostalgic as it was, the at-grade system became increasingly unattractive to rail patrons. It had to share the boulevards with cars, trucks and pedestrians and encountered increasing delays and collisions. When the system was developed in the early years of the 20th Century there was little or no development and motor traffic outside of Downtown Los Angeles. Patronage peaked in 1924 but went into a long decline until the Red Car and Yellow Car systems were sold after World War 2.
A grade-separated system would have been ideal but was too expensive for a private venture, in the days before public agencies endured the costs.