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.