TROLLEY LINES OF BROOKLYN NEW YORK 1950s HOME MOVIE (SILENT FILM) MD52964

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Shot by an electric railway enthusiast named Ben Young in the early 1950s, this silent 16mm home movie shows trolley cars of Brooklyn, New York including PCC or President's Conference Committee cars which ran from 1936 to 1956. Filmmaker Ben Young later became the President of the Sunrise Chapter (Long Island) of the National Railroad Historical Foundation. After his passing a portion of his collection was sold, including 4 reels of 16mm film.This particular film shows the Brooklyn PCCs heading to Coney Island, and throughout the system where the Brooklyn trolleys operated, along with the subway and elevated lines.
Trolleys were once such a part of the Brooklyn scene that the local baseball club was named the ‘Trolley Dodgers’, later shortened to Dodgers when the club moved to Los Angeles. At 2:54, a bus is seen -- foreshadowing the future demise of the trolleys. At 23:51 and 25:20, older double truck center-entrance trolleys made by J.G. Brill are briefly seen in service with buses. At 28:45, a NY subway car is seen on the elevated railway.
The Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corporation (B&QT) was one of the most active participants in the Electric Railway Presidents’ Conference Committee (ERPCC) that designed the PCC streetcar. BQ&T was the first to test a PCC prototype, and joined Pittsburgh and Chicago as the first to operate production PCCs in late 1936.
Brooklyn took delivery of 100 PCCs, all but the first one built by St. Louis Car Co.
Brooklyn's PCCs primarily served only three routes: 67-Seventh Ave.; 68-Smith-Coney Island; and 69-McDonald-Vanderbilt. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia didn’t like streetcars, preferring buses instead. The 100 Brooklyn PCCs were phased out by 1956.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit www.PeriscopeFilm.com

[@donschwartz9585]

I'm born and raised in NYC and have to tell you that I have vague memories of trollies and electric buses. How stupid was the city to eliminate them. They were quieter, except for the wheels on tracks, more efficient and with no smoke or smell. They could have easily converted them to light rail. I shake my head.

[@michaelquinones-lx6ks]

New Yorkers are "Smart" all right, "Smart" enough to hide how stupid they really are, They are so self deluded.

[@jamescashin288]

In the early '60, as a kid, I remember seeing the trolley tracks coming through the tar on Cortelyou Road.and Westminster Road. Thank you for posting this great clip!

[@mitchdakelman4470]

This is from an original Kodachrome silent film photographed by the late Ben Young, a good friend and nice guy. He was President of the Sunrise Chapter (Long Island) of the National Railway Historical Society, for many years.

[@Gio_Vanni6143]

I can't believe how quiet trolley cars were.

[@alterman156channel]

Getting rid of the trolleys was a big mistake. From what I could see in the video, the trolleys were faster than the buses and I would say that they were much quieter. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia made a tremendous blunder by paving the way to get rid of the trolleys. Instead, they were replaced by fume producing buses that were also noisy.

[@emelimarchione2913]

I remember seeing trolleys on Metropolitan Ave. where I grew up in Ridgewood, Queens. 1940's

[@luislaplume8261]

It ended at Metropolitan Ave. and Jamaica Ave by the gas station which was still there in the 1960s. Near the Van Wyck Expressway. Near the border with Jamaica and Richmond Hill where I lived.

[@ernestpassaro9663]

Think they stopped running in 1949 at metropolitan avenue

[@ernestpassaro9663]

You had idiot car drivers cutting in front of trolleys even then !

[@ernestpassaro9663]

Had to board them in the middle of the street

[@ernestpassaro9663]

Great old footage !

[@trainsupporter9088]

Thanks so much for uploading this fantastic film. Wow - it was a great 30 minutes spent!

[@s.willey6536]

Clearly shows the derivation of the name the "Brooklyn Dodgers". For those that don't know, the full name was the Trolley-Dodgers and it got shortened. We used to put pennies on the tracks and retrieve them after they got run over and severely flattened.

[@luislaplume8261]

So did my late mother who did the same in Havana,Cuba in the 1930s at the train line near her home.

[@bobwilliams3502]

We did the same thing. We also tied string to a lock and put bubble gum on the bottom and put some flame to it to make it extra sticky and fish coins and jewelry and watches out of subway grates. And retrieve bottles for the deposit don’t know why they did Away with that also.

