Charlotte "New Look" GM Bus #1074
(ca. 1972)
The Charlotte “New Look” GM Buses served the city’s public transit needs for more than thirty years.
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The growth and expansion of Charlotte as a major industrial, commercial, and banking center in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was intimately tied to the installation and development of its public transit system. Dating back to 1887 with the start of its mule-drawn (and later, horse-drawn) streetcar service, trolleys and buses provided the essential service of transporting Charlotteans between their homes and places of employment. The Charlotte “New Look” General Motors Bus No. 1074, purchased and put into service by City Coach Lines, Inc. in 1972, represent the preferred mode of public transportation on city streets from 1959 until 1992.
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The Charlotte Street Railway Company first laid track on Trade Street in late 1886. The city’s first three streetcars began operating in January 1887. Charlotte real estate developer Edward Dilworth Latta (1851-1925) formed the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company (known as the Four Cs) in 1890 to facilitate the development of Dilworth, the city’s first streetcar suburb. To serve that community (and earn additional profits), the Four Cs purchased the old horse-drawn cars and contracted with the Edison Electric Company in 1891 to install new electric trolley lines. In 1910, when James B. Duke’s Southern Power Company (later, Duke Power Company) launched its Piedmont Traction Company as a competitive electric trolley service, the Four Cs decided to sell its trolley line to Duke.
In 1934, Southern Power supplemented its trolley system with the newest public transit technology, motor buses. Increasingly seen as old fashioned and noisy, streetcars also required the costly disadvantage of laying new track to expand travel routes, a much higher expense than simply purchasing more buses. By March 1938, the city’s streetcar system had been replaced by buses. In 1954, Duke Power sold its bus business, including its fleet of General Motors “Old Look” Buses, to City Coach Lines. In 1959, GM introduced its “New Look” transit bus, nicknamed the "Fishbowl" due to its expansive front windshield. The futuristic appearance of their riveted aluminum bodies, large windows, and overall streamlined design stood in marked contrast to the “Old Look” buses that GM had manufactured since 1940.The “New Look” buses also provided a first for Charlotte public transit: air-conditioning.
The arrival of the new “Fishbowl” buses coincided with significant social change in the city as Black Charlotteans began to challenge ongoing “Jim Crow” segregation in such public accommodations as restaurants, theaters, and public transportation. Civil rights demonstrations in the early 1960s resulted in the voluntary termination of legal racial segregation, including the separation of bus passengers by race, in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in 1963. The “New Look” buses remained the backbone of Charlotte’s transit fleet until the 1970s when labor unrest, declining ridership, and rising fares made the for-profit operation of the transit system by a private company untenable. Charlotte City Council decided to take over the bus system in 1974, ending the city’s 87-year history of privately-run public transit by forming a regional transportation authority.