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All Aboard The Boom

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courtesy of warren wing For many years, the corner of 14th Avenue and East Jefferson Street was a transportation center for the South End. Here, in 1940, the corner was home to the Seattle Transit System’s new fleet of trackless trolleys. paul dorpat The corner has become the southeast edge of Seattle University’s campus — its Championship Field.

AROUND NOON on the 15th of December 1940, when the winter sun cast long shadows over the Seattle Transit System's new fleet of trackless trolleys, the veteran commercial photographer Frank Jacobs took this view of the Jefferson Street car barn and its new residents. Here, Jacobs looks northwest from the corner of 14th Avenue and East Jefferson Street.

By a rough count of the vehicles in this and a second photo Jacobs made of the barn,114 carriers are parked here. That is about half of the 235 Westinghouse trackless trolleys that the city bought with a loan from the federal government. The first of them were delivered earlier in March of 1940, and only three years after Seattle voters — by a large majority — rejected them in favor of keeping the municipal railway's old orange streetcars. But the transportation situation in the late 1930s was even more volatile than it is now, and the forces favoring both trolleys and buses (which the city also purchased) won over rails. Even the cherished but impoverished cable cars lost out.

When the Jefferson car barn was built in 1910 it was the last of the sprawling new garages made for the trolleys in the first, booming years of the 20th century. The Seattle Electric Co. also built barns in Fremont, lower Queen Anne and Georgetown to augment its crowded facility at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street. The Georgetown plant was also the company's garage for repairing streetcars and, when it came time in 1940-41, also for scrapping them.

The finality of that conversion from tracks to rubber tires is written here in the yard of the car barn with black on black. Fresh asphalt has erased the once-intricate tracery of the yard's many shining rails.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.