[@philconti1491]

❤FANTASTIC...remember taking thi model trolley from RedHook Bklyn to Coney Island...its teminal was at Carousel ride. Other model was a boxcar like wooden version access at front and rear on Myrtle Ave Bklyn.. used to stand at rear window which was reverse direction motormman position..loved stepping on bell floor lever at each stop and intersection..lucky never got into trouble or reprimanded!!! Thank you yu for this film..loved it ...did I tell you. ILOVED IT!!!😊

[@8avexp]

I was born 19 days after trolley operation ended in Brooklyn.

[@trainrover]

oo la .. cannot recall marvelling out loud this much 🍸💋

[@tbuchana58]

Within about two or three years, Brooklyn lost its trolleys, it's newspaper, and it's team....sad.

[@hornet6969]

They are bringing these things back. Only the names have changed. It's now called "Light Rail". I used to see the tracks for these poking up through the asphalt. ( as a kid)

[@GilmerJohn]

While I admit the "Modern" light rail system in Salt Lake City, Utah is impressive most of these systems are expensive and don't really carry that many people. Most of them don't even attempt to provide 24/7 service. Perhaps the "new era" of public transportation will simply be "robot" operated vehicles.

[@WitchKing-Of-Angmar]

@@GilmerJohn a pathetic concept frankly, apperentally the future to modernists means leaving humanity and humane thought process in all 8 out of 10 versions of what they Imagine the future should be. Women and men while hardly a concept today, will never be seen in accurate representations of gender filed clothing, so say goodbye to dresses and more collared shirts with neatly pressed pants. A gone thought I suppose....and that's just one problem of the "modern" or more likely for me to call it "current" eras rebellious attempts to leave behind the past in everyway..except the cliche way.

[@jaymorgenthal9479]

I remember the Church ave underpass on Ocean Parkway with the fancy ironwork. I must have been around 5 or 6.. 1956-57

[@johndean5251]

Great Movies

[@RechtsstaatBRD]

very nice document of an old time :-) i love it!

[@sarjim4381]

I saw a 1956 Dodge cab, so that places the date sometime in late 1955 or early 1956. The private right of way is a trash strewn mess, the ties have sunk down into the mud, and it looks like the PCC cars haven't seen a wash rack in at least a year. This must have been filmed close to abandonment. Most of Brooklyn looks like a dump as well. If I had the means then, I would have gotten out before it became worse...and it did.

[@PhaQ2]

@ezzz9 It's amazing what 70 years of liberal regressivism can do to a once thriving community.

[@chrisfreeman4457]

Fall 1955 into 1956. The single season when the original episodes of "The Honeymooners" ran. About a Brooklyn bus driver.

[@1979mackdriver]

Jim , I’m 87 years old and When I came back from Korea I drew a year of some crap duty at Fort Hamilton before mutstering out ( I’m glad I did , I met my wife in Brooklyn NY) I used to walk around Bay ridge on Furlough ( I always used to end my days by admiring what is known now as the gingerbread house ) I still recognize a lot of these streets especially aroud New Utrecht and the McDonald ave 39 st areas ( I don’t remember the names of those parts of town ) I married a local girl from sunset park and took her home with me where I later went to work for Plymouth at the Old North Assembly Plant and later worked in the Highland Park facility . I have a few great nephews and nieces who stil live there and I visited in the summer of 19’ and walked around and drove to some of the places I remembered ( which isn’t a lot these days ) I was friends with a fella my age Robert Scarlino ,who was a jalopy guy like myself he worked for a company called Bay Side and he also worked for a Company named Laforgia Coal and Ice and drove a tanker for both . if you look at 26:34 I think that could be one of the Laforgia trucks , he passed away in 2013 so I have no reference point now . I remember visiting only a few months before the demise of the streetcar and taking my niece For an outing because she wanted to ride the streetcars before they were all gone .

[@paulluchter3067]

The last Republican mayor before John Lindsay was before World War One, get off your irrational poorly educated high horse.o

[@Gio_Vanni6143]

It's sad to read that Ben Young's archive was split up and auctioned off after he died.

[@anotherview9604]

The PCCs always bounced when crossing over switches. Nice springy suspension as compared to the old cars.

