19 pictures showing the history of Detroit’s streetcar system

By Metro Times Staff

The final streetcar on Detroit's original Woodward Avenue line ran on April 8, 1956. To commemorate the ghosts of transit past, here's a nostalgic look back at the history of Detroit's streetcar system. Be sure to check out our piece on what Detroit's learned (or hasn't learned) in the 60 years since streetcars were an everyday occurrence.

This slideshow would have been impossible to make without the kind forbearance of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. You can see these images for yourself at the Virtual Motor City site.

Text by Michael Jackman

Scroll down to view images

By the early 1860s, Jefferson, Woodward, Gratiot and Michigan avenues were already trimmed with rail. Catering to the city's upper classes, dray teams pulled passengers along Detroit's radial arteries at a stately pace for 5 cents. Pictured here is a horse car of the Detroit City Railway. Note the arrow pointing to the bell on one horse’s neck.

The city offered franchises lasting for decades to private companies. By the mid-1870s, Detroit had 10 competing streetcar companies, each with its own lines, some running down arrow-straight thoroughfares, others zigzagging through the city, making turns every few blocks, sometimes paralleling the competition's tracks for miles at a stretch, belying the hodgepodge construction of routes. Pictured here is a horse car on the Woodward Line in 1882.

The conversion to machine power was equally fitful. Some streetcars ran on unshielded wires strung overhead, others on third rails embedded in slots in the street. A line on Cadillac even used steam power briefly. But by the end of 1895, the last company had completely electrified its operations. If the photographic records are correct, this image is of one of the last holdouts from the 1890s, on a turntable for cars at Hamilton and Holden.

Many Detroiters began to view the private companies providing streetcar transportation as greedy, self-interested trusts, lagging behind in improvements to infrastructure and charging high fares. After his election in 1889, Detroit's progressive Mayor Hazen Pingree (pictured here as the motorman) campaigned to get the companies to adopt 3-cent fares as their standard fixed price, with free transfers. When the companies refused, the maverick mayor sought to build publicly owned rail lines that would provide working-class passengers affordable transit.

By the 1910s, Detroit was the hub of one of the largest unified electrical transportation systems in the world. Detroit United Railways operated what may have been the largest regional electric rail system in the world. It had more than 800 miles of track, more than 200 of them in the city limits of Detroit, where one fare would get you across town, and 600 miles in the high-speed interurban lines.

Impressive though the DUR’s network was, the impression that it was an unaccountable monopoly prevailed. Battles over fares and fights against extending expiring franchises characterized the 22-year reign of the DUR, and a lively battle was waged in the press, with a great deal of support for municipal ownership.

Another fighter for municipal ownership was Detroit Mayor James Couzens. He chaired the Detroit Street Railway Commission, whose goal was to make Hazen Pingree’s dream of a municipally owned streetcar system a reality. Under his leadership, Detroiters approved a $15 million bond issue to build a city-owned system. Here Couzens is pictured wielding a sledgehammer.

Before he left office in 1922, Mayor Couzens got the job done. On March 13, 1922, the city of Detroit purchased all track from the DUR for a sum of $19,850,000. Detroit’s Department of Street Railways began operating all streetcars in Detroit from April 1922 onward.

Public anger and expiring franchises weren’t the only things hurting the DUR: Improvements to roads were lifting automobiles out of the muck and putting them on asphalt and concrete. The streetcar had always been the surest way around town, but now it faced competition from the private motorcar in a way it hadn’t before. They would exist side-by-side for the time being.

In theory, what Detroit got for its money was one of the most thorough municipal streetcar systems in the world. But the system had seen better days. Since the private investors running it weren’t certain how long they’d be allowed to continue, the city’s trackage needed maintenance and investment.