Moving Places
Episode 1 - Streetcar City
Although Cleveland’s electric street cars no longer rumble and roam up and down their tracks, they still shape day to day life in Cleveland and its inner-ring suburbs. The film opens up with a walk through some ghost relics of Cleveland’s streetcar history, sitting in plain site, but largely unnoticed. These relics are re-visited throughout the film and serve as a portal into a very different Cleveland than what we know today.
Streetcar City begins looking at how fundamental streetcars were to life in the emerging industrial behemoth of Cleveland in the late 1800s. It traces the transition from horse-drawn rail cars to the newly realized potential of electricity. It travels through the 1899 Cleveland Streetcar Strikes - one of the most violent episodes in the city’s history. It recounts the “Traction Wars” as former Streetcar magnate Tom L. Johnson devoted four terms to fighting private Streetcar monopolies to make a Municipal system that works for Cleveland’s working class majority.
The film then looks at the growth of electric rail both as a mechanism to facilitate transport within cities- but also as a way to connect city-to-city through its inter-urban rail system. It looks at how and why Cleveland’s extensive electric rail system eventually succumbed to the automobile, largely disappearing from the city after World War II.
But the Streetcars did leave in their wake qualities of what today are described as “sustainable neighborhoods” - places that are defined by urban density, mixed residential and commercial districts, and walkability. We zero in on Coventry Village- a popular neighborhood in Cleveland Heights - one of the first Streetcar Suburbs. We re-visit the comics of Harvey Pekar as a way to understand how the Streetcar suburb differs from the far-flung automobile suburbs of today. The chance encounters, perambulating conversations, and long-walks that make Pekar’s stories are facilitated by a neighborhood that favors the movement of feet over the solitary confinement of the automobile.
