Hooves to gridlock: mass transit in Bay View

If they don’t like my service, they don’t have to use it,” retorted Bay View omnibus driver Arthur Aldrich in response to complaints that he often left passengers stranded downtown when he left for Bay View earlier than the scheduled return. But since Aldrich Omnibus Lines was the only bus service in Bay View in the early 1870s, residents without family carriages or sleighs had no choice but to walk or put up with the unreliable service.

Drawn by horses, the omnibus resembled a small railroad car on wagon wheels. The exterior was elaborately painted, featuring gold and silver leaf lettering and polished brass fittings. The old omnibus resembled the present-day Milwaukee Trolley that serves the downtown area in the summertime. 

From 1873 to 1875, Aldrich’s omnibus offered three daily round trips between Bay View and downtown Milwaukee. Joseph M. Canfield, in his book, TM, The Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, reports that Aldrich ran a steam-heated omnibus called the J.M. Alcott. It featured “a tubular boiler under the driver’s seat [which] contained steam under 100 pounds of pressure and fed a coil of pipes running the length of the bus under a carpeting of hay.”

Aldrich’s competition came in the form of William Trumbull, a Bay View mill worker. Trumbull’s omnibuses offered five “rigidly adhered to” daily trips to the city. However, The Cream City Courier reported Oct. 3, 1874 that Aldrich was cutting his fares in an attempt to destroy his competition. “The ‘old line’ need not endeavor to run out this opposition line, for the people have resolved that such a course shall not be tolerated. Honesty and fair dealing is bound to win the people and rule the New Line,” claimed the Courier.

In 1874, a new form of transportation, the horsecar, was offered to Milwaukee-area commuters. The horsecar traveled on a network of steel rails laid in the street. The ride was smoother than the omnibus, and it carried more passengers. Since it ran on rails, it did not get bogged down in the mud as the omnibus frequently did. By 1883, the Cream City Railroad Company had extended its horsecar tracks as far south as Kinnickinnic and Russell avenues. To serve the rolling mill workers, the horsecar was extended in 1887 along Russell Avenue to the lake. A turntable was installed at Superior Street allowing the horsecar to turn around. According to Bernhard Korn’s book, The Story of Bay View, Father Fagan of Immaculate Conception Parish had expressed opposition to the lake extension, fearing the horsecars would scare the children who attended the parish school.

In the early 1890s, the electric streetcar replaced the horsecar as the most popular means of transportation in Milwaukee. The electric streetcar appeared in Bay View in 1891, when the Cream City Railway Company converted their horsecar route. Like the horsecar, the electric streetcar ran on steel rails laid in the middle of the street, but rather than being run by horsepower, the electric streetcar was tethered to an overhead electric cable and powered by electric motors. Similar to the horsecar in appearance and size, the electric streetcar was fast and quiet, but unlike the horsecars, odorless.

For over four decades, the electric streetcar was the main means of public transportation in Milwaukee, but in the 1930s the trackless trolley replaced the electric streetcar in popularity. The trackless trolley greatly resembled the present-day diesel-engine buses. Russell E. Schultz’s book, The Trackless Trolley Years, states that on Nov. 8, 1936, the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company debuted the trackless trolley on E. North Avenue. According to an old advertisement included in Schultz’s book, the “trackless trolley cars have pneumatic rubber tires and are electrically operated from double trolley wires suspended over the driving lane. Flexible trolley poles permit the cars to operate 12 feet to each side of the wire. They receive and discharge passengers at the curb…”

The days of the trackless trolley were numbered, however, when the modern diesel-engine bus arrived in Milwaukee in 1950. The trackless trolley had been especially short-lived in Bay View, with the Kinnickinnic Route #15 serving the area for only nine years, from 1953 to 1962. By 1965, all the Milwaukee electric streetcar routes had been converted to the diesel-engine bus. Today, Bay View is served entirely by the diesel-engine bus. But if the Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee commuter railroad is ever extended, local rail transportation could once again return to Bay View.

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