Customer Reviews

Brentwood

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two streetcar lines crossed through Brentwood on their way to Kirkwood. The single-track line immediately ran into trouble with a head-on crash. The double-track line subsequently bought the single-track line and converted it into a three-mile shuttle bridging two other lines. The book has the two lines mixed up or is simply unaware there were two lines. There is very little here about how Brentwood originally was not even thought of as a part of St. Louis but a town outside St. Louis and how the people who lived there were self-sufficient. Then how over the decades and after the trolleys came how the area slowly became a surburb. Or how yesterday's country roads became today's broad four-laners.
There's very little about Brentwood being one of the first places middle class people in the '30s and '40s could buy very pretty little homes which still exist today, still look beautiful and still are amazing people new to the area with their low prices. And there's very little here about the "feel" of Brentwood, an intimate community if ever there was one. Still, what is in the book is intriguing and treasurable. Just incomplete.

Brentwood is a fascinating little suburb of St. Louis, its biggest claim to fame being an early streetcar line advertised as an "Air Line," meaning it ran a straight course (which it didn't), which ran through a mostly rural area and was built with one track. That turned out to be a mistake as early in its history a horrendous head-on crash between two streetcars put the original owner out of business. The line was never doubletracked and continued to run right up through the mid-1950s, with one car shuttling back and forth over the three mile route with only a few riders. Just short of its terminal in Brentwood the line eventually hooked up with a double-tracked line which continued on the suburb of Kirkwood. There are any number of photographs available of this strange little streetcar line, of its junctions with other lines at either end, of its dangerous crossing with the Missouri Pacific Railroad at just the point the streetcar route left woods and moved on to a main highway, of the community growing up around the streetcar--but none of it is here! There are no maps, no photo of the massive power house which served the streetcar line and still stands as Brentwood Plastics (whose address is "Suburban Tracks" even though the tracks have been gone 50 years). There are photos and photos of homes but, strangely, almost none of the many very odd houses in the community, one built like a flat waffle iron. What is here is fascinating, colorful, informative and fun and the book is commendably well-written, but it's strange the trolley line barely gets a mention and only one photo, and that one not of the Brentwood trolley but one like it. Other things are missing, too, such as the 1959 tornado which first touched down in Brentwood and the many haunted houses in Brentwood. I do love this book but do hope there will be a Volume 2 one day.