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A Desire Named Streetcar

By Sylvia Adcock | Staff Writer

Long before the automobile took over Long Island, when the century was very, very young, a network of streetcars took Long Islanders from place to place with clanging gongs and whistles that announced their arrival.

For a brief time, the trolley had its day in the sun.

Electric trolley cars rumbled on tracks along heavily traveled roads such as Northern Boulevard, New York Avenue and Jericho Turnpike, drawing their power from electric wires overhead. The network was extensive. You could take a trolley from Elmont to Hempstead. From Roslyn to Mineola, Garden City to Freeport, Amityville to Babylon, Huntington to Farmingdale. For only a nickel, with service as often as every 15 minutes.

And then the trolleys vanished, almost overnight. The tracks in the roadbed were paved over, the trolley poles that held the electric wires were taken down, the trolley drawbridge over Alley Creek in Queens was dismantled, and it was as if they'd never been here. As quickly as they came, it seemed, they were gone.

Their story began in the 1890s, as ``trolley fever'' swept the country. In cities everywhere, electric trolleys began replacing horse-drawn carts. This new form of conveyance was what planners today would call ``light rail.'' Unlike railroads, which were designed for longer trips, trolleys made short hops with frequent service, often carrying folks from one neighborhood to the next.

The first electric trolleys arrived on Long Island in 1898 in Babylon and Huntington. As early as 1871, a horse-drawn cart ran on tracks down Fire Island Avenue bringing passengers from the Babylon railroad station to the ferry dock, where they could catch a steamboat to Oak Island. In 1898, the Babylon Railroad, as the service was called, replaced the horse-drawn cart with a new electric trolley. That same year, the Long Island Rail Road bought out a similar horse-drawn service that ran along New York Avenue from the train station to Halesite, called the Huntington Railroad. The LIRR immediately put up overhead electric wires and began trolley service along the route, later extending it south to Amityville.

It was after 1900 that traction companies began to build a booming network of trolley tracks. In 1902, one company started a line that would extend from Brooklyn to Freeport along the South Shore, and then north to Mineola from Freeport. When the workers laying trolley tracks on Franklin Avenue in Garden City reached the LIRR tracks, there was trouble. The railroad, fearing competition from the trolley lines and grade-crossing accidents, balked. But the trolley finally got permission to cross, and the route -- from the county courthouse to South Shore beaches -- was immediately popular. A brass band met the trolley in Freeport on its first run.

In 1907 another traction company built a network of rails along the less populated North Shore, from Flushing to Roslyn and then north to Port Washington and south to Hicksville. A concrete retaining wall was built alongside Northern Boulevard just north of the Roslyn clock tower to keep soil off the tracks. Today, the wall still hugs the road, which is called Old Northern Boulevard.

Another line ran from Patchogue to Holbrook. The Suffolk Traction Co. planned service to Port Jefferson, but although tracks were laid in that village, the battery-powered cars never ran. The Long Island Rail Road also operated small train-station-to-village trolley lines in Northport, Sea Cliff and Glen Cove.

The trolley's finest moment was in 1914. But things started going downhill after World War I began. For one thing, the war drove up prices for materials the traction companies needed -- coal for fuel, copper for electric wires and steel for rails.

But what hurt the trolleys most was the fact that they weren't allowed to raise their fares. The traction companies had made agreements with villages to charge a base fare of 5 cents, and the villages wouldn't let them increase it. Keeping employees was difficult because the traction companies couldn't match the pay of munition factories.

And then there were the automobiles. Production had been suspended during the war, but once it was over, people began buying Ford's Model T. Buses also began to compete on the trolley routes. The buses, which didn't need overhead power lines and miles of track, were much cheaper to operate. In 1921, traction company representatives appeared before Hempstead Village officials, complaining that the new buses were robbing them of their passengers, pulling up to the curb in front of the trolleys to pick up a waiting throng of passengers.

By the late 1920s, most of the traction companies had gone out of business, and private bus lines bought out the trolley routes. The last to go was the LIRR's Huntington line, which ran from the train station to Halesite until 1927. Remnants of tracks remain in Northport.

But some things don't change. Perhaps today's LIRR commuter could sympathize with a passenger who took a trolley daily from Port Washington to Hicksville. ``Almost invariably, I have the pleasure of listening to the stale jokes, ribald songs and comment on passengers,'' he wrote to a local newspaper. ``Three or four regular riders at night seem to think they own the car. Is there no remedy?''