Transport as SocioCultural Force
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on April 23rd, 2010
Source: Going Solar Transport Newsletter
From Mutual Benefits and Close Connections: Baseball and America’s Streetcars in the 19th Century, TR News, January-February 2010.
In the late 19th century, public transit via streetcars regularly intersected with baseball, with mutual benefits. Unlike many other enterprises, streetcars served a practical purpose for baseball—delivering large numbers of people to the games easily, quickly, and cheaply. Collaboration between baseball and streetcars therefore was consequential for both. [...]
Baseball became an important way of filling streetcars with “happy-faced occupants.” The comparatively young sport had mushroomed in popularity, and streetcar companies grasped that providing access to the games could enhance their own business. One streetcar executive commented that it was important “to keep in with the baseball people”. Earlier in the century, railroads had established a pivotal relationship with baseball. Trains made it possible for teams to travel hundreds of miles to compete and to bring the games to an expanding pool of spectators. Streetcars, however, could offer a transportation benefit that steam locomotives could not, by carrying spectators directly to the ballparks, further expanding the fan base for games. [...]
The streetcar industry, and the role of streetcars in taking fans to baseball games, would continue to grow in the early decades of the 20th century. Eventually many of the vehicles would be supplanted by other mass-transit options, like subways and motorized buses. Still in its infancy in the late 19th century, the automobile likewise would become a formidable competitor.
Nonetheless, the streetcar deserves recognition as the forerunner of those more modern modes and for its crucial contribution to bringing previously far-flung locales closer together. For baseball, streetcars played an important role in diversifying the attendance at games. In addition, hefty investments of money and infrastructure by streetcar executives contributed in the long term to establishing ballparks as permanent fixtures on the American landscape.
These contributions underscore the lasting impact of streetcars on baseball’s growth as a socio-cultural force, even though the clang and clatter of a trolley is no longer instantly and widely associated with the crack of a bat and the cheers of a crowd rooting for the home team.
The study of streetcars in the 19th century illustrates transportation’s time-honored influence not just on destinations, such as ballparks, but on everyday life.
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