A Self-Guided Audio Tour of New Haven's Century-Old Trolley Infrastructure
Do you love trolleys? Do you remember stories told by your parents or grandparents about riding them at a time when streetcars using overhead electrical lines were the predominant form of urban transit? Are you curious about a technology that shaped urban life and set patterns for social and economic movement through cities and into suburbs? Are you nostalgic for a different world of inexpensive and efficient public transit? If so, then this self-guided audio tour is for you.
Maybe you've just returned to your car from a morning or afternoon visit to East Haven's Shoreline Trolley Museum and you're fresh off a ride in one of the museum's yellow and red liveried Connecticut Company cars. That museum, with its unparalleled collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century-streetcars, should be your starting point. But it needn't be your ending point.
Join students of HIS259: Digital New Haven Project, an initative of Southern Connecticut State University's History Department, to extend your ride into the past from the Shoreline Trolley Museum using this self-guided audio tour. Buried--sometimes in plain site and sometimes obscured beneath concrete and macadem--are vestiges of a world long since passed, but one that continues to inform and determine our lives today. If you look closely, you can see the passage of time and the evolution of history all around you.
This tour takes about one hour to complete (depending on how much time you spend at each stop), and it will take you from the parking lot of the Shoreline Trolley Museum to visit five sites of existing trolley infrastructure in New Haven. Along the way, students Emily, Ben, and Professor Smith will introduce you to brief explanations of these sites so that you can better understand and read the history of the built environment around you. Enjoy...and all aboard!
To begin this tour from the parking lot of the Shoreline Trolley Museum in East Haven, let's first proceed to Lighthouse Point Park. Please note, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, you must be a New Haven resident or pay an additional fee to enter the park with a car. You may, however, park just outside on Lighthouse or other adjoining roads and walk into the park free of charge. The park is open to all Labor Day to Memorial Day.
To drive from the Museum to Lighthouse Point, proceed west on River Road, turn right on Hemingway Avenue. Make your next left on Main Street (Route 100), turn left on Townshend Avenue (Route 337). Turn right on Lighthouse Road. Once through the park gate, proceed straight toward Five Mile Point lighthouse and the Lighthouse Point carousel. If you prefer GPS, the address is 2 Lighthouse Road, New Haven, CT.
Special thanks to the Shoreline Trolley Museum and Executive Director John Proto for support and assistance in completing this project in the summer of 2026. Audio tour images are courtesy of the Shoreline Trolley Museum.