The Trolley Line & Creve Coeur Park

Many of America's oldest amusement parks originated as "trolley" parks during the 19th century. Trolley and railroad companies built these entertainment parks at the end of their lines in order to promote weekend riders and for a relatively short period of time, Creve Coeur Park in St. Louis County was one of them.  The idea caught on quickly, as people dressed in their Sunday best to enjoy a day at the park.  It was a unique, American innovation and one of the historical reasons that we have amusement parks today!

Over the years, trolley parks like the one at Creve Coeur Park added more and more features to satisfy the public's appetite for newer and more novel forms of entertainment.  And, even though Creve Coeur was short-lived as an entertainment destination, there were other amusement parks that became more popular in the St. Louis area, parks like the Highlands, Chain Of Rocks, and Holiday Hill.

The first streetcars in St. Louis were pulled by horses in the late 1850s.  They were followed by cable cars guided by underground cables in 1881, which needed constant maintenance and lubrication.  In 1889, the first electric-powered streetcar ran along Lindell Boulevard, and in less than a decade the cables were gone and replaced by the more efficient clutter of overhead wires.  By the 1920s, more than 1,600 streetcars rumbled along 485 miles of tracks in and around the city. Streetcar lines ran out to Florissant, Alton, Belleville, and Creve Coeur Park.

My father-in-law likes to talk about the afternoons that he used to ride the Grand Avenue streetcar down to Sportsman’s Park to see the his team, the St. Louis Browns.  He used to work all day on Saturdays delivering newspapers, then on Sundays he’d buy an all-day streetcar pass and ride the trolley everywhere around town.   He remembers going to the Highlands on school trips, and riding out to Creve Coeur Park on the trolley.

Another St. Louisian, responding to a streetcar story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch remembered the trip out to Creve Coeur.

“Streetcars were your passage to freedom, they went everywhere. Just get a transfer and away you go.  My mom took me to Creve Coeur Lake several times on the streetcar.  We lived at Shenandoah & Compton in 1947 and we’d catch the Grand street car and go north to transfer on the line that went out to the lake.  Hot summer days were best because almost no one had air conditioning back then, and the ride out there with the windows open was great; it ran through undeveloped areas with lots of trees, nice and cool,  traveling 40-45 miles an hour.”

The history of Creve Coeur Park is fascinating!  The first rail reached the park in 1881, and another competing line was constructed in 1886.  By the time the streetcar arrived in 1899 there were already several hotels, dance pavilions, and boat houses on the lake.  The upper part of the park was the site of an amusement park called Electric Park.  There was a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, and a dance hall.

After the  1904 World’s Fair ended in St. Louis, a 255-foot observation tower was removed and re-assembled at Creve Coeur Park just north of the trolley’s electric service building, the brick building that is still in use as a picnic pavilion today.  The streetcars had an inner-loop around the service building and an outer-loop around the upper part of the park.  Then, a scenic railway was built for riders to travel from the upper-level of the park down to the lake, using gravity and cables for the ride back up the hill.  Creve Coeur Park was the setting of a Tennessee Williams play set in the 1930s called A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur.  Beginning in 1889, it was also the location for The St. Louis County Fair for more than 30 years!  How ‘bout that!

The downfall of the park began in the 1920s as Prohibition took hold and hard times hit the country during the Great Depression. The Lake area began losing popularity as gamblers and gangsters took over the clubhouses and roadhouses. The Creve Coeur Hotel provided a haven for crime, and the amusement park finally closed in 1934.  The last streetcar from the park returned to the Delmar Loop on July 25, 1950.  The Creve Coeur Hotel building burned down in 1966.

Some of my earliest memories of Creve Coeur Park include seeing the old stilt houses on the lake during the first few years after moving to Maryland Heights.  That section of the lake was called Creve Coeur Beach and at one time it included about 150 permanent residences and vacation homes.  The houses were eventually demolished when the county passed a bond measure in 1969 to purchase the land and expand the park.

Tribute to Thomas Jefferson, Close to Disney

President Roosevelt approved of the idea to create a monument to Thomas Jefferson on the St. Louis riverfront back in 1935 when the voters in St. Louis passed a bond measure to fund the local costs.  The land was cleared, and a design contest was held in 1946-47 but the Korean War held up progress until construction finally began in 1963.  It cost $13 million to build, or adjusted for inflation, $ 90 million today!  


From the picture on the right below, you can see the millions of dollars being spent downtown during the early 1960s on construction projects for the stadium, the interstate, and the Arch.

One plan for redevelopment of the area included a Walt Disney theme park on the banks of the Mississippi River.  It was one of a handful of projects that Disney was considering in the early 1960s as a follow up to  the success of Disneyland in Anaheim, California.  Negotiations and site plans progressed until the project stalled over funding the project as Disney wanted full control over the site as well as construction funds to build it.

Meanwhile, Disney forged partnerships with with corporate backers to develop new theme park ideas at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.  Only months later, the company began buying property options for land in Florida to develop their biggest project yet, Walt Disney World.

Wolves Rebound in Yellowstone

The demise and rebirth of the grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park began in 1926 when the original wolves were completely eliminated.    

Once the wolves were gone the elk began to take over,  the conditions of Yellowstone began to decline rapidly.  The elk multiplied, and the plants and trees were overburdened with over grazing. The woodlands were literally munched into oblivion, and the destruction of the landscape affected the remaining species of animals in the park

With the rapid increase in the number of elk, the condition of the land eroded and plant life deteriorated.. Without wolves, the population of coyotes increased dramatically, which led to a decline in the number of pronghorn antelope. The dwindling vegitation included willow trees, which affected the number of beavers in the park, and without the work of the beavers, an entire ecosystem was altered. 

Finally in  January 1995, after years of debate, fourteen wolves were captured in western Alberta, Canada and relocated to Yellowstone into three packs in the Lamar Valley in the northeast area of the park.  

The chart at right shows the success of the relocation and the expansion of the wolf packs into new areas.  


Today, there are more than 300 grey wolves in and around Yellowstone National Park.

Revisiting Our National Parks

One of my visions of future camping trips includes exploring a few more of the national parks, including once again our very own in Oregon, Crater Lake National Park seen below.

First on my list is Yosemite National Park. It was way back in 1864 that the U.S. Congress ceded land in the Yosemite Valley to California to create a state park. (I think the Tea Party opposed the bill, but it still passed.)  Unofficially, it was the first federal park designated as a  sanctuary to preserve the natural landscape and wildlife, but it was not the first National Park. 

The trivia question this week:  What was the first National Park and when was it created?

Our first national park was created in 1872 and is located in the northern Rocky Mountains within a few miles of the first trickles of three different rivers that make their way down and into the Columbia, the Missouri, and the Colorado rivers.   It is not only the first National Park in the U.S. it’s the world’s first national park.  It has five park entrances, 9 visitor centers, 49 picnic areas, more than 1700 campsites, and 97 trailheads

It is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined and is jolted by more than 2,000 earthquakes each year. 96% of the park is located in Wyoming, 3% is in Montana, and 1% is in Idaho  It has more than 300 geysers, 240 waterfalls, and 10,000 thermal features.  The record high temperature was 98F in 1936 and the record low was 66 below zero in 1933.

The name of the park derives from the native Americans who lived in the area and called its river Mitsiadazi.  French fur trappers in the 1800s translated this to Yellow Rock, and today we call it…..Yellowstone National Park.