Customer Reviews

Streets and Streetcars of St. Louis: A Sentimental Journey

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This is the book I thought would never exist. As good as Young's previous two volumes on St. Louis streetcars were, this one soars into a totally different category. Here are photos most of us didn't even dream existed of all the significant streetcar lines which went into the suburbs of St. Louis, including rare shots of the St. Charles/Woodson Road line which ran along the north side of St. Charles Rock Road in a really remarkable and ambitious trolley construct; of the Creve Coeur Line; of the City Limits line, including the loop at Ferguson and the junction with the Berkeley line (which in summer was surrounded by deep woods); the Clayton dinkey and the Brentwood dinkey (what an odd little line that was) and so much more. My father was a Public Service motorman and in the 1940s as I was growing up on his one day off we would walk down Kennerly Avenue from Hamilton to an impressive set of double concrete stairs and walk down, down to the right-of-way at the Suburban Gardens loop to catch a City Limits car out to Ferguson or, sometime, the other way to Maplewood. We also rode the Kirkwood line and many others. When the streetcars went so did the weekend trips--the buses were totally dull as they stuck to the streets while the trolleys whizzed into the woods seemingly far from any street (if you look very, very carefully you can still trace the City Limits line; part of the Creve Coeur right-of-way exists untouched north of Dorsett Road west of Lindbergh; and the Brentwood-Kirkwood power house is still standing in Brentwood just east of Brentwood Boulevard where the Kirkwood line came in the street from its private right-of-way). My memories of those trips and those times has never dimmed. To have it all in photographs is so wonderful. This book is beautifully organized and designed and Young is the most economical and balanced of writers. This book will make a wonderful Christmas gift for anyone who grew up in, lives in and rode the cars in St. Louis. By the way, every house my parents ever bought was either on a streetcar line or turned out to be on one (the biggest shock was finding our home on Ferguson Avenue in Pagedale was on a street that had a line no one remembered had existed). Their first townhouse in Hazelwood turned out to be adjacent to the old Florissant right-of-way. When they bought a townhouse in Maryland Heights I set about sleuthing and sure enough, they were adjacent to the Creve Coeur right-of-way. The house I live in here in the suburbs of Chicago and the one I lived in previous: Both on abandoned electric railway routes. There's somethin' in the stars here, folks.

Good review of Street railways in St. Louis. Good text and fine photographs of different periods in street railways and neighborhoods in St. Louis.