Here’s a map that’s been a long time coming, and one that I think has been worth the wait. I’ve wanted to make a transit map of historical streetcar routes in my adopted home town of Portland, Oregon for at least five years now, but it’s always seemed like a very daunting task. The success of my historical Spokane streetcar map from earlier this year finally gave me the tools I needed to get this map done, and this map is very definitely a deliberate companion piece to it.

You can view the map in the window below, or click here to view it in a full-screen window.

At its height, the Portland Railway Light & Power Company’s city streetcar network had more than 35 routes, plus a few extra stub lines run by independent companies. Finding a way to clearly map these lines in the dense downtown area always seemed impossible to me, and I’ve made many terrible attempts at it over the years. It wasn’t until I made my Spokane map that I realised that I could simply bundle similar routes together into colour-coded trunk lines, which finally gave me the spark that this Portland map needed to work.

A City of Bridges

In Spokane, I grouped lines by the street they left downtown on, but for Portland there was an even better distinguishing feature: the bridges across the Willamette River. Each bridge had its own unique streetcar loop pattern in downtown Portland – for example, cars across the Broadway Bridge would run counter-clockwise on Broadway, Washington Street, Fifth Street (now Fifth Avenue), and Glisan Street, with the nominal “terminus” being at the intersection of Broadway and Washington.

So I simply grouped routes that used the five bridges of the time (three of which still stand today!) – from north to south being the Broadway, Railroad/Steel, (old) Burnside, (old) Morrison and Hawthorne. Remaining lines were then given other colours to denote if they ran along Washington Street on the west side, or if they were were crosstown or stub lines. The few remaining independent lines round out the forty-one (yes, 41!) lines shown on this map. Only one new streetcar line would be constructed after this date: the 1920 Municipal Terminal line from St. Johns to the city-owned docks on the Willamette. I chose to represent 1915 instead of 1920 because I came across a Pittmon Guide map from that year that included a diagram showing exactly how all the downtown loops worked and which lines used them – an invaluable aid that I’d never seen before, reproduced below.

Note: There’s one error in that Vancouver cars physically couldn’t have gone from Second Street to Glisan Street and then over the Railroad Bridge but must have used Flanders Street like the other Railroad Bridge cars, but the rest seems accurate and consistent with all my other research.

Of Streets and Avenues

Street names used on this map reflect the more chaotic Portland of 1915, rather than today’s orderly quadrant-based address system with streets running east-west and avenues running north-south. Many street names were different, there were only 20 numbers per block, and only streets on the east side had a directional modifier before their name (East Burnside, East Glisan, etc.) and then only if there was an equivalent street on the (older) west side – Belmont and Hawthorne didn’t have such a modifier, for example. In the far south-east portion of the city, a completely different system was in use, giving rise to names like 72nd Street S.E. On the west side, Burnside Street ran only from the Willamette to the intersection of 16th Street; further west was actually a continuation of Washington Street.

A Tale of Two Grids

Because of the denser network on the west side of the Willamette, this map uses two distinctly different grids – one that adheres to the city’s underlying numerical grid on the east side, and an enlarged one for the west side that also takes into account the double-width blocks west of 16th Street. The highlighted downtown area only shows streets that tracks run along or are necessary to make certain streets align properly to each other, so it really only gives a general indication of the street grid. I pondered long and hard over labelling streets here, but it just seemed too busy in the end. Your thoughts on this approach would be welcome!

Other Notes

The map also includes the two PRL&P interurban electric lines running to distant destinations like Troutdale, Gresham, Cazadero and Bull Run; the locations of the system’s carbarns and workshops (TriMet still has shops at Center Street, though they serve buses now); as well as city parks that were known to exist in 1915. Not shown are the extensive Oregon Electric and Southern Pacific interurban electric lines to Corvallis, Salem and Eugene, as they just seemed outside the scope of this PRL&P-centric city lines map.

One line to take note of is the Bridge Transfer line, which literally connects all the bridges on the east side of the river. Most sources I’ve seen have it running from the Broadway Bridge along Larrabee and Holladay to Grand Avenue and then south to its terminus at East Lincoln Street. However, I believe that at this time it actually ran south from Holladay along Union Avenue (today’s MLK, Jr. Blvd.) to East Burnside where it jogged across to Grand Avenue. This is how it’s shown on the little sketch maps that appeared in the Pittmon Guide of the time (see below, note the highlighted “B-T” marker along Union Avenue), and making use of existing track that wasn’t in use by any other line at the time (By 1920, the Vancouver line was rerouted over the Burnside Bridge instead of the Steel Bridge and it ran along Union Avenue north of East Burnside).

For the most part, Portland used letter codes on the headboards of their streetcars, and these are reflected on the route name bullets used on the map: even the strange ones like “L” for Mississippi Street cars, “U” for Williams Avenue, or “WR” and “WW” for Richmond and Woodstock cars: the initial “W” stands for “Waverly”, a neighborhood designation that was gradually dropped. Cars up to Council Crest (the most famous Portland streetcar route) were still known as “PH” or “Portland Heights” in 1915; the “CC” or “Council Crest” designation didn’t come into full effect until after World War 2, though it does seem like the terms were partly interchangeable at the time (see the map above which has both PH and CC markers).

Conclusion

The second in a series of maps showing historical streetcar networks of the Pacific Northwest, and a deeply satisfying one to make. Will there be more maps in this series? Only time will tell. I’d love to do Seattle one day – maybe! As always, your thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome below, and prints are available in the Transit Maps store.