Imagine Trolleys on Third Street Promenade

A streetcar would whisk you up 3rd, all the way from the Starbucks at Santa Monica Place to the … Starbucks … at 7th and Montana.

EDIT: I guess this ties in with my post on Steampunk Santa Monica.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the history of “Third Street”, (a.k.a. “The Promenade”); it’s too vast and it’s well been documented to great detail. In short, one could argue that this property was Santa Monica’s original “main street” long before the first “Southern California Railroad” would arrive in Ocean Park in (1899). To be fair, there was a light public transit service along 4th and Main Streets between Pico Boulevard and Hill Street. This “south loop” was for some period known as the “Los Angeles & Santa Monica Electric Railway”. At one point, this line had been served by a horse trolley, then converted to traction motors of some kind. Poor horsies. Oh, damn it – I’ve gotten all bogged down anyway.

Below, I’ve included a section of the map of downtown Santa Monica from late (December) 1910.

In this map, you can see that the “3rd Street Line” starts at Montana and 7th. From there it heads west to 3rd Street. It then runs downhill (south-ish) on 3rd all the way to Broadway, crossing a junction with an “east-west” line on Santa Monica Boulevard. For the last two blocks it turns west to merge with the southbound flow of Los Angeles-Pacific traffic from the line down Ocean Avenue. There is an adjacent building called the “L.A.P. Depot”

I’d like to do a series on subjects like this. I guess this line is part of what was sometimes called the “North Loop”.

Here are some subjects to cover:

• The Santa Monica “South Loop” in Ocean Park.
• The “Nevada Avenue” line to the Old Soldier’s Home (the West L.A. VA property).
• The miniature railway in Venice.
• The short-lived “Eighth Street Line” that ran down Lincoln to Pearl.

As a footnote, here are the original street names for the major west-east thoroughfares:

Wilshire Boulevard was “Nevada Avenue”

Santa Monica Boulevard was “Oregon Avenue”

Broadway was “Utah Avenue”

TL;DR

I’ve sat on this draft for years now. Time to just publish what I’ve got and finish/fix it later.