Muni Heritage Weekend drew thousands of San Franciscans and visitors to the Ferry Building area November 1-2, both for the rare opportunity to ride a mix of vintage streetcars, cable cars, and buses, and for a variety of other family-friendly attractions. The event was co-sponsored by Muni’s parent, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), and Market Street Railway.
August 2, 1873 — In the wee small hours of a misty San Francisco night (they didn’t call the month “Fogust” back then, but it was), a new type of transit was about to be inaugurated. An endless wire rope clattered beneath Clay Street. An odd open vehicle sat on the rails at the top of the hill. Standing by was Andrew Smith Hallidie, a Scot who had experience using wire rope in the mining business, and was part of the team promoting this new technology, aimed at making horsecars obsolete.
The California Street cable car line has terminated at Market Street since 1891. For the past 50 years, its neighbor has been the Hyatt Regency, the innovative hotel designed by John Portman, now iconic in its own right. When the hotel’s current management generously supported the celebration of 150 Years of Cable Cars, they asked us if we had some old photos of the location.
On October 26, San Francisco got a joyous reminder of just how important our cable cars are with a bell-ringing, bottle-breaking celebration of the 75th anniversary of the saving of the cable cars, in a grassroots campaign led by Friedel Klussmann, in an era when women had very little power in city political and economic life. (Here’s that fascinating story.)
The idea of a transit subway under Market Street goes back to the first years of the 20th century, but it took more than 70 fitful years to become reality. That’s a complex and fascinating story we tell in this companion post, which explains the compromises that harmed Muni’s subway operation from the get-go.
Not only does San Francisco’s transit agency, Muni, have the world’s only multi-line system of street running cable cars AND one of the world’s most popular and varied daily vintage streetcar operations, it also preserves important pieces of its rubber-tire heritage in the form of vintage trolley buses and motor buses. (In San Francisco, transit companies have traditionally referred to buses as “coaches”, though the public calls them buses.)
Can a tram be entrancing? Sure seemed that way yesterday at the ceremony at the foot of Market Street celebrating the elimination of private automobiles on San Francisco’s main thoroughfare.
Seats are going fast for a first-time opportunity to tour the cable car system on the biggest cable car ever built: Sacramento-Clay “Big 19”, at 34 feet a full seven feet longer than Powell cars, and at 136 years, the oldest operating cable car in the world. And you can ride it on Mason and Hyde Streets, as well as California Street, in a four-hour exclusive charter on November 9, starting at 11 a.m., with lunch included from the famous Buena Vista Cafe at the foot of Hyde Street.
