On February 9, 1891, a new sound echoed along O’Farrell, Jones, and Hyde Streets: the rumble of cable cars. It was already a familiar sound across most of San Francisco, of course, including its main street, Market. But on that date, cable cars came to the Tenderloin and Russian Hill as well. The opening of that line, 125 years ago, turned out to be the zenith of cable cars in the world. It was all downhill from there for cable cars as a major transit technology. Yet this last line—or at least part of it—has endured to become the most beloved cable line of all.
Last of its kind
The O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was the last wholly new cable car line to open in San Francisco, and one of the last new street cable car lines in the world as well. The arc of the cable car’s transit dominance was stunningly short.
It was less than eighteen years earlier that Andrew Hallidie had opened the world’s first cable car line, on Clay Street. Cable cars operated twice as fast as the then-dominant horse-drawn streetcar. Though capital costs were higher, there were no animals to care for, and many transit operators around the world felt cable car lines were a good investment, even on flat routes. From London to Los Angeles, New York to Oakland, three-dozen cities joined San Francisco in embracing cable technology.
One of San Francisco’s most successful cable lines was owned by the California Street Cable Railroad Company, opened in 1878 and ultimately stretching three miles east-west along California Street from Market Street to Presidio Avenue. A competitor, the Ferries and Cliff House Railway, acquired Andrew Hallidie’s original east-west Clay Street line in 1888 and planned to rebuild and extend it. The F&CHRy then opened two lines in 1888 that shared Powell Street from Market over Nob Hill, then diverged, with one branch heading north on Mason, Columbus, and Taylor to reach Bay Street (then the water’s edge), and the other running west on Jackson to Presidio Avenue and back on Washington Street. (The eastern terminal of this Washington-Jackson line was cut back to Steiner Street following the 1906 Earthquake.)
Suddenly faced with more competition, the owners of ‘Cal Cable’ came to believe that a north-south line connecting Russian Hill with the downtown shopping area would be a profitable complement to their California Street line. They secured a franchise that started in what was then called ‘North Beach’ but today is known as Aquatic Park at Hyde and Beach Streets. The line followed Hyde up one of the steepest cable car grades ever conquered—almost 21%—and then across Russian Hill and the western shoulder of Nob Hill to reach Pine Street. Two blocks east on Pine brought it to Jones, where the line turned south again and ran into the Tenderloin. At O’Farrell Street, the main line turned east again to reach Market Street, passing one block south of Union Square. Tracks also continued down Jones Street another five blocks, served by a smaller cable car that shuttled back and forth to connect to the main line.
Being the last cable line built in San Francisco had its disadvantages. Under the protocols of cable car practice, new lines had to string their cables below any existing lines they crossed. Operationally, this meant that gripmen holding the ‘inferior’ or lower cable had to release it from the grip at cable car crossings, lest they hit the crossing ‘superior’ cable, causing damage and injury. The O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line required gripmen to drop and retake the cable 22 times per round trip, surely a world’s record. For this reason, the Hyde cars were fitted with Epplesheimer bottom Grips, a newer (and easier to operate) technology than the Root side grips used on the older California Street line. So while the cable cars of the two lines looked identical (except for the destination lettering on the ends of the cars), they were not compatible operationally. Cars from both lines were housed on separate floors of the same building at California and Hyde Streets, which also served as the powerhouse, a handy circumstance made possible by the grade on California Street.
Yet even as the O’Farrell, Jones, and Hyde line opened, the cable car’s reign atop the transit world was ending. Frank Sprague’s electric streetcar, made practical in Richmond, Virginia in 1888, swept cable lines away almost everywhere in short order, except on hills too steep for electric traction. San Francisco opened its first streetcar line just one year after the Hyde cable line debuted, and after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire triggered the conversion of the five-line Market Street cable system to streetcars, cable cars here were already being viewed as somewhat quaint.
Quaint, perhaps, but irreplaceable at the time on the hillier lines. For example, the grade over Castro Street from Eureka Valley (now generally known as the Castro District) to Noe Valley was too steep for streetcars, so that one remnant of the once-great Market Street cable car network was retained, with cable cars running from 18th to 26th Streets until 1941, when bus technology had finally advanced enough to take over. The Powell Street lines and the two lines owned by Cal Cable were similarly protected from conversion for decades by their steep grades, as well as their continued, though steadily diminishing, profitability.
