Perhaps the tram route has an ancient curse
Eerie precendent: As construction begins on the aerial tram, Anton Vetterlein of the Homestead neighborhood notes an earlier transportation venture on the identical route.
In 1889, one Frank Prantl tried to build a cable railroad between Marquam Hill and Southwest Second Avenue along Southwest Gibbs Street. At a half-mile long, Prantl's Portland City Homestead Railway was only a few hundred feet shorter than the tram route. Alas, Prantl couldn't make the steam-powered car negotiate its way along a cable anchored between the tracks. It never went into service. "The failure caused the promoter to go insane," wrote John T Labbe, in "Fares, Please," a history of Portland's street railways published in 1980.
-Fred Leeson
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make paradise, tear up a parking lot
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