Trolley Thursday 5/6/21 - The Key System

In the annals of East Bay history, no other names holds as much legend and iconic imagery as Oakland's Key System. Developed as yet another interurban real estate scheme, the eight lines of the Key System helped to develop much of East Oakland and Berkeley. The Key System maintained its dominant position in East Pay transit after the opening of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and widespread adoption of the automobile. Unfortunately, much like its contemporaries in Los Angeles, El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, the Key System fell victim to the same machinations that brought down dominant private interurbans like it in the form of the infamous National City Lines. On today's Trolley Thursday, let's hop aboard a Bridge Unit and rediscover the rich history of one of America's iconic street railways.

United Under the Borax Empire

Francis Marion Smith as a  younger man,
with borax dreams in his eyes and a noble moustache.
(Legends of America)

Francis Marion Smith (1846-1931) was a very busy man in 1895. By this time, the self-styled "Borax King" founded two railroads in the middle of the California desert to accommodate his lucrative borax and silver mining in Daggett, California, and Rhyolite, Nevada. However, after marrying Mary Rebecca Thompson Wright (1846-1905) in 1881, he moved out of the desert and settled in Oakland to find his fortunes there. His interest in borax soon turned to buildings as Smith purchased real estate all over the developing city, including constructing a palatial mansion at McArthur and Park Blvd and the nation's first reinforced concrete building, the Pacific Coast Borax Company refinery, in Alameda in 1893. As his interest in boosting East Bay land grew, he entered a business partnership with local real estate developer Frank C. Havens (1848-1918) and founded the "Realty Syndicate" in 1895 to better secure the necessary funding for his grand plans.

A line of streetcars of the Oakland, San Leandro and Haywards Electric Railway
 line the Oakes Hotels on May 7, 1892, opening day. This line was purchased by
Francis Marion Smith in 1906.
(Hayward Area History)

The grand Key Route Terminal, as rendered on a circa-1915 postcard.
(Unknown Author)

One of these grand plans involved a mass acquisition of the East Bay's disconnected street railways from 1893 to 1911. Smith, much like his contemporary Henry E. Huntington, knew the value of a good streetcar line as anything developed on land accessed by his tracks sent a share of that development cost directly back to him. His first round of acquisitions involved purchasing the bankrupt California & Nevada Narrow-Gauge Railroad in 1893 to buy their Emeryville Pier, intending to use it as his base of operations for a streetcar-and-ferry system. The other two railways, the Oakland & San Jose and the San Francisco & Piedmont, both came about in 1901 to give the Realty Syndicate more control in the East Bay, which culminated in the 1902 incorporation of the San Francisco, Oakland, & San Jose Railway (SFO&SJ). The first trains departed downtown Berkeley on October 26, 1903, carrying 250 passengers to the "Key Pier". After the line was inaugurated, the general manager decided to capitalize on the Key Pier's name and created the familiar "Key Route" we know today, with Berkeley, Piedmont, and Oakland as the handle loops and the ferry pier as the "teeth". This was later amended into the "Key System" in local vernacular.

The famous "Key System" logo, displaying an oak tree surrounded by two wings and a three-looped key.
Oakland, Berkeley, and Piedmont were the loops, while the key's teeth represented the ferry pier.
(jaycross)

East Bay Electric? More Like... LEAST Bay Electric!

In a 1909 view, a Key System interurban train heads west
underneath the Southern Pacific tracks at the base of the
Key Route Pier in Emeryville.
(Electric Railway Journal, 1909)

The largest rival in opposition of the Key System was Southern Pacific's Oakland-Alameda-Berkeley Lines (OA&B), who didn't take kindly to the new electric upstarts getting in the way of their own development. Prior to the advent of the Key System, Southern Pacific (or SP) had a near-monopoly on movement around the East Bay due to Oakland being their transcontinental railroad hub accessing San Francisco. Their touting of a "more direct route" to their Oakland Mole ferry pier compared to the Key System gave them far more bragging rights, but the Key System had the advantage of being a more suburban-oriented route. Furthermore, the Key System built into areas not accessed by SP, which gave Smith access to suburban development in the East Bay's foothills. After 1941, when the SP officially gave up its interurban holdings, its tracks out to Northbrae became a part of the Key System's "F" Line between Berkeley and Adeline Street.

