The trolley car ran on a track in the middle of the street and the track was a scar in the pavement. You could see the tracks after the trolley was gone. The city paved over them but the pavement cracked along the track and the track showed through like a memory the street could not forget. The trolley car left its signature on every block it ever ran.

The trolley cost a nickel. A nickel got you from one end of the line to the other. The trolley did not care where you were going. The trolley only knew the track. You got on and you got off and the trolley kept going. The trolley was the most democratic transportation in the city. It did not skip neighborhoods. It did not express past the poor. The trolley stopped at every block because every block deserved a stop.

The trolley had a bell. The motorman pulled a cord and the bell rang and the bell meant get out of the way. The bell was the polite version of a horn. The bell said I am coming through and I cannot stop quickly and you are in the street and the street belongs to both of us. The trolley bell was a negotiation between the machine and the pedestrian. The car horn is not a negotiation. The car horn is a threat.

I rode the trolley in Brooklyn when I was a kid. The trolley swayed on the track and the windows were open and the city came in through the windows like a movie. The trolley was a moving window. You saw the whole neighborhood from a trolley and you saw it at the right speed. Walking was too slow. The car was too fast. The trolley was the speed of looking.

They ripped out the trolley tracks in the fifties because General Motors and Standard Oil and Firestone wanted to sell buses and tires and gasoline. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a court case. They were convicted. They paid a fine of five thousand dollars each and they got the contract and the trolleys died and the buses came and the buses needed gasoline and tires and General Motors built the buses. The trolley was murdered. The bus was the getaway car.

See also: Subway Token, Newsboy