The Powell-Mason and Washington Jackson lines, which had been purchased by the Market Street Railway Cable Railway Company in 1893, continued operating with few changes under successor companies for 50 years. In 1944, they came under the ownership of the city government when its Municipal Railway (Muni) bought out the assets of our namesake, Market Street Railway Company.
Three years later, in 1947, Mayor Roger Lapham tried to convert the Powell cable lines to buses, so confident of success that he bought the ‘hill climber’ motor coaches in advance (our nonprofit preserved one of these historic buses and donated it to Muni, where it awaits restoration). But a coalition made up largely of women and led by Friedel Klussmann famously fended off Lapham’s plans at the ballot box, drawing worldwide attention to the cable cars as a symbol of San Francisco in the process.
The last line lasts
All the while, the two lines owned by Cal Cable (three, if you counted the Jones Street Shuttle) soldiered on. The California Street Cable Railroad Company had managed to survive as an independent company, not part of Muni or its bigger private competitor, Market Street Railway Company. The city government had twice inquired about buying Cal Cable, in 1913 and 1925, but was rebuffed both times. Cal Cable’s finances began to deteriorate seriously in the early 1940s, as was true in most of the U.S. transit industry due to increasing costs and resistance to raising fares. Finally, when Lloyds of London cancelled Cal Cable’s insurance, the company gave up and ceased operations on July 31, 1951. The City and County of San Francisco took over the operation and it reopened as part of Muni in January 1952.
Yet it was soon clear that the former Cal Cable lines were hemorrhaging money, even more than the two Powell Street lines, which were also money losers. Today, when virtually every transit line in America costs two to four times as much to operate as fares bring in, with the rest made up through subsidies, it is hard to understand the pressure that Muni leaders of the early 1950s felt over the cable car losses. But voters and their elected officials had been conditioned to believe that public transit could at least break even on fares alone. So talk began about pruning back the cable car system to something more sustainable.
As more and more tourists wanted a cable car ride, the Powell-Mason line had emerged as the most attractive to them, since it connected the big department stores and hotels with the Fisherman’s Wharf area, which had emerged as a tourist destination three blocks north of the terminal at the end of Taylor Street. The Washington-Jackson line had many regular riders in Pacific Heights who used it to reach shops and offices downtown, but while the ride through the mansions along Washington and Jackson west of Van Ness Avenue was beautiful, there was no tourist-oriented destination at the end of the line.
The same was generally true of the two lines formerly owned by Cal Cable. The California Street line had devoted riders west of Van Ness, but that entire stretch of California was residential, and Muni offered frequent east-west bus service one block north on Sacramento Street and three blocks south on Sutter. As for the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line, one of its major traffic generators was lost when ferries to Marin County stopped running from the foot of Hyde Street after the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. It and the Bay Bridge had enabled a torrent of automobiles to reach the city every day, which in turn was pressuring the city to make some streets downtown one-way. Pine Street had already been converted in the early 1940s, which required cable cars heading downtown to run against automobile traffic for two blocks, protected only by a couple of overhead neon warning signs above the street and the frantic clanging of gripmen. By the early 1950s, downtown merchants and other auto-related interests were pressuring the city to convert O’Farrell to one-way as well.
Faced with this financial and political dilemma, Muni and city leaders explored various options for cutting back the cable car system, wondering whether the formidable pro-cable car lobby of 1947, and especially Friedel Klussmann, might resurface and fight. We recounted that bloody fight on its 50th anniversary here.
In summary, after attempted bargaining with Mrs. Klussmann and outright deception and gross misrepresentation by leaders and consultants tied to Muni’s governing body of the day, voters narrowly approved a 1954 ballot measure that cut total cable car trackage in half and turned down an attempt to repeal it later that year. (See the sidebar at the bottom of this post for what alternatives might have looked like.)
The O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line had capriciously been shut down by Muni a month before the election and would never run again in that form. The deal approved by the voters combined the inner part of the Washington-Jackson line with the outer part of the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line. On April 7, 1957, the ‘new’ Powell-Hyde line opened, following the construction of a turntable in a dirt lot off Hyde Street between Beach and Jefferson, necessary for operation of the Powell line’s single-ended cars.
At the time, the area around the Hyde Street turntable was nearly derelict. The heart of Fisherman’s Wharf was invisible from the turntable. A sailor named Karl Kortum was on a mission to collect historic ships at the old Hyde Street Pier, but that hadn’t reached reality yet. The Art Deco building and bleachers built by the WPA nearby in 1937 were little used, the Maritime Museum not yet a reality either. The Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory was imposing but not accessible to the public.
