What happened: Electric streetcar service between Minneapolis and St. Paul began.
When: Dec. 9, 1890.
A horse apiece: There had been streetcars before this one, of course. The first ones were horse-drawn, slow, stinky and messy.
The city of Minneapolis also had experimented with using cable-drawn streetcars to replace the horses. Cable cars were seen as less invasive because they didn't require unsightly overhead lines. But to install cable-drawn streetcars, it was necessary to dig up the street for the cables, then find a way to power them.
In 1889, the City Council ordered the Minneapolis Street Railway to build an electric line.
Electric avenue: According to "Twin Cities by Trolley," a history of the streetcar era by John Diers and Aaron Isaacs, the first electric streetcar was so popular that the city vowed to forgo horses and cables and go electric. A little more than a year later, the first interurban electric line, down University Avenue, opened.
As the book described the line's usage after World War II: "On University Avenue at peak hours, there were more than 60 cars in service on the St. Paul-Minneapolis line. Stand anywhere along University Avenue and there was a steady parade of streetcars just a block or two apart, and most of them were standing room only. No one ever bothered to look at a schedule because waiting for the streetcar was like waiting for an elevator."
In 1892, the horses were retired in Minneapolis and St. Paul and replaced with electric streetcars.
