Meet the Portlander piecing together our streetcar history, one article at a time

Many of us can summon a general outline of Portland’s streetcar legacy. We know the city was once filled with tracks and lines that criss-crossed both sides of the Willamette and we have experience seeing old tracks on or under a street we ride on. But for transit buff Cameron Booth, it is a history that deserves to be understood in greater detail. Booth, whose fascination with public transit maps began after a boyhood ride on the London’s “Tube”, is a graphic artist by day who’s working on a project to digitize Portland’s streetcar history. 

Some of you might know Booth as the guy behind Transit Maps, the very popular blog and online store that features nearly 200 vintage and artistic transit maps from all over the world — including the BikePortland collab, “1896 Cyclists Road Map of Portland.” Booth enjoys restoring old transit maps and creating his own. A few months ago, he mentioned to me in passing that he was researching streetcar information via historical articles in The Oregonian and then sharing what he learned on a website. I’ve always been fascinated by how streetcars have shaped our city, so I was instantly intrigued by the project. This morning I finally got to learn more about it.

Portland Streetcar History is a website where Booth is sharing the over 1,000 articles he’s transcribed so far. He’s sharing illustrations of old maps and has compiled information on 35 different streetcar companies and 68 distinct streetcar lines. He began the project in February 2024, armed with nothing more than a Multnomah County Library Card and an insatiable curiosity. The project started because he was already doing the research for this map projects, “And every time I went to work on them,” he told me in an interview this morning, “I have to go the library and borrow like eight different books, or I have to look on the Internet and find four or five different websites to get that information that I’m after. So in the end, I guess I was just like, well, what if I just started compiling all this stuff myself?”

Judging from the changelog on the wiki-style website he’s using to share everything he finds, Booth edits a few articles a day. Browse the list, choose something to click on, and you might find an article from June 19, 1904 that details a new “through line to St. Johns” that would have created a new route, “from the heart of Portland” all the way up the peninsula to St. Johns. Or you might click on a detailed, high-resolution image of a 1932 map of transit lines in the central city. Each item is notated by Booth with updates and insights, creating an intriguing trove of transit information.

What started as a way for Booth to fact-check specific route locations and line information, has grown into a project that tells a wider story. Through all the articles he’s transcribed, Booth says, “You can see the social impact and the way that the streetcar basically, in a lot a lot of ways, defined the way Portland looks now. You know, all the cool neighborhoods are all along the old streetcar lines.” It makes you wonder what those neighborhoods were like in the peak of Portland’s streetcar era, which Booth pins to 1915-1920.

Beyond that, Booth said he’s learned of a brief revival during World War II. “There was shortages of gas and tires and stuff like that, so they actually dug out one of the streetcar lines. They’d buried it in 1940 and then there was a rubber shortage for tires so they basically dug up this old line and started running streetcars on it again.” It was the Bridge Transfer line that ran from the Broadway Bridge to the Hawthorne Bridge on Grand and Union (not Martin Luther King Jr Blvd) on the eastside. “There’s photos in the newspapers of them jack-hammering out the tracks,” Booth said.

The tracks would all be buried eventually as rising maintenance costs and stagnant rider fares buried streetcar companies in debt. Booth says from what he’s gathered in contemporary news articles, it was the onslaught of cars or any conspiracy by Big Auto to buy up companies and bankrupt them. They just weren’t cool anymore. “By the 1930s, they were seen as old-fashioned and out-of-date,” he said. Unloved and unmaintained, the streetcars were replaced by buses which were considered to be much more modern and comfortable.

“And you can literally see the attitude change to streetcars through the newspaper articles,” Booth shared. “At the beginning it’s all, ‘Oh my goodness, another streetcar line! How exciting!’ And by the end, it’s like, ‘Thank goodness that’s gone.’ The public attitude towards them was changing drastically.”

Has Booth come across any mentions of bicycle riders in his research? Yep. He recalled two stories.

In 1890 or so he came across an article about a man who was biking on SW Jefferson near the old Portland Heights cable car line. The man fell into the hole where the cable returned and was seriously injured. “He wanted to sue the cable car company, but they said, ‘Well, you were riding a dangerous and defective bicycle.'” Booth also said around the turn of the 19th century, when American was solidly in its bicycle craze era, streetcar companies lamented that they were losing ridership to bike riders.

Booth’s research is full of fun little nuggets like that. And it’s all available online. Check out his Portland Streetcar History website to learn more. And if you’re looking for an excellent holiday gift, check out his store on Transit Maps.