After the Second World War, in the late 1940’s the trolley car was rapidly disappearing from the American inner city landscape.  The rationing of gasoline and tires that was in place during the war had come to an end. America was now involved in a full blown love affair with the automobile. An alliance of bus building companies, tire manufactures, and fuel providers; formed a strong lobby to persuade local and state governments to scrap their trolley cars and tracks in favor of diesel fuel buses that ran on rubber tires.  With the middle class rapidly moving to the suburbs after the war, municipal road and transportation planners felt trolleys and their tracks would only impede the onslaught of automobile traffic that would be entering and leaving their cities everyday.  By the mid 1950’s the trolley cars that once were the main stay of most urban city surface transportation had almost disappeared completely.

The San Francisco MUNI F Line PCC trolley cars are a beautiful anachronism today that serves the city from Market Street in the Castro to Fisherman’s Wharf.  These cars manufactured from the mid 1930’s to the early 1950’s are truly “museums in motion” that grace the streets of San Francisco.

Leonard Greenwald has been photographing these vehicles since 2006 and has recently completed a photographic portfolio of these majestic PCC cars at night along their route.  His fascination with urban rapid transit comes from his upbringing in New York City in the 1950’s and 60’s.  Each image is captured with a medium format camera on color slide film.  The image is then scanned into a high resolution tif file and post processed. The final image is then printed with an inkjet printer.