MORRISON--Allen S., 84, on January 6, 2019. Born in Lexington, Kentucky on May 10, 1934, he spent his childhood in Louisville, until age 11, and then Cincinnati. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1956, he lived abroad for a brief time, in Paris, where he earned a Diplome de Langue Francaise from the Ecole Pratique de Langue Francaise in 1958. That same year, he settled in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York, where he resided for the rest of his life. He taught French and French literature at Columbia University for almost 10 years and earned a PhD in French lit. from Columbia in 1968. A trip to Mexico rekindled a childhood love of streetcars, and his interest soon expanded to South America. In the 1970s, Allen Morrison embarked on what would become decades of pioneering research into the history of street railway systems throughout Latin America, many of which had used vehicles built in the U.S. He authored three books on the subject, starting with "The Tramways of Brazil" in 1989, and ultimately became widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on the history of electric transit in Latin America. His web site www.tramz.com entitled Electric Transport in Latin America, established in 1998, was one of two honored by the Association of American Geographers in 2005 as Best Web Site. He made arrangements to ensure that the site would be preserved after his death.
Published in The New York Times on Jan. 31, 2019
