On September 23rd residents of Fulton organized a neighborhood walk with sector officers and the Command Staff. During the walk they discussed issues related to the Powhatan Park; lighting, loitering, graffiti and trash.

During this reporting period Sector 111 officers answered 1740 radio calls, compiled 176 reports and investigated 13 vehicle accidents. They also made 139 misdemeanor arrests, 24 felony arrests, executed 66 warrants, issued 73 traffic summons, conducted 97 field interviews and seized 4 guns.

The Richmond Parcel Mapper is a map of the city of Richmond that “permits querying and display of real estate Parcels”. It also makes it easy to find out the Richmond/Henrico border.

Changes at one of our sister sites had disabled the neighborhood crime map for a few days, but everything is back up and running.

I picked up Carlton McKenney’s Rails in Richmond (Interurban Press, 1986) a while back. Having always been fascinated that there used to be trolley lines all over the city, I couldn’t pass up this history of Richmond’s horse-drawn and electric trolleys.

The book goes into great detail explaining the beginning of Richmond’s trolleys and the various changes over the 62 year life-span of this unique part of the city’s past. There are contemporary newspaper articles (Father of the Trolley [Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dec.29, 1935] and You’ve Missed the Last Trolley [Richmond Times-Dispatch, Nov.27, 1949]) that give the story if you want a shorter version than the book provides.

Rails in Richmond has some wonderful pictures and maps. With the exception of photos set along Broad Street and Main Street, though, there aren’t any pictures from the neighborhoods in a currently-identifiable setting. This is surprising given how many photos of the trolley cars themselves have Fulton, Church Hill or Chimborazo on the marquee.

The maps are fascinating in their own right. The “Spring Street Viaduct” may be pictured above, identified at another trolley site as being on “the Fulton trestle”.

Having both lived in New Orleans and recently visited San Francisco, I’ve known working trolley lines being used by people on a daily basis. The experience is definitely different than riding the bus… I can’t imagine how the trolley lines would have held up over the city’s more trying years, but I so wish that Richmond had been able to to preserve some of this.