A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

When I was 6, I started in a private school across from one of the parks that circle the older part of Copenhagen, and we were living in the suburbs just north of town.
I was to take the streetcar all by myself!
Line 14 was my favorite, it was the line that stopped virtually door to door. Another, line 4, had its terminus one short stop before our house, and the short walk home from there went past a candy store and across a bridge over the railway tracks. Line 4 was peculiar in that it had only one car, no ‘bivogn’ (second car). Anyway, riding in ‘bivognen’ was for wussies; the place to be was in front, only separated from the conductor by an iron bar, with the full view of the street. There was not much traffic: bicycles, some horse carts and automobiles, and the streetcar was sovereign and had always the right of way.

I really loved the streetcars. I had a notebook where I noted down the serial numbers of the cars I rode in to keep track of the times I was riding in the same car. All the streetcar lines were identifiable at a distance, at night, by two colored lights, and I knew them all by heart and would sometimes quizz my mother about them.
Long after the last streetcar ran in Copenhagen in 1972, they kept running in my dreams. They seemed to be symbols of desire and I would just miss one, or I would try to jump off one in speed, or I would be the conductor and just barely avoid hitting another streetcar.

Here is a picture from 1958 downtown Copenhagen, and line 11 #325 is just rolling in to the stop that is marked by the art deco sign.


Some of the early models being shown downtown Copenhagen in 69; the two cars of line 3 were still in use when I was a kid.