Key System "Bridge Unit" No. 129 exits the ex-SP Northbrae Tunnel
at Hopkins & Sutter Streets, year unknown. Cars in the background suggest circa 1955.
(Key Rail Pix)

Gotta Make That Side Hustle, Somehow

The Key Route Inn at 22nd Street and Broadway, with the
Grand Avenue tracks going through the building.
(Local Wiki Oakland)

Despite the extensive reach of the Key System, Francis Marion Smith was always looking for the next biggest draw to fill the Realty Syndicate's coffers. Four years after opening the Key System, Smith and Havens set aside some money to create a grand draw for riders in the form of the "Key Route Inn", a giant Old World-style "showplace" hotel on West Grand and Broadway in what's now Oakland's Financial District. Smith's intentions for the hotel, which opened in March 1907, was to show that Oakland was a "refined, civilized, and sophisticated" place, ready to receive new citizens. Interestingly, the hotel was built right over Grand Avenue, with the "B" Line to Lakeshore and Trestle Glen passing right through it and able to disembark passengers right at the hotel lobby. Unfortunately, on September 8, 1930, the wooden hotel suffered major fire damage and, thanks to the Great Depression, was not worth saving. It was eventually torn down between April and May 1932.

An interesting photo showing the Key Route Inn's integrated hotel lobby and train platform, undated.
(John Harder, Key Rail Pix)

An "E" Line Train approaches the Claremont Hotel some time after 1940,
due to the presence of the "E" letter board. The tennis court is to the left.
(Elaine Fischer)

However, despite opening one hotel, Smith wasn't finished just yet. In 1905, he and Havens joined the Claremont Hotel Company and purchased some hillside acreage in Claremont Canyon that used to belong to early settler William B. Thornburgh. After Thornburgh's "castle" burned, the land was sold to the Claremont Hotel Company who intended to build a massive pleasure complex with a ten-story, 279-room hotel at its center. Between 1906 and 1910, the hotel's construction was vacated due to both the recent Great Earthquake of 1906 and the Hotel Company falling into hard times, but this resumed in 1910. The hotel was eventually finished in 1915 and opened its doors as the Claremont Hotel. Its elevation at 400 feet above sea level gave visitors a stunning view of the San Francisco Bay. Smith's contribution to the project was creating the "E" Line, a Key System route that ran directly to the hotel but just stopped short between its two tennis courts. Of Smith's three major non-rail investments, this palatial hotel is the only one to remain in business.

Idora Park, Oakland, in 1910, featuring a "Figure Eight Skyway" from 1903 along with a Merry-Go-Round.
(Unknown Author)

A postcard from 1910 shows a Key System car arriving
outside the gates of Idora Park. Note the mix of motor cars
and horse carts still in use.
(AlamedaInfo.com)

One more non-rail property helmed by Smith and the Realty Syndicate was Idora Park, a 17-acre "trolley park" meant to be a significant seasonal passenger draw to boost the Key System's ridership. Smith, always keen to boost Oakland's morale and community engagement, heavily invested in the land parcel and began initial construction in 1903, but he then later leased this land to Rodney Ingersoll's Ingersoll Pleasure & Amusement Park Company, who also ran another famous trolley park in Pennsylvania, "Kennywood". Legend has it that Ingersoll named his Oakland park after his daughter Idora, despite the park sharing the same name with a park in Youngstown Ohio. Idora Park hosted plenty of interesting events and attractions, such as a balloon-launched glider designed by American inventor John J. Montgomery in 1906, the first round-trip dirigible flight by Thomas Baldwin in 1904, and even serving as a shelter for displaced earthquake victims in 1906. Idora Park was later razed in 1929 due to the Great Depression and increased automobile usage giving patrons a chance to seek entertainment elsewhere, with workers housing taking up the land.

Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

A 1911 map of Oakland showing the many constituent routes of the Key System. A larger view can be found here.
(Public Domain)

In an undated photo during NCL ownership, OTC No. 271
is passed by an "A" Line Bridge Unit in Oakland.
(Bill Volkmer)

Despite the varied investments made by Smith and Havens, their main investment unfortunately suffered as a result. In 1908 and 1912, the Key System changed its name twice as it became the San Francisco Oakland & San Jose Consolidated Railway, and then the San Francisco-Oakland Terminal Railway, respectively. The latter brought with it three new railways acquired to grow out the Key System, including the California Railway, the East Shore & Suburban, and the Oakland Traction Company (OTC) all within 1912. The latter company, OTC, was used as a separate company division to operate the Key System on paper, possibly to get around local and national tax laws. The East Shore and Suburban was a formerly independent branch of the Key System that ran services out to Richmond, San Pablo, and El Cerrito, but required changing trains at Oakland to the OTC at the county line between Contra Costa and Alameda. 

Francis Marion Smith's 53-acre estate, Arbor Villa,
near Lake Merritt, Oakland, where he lived until 1928.
(Legends of America)

With the growth in the system, Smith galvanized himself and his syndicate to build all the way down the East Bay to San Jose, but reality stopped him cold in his tracks. I'll let guest editor Miles Callan and his creative partner, Jay Sethe explain: 

"With Encinal (Oakland) growing, and finally using the Key System more substantially, Borax Smith turned to expansion - if the network could expand south, to the agricultural center of the region in Mariposa (San Jose), Smith thought that it would make a system strong enough to take on the Coast Range. To finance this, Smith managed to raise more than $250 million by selling stock in the Realty Syndicate. He then began to consolidate his huge variety of small companies into a single entity.

This proved to be his undoing. For years, Smith had been carefully managing his huge portfolio of ventures, with each lending money to each other, sharing labor with each other, and even making major purchases for each other - depending on which enterprise had the largest lines of credit and least debt. Smith’s practices were an open secret, but his skills at moving money and hiding debts allowed him to stay afloat until he began to consolidate. As he combined his businesses, all the hidden debt rose to the surface, and Borax Smith was forced out by the Board on May 5, 1913."

Smith continued living in Oakland in his twilight years, giving to various charities and investing in small projects around the city. However, a major stroke in 1928 moved him out of palatial Arbor Villa and into a smaller residence in Adams Point, across Lake Merritt. Arbor Villa was demolished in the wake of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and Smith died at age 85 in 1931.

Smith's Crypt along Millionaire's Row in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland.
(Find a Grave)

Re-Organizing the Biggest Party in the Bay

The Oakland Terminal Railway is the direct descendent
of the Key Terminal Railway, which still operates in
Oakland to this day. The Baldwin DS-4-4-1000, No. 101,
is now preserved at the Niles Canyon Railway.
(Ken Rattenne)

1923 was the first major blow to the Key System as its management, going on in the wake of Francis Marion Smith leaving the company, declared bankruptcy. After a reorganization, the company emerged and was renamed the Key System Transit Company, canonizing its popular nickname. Under its new identity, it continued running its trains and its ferries into San Francisco through the 1920s, in spite of both increased competition from the East Bay Electric (with which it had to give up some lines to eliminate redundant services) and the rise in automobile ownership. However, come the Great Depression, the Key System entered another change in identity as it was split in two. Under the Railway Equipment & Realty Co., Ltd, a holding company created in the wake of the Stock Market crash, the Key System was split into the "Key System" commuter railways (which handled the interurban operations) and the "Key Terminal Railway, Ltd", a freight interchange business. 

The Key System mole goes up in flames the night of 
May 6, 1933, taking the ferry Peralta with it.
(Local Wiki Oakland)

1930 also brought with it a slow end to Key System's ferry business as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was about to bring an end to the once-great institution. The trains were already accommodated for, taking up the lower deck of the bridge, but it seemed God and nature had it out for the Key ferries after 1933. On May 6 of that year, coincidentally today, a fire took hold of the pier end of the old mole, completely destroying the Key and taking with it the ferryboat "Peralta". Thankfully, both the pier and the ferry was reconstructed, as the "Peralta" was later sold to Puget Sound Navigation Company and rebuilt into the streamlined MV "Kalakala" (which sadly has been scrapped as of 2015). The ferry service came to an end in 1939 thanks to the opening of the new San Francisco Transbay Terminal, but the ferries saw extended use taking passengers from Oakland and San Francisco to Treasure Island, home to the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition.

