A fascinating collection of photographs documenting the first year Camp Moodna, a “street car colony” in Mountainville, New York, which served as a summer camp for impoverished New York City women. Under the auspices of the Downtown Ethical Society, Camp Moodna was founded in 1907 by social worker Rose Gruening (“The Angel of Grand Street”) and it consisted of about twenty “old horse cars taken from the barns of the Metropolitan Street Railway to the mountains of Orange County,” housing a different group of women each week.

Camp Moodna was named for a nearby body of water (seen in a number of the present photos) and its genesis was described in a lengthy 1907 New York Times article (“Abandoned Horse Cars Make Summer Hotel”). After the success of a similar summer camp for NYC’s young men, Gruening wanted to create a similar program for young women. However, “tent life wouldn’t do; for a tent has no guardian doors that girls could lock at night, and all manner of crawly things could creep under the canvas and bring on attacks of the fidgets.” So, “twenty perfect specimens of the classical age in New York transportation [were] unearthed from beneath a deep strata of dust and cobwebs in one of the barns of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, carried into the mountainland of Orange County, and set upon a hillside near a beautiful babbling brook.”

Transporting the trollies was “no Lilliputian task.” The trollies had all been stripped of their wheels before being donated, so they were each 3800 pounds of dead-weight. However, a flat, low-bodied wagon, a big team of horses, and a gang of husky men with crowbars and jackscrews finally got all the potential Summer homes loaded upon Erie Railroad flatcars.” And when they got to Mountainville they were transformed into two-room apartments of parlor and bedroom. Two of the others were made into diningrooms, another into a kitchen, and still another into a hospital.

In 1925, Camp Moodna was donated to the Grand Street Settlement in 1925 and remained in Mountainville until 1955, when flooding from Hurricane Diane forced it to relocate to East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It was later sold to fund Grand Street's Lower East Side community center located at 80 Pitt Street.