Streetcar

HE KNEW there was a streetcar named Desire, but not here in this city. There was one here, he thought, named Paradise. But mostly he knew one named Nineteen, No. 19, a time ago, on Harford Road.He was up in years, and there was time to remember. He'd lived on Harford Road when he was so small as not to remember anything before it. Always the 19 screeched by at day, rumbling at night.It was the streetcar that had taken him into the world. He'd seen it when he was small and knew it went worlds away.

J. Edward Naylor Sr., a retired Maryland Transit Administration employee who once had top seniority among his peers as a streetcar and bus operator, died of respiratory failure Nov. 29 at the Village of Harbor Point Assisted Living in Salisbury. The former Medfield-area resident was 95. Born in Upperco and raised in White Hall in Northern Baltimore County, he was the son of farmers Clearfield and Elsie Naylor. Family members said he attended Hereford High School and worked on neighboring farms as a young man. Mr. Naylor moved to Baltimore and took a job at the Greenspring Dairy in 1937.

Could an old streetcar that began its life as a open-air summertime trolley and then became a Ritchie Highway diner ride rails girdling the Inner Harbor basin?Step aboard and take a seat, says a coalition of local transportation museum heads, foundation officials and business executives.The group proposes restoring broken-down streetcar bodies with new operating motors and trucks to run on a roughly 1.5-mile system from Little Italy to some as yet unfixed point along the base of Federal Hill, with a leg to Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the Convention Center.

Francis Xavier "Boots" Hannon Sr., who fought in Normandy, France, during World War II and drove a streetcar for many years, died of pneumonia at St. Agnes Hospital on Wednesday. The Catonsville resident was 91. Mr. Hannon, who grew up with his 12 siblings in Irvington, served in the Army's 8th Infantry Division, 8th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop and saw battle in Normandy, Central Europe and the Rhineland. After returning from the war, Mr. Hannon drove a streetcar along the No. 8 line between Baltimore and Catonsville.

Barring some unforeseen difficulty, streetcars will begin their downtown comeback this week, when the Mass Transit Administration turns on the electricity along a 1.5-mile stretch of Howard Street. Trains will then be tested seven days a week between Dolphin and Camden Streets in preparation for light-rail service in the spring. It is a welcome return after a 28-year absence.These are exciting times. A popular technology that was forsaken for allegedly being outmoded is reborn. Just think about it: in 1923, Baltimore had an extensive streetcar network that enabled people to travel to areas that even today's bus routes cannot duplicate.

"So many people have condemned the play for its sordid theme," Vivien Leigh said in a 1950s interview about Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," the vehicle for one of her most indelible achievements as an actress. "To me it is an infinitely moving plea for tolerance for all weak, frail creatures, blown about like leaves before the wind of circumstance." That plea seemed more affecting than ever as the Sydney Theatre Company's production of "Streetcar" unfolded Saturday night at the Kennedy Center, with Cate Blanchett inhabiting the central role of Blanche DuBois.

Fifty years ago today, Tennessee Williams' landmark drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire," opened on Broadway. The account of the conflict between Blanche DuBois, a faded Southern belle, and her abusive brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, won every major award, including the Pulitzer Prize.Elia Kazan directed a cast headed by Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Jessica Tandy, whose performance as Blanche made her a star. In his memoirs, Williams wrote: "It was instantly apparent to me that Jessica was Blanche."

WITH ALL the talk about the return of "light rail" (or streetcars), Glimpses returns to the thrilling days of yesteryear and three of the most unusual cars that ever rode the rails in the Monumental City.* The post office car.This was a streetcar built as a post office. It even had its own postmark: "Railway Post Office." It carried the mail until 1929.Norman Yingling was a postal clerk aboard the Towson-Catonsville line. "We had a canceling machine aboard," he said. "We'd pick up mail at the mail boxes along the route.

It can be tough to separate Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Streetcar Named Desire" from the indelible 1951 movie version and the countless Marlon Brando parodies ("Ste-lllaahhh!!!").So any theater that climbs aboard "Streetcar" has to shed lots of baggage before zeroing in on the text. Olney Theatre Center's current production accomplishes that, and in the process illuminates several aspects of this modern masterpiece.The word "illuminates" is deliberately chosen since light -- or more precisely, the attempt to evade light -- is a defining element of protagonist Blanche DuBois.

Jean M. Citro, the first woman president of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, a motorman and longtime Girl Scout and parochial school volunteer, died Tuesday of cancer at Union Memorial Hospital. The lifelong Overlea resident was 60. Mrs. Citro was a familiar figure to those who attended events or took weekend rides on the streetcars at the Falls Road museum. Mrs. Citro was a trained motorman who dressed in an authentic midnight-blue Baltimore Transit Co. uniform and hat. She operated cars or acted as conductor making her way through the humming and swaying cars collecting fares from passengers and answering questions.

