105 Years Ago
In 1920, Denver’s transit workers were striking for higher wages. The U.S. had seen steady inflation since the beginning of World War I (in 1917). To compound that problem, Denver had a new mayor who had promised reduced transit fares. In order to meet the mayor’s promise, the Tramway company reduced service and lowered the wages of their workers. By 1920, the employees of the Denver Tramway system found they could no longer live on their wages. They went on strike.
What followed was all too familiar for labor confrontations in that era. The company called in a professional strikebreaker, who arrived with a gang of 150 men to operate the streetcars. The strikers attacked the cars. The strikebreakers fired on the strikers. The strikers responded with stones and bricks. The Mayor of Denver and Governor of Colorado called in the Army. Soldiers protected the strikebreakers and imposed martial law. In the end, the strike was broken, 700 of the strikers lost their jobs, 7 people were killed, and many were injured.
Denver Tramway owned both of the interurban lines that ran between Golden and Denver. The Denver & Intermountain line ran through Lakewood and the Denver & Northwestern line ran through Arvada. Both served Golden from a depot at 13th and Washington.
Our hometown paper, the Colorado Transcript, said surprisingly little about the strike. They inserted one small item, about 10 days after the strike, saying that they thought service would be restored soon. In late September, they were still waiting for mail service to be reinstated on the Denver & Intermountain line.
Finally on October 7th they announced the new schedule. The Intermountain would leave Golden every hour on the hour from 6AM till 8PM, with two additional departures at 10PM and midnight. The Northwestern would leave every hour on the half hour from 6:30AM-8:30PM, plus one departure at 8:30PM and one at 12:30AM.
This means that Golden was accustomed to 34 departures to Denver every day (17 on each line). Most people did not own cars at that time, so I can’t help but wonder how commuters were getting to their jobs in Denver throughout the service outage.
In case you're curious, the W Line currently offers 64 departures (Monday-Thursday) to Denver from the Jeffco government center.
