When Gus Dussin and Mike Polos open their new restaurant, The Spaghetti Factory on SW Pine St. sometime this fall, one major item in the decor will be a completely restored Birney streetcar.
Making the restoration is one of Portland’s most avid collectors, Stan Lackey. Most of the time Lackey is on the lookout for antique automobiles, and finding and restoring and old Portland Traction Company streetcar turns out to be a treat.
Story of the search for such an antique is most amusing. Since regulation streetcars, whether from Portland, Brazil or Australia (There are some here from these places) are 50 feet or longer, Lackey bought an old caboose. (The dining room is 48 feet).
When estimates came in for the work necessary to convert this into a trolley, the figure was triple his budget. Then he got an idea: He telephoned Paul Class of the Oregon Electric Railcar Association [sic: the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society].
Within hours, Class told him he had located the chassis of an old Birney street car in a drainage ditch on Mount Scott.
The Birney, I discovered after talking to Harold H. Rice, assistant to Victor V. Cox, general manager of the Rose City Traction Co. [sic: Rose City Transit Co.], is the old “safety” or one-man car that ran on SW 16th Ave. up Jefferson into Goose Hollow on SW 5th Avenue, on the Errol and Willamette Heights, and other short run areas. It made its debut in the ‘20s and was 27 feet-9 inches long (shorter than todays buses) and carried about 32 passengers. These cars were out of service in 1937, long before the old Portland Traction Co. gave way to Rose City Transit in 1950.
They were light (10 ton) 4-wheel cars, loaded with safety devices. The car couldn’t start until the door closed and the controller had a “dead-man” spring-activated device – which stopped the car the moment the operator removed his hand.
The car, completely restored from top to bottom (Even the windows will be open) will be installed in the Spaghetti Factory dining room visible through the windows from SW 2nd Ave. and Pine Street. It will provide booths for service. Even the wheels, the tracks and the overhead trolley line will be restored. The color scheme? Deep wine and cream.
Note: This Birney car is No. 801, still in the Old Spaghetti Factory’s newer location on the southwest waterfront today, though further “restoration” in 1983 added a fake clerestory roof so that it now barely resembles the original Birney car. Richard Thompson’s rolling stock inventory notes that car 801 – one of only two standard-gauge Birney cars used in Portland – was retired in 1938, so it would seem to have been in that ditch at Mount Scott for quite some time!
<aside> <img src="/icons/warning_gray.svg" alt="/icons/warning_gray.svg" width="40px" />
It’s worth comparing this contemporaneous article with the Old Spaghetti Factory’s official account of how the streetcar was acquired, which seems to give a bigger role to the one of the founders of the restaurant:
In 1968 our founders Guss and Sally Dussin were building the original downtown Portland Old Spaghetti Factory. Sally was out looking for antiques to decorate the new restaurant when she came across an abandoned old trolley car in a ravine. She had an idea! The city said she could have it if she paid to remove it.
She did just that! Sally had the trolley towed out, refurbished and placed in the very first restaurant as a unique place to eat your meal.
It became such a desirable place to be seated that when it came time to expand and build more restaurants, a trolley car was sourced to be a part of the décor at the new locations.
For the first decade, each new restaurant had an actual trolley car from the city it was built in, but as the supply of old trolleys dwindled, we started building our own version of the trolley! Old or new they still sit proudly in the dining rooms of our restaurants! (In 40 of the 42 locations).
</aside>