There’s little doubt that the Powell-Hyde line spurred the huge visitor-oriented developments that have transformed that area since then. Muni helped by putting dash signs on the new Hyde line cars indicating that Fisherman’s Wharf was just a few blocks from the terminal. And word got around among visitors that the stunning view of Alcatraz and the Bay on Hyde, plus access to the ‘Crookedest Street in the World’ (Lombard between Hyde and Leavenworth) made the Hyde line an even better ride than Powell-Mason.
Next year, the Powell-Hyde line celebrates its 60th anniversary, when we’ll take a closer look at its operation. And in 2020, the Powell-Hyde line will have been in service longer than its half-parent, the O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde line was.
What almost was
By 1954, Muni was in financial trouble. They had taken on the California Street and O’Farrell, Jones & Hyde cable lines, plus the Jones Street shuttle, after the city rescued them from bankruptcy and they were losing money. Muni proposed a bond issue to rebuild track and the two lines’ powerhouse and carbarn at California & Hyde Streets, but voters had turned it down. The lines’ infrastructure was decrepit and operating losses were large and mounting rapidly.
At this point, a flurry of proposals quickly emerged to “consolidate” cable car service in the name of saving money. City Public Utilities General Manager James Turner favored abandoning all three Cal Cable lines, continuing to run only the City Charter-protected Powell lines. Two members of the Board of Supervisors, first Francis McCarty, then J. Eugene McAteer, proposed combining the inner end of the California line with the Hyde Street portion of the O’Farrell line to create a new California-Hyde line.
There was strong Downtown opposition to cable cars on O’Farrell Street, tied to the City’s desire to make it a one-way street, in part to serve a proposed (later built) garage opposite Macy’s. Downtown interests, whose main target was O’Farrell, apparently approached Ms. Klussman and offered to support a compromise where the Hyde line and Jones shuttle would be combined to provide through service, abandoning only the tracks on O’Farrell. Mrs. Klussmann said no.
McAteer backed off his California-Hyde proposal and told Mrs. Klussmann he would support a Board of Supervisors resolution to save all five cable lines. This caused her forces to postpone a voter initiative drive to accomplish the same thing. At the last minute, though
McAteer changed his position again, throwing his weight behind a compromise plan to create the cable car system we have today. This plan was adopted by voters after two contentious elections characterized by a misleading campaign created and funded by Muni’s parent, the Public Utilities Commission, for which they were later upbraided by a judge—but too late. The changes were already in place.
If either of the alternative proposals—a California-Hyde line, or a Jones, Pine & Hyde line—had become reality, with the Washington-Jackson line left as it was, San Francisco’s visitor destinations could have greatly changed. A line featuring the spectacular Hyde Street hill might have spawned visitor attractions at its Market Street end, whether at the foot of Jones Street or the foot of California. Specifically in the case of a Jones, Pine & Hyde line, the routing might have upgraded the blocks of Market that then featured theaters and middle-class retail, and revitalized lower Jones Street as well. Over time, the Washington-Jackson line, had it survived, might have transformed the surrounding blocks of Fillmore Street into more tourist oriented retail, instead of the upscale neighborhood-serving retail and restaurants that are there now. This would have been reinforced had the California line continued past Fillmore to Presidio Avenue.
There is no question that the two current Powell lines have been great successes over the last 60 years, but the truncated California line, which ends in a stub-end terminal with a standard Muni bus shelter at a busy intersection with U.S. 101 (Van Ness Avenue) does not attract nearly as many riders, despite its scenic passage through the canyons of the Financial District, then crossing Chinatown and Nob Hill.
Since the current cable car routes began operating in 1957, various proposals to extend the California line have been made: west to Fillmore or Japantown, south on Polk to City Hall, or north on Hyde to share the Powell-Hyde line (this last put forward 30 years ago by Market Street Railway). None has gained traction. Nor have ideas to extend the Mason line into the heart of Fisherman’s Wharf, connect the ends of the Hyde and Mason lines to make a loop, or extend the California line east to the Ferry Building. High costs for new underground work and terminals and lack of strong advocacy from merchants and others who would benefit have kept these ideas just that. But at least the routings and service levels of the today’s cable car system are protected in the City Charter. It is overwhelmingly likely to stay as it is for the foreseeable future.
