Phoenix Trolley (Arizona Street Railway Museum)

Incorporated as the Arizona Street Railway Museum, the Phoenix Trolley Museum was established in 1975 to preserve original Phoenix trolley cars and memorabilia and to show their place in the history of America's fifth-largest city. Its subject is the Phoenix Street Railway, which carried riders from 1888 to 1948 under the motto "Ride a Mile and Smile the While": founded by Moses Hazeltine Sherman with horse-drawn cars, electrified beginning in 1893, purchased by the city in 1925, and finished off after an October 1947 fire destroyed most of the streetcar fleet, leading the city to abandon streetcars for buses in February 1948. The museum operated beside Margaret Hance Deck Park in downtown Phoenix until December 2017, after the city declined to renew its lease, then relocated in 2018 to the historic Grand Avenue Arts and Small Business district along one of the city's earliest trolley lines — buying the property outright in 2020 after a successful fundraising campaign. That same year, local businessman Mike Bystrom donated streetcar No. 509, a car the founders had long suspected was lost in the 1948 car-barn fire.