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Saturday, December 26, 2009

Vintage Streetcar Photographs Show Mid-Century St. Louis

This week St. Louisan extraordinaire Jeff Vines discovered an online cache of 120 photographs of St. Louis Public Service Company trolley cars taken between 1954 and 1961. A few photographs from the 1980s are included.

The images of the cars in their vintage red, white and tan color scheme are fabulous. Yet the photographs also capture views of the city long lost, change or, in a few cases, preserved. The old Grand Avenue viaduct, its replacement soon to be replaced, features in many of the photographs in use adn under demolition. Other locations include the South Broadway car barn (now site of Carnahan Middle School), the Midtown skyline (remarkably unchanged), Maplewood, University City and Flynn Park, Washington Avenue from the Eads Bridge street car turn-around to 15th Street, rural Creve Couer, downtown St. Charles, and McKnight Road.

The photographs of the vicinity of the Eads Bridge and Washington Avenue include shots of the piers for the modern elevated lanes of I-70, now seen as likely to be removed in most of our life times.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Way cool!!! - Thanks! - sorry to read about Jim Ozment's recent (12/9/09) passing on the main site . . .

samizdat said...

Wow! I viewed every one of those pictures. Now my coffee's cold. Such a geek.

lana said...

railway enthusiasts are a great source of historic photos...railfan.net is a good place to start.

Joe said...

Very, very, cool... but still, I've never seen a photo of a streetcar on the (now) median of DeMun Avenue in my neighborhood. Anybody know where I might find such a thing??