IMAGE EXTRACTED FROM MICROFILM BY GREG HAND
Although the city’s newspapers regularly cited unsafe conditions on the city’s streetcars, the trolleys were popular and heavily used by Cincinnati’s commuters. The hilltop neighborhoods would not have developed without mass transit. Even so, riding the streetcar included some unusual situations.
For instance, halitosis. The Cincinnati Enquirer [10 April 1898] reported that a delegation of women “whose sense of smell seems to have been abnormally developed” invaded the private offices of John Kilgour, president and general manager of the Cincinnati Consolidated Street Railway, to complain about the malodorous exhalations of his streetcar conductors.
“Only last week about 20 Cumminsville ladies rode into town with a conductor who had eaten onions for dinner, and so soon as they landed in the city they adjourned in a body to Mr. Kilgour’s office. Many ladies of Mt. Auburn are kicking, while a great many more who live in Clifton are up in arms. Walnut Hills has sent in her petitions, but from all sides the kicks and the petitions are from ladies, and all are down on onions as used by the street car conductors.”
The Enquirer, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, offered a variety of remedies for onion-hungry conductors including salting his onions with chloride of lime, strapping a horse sponge soaked in carbolic acid and asafetida to his mouth, and ingesting onion-heavy dishes such as Hamburg steak in capsule form. (It is not surprising that breath mints – not yet a common thing – are not mentioned here, but it is odd that cloves – on-hand at every saloon in town – are not listed as an option.)
While the society ladies petitioned the streetcar company for pleasanter olfactory experiences, younger women blamed courtship hurdles on the streetcar schedule. Many young men back then lived in town but courted fair maids out in the tonier suburbs up the Millcreek Valley. The city’s streetcars ran late enough to get their dates back home to Glendale and Wyoming, but not late enough to convey the ardent swains back to town. According to the Cincinnati Post [16 October 1902]:
“Maidens of the Mill Creek Valley are making a strenuous effort to secure better street car accommodations for the young men from the city who take them to theaters. At present these young men have to walk anywhere from seven to 14 miles to the city, according to the part of the Mill Creek Valley in which the girl lives, and a long, lonesome promenade by night has proved enough to take the keen edge off many an incipient and promising love affair.”
According to the Post, parents were mum on the issue and those who did voice an opinion thought the streetcars ran late enough as it was.
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Meanwhile, the folks who rode the streetcars during the normal business hours had regular trials of their own, among them Cincinnati’s beloved totem, the pig. The Commercial Tribune [13 February 1898] reported a situation in which a fattened hog on the way to the slaughterhouse decided to delay the inevitable by napping under the wheels of a streetcar, causing a delay of some minutes.
“But why growl, and fuss, and fume, and blame the Consolidated? It can’t help it. It might make a thousand laws against pigs getting under the car, but every now and then a pig would break the rules.”
The Commercial Tribune described a situation in which a horseshoe, cast off by some farmer’s dray, settled into the groove in which one of the city’s cable car’s lines ran. Cars backed up for blocks as gripmen and conductors and then passengers and passersby attempted to remove the blockade or offered advice on how to make it disappear.
Coal deliveries regularly brought streetcar service to a standstill. The Commercial Tribune opined that basic geometry dictated that coal wagons and streetcars did not mix:
“Take the great big lumbering coal wagons. It is all they can do to turn around in a narrow street. When they dump a load of coal something more than half a street is needed. It matters not to the driver that a loaded street car is coming with forty or fifty passengers, some of whom will be docked if they are late. He must get that coal off.”
IMAGE EXTRACTED FROM MICROFILM BY GREG HAND
Cincinnati has always loved a parade, but parades played hob with streetcar schedules. The Commercial Tribune dreaded the disruption the Grand Army of the Republic reunion in 1898 would inflict on the city’s transit system.
“When the veterans are here this summer there will be a blockade that will be a blockade unless arrangements are made in the line of march to permit some of the [streetcar] lines to continue in operation. If 40,000 veterans are to be in line, and this is by no means improbable, it means a winding mass of humanity that will cross every line of cars near and far, a line that will be hours passing any given point.”
Even when the streetcar routes ran smoothly, commuters complained about the outrageous fares charged by the streetcar companies. When Cincinnati charged five cents for a ticket and a penny extra for a transfer, Columbus, Cleveland and other cities offered eight tickets for a quarter, with free transfers.
Complicating matters, Cincinnati had multiple transit companies operating with totally different fare structures. The big player in town was the Cincinnati Street Railway Company, owned by the Kilgour family, followed by George Kerper’s Consolidated Lines based around the Mount Adams Incline, the Mount Auburn Cable Line, the Main Street Line and other players. A mourner wishing to place flowers on the grave of a loved one in Spring Grove Cemetery had to pay a ten-cent fare to ride an electric trolley to the end of that line at Knowlton’s Corner, and then pay an additional ten cents to ride a horse-drawn trolley out to the cemetery.
Overcrowding was a perennial issue. The Cincinnati Post – possibly exaggerating – recorded 117 passengers stuffing one struggling car. An editorial cartoon recommended that the transit company directors should be drafted to personally pull one of the overloaded cars.
Many of the streetcars were “open,” meaning they were not enclosed at all and even those cars fully encapsulated with windows had open platforms at the front and rear of each car on which overflow passengers had to stand. A Cincinnati Post cartoonist advised commuters to bring their own pot-bellied stoves along for the ride.
The “modern” trolley cars introduced in the 1920s must have seemed like celestial chariots to Cincinnati’s long-suffering strap-hangers.
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