The trolley wire was strung above the street like a clothesline for electricity. Copper wire on wooden poles with a steel cable running down the middle of the avenue and the trolley car underneath reaching up with a pole to touch it. The trolley wire was the nerve of the city. The electricity ran through the wire and the wire ran through the city and the city moved because the wire said so.

The trolley wire hummed. You could hear it on a quiet morning before the traffic started. A low electric hum that came from the wire and settled into the street like a second kind of silence. The hum was the sound of potential. The trolley had not arrived yet but the wire was already working. The wire was always working. The wire never stopped.

I rode the Third Avenue trolley when I was a kid. The trolley swayed and the pole on top scraped along the wire and sometimes the pole slipped off and the conductor had to go outside and put it back. When the pole came off the wire the trolley stopped dead in the middle of the avenue. No electricity. No movement. The trolley without the wire was a box on rails. The wire was everything. The trolley was nothing without it.

They tore the wires down in the fifties. Robert Moses wanted buses. Buses did not need wires. Buses ran on diesel and diesel ran on oil and oil ran on politics and politics ran on money and money said tear down the wires. The last trolley in Manhattan ran in 1957. The wires came down the next week. The poles came down the week after that. The avenue looked naked without the wires. The sky above Third Avenue had a gap where the wire used to be.

Some cities kept their trolleys. San Francisco kept them. New Orleans kept them. Those cities understood that the wire was not just transportation. The wire was the shape of the street. The wire told you where you were. Take away the wire and the street forgets what it was for.

See also: Telegraph Pole, Elevated Train