Kenosha's Streetcars
Kenosha operates five electric streetcars on a lakefront route along 54th and 56th Streets, seven days a week.   Ridership is around 60,000 people each year. Each car is painted in the livery and is known by the name of a North American city that currently provides or has provided streetcar transportation.   There is the Toronto, the Chicago/Green Hornet, the Pittsburgh, the Cincinnati, and the Johnstown (PA).
 
The streetcars have gained international attention, as enthusiasts have traveled from Germany and other countries, as well as other U.S. states, to climb aboard.  They've been featured on television and in magazines and have inspired many other cities to build streetcar lines, offering clean-air solutions to transportation, providing fun for tourists and citizens, and a piece of history. 
 
The streetcars are operated by the City of Kenosha Transportation Department.   They are promoted through the non-profit Kenosha Streetcar Society.  Since June, 2000 they have served Kenosha and offer a colorful sight as they glide near the harbor.  For more information, visit www.kenoshastreetcarsociety.org
 
StreetcART series is funded, in part, through a generous contribution from the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Initiative. This program is a part of Poetry Jumps Off The Shelf,which was launched in 2004 by poet Shoshauna Shy, Madison, WI, with a mission to bring poetry out of libraries, bookstores and classrooms and into the public arena. Many thanks to Shoshauna Shy and the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Initiative for helping to make the StreetcART series possible.

StreetcART is also made possible through the efforts of:
 
Located at 5002 7th Ave, Kenosha, WI, ArtWorks is a framing and arts supplies store and art gallery, as well as offering classes and art-making opportunities.

Southport Press products are sold through ArtWorks and its projects are often coordinated through the generous guidance and assistance of ArtWorks' owner and operator, Chet Griffith.
 
 
 
 The Kenosha Writer's Guild welcomes everyone
who loves to write to participate in their monthly gatherings to share, read and listen to works created by authors of this region. 
 
The Guild meets at 6:30 p.m. each third Thursday at Room S139, Science Bldg in Gateway Technical College, 3520 30th Avenue. Membership is free.
The Guild also meets on the second Tuesday at 6:30 PM, same location, for workshops and in-depth critique.
 
 
 Many thanks to Kenosha Transit, which manages Kenosha electric streetcar operations, for allowing use of space on streetcars for the StreetcART series.
 
About StreetcART
Artwork and poetry ride together on StreetcART, a community-based project that places full-color placards inside Kenosha's electric streetcars, promoting the arts while offering a bit of poetic sass and artistic style for riders' enjoyment.  
 
The StreetcART project was launched on April 5, 2011, when work by Kenosha and Racine artists and authors went on display, transforming the Kenosha cars into rolling galleries
 
 
 
Joshua Frazer is an accomplished
cartoonist and visual artist. His piece carries resemblance to the film work of Japanese animator, Hayao Miyazaki, whose pictures, such as Castle In The Sky and Porco Rosso, often demonstrate their creator's love of flight and the craft that make men soar.
 
Words for this piece are by another man who knew a thing or two about balloons, Jules Verne.
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Eric Huff, former Kenosha Poet Laureate, contributed this "love poem"
represented at right, floating above an abandoned factory. 
 
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Kelly Witte created this colorful, eye-catching piece of visual art that is accompanied by a poem penned by Sherri Smolik-Heinisch.
 
The piece has echoes of Frazer's balloon-trip image in both its artwork and its words, evoking dream, wind, and passage through the heavens.
 
 
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Lisa Adamowicz Kless' poem is perfect for the terrain over which the Kenosha streetcars pass, lakefront land where waves batter the harbor walls and the sky releases its wonders, from a seemingly still blue to tent-poles of lighting during a summer storm.
 
Mark Giese, Racine poet and artist, offers a contemplative backdrop for Kless' words. Are we seeing the lights from inside a passing streetcar or an image of our own, often-fragmented mind, seeking wholeness once again?
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 Peg Rousar-Thompson created a
collage filled with family faces and final resting places, while recognizing her 
place in the continuing story. "I am the gap," she writes. A key at the top of the artwork hints that her role is also to unlock the chest of memories and share them with others, helping them to discover not only their family history but themselves, too.
 
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Lisa Adamowicz Kless, President of the Kenosha Writers' Guild, provides a poem on the fragility of self. While we walk through this world, seemingly with a devil-may-care attitude, we are often as fragile as crystal, needing not an avalanche to harm us, but a slight gesture or slip of tongue.
 
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Lauren John paints an image that renders association with stained glass, but also the confluence of rivers. The flow of color meets the tributary of a poem by Suzanne Simonovich, which reminds us that while we often strive for individuality, our strength lies in each other.
 
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Mark M. Giese is the master of the one-liner and an inspiration for this StreetcART series. He crafts chapbooks with titles such as "Observations and Thinkings" and "More and Further Observations and Thinkings" and the impossible-to-find publications: "Why Holidays Aren't" and "Mark M's Incomplete International Universal Cosmopolitan Atlas of the Whole Wide World".