“The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been.” Written and illustrated by Jake Berman. University of Chicago Press, 2023. Hardcover, 272 pp. $35.00.
At a meeting of the Lackawanna Coalition in New Jersey last fall, I heard a presentation I found fascinating. The presenter was Jake Berman, who came to promote his book, The Lost Subways of North America, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. I immediately felt a certain kinship with Jake. We are both lawyers, we are interested in cities and their transit (and their history), we both take an interdisciplinary approach to our writing, and we both like maps. Jake has an advantage over me there: He creates them. I can only study them. I immediately filed a query about reviewing Jake’s book, and this piece is the result.
Jake doesn’t write only about “lost subways.” He also includes stories about lines that are in service today. Much of his content concerns other urban transit, particularly existing light rail lines and streetcars, past and present. I suppose having the word “subways” in the title, as opposed to something like “Lost Rail Transit” has a better appearance and ring to it, and the apparently narrow title makes sense, even though the scope of the work is much broader than the limitation of the historical roster of “lost subways.”
Jake presents 23 bite-size chapters, each about rail transit in a city, sandwiched between an introduction and a brief conclusion to the work. In each, he describes the decline of rail transit that took place during the last century and traces the history of every system he covers to the present day, whether rail transit made a comeback, hangs in as a minor component of local mobility, or disappeared completely. He covers twenty cities in the United States and the three in Canada that have major local rail transit systems: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Jake writes about most of the U.S. cities with rail transit, but not all of them. He skipped some places like Austin and El Paso with their single lines, Memphis and Oklahoma City with their relatively weak systems, NJ Transit’s three isolated light rail lines, St. Louis, Kansas City and other places. There are stories to tell about those cities, too, and maybe he will tell them someday. He includes chapters about two cities that have no rail transit anymore: Richmond, which was the first city to use electric streetcars, and Rochester, which is the only American city that had a subway and then got rid of it. It ran from 1927 until 1956.
Jake tells the story of some transit successes, although one of the systems he praises is in Pittsburgh’s busway system, a story not primarily about rail in the city today. He also doesn’t pull his punches about failures, like Detroit’s lack of strong transit as part of the legacy of the city’s troubled history, or the ill-fated Cincinnati Subway that was left incomplete in the 1920s. All it would have needed to be ready for service were a few finishing operations, tracks and overhead wire, but it has been that way ever since.
As I read Jake’s case studies, I was impressed by his chapter subtitles. They are spot on. Here are some examples: “The Loop Elevated: Beloved Steel Eyesore” for Chicago (yes, the Loop is now an icon of the city, like San Francisco’s cable cars and the streetcars of New Orleans), “72 Suburbs in Search of a City” for Los Angeles, “An Exceptional Elevated” for Vancouver, and “The Freeway Revolt and the Creation of Metro” for Washington, D.C., a tale of concerted citizen action and its success, despite obstacles placed in the way by some members of Congress. Others were not so easy to take, but those chapters were still on target: “Overpromise, Underdeliver” for Miami, “The City-Suburban Rift and the Most Useless Transit System in the World” for Detroit, “How Not to Run a Railroad” for Philadelphia, and “The Tortured History of the Second Avenue Subway” for New York.
Throughout his studies, Jake takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining what happened to rail transit in nearly two dozen cities. The legal side is always part of the equation, and he shows his “legal credentials” by citing Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926) in the second footnote of the work. That was the case that established the legality of zoning ordinances to regulate land use. Land use is an integral part of the urban fabric today (with possible exceptions like Houston), and land use and transit seem to act like a married couple who have come to dislike each other, and who are waiting eagerly for the divorce that will never come.
Jake exhibits scholarly thoroughness, while keeping his text readable, for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. He cities sources (including cases) as appropriate and manages to stay away from the extreme rigor of law-review scholarship, where footnotes often take up more space on the pages of the journals than text. One particularly positive attribute of his scholarship is its multidisciplinary nature. Of course, his work is about urban history generally and the history of transit in particular. In presenting that history, he looks at land use, legal history, economics, immigration, local cultural history, geography and the built environment, and other disciplines where they are material to his discussions. I also note his emphasis on politics, while I take the liberty of claiming that we both understand that politics rules transit everywhere, something that he shows in his work, and I mention in Railway Age commentaries.
Jake’s volume is a hardcover book in 8.5 x 11-inch format. It could be considered a “coffee table” book, and it is a volume where presentation counts. About half the page space is taken up with Jake’s maps of transit, past and present, in the cities he covers. His maps are beautiful, and they are works of art, all 107 of them, plus the cover art on the dust jacket. These are not the exact historic maps that were issued by the transit provers, but Jake deserves additional credit for formatting his maps with typefaces and graphics that evoke the periods when the lines he depicts were running, or when a plan to build them was originally presented. Jake’s maps compliment his text, and he uses both to tell stories of the birth, former strength, decline, and occasional rebirth of rail transit in North America’s cities.
