On This Day

Wednesday 14th November 1832

187 years ago

The world’s first streetcar, named the John Mason, began operation in New York City, running between Prince and 14th Streets in Lower Manhattan. For a long time, Americans had relied on horse-drawn carriages to get them around cities. In 1827, a new form of mass transit was built in New York City, called an omnibus. It was the brainchild of a businessman who owned a line of stagecoaches. He had seen something similar in a French drawing, so he commissioned a young Irish immigrant named John Stephenson to build one. An omnibus was basically a big, boxy stagecoach, but it ran along a designated route and the fare was cheap. If someone wanted to ride one, they just put up their hand, and to get off they pulled a leather strap, which was connected to the ankle of the driver. In 1832, 23-year-old Stephenson received a commission from John Mason, a wealthy banker and one of the biggest landowners in the city. Mason envisioned an omnibus on rails, but with the rails laid in the street, and he had just been granted a charter for such a rail line: the New York and Harlem Railroad. He left it up to Stephenson to design and build the new streetcar, to be named the John Mason in honor of the railroad’s president. Stephenson modeled it on railway cars, but he dropped the body of the car so that the seats were above the wheels but the floors were in between the wheels, which made it easily accessible from the street, without a railway platform. Stephenson was granted a patent for this idea the following year, and requests began to pour in from all over the country. Stephenson’s new streetcar was a huge improvement on the omnibus. Although an omnibus was supposed to carry 15 people, there were usually many more packed inside and even on the roof, and everyone tried not to fall off as the car bumped over rough roads. One contemporary writer proclaimed: “Modern martyrdom may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York City omnibus. People are packed into them like sardines in a box with perspiration for oil. Passengers hang from the straps like smoked hams in a corner grocery … pickpockets ply their vocation … the foul, close heated air is poisonous.” By contrast, the streetcar was luxurious. The John Mason had three separate compartments — each had their own entrance and held 10 people, and the compartments were bigger than those in an omnibus, with beautiful upholstered seats and glass windows. Horses pulled the streetcar’s steel wheels along steel rails in the street. With the reduced friction, a streetcar was much easier to pull than an omnibus — so the ride was much smoother for the passenger, almost twice as fast (6-8 mph), and needed fewer horses. Because of the increased efficiency, a ride on the John Mason cost about 10 cents, instead of the 15-cent omnibus. Each streetcar was operated by two people: the driver and the conductor. The driver sat in front, on an open platform no matter what the weather was like — the thinking was that the driver would be more alert out in the open than in the comfort of an enclosed compartment. He controlled the horses and had a brake handle to stop the streetcar. The conductor sat in back and helped passengers board the train, took their money, and rang a bell to signal to the driver when to stop and go. By 1870, New Yorkers made 100 million trips a year in horse-drawn streetcars. By 1880, there were at least 150,000 horses in the city. But each of those 150,000 horses was producing 22 lbs. of manure each day, and soon the city was a mess. One citizen wrote: “In hot weather the city stank with the emanations of putrefying organic matter.” Another wrote that the streets were “literally carpeted with a warm, brown matting of comminuted horse dropping, smelling to heaven and destined in no inconsiderable part to be scattered in fine dust in all directions, laden with countless millions of disease breeding germs.” One writer guessed that by 1930, the manure would reach the third story of Manhattan’s buildings. But in just a few decades, cars took over as the primary form of transportation, and in 1917 horse-drawn streetcars ceased to operate in New York City.