Cobblestones

Google tells me the last time I rode the trolley car on 59th Street was March 1936.

Never to doubt Goggle’s veracity, but I did think it was a year or so later when I stood on the corner of Tenth Avenue waiting for the trolley car to turn east so I could safely cross the street.

Several months earlier, a young schoolmate had perished under a trolley car, and my parents were adamant. “Do not cross the street until the trolley has reversed and headed back east.”

I loved the trolley cars even though Judy Garland and Tom Drake weren’t passengers, and I had not yet learned the words to “The Trolley Song.:

Perhaps my delight in riding the tranquil trolley was because it took me east, a far more civilized section of our vast city. Even though I didn’t disembark, I loved passing the oasis of Central Park. I rejoiced sitting by the window absorbing the elegance of the stately Plaza Hotel always guarded by doormen wearing blazing scarlet coats.

The trolley ride did more than provide transportation, it invited dreams for an imaginative child.

Change, of course, came when the trolley cars disappeared and the familiar cobblestones that I counted walking to school were replaced with mundane bleak concrete. I had to look elsewhere to find my rainbow.

The slow pace of the trolley also signified a softer side of New York that seemingly disappeared when far more efficient modes of transportation arrived.

Buses, less gentle, moved faster and never seemed as welcoming. However, even as life grew faster, dreams still dominated a lonely child’s imagination.

Perhaps the frenzy of a crowded bus on a rainy day provoked the imagination and impetus to always remember not only the trolley cars but a neighborhood slowly dying.

Although soon a majestic cultural edifice would absorb the heartbeat of a parish and fragment families, it was still unable to deny the memory of cobblestones on a quiet corner.