Inside the streetcar depot that became a climbing wall
The old Line 2 depot closed in 2009. Now three hundred people a night hang from its roof trusses, on purpose.
The Line 2 streetcar depot on Foundry Road was built in 1911 to hold forty streetcars under one roof. It held them for almost a century. When the line was cut back in 2009, the streetcars went to a yard by the beltway and the depot went quiet.
For eleven years it was a parking lot, then nothing. In 2021 two climbers from the university rented it for a year, on a lease the city expected them to give up by Christmas.
The walls
They built the first wall on the old inspection pits, so the fallen could land in them. The pits are now padded and painted blue. The roof trusses, which were made to carry the weight of a crane, turned out to be ideal for hanging the overhangs from.
The members
Three hundred people climb there on a busy night. Some of them drove streetcars out of the same building. One of them, a retired mechanic named Gwen, is the oldest member at seventy-three, and the only one allowed to climb the old signal gantry.
What the city thinks
The lease has been renewed four times. The planning file, which we read, calls the building "a temporary use". It has now been a climbing wall for longer than it was a parking lot.
