Chris Churchill Saves the World | It Was Good While It Lasted: Saying Farewell to the Chicago Trolley & Double Decker Co

By Chris Churchill

Anyone who knows me knows a few things about me. Comedy, music, birds, and trolleys. Three passions and a job. Of course, I haven’t driven a trolley in about six months. I’m a teacher now. The music is still in me and so is the comedy. Only now I use those tendencies as I make my documentaries for the MFA program in Documentary Media at Northwestern University where I am now a student. Spoiler: not too many funny documentarians out there. The birds are all day every day with me. If it’s not the friends I share my apartment with, it’s the pigeons, the sparrows, the hawks, and the mourning doves that get my attention any time they seem to be busy with something outside. It’s the trolley thing that has gone away.

Time to take out the Trolley Trash…

And I don’t mean just for me. Just found out last night that the company that employed me as a trolley driver/tour guide for twenty-one years is going out of business, after more than a quarter century on December 31st. I assume at the stroke of midnight, so as my wife called to my attention, it might affect a few New Year’s Eve celebrations. Definitely, a lot of spring and summer weddings that will need to adjust their transportation plans.

Two things strike me about this sudden news that I just received. As I look back, I realize that though we told stories about Chicago to millions upon millions of visitors over those years, we actually became part of Chicago’s history as well. The other thing that I realized was that Chicago Trolley & Double Decker Company was murdered from within and without; a slow death of slow poison and a thousand tiny cuts that ended with a young pirate running their sword through a dying old man.

The company was created by three guys from LaGrange back in the early nineties. Tim Lattner (son of the Heisman Trophy winner, Johnny Lattner), Rob Pierson, and Tim Carey. They built it from the ground up, just a few trolleys at first, and a few seasonal employees. They were up against Gray Line (a trolley tour company), American Sightseeing (a double decker company), and the Chicago Police, I’m sure, to find their niche in a crowded market and a spot on the sidewalk to sell tickets and pick up passengers. Believe it or not, this company existed for five years before they every hired me.

I don’t know these ladies. They took my tour. They wanted a picture because they thought I looked like Jason Bateman

By the time I joined the company, it was established and on the verge of tearing down the competition. You don’t see too many Gray Line trolleys or American Sightseeing double deckers downtown anymore do you? While I’m sure there were other circumstances that helped it along, I’d like to say that, ultimately, we did that. We went out there and with superior tours, salespeople, hustle, and by outnumbering their vehicles, we became ubiquitous. We became the thing that was in a tourist’s mind when they thought, “I want to take one of those trolley tours in Chicago.”

I don’t know this lady. She also took my tour. She also wanted a picture because she thought I looked like Jason Bateman.

And I can’t tell you how much I loved it and hated it over the years. How much I loved hustling for tips with sometimes corny, sometimes just bizarre trolley jokes. I can’t tell you how rewarding it was to eventually stop doing trolley jokes on my tour as I settled into my confidence as a tour guide. As I was just able to narrate the story of Chicago, as I saw it, to people who wanted to know. And the people I met and worked with over the last twenty-one years are among the most unique, talented, passionate, and fun loving people I’ve ever known.

As a performer, I’ve made good friends creating and performing comedy shows, rehearsing, writing, and producing stuff. When I was an active comedian, I made some good comedian friends. I make friends wherever I go. But these trolley people… these are the people I think of all the time. There are people I worked with who passed on long ago but who I think of all the time. There are people who were there before I got there and appear to be riding this last trolley into its last loop around downtown. And these people are my family outside of my family and my mobile home away from home.

I’d tell you more, but that would take a book. So I wrote a book and Literate Ape put it out.

Buy it. Read it. Tell others.

“Twenty Years Without A Weekend”

The book I wrote is available on Amazon right now. This article isn’t in that book.

So that pirate I talked about in the earlier metaphor—I saw them coming, and luckily for me, I was already on my way to another life when they showed up. The trolley company was purchased by, I guess you’d call them, a venture capitalist or maybe a turnaround artist. They don’t necessarily call themselves that. But when you look at the website for the company that just bought your parent company, you know. A bunch of young millionaire bios all over the About Us page. They were just doing a vague, big money, thing with no real mission other than making bigger money. Then, you add that the rest of their portfolio had absolutely nothing to do with transportation or tourism, the smell in the stockyards, where the trolleys are parked, became stronger than usual.

But this wasn’t the only corporate greed that killed us. Let’s not forget all the tiny cuts that left us vulnerable. When the company started, it was special, the owners had vision, the employees were on a mission. Then it got purchased by a transportation company and it slowly began to lose some of its focus. Little by little, the tour company became more of a transportation company. The trolleys were secondary to the larger corporation’s larger goal. That was what started it.

Then our success became a problem. Once we became the biggest game in town, we had to hire a lot of people, and quality control started to falter. It was no longer a small, focused crew. It was whomever could respond to our desperate cries for help in the Reader or hiring fairs we’d set up next to Second City.

Then, Megabus happened too. That discount bus company is owned by the same people who own Chicago Trolley & Double Decker. They share the lot with all the trolleys and double deckers. They also shared the attention and resources of the transportation company that, knowing or caring little about tours, was only skilled in the logistics of transportation but not of running a tour company.

So by a few years ago, the number of complaints about our tour grew. Check out our Yelp page. And we were too spread out as a company to do anything to affect a turnaround in the overall quality of our product. This isn’t to say that there weren’t a lot of great tour guides. There were always about ten really great ones, myself included. But when the ten great ones are outweighed, in the summer, by fifty poorly trained ones, well… you get the picture. I finally started telling tourists who rode with us in winter that they were getting the best tour because we only kept the good tour guides employed through the winter slow season.

That penultimate slash to our skins, cutting across the wrist but not yet the jugular, was a new kid in town named Big Bus. They came from out of town. They were built out of money. Built from the top down, rather than from the ground up. They came to town with one of their main goals to put Chicago Trolley & Double Decker Company out of business.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? That’s essentially what we accomplished with out rivals back in the day. What comes around goes around I guess. Big Bus will have its day in the sun and then the sun will set for them, too. This is not bitterness, just an observation of truth. Turn, turn, turn.

So I take a moment to think about how synonymous with Chicago tourism and just how special our company became during those years. We were part of the history of this town.

For many years, we were the Navy Pier Trolley. We were the city’s free trolley system that ran for a decade. We were the double deckers that carried the Chicago Blackhawks through Chicago after three separate Stanley Cup wins. And We were the company that carried the Cubs through the streets of Chicago and delivered them to the thirtieth largest gathering of humans in one place in the history of the world. Most of the gatherings ahead of that were religious pilgrimages. We were the trolleys on an evacuated Lake Shore Drive taking guests to and from the election night rally for Barack Obama in November 2008. That was us. That was history. We were a part of history.

I’ve still got birds…

I’m biased, of course. I’m also romanticizing a bit (it has been six months since I wore the khaki’s and red polo). But seriously, we were a great tour company for a long time—until we weren’t. We were a huge part of what made visiting Chicago special for over twenty-five years. And now it is officially history.