Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Editorial Section
Guest
Column
A Christmas Wish
for Transit
By
Doug Alexander
There
was a time, not so long ago, when a person could get nearly everywhere in the
city of Atlanta on transit. Of
course, that was when the transit system was privately owned by the Georgia
Power Company and consisted almost entirely of streetcars. The
system was enormous; tracks went up and down most major streets, and extended
out as far as Marietta and Stone Mountain. The
streetcars were safe and reliable.
When
Harry Norman Real Estate Broker Necia Kelleher was just six years old, she
could get on the streetcar near her home in West End and ride downtown all by
herself to do her Christmas shop-ping at Rich’s Department Store.
She
wasn’t unsupervised, of course: her mother, Thelma Knight, put her on the
streetcar at the stop near her home; her Aunt Lucy welcomed her downtown (and
took her to lunch at the famed Magnolia Room); and the streetcar motormen kept
an eye out for the young lady throughout her trip.
Children
were not the only ones who took “the Car” with ease. My grandfather, Cecil
Alexander, Sr., had a hardware store on Pryor Street. He also had a little
black Scottie dog named Snuff.
Each day, he and Snuff would walk a block from their home on St. Charles Avenue to catch an inbound streetcar on Ponce de Leon, and then walk another block to the store to open it up for business.
After
the day was done, Cecil and Snuff would lock up, and catch the Car for home.
According
to family lore, as Snuff “got on” in years, he began sleeping in at home. An
hour or so after my grandfather had left for the store, Snuff would head out by
himself. The streetcar would rumble and squeal to a stop, the door would open
with a woosh as the steps drop-ped
down with a whump, and the little dog
would bound up into the streetcar and sit himself down for the trip.
Family
lore also tells us that after a year or two of this, as Snuff became elderly
(for a dog), he decided that he didn’t need to stay at the store until closing. Snuff began leaving about an hour before
closing to catch the Car for home. Georgia Power even gave Snuff a lifetime
pass to use the system as he pleased, though his master still had to pay full
fare.
Of
course, one has to take family lore with at least a few grains of salt, but we
do know that the part about the pass is true; years ago the late historian
Franklin Garrett found and showed my Dad and me the entry in Georgia Power’s pass
records for “Snuff – a dog.”
By
the time I came along, Atlanta’s streetcars and the trolley buses that
succeeded them were long gone, replaced by buses owned by the city. They didn’t
go to quite as many places as the streetcars had gone, and as years went by
they became less frequent too.
Fortunately,
I was blessed with a grandmother in New Orleans, so on visits as a youngster I
did get to know what it was like to ride a real streetcar, and it saddened me
that we didn’t have these wonderful rolling park-benches on our streets.
When
I was a member of the City Council in the 1990s, I began a conversation about
bringing street-cars back to Auburn Avenue to help in the redevelopment of that
famous street. That conversation has at last borne fruit: a brand-new streetcar
line is being built from the center of downtown to the heart of our civil rights
heritage at the Martin Luther King Center.
And
so on this Christmas Day, my wish for our city is that this will be the first
of many new streetcar lines, and that they will help to re-connect our
neighborhoods and knit Atlanta back into to a place where six-year-olds – and
the occasional dog – can get around town in safety and with ease.
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