Jake made an interesting statement about maps in a blog post in 2018: “The newest concept I’ve come up with is using the visual language of subway maps to show how a plot goes forward. It’s a simple and elegant way of how to reduce the plot of a story to its essentials. The first ones I’ve put together were of the Star Wars original trilogy.” It’s an interesting concept and, as a Registered Patent Attorney, I appreciate his imagination. I don’t think I would enjoy riding transit systems whose lines were like those configured in his science fiction maps, though.
Jake studied on both coasts, at UC Berkeley and NYU Law School. He practices his profession when not writing or making maps. In his “about the author” statement, he says: “I’m a New York City-based writer, cartographer and historian. I’m fascinated by how data visualizations—like maps—influence how we perceive the world around us.” His book is available at www.lostsubways.com, and can be ordered through that website. Jake also has his own website, www.53studio.com, where he posts on his blog about cities and transit.
Some of his posts contain material that was deleted from the book as published. Those posts are as interesting as the material that was included. He wrote about Sacramento (beginning with “Sacramento, California started out as a big city and grew into a small town”), Denver (recounting the Great Denver Streetcar Strike of 1919), Kansas City and Tom Pendergast’s Machine in the 1920s (Author’s note: which also gave rise to the legendary Kansas City jazz scene and Harry Truman’s political career), and Portland, Ore. In that “deleted scene” (as he calls it), Jake examined how the Ku Klux Klan almost took over the city. He also mentioned D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a 1915 blockbuster film that praised the Klan and bestowed nationwide popularity upon it (cf. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1926) [invalidating Oregon statute that banned private and religious schools that was enacted when Gov. Walter M. Pierce, a Klan supporter, was in office]).
As I read Jake’s work, I usually had one of two reactions to what he said. The more frequent was something to the effect of “I know about that, and I’m glad he wrote about it the way he did, including all of the background information he included.” Sometimes it was more like “I didn’t know about that part of the story, and the narrative makes more sense to me now that I read his account.” As a personal note, I have ridden every line about which Jake wrote that still runs today, and a few that now live only in our memories. If that means anything, it means that I have visited every city on his chapter list, and other places where his episodes were either deleted from the work as published, or places about which he did not write. I hope that a future edition of the work includes the “deleted scenes” he presented on his blog, and more about the other cities that have at least one rail transit line running today. I know the stories behind some of those lines and those cities, and I look forward to Jake discovering those stories and telling them to us.
Overall, I agree with most of Jake’s analysis, especially as he develops the political and other aspects of urban history as they affected transit and still do. We have an expression in the profession we share that says: “Reasonable people can differ.” Overall, I would say that I differ with Jake on roughly 10% of what he had to say and agree with him the other 90%. I am not convinced that the busway system in Pittsburgh is as good as he claims, especially since some of it was built on rail lines that could have hosted local trains or light rail instead. He also calls out New Orleans for not running a more-modern transit system. Having spent considerable time in the Crescent City, I can’t agree. The culture of New Orleans would reject that sort of transit, as the residents and tourists who ride the streetcars enjoy taking their time and taking in the sights and sounds of life as they go along. They don’t like “fast food” there, either.
About 25 years ago, I visited the historic 1890s-vintage Carrollton Barn, where streetcar legend Elmer Von Dullen and his crew were designing new cars for the city that still retained some of the flavor of the hundred-year-old Perley A. Thomas cars that continue to run on St. Charles Avenue in everyday service. The sight of a brand-new Skoda car from the Czech Republic in the historic barn was jarring, it looked like an interloper from a science-fiction scene that had no business in that beautiful, historic shop. The agency bought controllers and other parts that Skoda manufactured for its cars, while using Von Dullen’s design for the cars that now run on four lines in the city today. I could say something similar about the “modern” cars that now run in historic neighborhoods like downtown Cincinnati and Over-the-Rhine in that city, and Bricktown in Oklahoma City. In my opinion, cars with a “heritage” appearance would have fit better with the built environment for the enjoyment of the locals and tourists who ride them.
All in all, Jake Berman has a lot to say about how urban transit developed through the years, and where it stands in many cities today. It’s far from a “feel good” story, but it had to be told, and Jake has the background and the style to tell it. He also has more to say about transit and urban life on his blog, most recently with a post about Congestion Pricing in Manhattan, which was implemented shortly after this year began.
As I contemplate writing a book of my own, I think about how Jake formatted his work and presented his stores (and argued his cases, so to speak). One place I know I won’t be able to keep up with him concerns his informative and beautiful maps. Between his text and his maps, he tells a story about transit yesterday and today that needs to be told.
David Peter Alan is one of North America’s most experienced transit users and advocates, having ridden every rail transit line in the U.S., and most Canadian systems. He has also ridden the entire Amtrak and VIA Rail network. His advocacy on the national scene focuses on the Rail Users’ Network (RUN), where he has been a Board member since 2005. Locally in New Jersey, he served as Chair of the Lackawanna Coalition for 21 years and remains a member. He is also a member of NJ Transit’s Senior Citizens and Disabled Residents Transportation Advisory Committee (SCDRTAC). When not writing or traveling, he practices law in the fields of Intellectual Property (Patents, Trademarks and Copyright) and business law. Opinions expressed here are his own.