[@tuffguy428]

Reingold Beer truck @ 13:10

[@JeffreyOrnstein]

I believe this was posted a few years ago by Periscope. I think the other version had music.

[@hilaryrubinstein9022]

Melbourne, Australia (where I live) kept all is trolleys and trolley tracks (Known here as "trams"), and has the longest tram network in the world, with hundreds of miles of them. They are a big tourist site here. The trams are, of course, far more modern than those in this video. To be successful, trams ha=ve to have wider streets, since, obviously, they cannot move around a car or truck which is blocking the road.

[@chunhchan]

27:43 is that Ditmas Avenue Station? Looks like Culver Line. That part is now gone and the F train runs into Church.

[@cats0182]

2:50 A "Twin Coach" bus passing by the camera.

[@SEFR7337]

At 12:30, there is an unusual maintenance vehicle on the trolley tracks. It's built like a square box, getting its power from the overhead electric line. I wonder what that vehicle was doing? Great to see this footage by the way. I can make out sections of Church Avenue and I can see the elevated Gowanus Expressway is there, with the #35 trolley passing below it, terminating near the water.

[@GilmerJohn]

The trolly wire had to be replaced from time to time and specialized equipment (often made from old trolly cars) allowed workers to access the lines. I remember platforms on ordinary trucks being used for this work in Pittsburgh.

[@lawrencelewis8105]

It must be September of 1956- there is a billboard for the new 1957 Chevrolet.

[@grizzlygrizzle]

That was at 3:42. The newest cars I saw were a '56 Oldsmobile near the beginning and a '56 Plymouth at 6:32. The pedestrians were dressed in warm clothes, so it was probably later in the autumn, maybe late October or November. Probably not later than that, or we would have seen some '57s on the road.

[@luislaplume8261]

The older trolleys nearly resembled the same ones in Philadelphia is style and color of that era.

[@TheUnknown-mg8fv]

I saw a couple of them left abandoned in red hook same ones in the video

[@964302]

But again no fumes from gas cars and electric run is good for the environment

[@bobwilliams3502]

One trolley line ended at Prospect Park Was & Barrell Pritchit

[@Tony-1950]

Looks like 1953 for sure, thought I seen a few cars that could have been 1954 or maybe even 1955.

[@grizzlygrizzle]

There were several '56 cars, a couple of Oldsmobiles and a Plymouth. And a billboard at 3:42 for a '57 Chevy.

[@AlphabetSoupABC]

You'd think mass transit would have advanced more in this country in the last 65 years.

[@GilmerJohn]

The destruction of the trolly systems in the 50s and early 60s with the "replacement" only being busses charing space with cars halted most progress in "mass transit" and except for a literal handful of system, most places are stuck mostly what was in place back before the Great Depression.

[@bobwilliams3502]

Bartel Pritchet Square. It pulled into a big turntable & rotated it 360 degrees so it could now head back the other way.

[@savelittlecreekgroup5107]

No it just went around the circle.- there was no turntable.

[@bobwilliams3502]

@@savelittlecreekgroup5107 You’re so right I think I confused it with San Francisco trolley cars. I also meant 180° not 360. That’s what happens when you get old I guess! Thank God you have all your marbles.

[@savelittlecreekgroup5107]

@@bobwilliams3502 Bob, That’s the first time I ever added a reply to youtube, but I used to ride that line to Park Circle - rented horses there to ride through the park. There were stables just off Coney Island Avenue.

[@bobwilliams3502]

@@savelittlecreekgroup5107 Yes I rode horses also add Park Circle next to the skating rink. When we got bored with those horses we used to ride the ferry for a nickel to clove lake stables in Staten Island, those were the good all days.

[@JPaul60]

Today you would be robbed if you boarded one of those cool trolleys in Brooklyn just like in Philly.

[@stevenmetzger3385]

@ 28:10 Under the Overhead Subway lines

[@luislaplume8261]

That was the Culver line which opened in 1919 and carried subway and el trains.

[@stevenmetzger3385]

@ 27:43 Moving & Storage Warehouse & Overhead Subway lines

[@stevenmetzger3385]

@ 27:12 Scapola Fuel Truck

[@anthonygallo3576]

A bit of narration or some soft music would have been nice

[@SkipSpotter]

So much trash along the embankment. Looks worse than current litter dropping. At least the roadways are tidy. Certainly a great lookback to the 1950

[@stevenmetzger3385]

1st. Thanks!

