History 301: Mass transit had its day in Indy, but came up short

By Connie Zeigler

As we in Indianapolis discuss new transportation options, including the possibility of light rail along our city streets,

Connie Zeigler is a resident of Fountain Square who holds a master’s degree in history. She is an architectural historian who operates a green preservation consulting business. C Resources, Inc. offers a variety of writing services as well as historic research, national register nominations and preservation planning.

the obvious comparisons between historic transportation lines and proposed current ones come to mind. It’s natural to romanticize the transportation system that existed here before the turn of the last century. And to wonder what happened to it.

Of course, there were all sorts of conflicting views, nuances of opinion and mixed reviews of public transportation in the past, just as there are now. Before we drift too far on a wave of nostalgia, it may be useful to take a realistic backward view of the time when street railways were the common mode of transportation.

The first Indianapolis streetcars, beginning in 1864, were owned by the for-profit Citizens Street Railway, not by the city. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis states that these mule-powered (or horse-drawn) early cars each carried 14 passengers.

The first tracks were on Illinois Street, but one of the earliest expansions was along Massachusetts Avenue, making it easy for shoppers to travel to and from the commercial area there. In its first 30 years of operation, animal-powered streetcars reached the suburbs of Irvington to the east and Haughville, west of White River, to the west.

This street railway system hit a new benchmark in 1890 when the system was purchased by new private owners. They included John C. Shaffer, then publisher of the Chicago Post and soon to be the publisher of the Indianapolis Star, and Samuel Allerton, organizer of Chicago’s Union Stockyards and the Chicago City Railways Co.

These big-city boys brought a clever marketing plan and new technology to the Indianapolis system. They purchased a farm on the northern edge of Indianapolis and transformed it into a bucolic playground complete with exotic plants, rides and horses which dove into a pool of water. They named it Fairview.

The clever businessmen then constructed a streetcar line to Fairview. And they installed an electrical overhead line to electrically power the street car along its length from Illinois Street to the park, on what is today’s Butler University campus. On June 18, 1890, the first electric street car in Indianapolis traveled on its maiden trip carrying Mayor Thomas Sullivan and other dignitaries.

That first ride on the electrified line took 60 minutes to travel 12 miles. In addition to numerous breakdowns, one unfortunate dog was electrocuted on the rails and a number of pedestrian near-misses were noted in the local papers. Still, the experiment was so fabulously novel that Indianapolis was sold on the idea of electric streetcars.

The canny businessmen who owned the streetcar company had definitely found an appealing recipe to entice citizens onto their cars. A lovely park reached only by streetcar. It wasn’t a recipe unique to Indianapolis. Streetcar parks were found at the edges of most cities in the late 19th century.

In 1904, when the Chinese prince, Pu Lun, visited Indianapolis, he rode the streetcar to Fairview Park. Local newspapers reported that 10,000 people were at the park that day to watch Pu Lun as he watched the diving horses.

By the 20th century, entrepreneurs were locating mechanized amusement parks at the end of these streetcar lines. The electricity necessary for the streetcars then also served the double purpose to power the amusement park rides. Indianapolis had three of these amusement parks by 1906. Each located at the end of or along a streetcar line.

Despite offering marvels at streetcar parks, and what one would suppose to be the need of most citizens to ride a streetcar in these years before automobiles, street railway companies had continual problems turning a profit.

The Citizens Street Railroad owners, who had opened Fairview Park, experienced financial troubles and sold the company to the Indianapolis Street Railway Co. in 1899.

In 1900, the new owners allowed interurbans – electric trains which ran between towns and cities – to use the streetcar rails. After a consolidation of all interurban and streetcar lines into one company, the Indianapolis Street Railway Co. became the Indianapolis Traction and Terminal Co.

The Traction and Terminal Co. hired Daniel Burnham, architect of the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition, to design the Indianapolis Traction Terminal. When it opened in 1904 the new terminal in the 100 block of West Market Street was one of the largest free-span structures of its day.

But by 1911, the Traction and Terminal Co. was also losing money.

In 1913 a strike of overworked, underpaid streetcar workers who hoped to unionize resulted in violence against strike breakers and the murder of a striker. Eventually, the governor had to call in 2,200 national guardsmen to quell the violence. Several months after it began, the strike was settled by the Public Service Commission. The commission’s Court of Arbitration ruled against the streetcar company in 1914 ordering pay raises, reduced workdays and demanding that workers receive one Sunday per month off.

By then, many Indianapolis citizens had learned the benefit of having their own private transportation. And a Detroit automaker named Henry Ford was providing them with a relatively inexpensive way to do so. Although the Indianapolis Street Railway Co. (once again renamed and with new owners) added buses to its offerings in 1925, it went into receivership in 1930.

Serious interurban crashes and troubling breaks in service made citizens, already interested in owning their own cars, skeptical about continuing to commute by electric train. By the 1940s, the interurbans closed down their Central Indiana service. In the 1950s the streetcars stopped running.

By then most Americans owned a family auto and had given up the often complained about, less flexible, not always reliable, and sometimes dangerous public railways.

Almost 60 years later, modern citizens of Indianapolis are beginning to hope for a system of public transport that includes trains traveling over light rail lines, similar to the interurbans and streetcars of earlier days. To many of us it seems that public transportation is a better use of resources than private transportation.

As we hearken to the past to justify our hopes for the future it might be useful to understand that public options won’t, and never did, satisfy everyone, or work exactly as planned, or make money in the long run. Or we can hope that these entrepreneurial leaders have worked out the kinks that their predecessors didn’t.