Restoring Old Trolley Brings History Alive

The crumbling trolley traveled thousands of miles and more than 100 years to its resting spot outside Garfield High School’s wood shop.

It started its journey about 1895, shuttling Angelenos around the city. The old open-air streetcar--a precursor to the Yellow Car network--was decommissioned about 15 years later and had a short career in the movie business before ending up at Travel Town in Griffith Park, its paint peeling and wood rotting.

The trolley would have stayed there, disintegrating, if not for the zealousness of a lone MTA manager. Instead, it is being rebuilt by the East Los Angeles students, who are laboring over their wood shop tables to bring the original car back to life.

The man to thank is Steven Brye, the MTA’s project manager for the Eastside and a reverent disciple of public transportation--the kind of kid who dreamed in school of creating a mass transit shop where students could work on buses and trains.

Brye will quickly tell you how the trolleys and the later Yellow Cars, which ran through the city until they were ripped out in the 1960s, glued together neighborhoods like East Los Angeles. The more famous Pacific Electric Red Cars transported riders longer distances throughout Los Angeles County.

“It was a time when people could feel close to their transportation,” he said. “These streetcars made of wood were accessible to everyone.”

When Brye heard last year that two of the trolleys in Travel Town had fallen into disrepair, with no money for restoration, he vowed to save them.

The old cars “had the consistency of cookie crumbs. Within five years, all the wooden parts would have fallen on the ground and you couldn’t hope to restore it,” he said.

The open bench cars, the earliest form of trolleys in Los Angeles, ran on lines across the city that were later used by the mostly enclosed, colorful Yellow Cars. Officials know of only one other trolley of the same model left in the area, located at the Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park.

Brye convinced city park officials to send the old streetcars to Garfield and Locke High School in Watts. Since February, students have been refurbishing them from top to bottom. With funding from the MTA and other donations, the wood shop students are building new bodies for the trolleys, while the drafting classes are sketching the dimensions of the cars and auto shop students are rebuilding the engines. After the yearlong project is completed, the trolleys will be returned to Travel Town for display.

At Garfield, only a few blocks from the old streetcar tracks on Whittier Boulevard, students have realized they’re fixing up an old trolley like the ones their grandparents may have ridden.

“I never knew there were trolleys in East L.A.,” said Willie Lopez, 15, whose mother started telling him stories about the streetcar she rode to go to school when she learned of his project. “I just knew there were some in San Francisco. It’s pretty exciting to be working on a part of history.”

When the aging trolley car was brought to the school in February, hauled on a flatbed truck by city firefighters, no one quite knew what to make of it.

“What in the world?” thought Robert Hernandez, the wood shop teacher, surprised to see how run-down the trolley was. “What are we going to do with this?”

But Hernandez said he soon realized the potential of the project sitting outside his classroom. He scrapped his usual curriculum for beginning wood shop students--making jewelry boxes--and instead, put the fourth-period class to work sketching the dimensions of the car and preparing to painstakingly rebuild it.

“It’s part of our shop now,” he said. “We couldn’t be here without it.”

Last June’s graduates, who worked on the car for several months, were so enthusiastic about the project that they still visit regularly and check on its progress.

On a recent morning, about 20 Garfield students climbed aboard the old car to measure the floor and walls, carefully stepping around the sagging floor.

Steven Gallegos, 16, said he had only seen trolleys in “old movies where people have to run to catch one.” Now, he’s become attached to the car, and says the project has given him something to do after school, instead of just hanging out.

This week, the students began cutting patterns of the old pieces out of cheap lumber. Next: shaping the smooth ash wood planks into pieces of the trolley.

Around the turn of the century, the electric streetcars were part of the Los Angeles Railway, an urban transit system from East Los Angeles to the Fairfax district.

Around 1910, the open bench cars were replaced with more up-to-date cars that had enclosed seating. Many of the original trolleys were stripped down and used for maintenance on the tracks or to transport baseball fans on game days. Some ended up as floats in parades, or were sold to private parties and disappeared from public view.

In 1962, Travel Town acquired the two trolleys now being restored by the students and loaned them out to United Artists Pictures for the 1969 movie “Gaily, Gaily.” When they were returned, the streetcars ran on a short track on Travel Town, until that was deemed too expensive in the late 1970s. The trolleys were placed on display and left alone for two decades.

As a project manager on the Eastside, Brye said, he is often accosted by senior citizens at public meetings who want to know why the streetcars were torn out.

He dreams of getting the trolley in working condition so, at least once, he can watch it glide down the tracks again. Perhaps, he thinks, the restored trolley will spark new ideas about transportation in East Los Angeles, where officials are trying to come up with a public transit plan after voters rejected the option of using more county money to build a subway line extension.

“Here we are facing the same questions about transportation people faced years ago,” he said. “What we’re looking at doing today is the finding the modern equivalent of this car.”