Paul W. Wirtz, former deputy director of facilities engineering at Aberdeen Proving Ground and longtime comptroller and trustee of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, died Nov. 4 from multiple organ failure at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The former Roland Park resident was 91. "Paul was a very erudite guy and very learned. He was a world traveler until he became ill," said Andrew S. Blumberg, a member for many years of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, where he is director of public relations.

All world-class cities have extensive mass transportation systems, but with the exception of Toronto - which has a robust streetcar program to support its massive subway network - virtually every city in North America has abandoned streetcar systems ("A streetcar named Charles?" Oct. 3). Only now are cities like Washington beginning to bring streetcars back as a way to get people from neighborhoods to their subway spurs. Strong mass transportation is critical to strong quality of life, and in a city with high levels of middle- and low-income residents, mass transportation is all the more important.

I've lived in Baltimore most of my life and own a house in the city, but I travel for work, and when I go to Portland I stay at a hotel along the streetcar line, in Seattle along the streetcar line, in San Francisco along one of their streetcar lines, and in New Orleans at a hotel with the streetcar out front. When people who don't know Baltimore come to visit, I tell them to find a place along the light rail line, usually in the county. Begin to see a theme here? Why, because you always know where it is going.

Most who ride the St. Charles Avenue streetcar through New Orleans' Garden District are immediately smitten, not only by the city's charm but also by the convenience and nostalgia of the historic trolley. Many other cities, Baltimore included, have tried to offer light rail as a more modern take on that classic form of street-level transportation. So it's not surprising that many folks who live in Charles Village and other points along Charles Street are taken by the notion of a streetcar running through their neighborhood, too. Eighty years ago, Baltimore was a city that largely ran on streetcars, with more than 400 miles of track crisscrossing the city, including portions of Charles and St. Paul streets in Charles Village.

Plans to get mass transit to the communities north of Pennsylvania Station are proceeding on parallel tracks. A one-year-old, grass-roots campaign to establish streetcar service along the Charles Street corridor and south to the Inner Harbor is still at the door-knocking, leaflet-passing stage. Meanwhile, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is driving the bus - figuratively - to extend the Charm City Circulator's Purple Line from the train station to 33rd Street. She made the proposal part of her State of the City address in February and reiterated her support last week at a Charles Village community meeting.

After the frost lowers the mosquito population, a dedicated group of park builders will be clearing a path through the middle of Catonsville. They are reclaiming the old right of way of the Catonsville Short Line Railroad, a route that has been overtaken by weeds and trees since the last train left for good in the spring of 1972. The summer's storms, including the June 29 derecho, felled tree limbs along what had been a tidy gravel walking path, which is now being expanded through several neighborhoods within greater Catonsville.

For the first passengers on the Howard Street section of the light-rail line, it was deja vu.Years ago, these veteran Mass Transit Administration employees, most in their 50s and 60s, operated the city's fleet of streetcars and trackless trolleys. Today, they are training as light-rail motormen.They clearly enjoy their new jobs. When their big white streetcar coasted through the longtime retail district yesterday, awed pedestrians waved their hands. The streetcar's operator rang its bell in response.

Dave Lathrop was keen on Hank Jaeger's three sets of trucks -- swiveling wheel frames that would perfectly fit both the Stone & Webster and Birney streetcars under restoration at the Historic Railroad Shops in Savannah, Ga. Jaeger was taken by Lathrop's wheels, axles and motors, extra parts that would help complete several streetcars and a crane at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on Falls Road. Theirs was a simple, two-way swap, not nearly as convoluted as some exchanges among antique streetcar enthusiasts that can involve as many as five parties.

The other evening, I sat at Doris Poling's dining room table and we discussed Overlea. A lifelong resident of the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood, she asked what angle I would take in writing about it. After all, it is a quiet, livable residential community crossed by Belair Road and straddling Baltimore City and Baltimore County. Not much happens here, except for the current spring show of lilacs, fresh grass, irises, azaleas and buzzing bees. The place, with its church steeples and old-fashioned walk-to shopping strip, looks like a community out of a holiday train garden.

Harry Judd Rose, a retired bus driver with the Maryland Transit Administration and a World War II veteran, died Sunday at Gilchrist Hospice Care from complications of a fall. He was 94, and died four days after his daughter, Diane Beverly Rose, 62, who also was in the Towson hospice and died from complications of Down syndrome. Father and daughter were across the hall from each other — she in room 12 and he in room 14. Miss Rose, who was born with Down syndrome, lived with her father and her mother, Dorothy Rose, at their Rosedale home until five years ago, when she moved to Gallagher Services in Timonium.