The day the Pelham trolley died…
On July 31, 1937, eighty four years ago today, the trolley that ran from Pelham Manor through downtown Pelham made its final trip. Based on the crowds pictured on that day, you’d think many were already regretting the decision.
Another irony is the side-by-side photo of the trolley with the bus that most certainly put it out of business.
At the Examiner, one favorite photo is of the storefront office of the Pelham Sun, the newspaper that had its longest run in this town. The last driver of the trolley, James Bailey, posed in front of the office.
There’s a second newspaper connection to the H-Line Trolley, one that made Pelham a bit famous.
Fontaine Fox created one of the most popular comic strips in the country in the first half of the 20th century, ‘Toonerville Folks.” It featured a trolley. Fox said this to the Saturday Evening Post in February 1928 about how he dreamt up the strip:
“After years of gestation, the idea for the Toonerville Trolley was born one day up in Westchester County when my wife and I had left New York City to visit Charlie Voight, the cartoonist, in the Pelhams. At the station, we saw a rattletrap of a streetcar, which had as its crew and skipper a wistful old codger with an Airedale beard. He showed as much concern in the performance of his job as you might expect from Captain Hartley when docking the Leviathan.”
The comic strip chronicling the adventures of the Toonerville Trolley was published in hundreds of papers from 1908 to 1955 and spawned toys, backyard rides, amusements and movies (one is pictured).
In the slideshow, a picture of Fox’s ticket for the trolley’s last ride shows he attended the end-of-the-line festivities.
The final trip of Pelham’s trolley “took hours to travel only a couple of miles due to the crowds and the antics of local residents dressed as various characters from the ‘Toonerville Folks’ comic strip,” according to the Westchester Archives.
In general, the pictures give a feel for the many shops that populated the bustling Pelham downtown on a street paved with bricks/cobblestones.
(The above pictures of the trolley’s last run were first posted in the Facebook group Remembering North Pelham, NY by Joe Gallello, after he found the originals for sale on eBay.)
Jeff Alterman • Dec 19, 2021 at 1:59 pm
I’m not an old timer, but I knew of the trolley line in Pelham that was the inspiration for the “Toonerville Trolley”. For many years, the #50 Westchester County bus served much the same route. That route is defunct now. However I think a Bee-Line bus still serves a portion of the old trolley route.
I know one old man (he’s now 91 years old0 who remembers the trolleys of Mt. Vernon, NY) who might have known of the old trolley line in Pelham.