by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Construction crews working on Hendricks Avenue’s future recently dug up a little-known piece of San Marco’s past when they uncovered a network of trolley tracks.
It’s fairly well-known that the Springfield and Riverside neighborhoods got their start as streetcar suburbs. But memories of the trolley’s decade-long run on the Southbank had been buried for about 60 years.
The discovery of thousands of railroad ties 10 feet below Hendricks even came as a surprise to the City’s Public Works Department and the revelation wasn’t entirely a pleasant one. Digging the ties out of the ground added significantly to the City’s workload in its overhaul of the four-lane corridor connecting downtown and San Marco.
The unexpected work means the project will likely push past its scheduled October 2006 completion date and cost more than its $7 million budget.
But the discovery does offer a glimpse of life on the Southbank at the beginning of its boom years leading up to the Great Depression, according to Jacksonville historians. Then, commuters cruised down Hendricks on rails from as far away as San Jose to their jobs by the river. It’s enough to make today’s Hendricks drivers, sitting in stop-and-start traffic squeezed to two lanes by construction, wax nostalgic.
It was the popularity of the automobile that led to the trolley’s early exit from San Marco, said Joel McEachin, a senior planner with the City and member of the Jacksonville Historic Preservation Commission.
Trolleys had been running on the Northbank for more than 30 years before their bells were first heard clanging in San Marco in 1924. By the end of 1936, the trolleys disappeared from downtown streets. The streetcars and their accompanying tangle of tracks and electric wires were replaced by cars and buses.
Despite its limited run, the trolley’s arrival was cause for celebration in San Marco, then known as South Jacksonville. It meant that the Southbank was catching up to the more well established neighborhoods across the river, said McEachin.
South Jacksonville welcomed its first trolley on May 15, 1924 with a parade down Hendricks. The system was built for $100,000 and featured a single car known as a “four-wheel Birney” and built in St. Louis. The cars were popular throughout the ‘20s. More than 6,000 of them were delivered across the country. A year later, the South Jacksonville City Council voted to add two more cars, said McEachin.
When the South Jacksonville line first opened, the streetcars shared the road with the occasional horse-drawn wagon, but it didn’t take long for the automobile to take over the streets.
San Marco never qualified as a true trolley neighborhood like Springfield, said McEachin. The evidence of San Marco’s growing infatuation with the automobile is built alongside the neighborhood’s historic houses. Garages and driveways came standard-issue during the streetcar era. That wasn’t the case in Springfield where garages had to be added later, often stashed away in back alleys.
“When Riverside and Springfield were platted, the automobile wasn’t even part of the conversation,” said McEachin. “If you look at how later neighborhoods were developed like in Avondale, you start to see garages as part
of the house.”
Those garages and driveways were visible signs of the beginning of the end of the Southbank’s streetcar era. The automobile became the conveyance of choice not just in San Marco but for the commute downtown.
But, 60 years later, as San Marco’s streets swelled to their limits with cars, City leaders turned again to the trolley as a possible solution to the congested corridors connecting downtown and the Southbank.
The trolley this time was gasoline-powered. The Jacksonville Transportation Authority extended in February 2003 its downtown trolley service to San Marco Square, a popular lunch spot for downtown workers. The free lunch time rides were designed to ease traffic and parking problems.
The trolley’s second run on the Southbank was again short-lived. JTA canceled the service about a year later, citing a lack of riders.