Jake Berman’s take on Richmond’s 1891 streetcar lines (Image courtesy Jake Berman; click upper-right corner to expand)
When you’re trapped in a traffic jam, what’s your go-to coping mechanism? An audiobook? Rocking out to your favorite CD? Checking your email (which you shouldn’t do while driving)? Leaping out of your car and engaging in a spontaneous song and dance sequence?
If it’s 2010 and you’re contract lawyer Jake Berman, then living in Los Angeles, and you’re stranded in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the infamous U.S. Route 101, you get to thinking: There must’ve been a better way to get around. Once off the freeway, you descend into the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library to learn about the extensive red and yellow streetcar lines that once thread through L.A. The demise of a transit system — the lines exceeded New York City’s in size — is the ostensible plot of the film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
And then you start making art out of this and other ideas, among them the Richmond streetcar system circa 1891, when the privately run transit service was about three and a half years into its 61-year run. The lines running to Ashland and Petersburg didn’t yet exist. The Richmond system — never managed by the city but instead often badly managed by private companies — was the first of its kind in the world.
Berman, today a New York City artist, got clued into the Richmond streetcar story when visiting the region to track down a Colonial period ancestor. The year 1891 turned out to provide the best routing and timetable information for Berman’s project.
While Carlton McKenney’s “Rails in Richmond” gives extensive photographic and background information, including maps, Berman needed more.
“Most of the materials that I've found are in [Virginia Commonwealth University]’s collection, with some of it coming from the [University of Virginia] library.”
He finds that city guidebooks provide encyclopedic, granular information. Berman’s legal skillset has proved extremely helpful for research, especially for the efficient filterings of great quantities of data.
A chamber of commerce guide for tourists who’d never visited Richmond or used its trolleys gave precise arrival and departure information, and what cars went where. These booklets served as promotional tools, filled with purple prose about how Richmond at the end of the 19th century was poised to become a grand Southern metropolis, especially with an embracing of modernity as exhibited by its electric streetcars and high-rise office buildings.
Yet, with the city’s typical push-me-pull-you erraticism self-viewed as normal, the streetcars ran while Lost Cause memorials went up. The trolleys aided in the expansion of the city but with neighborhoods divided by race and class. The future carried the past’s baggage.
Berman points out that across the country until the 1930s, mass transit companies doubled as real estate developers. In Richmond, this meant the creation of amusement parks in Westhampton, Forest Hill and Byrd Park, to encourage cramped city-center residents to move further out. Neighborhoods blossomed that remain today. “They have good bones,” Berman compliments.
The point there, though, is that this expansion came about as the result of transit-directed development as opposed to development-directed transit that evolved into the leapfrog suburban paradigm and reefs of cul de sac archipelagos reachable only by oxymoronic express- and parkways.
“Traffic is is a choice,” Berman says. “If you don’t plan for or invest in neighborhoods to include transit, or other means of getting around, then that means the cars pile up.”
Among his works are “speculative maps,” like the transit system of Wakanda, the world of "Black Panther." I guess that would be more popular than a schematic of the rails traveled by the failed 1979 television series “Supertrain.” What I wistfully wish for is the alternative world where our rail-based transit system was rescued in 1949, improved upon and extended throughout the region.
From “Chew on This” magazine, a speculative 2003 map for Richmond to gear up for the 2007 Jamestown anniversary celebration (click upper-right corner to expand)
We’ve been without the streetcars now for about a decade longer than they rolled here. How different Richmond would be today if their presence mitigated the highways. The outside world might recognize trams climbing our city’s hills as one of the ways we are identified. Back in 2003, the magazine “Chew on This” humorously devised a Richmond subway map for 2007.
“Those kinds of things wouldn’t make much sense in the real world, which is why I do the research," Berman says. "Otherwise, they're at least useful for people to dream about the possibilities.”