The MV Kalakala in her rebuilt, streamlined form.
She will be missed.
(Peninsula Daily News)

Key Lines and Buildings

A 1941 reorganized map of the Key System following the opening of the San Francisco Bay Bridge.
(Public Domain)

A 1938 newspaper cartoon shows Father Time inaugurating
the first Key System test train across the Bay Bridge.
(FoundSF.org)

By now, you might be a little bit confused as to where the Key System ran, or what its stations looked like. Well, we'll take a little detour and talk about it. Prior to the opening of the Transbay Terminal in 1940, the Key System's lines went by destination rather than by letter. Of the eight lines operated, five went to the Transbay Terminal, those being the "A" (Downtown Oakland), "B" (Lakeshore and Trestle Glen),  "C" (Piedmont via 40th Street), "E" (Claremont Hotel), "F" (South Berkeley/Adeline Street), and "H" (Berkeley via Sacramento Street and Monterey Avenue). The two other lines were the "G" (Westbrae via Key Route Blvd, branching west off the "H" line) and "K" (An "F" line extension up Alcatraz and College Avenues to Telegraph Avenue). A "D" line was also planned, accessing Montclair and interchanging with the Sacramento Northern interurban, but this never happened. Of the small branch lines, the "K" College Avenue line proved indispensable as it provided packed football game day services to the terminal a few blocks from UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium.

The impressive, art-deco Key System Piedmont Station on Piedmont Avenue and 41st Street.
From here, it's 25 minutes to downtown San Francisco.
(rokstar66 on reddit) 

Line Car No. 201 is seen poking out of the "Division 1"
Shop Building at the Bridge Yard, after 1940.
(John Harder, KeyRailPix.org)

The Key System also maintained at least three carhouses all over Oakland, each serving their own district. The Northern Carhouse (and substation) was located in Richmond and served all of the Richmond-area lines, formerly run by the East Shore & Suburban Railway. The Elmhurst Carhouse served east Oakland and was located in the Elmhurst district, while the Western carhouse was located on 51st and Telegraph and served the Temescal district. The Central carhouse was located on the east side of Lake Merritt and primarily served as the streetcar hub. To power the line, a power station was set up at the base of the Key Route Pier and provided the 600V DC used to run all of the trains. Heavy maintenance and construction of new cars was handled at the Key System's Emeryville Shops, which was also home to a massive staging yard, and the Piedmont Shops, which was originally built in 1890 to power the Piedmont Cable Car Company. The latter was later deemed surplus in the 1920s and converted into a Cadillac dealership. A third yard, dubbed the "Bridge Yard" was erected following the opening of the Bay Bridge at its eastern end, on what was formerly an Oakland Army Base site, and also powered the Bridge tracks through its own substation.

A view inside the immense Emeryville Shops in 1945, complete with an adorable antique shop switcher.
(John Harder, KeyRailPix.org)

WAR! What is it Good For? Increased Transit Ridership, Apparently

A 1943-dated advertisement announces the new Richmond Shipyard Railway
providing service to Kaiser Shipyard number 2.
(Unknown Author)

A loaded Richmond Shipyard Railway train crosses East Shore Blvd,
taking tired workers back home from work.
(Unknown Author)

As World War II began in the United States and many cities began to deal with the artificial demand for mass transit, the Key System was one of those called up to help take workers from their houses at the Albany Village project to the local Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond. The route, which traveled 11 miles from 40th and San Pablo in Emeryville, used the recently-abandoned Interurban Electric Railway (IER) Ninth Avenue Line tracks and recycled both rail from the IER as well as wire. The wires were sourced from the Bay Bridge tracks, as the railroads that used the former 1200V overhead (IER and Sacramento Northern) stopped running to San Francisco in 1941. The hasty construction began in 1942 and extra rolling stock was sourced from New York scrapyards housing ex-Interborough Rapid Transit wooden cars from the 1890s. After a year of hasty construction, the Shipyard Railway worked so well that 747 ships were produced in Richmond from 1943 to 1945, unequaled by any other yard. After the war, the Maritime Commission offered the use of the Shipyard Railway to Key System for peacetime, but Key System declined and the railway was dismantled as quickly as it was constructed.

A Shipyard Railway coach is bound for the scrapheap following V-J Day, 1945.
(John Harder, KeyRailPix.org)

A Cloverleaf Jams the Lock

Yeah, you knew this was coming.

