The St. Paul Athletic Club and surrounding buildings. View of the intersection of Fourth Street East and Cedar Avenue, St. Paul. The St. Paul Athletic Club is at center left.
Looking north on France Avenue at Forty-Sixth Street as the last streetcar to run on France between Forty-Forth Street and Fifty-Forth Street passes the work crew that is about to tear up the track, August 10, 1952.
Minneapolis farewell to streetcars. TCRT Chairman, Fred A. Ossanna, smashes the window of an electric streetcar following the implementation of motor buses in Minneapolis, 1954.
Horse car and cable car systems in the Twin Cities spurred urban growth and gave residents more mobility. The coming of the electric streetcar in 1889 had an even greater impact. With cars that could travel faster and farther, the system grew to become one of the nation's finest public transportation networks before the dominance of automobiles and buses in the 1950s.
With the rapid growth of the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis in the mid-nineteenth century, the need for a reliable form of public transportation became apparent. Horse-drawn streetcars provided the answer and sparked the growth of what would become one of the most extensive streetcar systems in the country.