When people fall for trolleys, they fall hard. It’s why some folks are so passionate about bringing back the Route 23 trolley, the subject of Tuesday’s news story about the City’s plan to pave over its tracks at certain intersections. David Wilson was visiting family in Glenside and Elkins Park in 1966 when he fell in love with the Philadelphia Transit Company’s green-and-cream colored beauties. The Chicago teenager returned to Philadelphia nine times over the next four years, roaming the city with his Brownie Hawkeye camera to photograph streetcars, trackless trolleys and even buses. His hobby would lead to a career in freight logistics and urban transit planning. We stumbled across Wilson’s photos on flickr, where he has posted not only his Philadelphia material, but also thousands of photos (23,921 to be exact) of transit in numerous cities, including a spectacular collection from Chicago.

We like trolleys well enough, but we were enthralled by the portrait of the city’s neighborhoods Wilson inadvertently created. There are photos of Olney, Kensington, Fairhill, Tacony, Germantown, Elmwood, Ludlow, Powelton, Fishtown, Gray’s Ferry, Eastwick and South Philadelphia. We went ahead and posted them all because, well, there’s nothing like looking at a whole bunch at once to make you feel like you’re there. It’s a period we rarely see represented in Philadelphia history or photo books, or online, especially in color. Wilson’s photos depict a city that in many cases looks little changed from the 1950s–or even the 1940s in certain shots. The corner stores are still open, the neon bar signs still lit, the glass in the factory windows still intact. Yet we know now that these neighborhoods were on the brink of massive social and economic change. The slow decline in population that began in 1950 was about to accelerate, and many of the streets we see in Wilson’s photos would soon become a shadow of what they once were.