Tram Flânerie: Streetcar Impressions of Nineteenth-Century Madrid

Collective transportation arrived significantly later to Madrid than to many other European cities. Whereas the first omnibuses in Paris and London were introduced in the late 1820s and the first trams in the 1850s, such services did not take off in the Spanish capital until the 1870s. Although a concession for six omnibus lines was granted in 1856, the company went bankrupt before the project was even inaugurated. A few irregular services operated for special events (bull fights, romerías, etc.), but an organized transportation system did not emerge until the introduction of the first tram line in May 1871—the Puerta del Sol-Salamanca line—which was followed by several more lines connecting peripheral neighborhoods to the casco antiguo.¹

From the beginning Madrid residents appreciated the service not only as a convenience but also as a novelty, an interesting way to see both the city and one another. Writers observed that people were riding it "por curiosidad y capricho" (Ossorio y Bernard, Viaje, 62) or for "el placer de un niño de ser paseado" (Fernández y González, 42). The theatre critic Pedro Bofill (d. 1894), one of the great chroniclers of the Madrid tram who was ironically killed run over by one, wrote that "[l]a fiebre de los tram-vías se ha desarrollado hasta el extremo de ser ya una especie de caso patológico. No sería de extrañar que apareciera una enfermedad llamada tramvitis" (2).

Before the tram, many poorer residents who could not afford a hired cab knew only their immediate neighborhoods, the areas they could reach by foot. The introduction of the tram, however, allowed them to discover unfamiliar parts of the city. Suddenly, gushed the celebrated chroniclist Mariano de Cavia (1855–1920), exploration was available to everyone: "El tranvía abierto, con su enseña «Diez céntimos cualquier distancia», ha despertado más apetitos de locumoción que las novelas de Julio Verne. ¡Viajar! ¡Ver tierras! ¡Atravesar la zona tórrida, entre Fornos y el Suizo! ¡Pasar por la zona glacial, entre la Cibeles y el circo de Rivas!" (7). Similarly, Francisco Flores García (1846–1917) marveled at how foreign his native city could seem when viewed from the tram: "entreguéme de lleno al placer de la observación. La creencia (absurda y extravagante) de que viajaba por el extranjero volvió a ser para mí artículo de fe… Hasta me pareció que disfrutaba de otro clima" (7). As these quotations suggest, the tram offered a fresh and defamiliarizing perspective on the urban space.

Journalists and writers quickly recognized the literary potential and unique vantage point of this new social space. Within months of the inauguration of the service, Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) wrote his well-known short story "La novela en el tranvía" (1871), which takes as its protagonist a modern-day Don Quixote who projects his readings onto his fellow passengers in a streetcar. And the years that followed would witness an outpouring of stories, cuadros de costumbres, songs, vaudevilles and caricatures that took the tram as their setting.²

In an 1888 sketch titled "El tranvía abierto" included in the collection Tipos madrileños, Carlos Frontaura distinguishes between two ways of experiencing the tram. When he is "de humor de hacer observaciones" (219), he takes a seat at the back of the vehicle, which allows him to watch the dynamic among the passengers and overhear their conversations. But when he is in the mood to "soñar un poco, aunque despierto" (218), he opts for the front row from which he can see the sites and monuments of the city. Most nineteenth-century texts about the tram adopt the first type of observation, focusing on the interior of the vehicle and describing (often satirically) the passengers' interactions and discomfort. A number of writers, however, used the space in a different way: to observe through the windows or from the platform the urban space and its transformations. In such texts, the narrators engage in a sedentary form of flânerie, taking advantage of...