[@gojeda]

It is quite disgusting how New York City has destroyed these infrastructures over the years. How useful they would be today. Now they literally have to start from scratch if they wanted these modes of transportation.

[@tomryan943]

It's funny how they got rid of the trolleys, and now they want everyone to buy electric cars!! They did go back to electric buses, and they are much better than the gas models. Less pollution!

[@Madridme3]

What a depressing place...trash, decrepit buildings..dank....and I thought the 70s was New York at its worst.

[@lawrencewestermeier93]

This was the way things were in America's big cities in the 1950s and it would keep getting worse through the '70s.

[@trainluvr]

@@lawrencewestermeier93 It was so bad, kids were allowed to roam the streets unsupervised, and they could only enjoy whatever music radio stations decided to play! Cops mostly walked around alone, without two way radios!

[@luislaplume8261]

True! And I myself am a New Yorker who grew up in NYC during the Mad Men era! 😊

[@bwayne40004]

Is Brooklyn still this disgustingly dirty and run down? Papers blowing everywhere? Everything rusted out and needing a paint job? No wonder people are dropping like flies up that way right now.....can't stand it.

[@lawrencewestermeier93]

This isn't disgusting, this is simply city life in Brooklyn back in the 1950s. What wonderful place do you live in, buddy?

[@steveevans4093]

Everyone read the newspaper back then. And then obviously threw it in the street.

[@grizzlygrizzle]

That was before Lady Byrd Johnson (LBJ's wife and First Lady) pushed an anti-littering campaign in the mid 60s. There was a famous ad that showed an Indian overlooking a litter ridden area with a tear in his eye. Today, people would probably call that a racist ad or complain about cultural appropriation.

[@Neillan]

​​@@grizzlygrizzleWell it was. That actor was an Italian man in redface and that whole getup was historically nonsensical. Ramming a multi-lane highway through the heart of an old growth forest almost certainly made that light trashes harm pale in comparison. Since when did you (or the government) care about what happened to Indians or their civil rights anyway? The whole point of that ad campaign was to put the blame for pollution on the consumer, rather than the massive plastic and bottling companies making and discarding said waste on a far larger scale. But make it about your own insecurity again, that always helps. -_-

[@grizzlygrizzle]

@@Neillan The ad was designed to make a point about littering, and the anti-littering campaign had a positive effect. There was a lot more trash lying around in cities and in the country back then than there is now. That ad was part of the roots of the popular environmental movement, which was seen as kind of fringe-y at the time. The first Earth Day didn't happen until several years later. And plastic bottles for water and soda didn't become widespread until several years later, so there wasn't a massive plastic-bottle industry around at the time. -- And despite your concerns about the actor being an Italian in redface (the ad was in black-and-white, btw), the ad wasn't disrespectful toward an American Indian, but instead presented him as a kind of environmental conscience for the country. -- Historically, that ad was made close to the time of the civil rights movement, when actual civil rights were a big issue, not the kind of racism-under-every-rock hypersensitivity and self-indulgence we see today. Grasping history requires an imagination and the ability to set aside the trendy biases of one's own time. Your credulity regarding the intellectual fashion-show of our time suggests a "year-zero" mentality of the sort that led to tens of millions of deaths in the mass murders of the French Revolution, the Stalinist purges, and Mao's Cultural Revolution. -- We do not live in some intellectual golden age that would warrant so much credulity toward currently trendy social attitudes and intellectual fashions, especially since the prevailing "critical" theories regarding gender and race are based in postmodernist assumptions about the nature of truth, i.e., that there's no such thing as objective truth, i.e., no such thing as truth. Credulity toward the alleged "truths" about the human condition which are based on anti-truth philosophical foundations is a fool's errand. -- And who TF are you to make presumptions about my attitudes toward and relationships with American Indians?

[@964302]

It wouldn’t work today to slow and the kids would be playing all over those power lines it’s too risky as far as safty

[@sydneypowell1579]

WASTE OF MY TIME

[@pixelkeckleon1171]

K

[@mitchdakelman4470]

@@pixelkeckleon1171 By curiositym Sydeny, why was this a waste of time?