Trolley Mail

Earlier this week we received a note from a reader with an observation about the Downtown Claremont Trolley. The reader saw the trolley on a run outside of it's usual environs:

DATE: Monday, March 23, 2009 10:46 PM
SUBJECT: Claremont Trolley
TO: Claremont Buzz

Speaking of the Claremont Trolley.

On Sunday March 22, I noticed that the Trolley Folly went on a whimsy run, up Padua Ave. past the under-construction sports park, on up to the 4-way-on-demand stop light signal, at 1:07PM, then up Mt. Baldy Road, past Fergus Falls, presumably to the gravel turn-around at the San Antonio Dam, as it shortly returned down Mt. Baldy Road. It turned into Flat River and back out, and on down to Padua Ave., then north on Padua Ave. up past the Theater, then down Via Padova past the sharp double curves, and on down to Mt. Baldy Road, and then to the Mills 4-way stop signs, at 1:21PM, and then down Mills. I was not close enough, from my view point, to see if any passengers were inside.

We checked and discovered that what the reader witnessed was a Claremont Community Foundation event that we wrote about a couple months ago. This was the City loaning this public resource out to a private organization for a charity fundraiser, one of many CCF Party Parade events.

The CCF website said this about the Trolley Folly before the March 21st event slipped into the past (click on image adjacent to text):

With former Claremont Mayor and Author Judy Wright.

Ride the new Claremont Trolley as we travel from the Metrolink Parking Lot to Oak Park Cemetery and Russian Village, and then on to Padua Hills Theater, the Wilderness Park, and Webb School.

The tour of our vertical city will include residential neighborhoods in context including architecture by Gordon Kaufmann, Helen Wren, Paul Williams, Cliff May, Alan Taylor, Konstanty Stys, and Robert Orr. Architectural examples from Myron Hunt, Gordon Kaufmann, and Edward Durrell Stone, among others, as well as landscape architecture by Edward Huntsman Trout, Thomas Church, and Ralph Cornell, will be components of The Claremont Colleges. In the Village we will see and talk about what makes a downtown a downtown - the architecture, the people, the restaurants, the shops, the services, etc. The tour will take approximately two hours.
9:30 a.m. - Noon
or
12:30 - 3 p.m.

With light refreshments from Noon until 1 p.m.

$35 per person
Capacity: 20 guests per tour

Hosts:
Judy Wright
Kristin and Steve Hagstrom
Vicke Selk

Sponsored by the City of Claremont

The CCF's website said that both sessions, morning and afternoon, were sold out, so the Trolley was likely as full as you're ever going to see it. At 20 guests per session it was running at about 2,000 percent of its usually usage. Maybe we could convince the CCF to take over the lease.