Longtime resident loved the old cars

By James Steinberg
STAFF WRITER

August 14, 2000

Lorraine Halac remembers the No. 7 streetcar that ran along University Avenue. A ride cost a nickel when she was a girl, and Halac and her sister, Allene, used to take it to the San Diego Zoo almost every weekend.

That was in the 1930s, and the streetcar was also her passport to downtown San Diego. "I rode the streetcar a lot," she recalled. "Not everyone had a car in those days. I remember going to Lane Field (the bay-front home of the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League) and to Balboa Stadium to watch the midget-auto races with my father."

The streetcars, she said, were always full of riders, but she could almost always count on getting a seat where she boarded, at 42nd Street and University.

"They were very airy. They had a lot of windows," she said. "I used to get sick on a bus, but I never got sick on a streetcar."

Halac, who grew up in North Park and still lives in the neighborhood, commuted to work by streetcar when she got her first job.

"I worked at the North Park Theater, at 29th and University, from 1944 to 1947. I was a cashier and an usherette," she said. "In order to catch the streetcar, you had to stand out in the street, and they stopped for you."

University carried fewer automobiles then, and the electric power for the streetcars was carried overhead, on wires suspended above the street.

The news that the streetcars were going and the buses were coming wasn't greeted with much enthusiasm, Halac said. "There's a certain amount of nostalgia connected with streetcars. People did not want the bus line. (My sister) was very unhappy about it."

As for Halac's first ride on the new No. 7 bus: "I got motion sickness," she said.

Motion sickness is no longer a problem, Halac says, but she still doesn't like to take the bus. "I drive my car whenever I can. I find the bus an unfriendly way to go. But I find that true of a lot of things today."

What does Halac think of the proposal to bring the streetcars back to University Avenue?

"I'm sure it will be more expensive, with electrical rates going out of sight," she said.

And she can't imagine waiting in the middle of the street to board the streetcar, as she did more than 50 years ago. "There are so many more cars today," she said.