E. Jay Quinby, at left, poses with Amelia Earhart as his
company, Western Electric, provided the radio equipment
on her Lockheed Electra, 1937.
(Purdue University Library)

Much like their dirty doings in Los Angeles, National City Lines (NCL) entered the scene in 1946 and purchased a controlling stock share of 64% to gain control over the Key System. Unlike in Los Angeles, however, NCL's cover story was quickly uncovered by E. Jay Quinby of the Western Electric Company, who warned in ominous tones: "This is an urgent warning to each and every one of you that there is a careful, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities–your Electric Railway System." Quinby also went on to expose General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Phillips Petroleum as being behind National City Lines' purchase of many streetcar lines, including the Key System, which ended up getting the three companies (of total, nine) convicted, then acquitted, of "conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies". 

A Key System Bridge Unit bound for Lake Merritt
finds itself crowded by cars in a 1957 view down
Grand Avenue in Oakland.
(Clark Frazier)

However, as the Great American Streetcar Scandal raged on, the Key System soon found itself heavily cut back as the "A" Line was cut back into Downtown Oakland and fare increases became more commonplace into 1947, with Oakland's citizens complaining of severe overcrowding. Things only got worse in 1948 when the local streetcar lines around Oakland were ended on November 28, 1948, in favor of increased bus usage. Prior to the NCL purchase, Key System attempted its own bustitution in 1945 using ACF-Brill trolley coaches, but due to new management these plans were scuttled and the order was instead delivered to Los Angeles Transit Lines. Despite the opposition from the Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro City Councils, and the population at large, NCL went on unimpeded with only the major Transbay lines left in operations. Fares rose from 20 cents to 50 cents between 1946 and 1954 (From $3 to $5 in 2021 dollars), with the extra cost being directed towards dismantling of the rail system, while ridership fell from 22.2 million riders in 1946 to 9.8 million by 1952.

A grubby Bridge Unit No. 158 trundles along the Bay Bridge
inbound to the Transbay Terminal on April 18, 1958, two days
before the complete cessation of streetcars in Oakland.
(Robert Gadsdon)

The last day of the Key System came on April 20th, 1958, when the last services across the Bay Bridge were rendered. After this, the Key System continued for the next year and a half before its buses were sold to the new Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District in 1960. The name vanished soon after, bringing an end to the East Bay's streetcars once and for all. 

Surviving Structures and Lines

The Key System Piedmont station today, formerly housing the food stand "Kronnerburger".
(EponineBunnyKickQueen)

The newly-restored Bridge Yard Building at John Sutter
Shoreline Park, looking absolutely stunning.
(East Bay Regional parks)

Compared to the Southern Pacific's Oakland Alameda & Berkeley Lines, much of the Key System's infrastructure remains part of Oakland's daily life. The Piedmont Shops is now a Whole Foods Market grocery store, with its exterior facade substantially restored, while the Emeryville Shops and the Richmond Northern carhouse are now converted into AC Transit bus yards. The former Bridge Yard is now converted into the John Sutter Shoreline Park, which opened on October 21, 2020, while the shop building itself is now an events venue. Several station buildings, such as the one on Piedmont Avenue, also are still standing but await new tenants. Even Smith and Haven's own Realty Syndicate Building, at 1440 Broadway, still exists today on the National Register of historic Places. As for the infrastructure in daily use, the lower Eastbound deck of the Bay Bridge and the Yerba Buena Tunnels that once carried Key System trains over the San Francisco Bay see continued use by road, with the construction west of Yerba Buena Island remaining untouched. Finally, much of the original Key System lines like the "F" Line along Shattuck Blvd is seen to by buses, with former transbay rail service handled by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) under San Francisco Bay. 

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included the archives of LocalWiki.org, the photo archives of Bay Area Railfan and KeyRailPix.org, the Western Railway Museum of Rio Vista, CA, and FoundSF.org. Special thanks also goes to our guest editor for this month, Miles Callan of Interurban Era, whose Cities Skylines documentary, Presidio Bay, goes into more detail about the early years of the Key System. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Tuesday, we open up the Emeryville Shops and take a peek at the Key System's iconic rolling stock! For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!