Muni’s 22-Fillmore line is one of San Francisco’s longest-lived and most important transit routes, gaining additional popularity even now, 130 years after it was built.
This is its story.
Before the turn of the 20th century, most transit lines in the city ran East-West, radiating from Market Street, San Francisco’s unquestioned main artery. The relatively few lines that ran in a generally North-South direction were east of Van Ness Avenue. Most of them were cable cars.
The 22-line broke new ground. It opened in June 1895, using electric streetcar technology made practical just seven years earlier. It used single-truck electric ‘dinky’ cars that looked just like cable cars, identical to preserved streetcar No. 578 in Muni’s historic fleet.
Electric streetcars were faster than cable cars and made more money for the companies that ran them. But they couldn’t climb steep hills on electric power alone.
So, within months of opening, the Fillmore line incorporated a unique cable-enabled counterbalance to conquer the steep hill between Broadway and Green Street on Fillmore, the north slope of Pacific Heights. The first Fillmore streetcars were equipped with a connector that let them hook up to the cable for those two blocks. Downhill cars, northbound from Broadway, used the cable to help pull their southbound mates up those steep blocks. The combination of the funicular-like cable assist and the electric power allowed the extension of the Fillmore line down to the Cow Hollow district and on to the edge of the Bay (which was then, fittingly, Bay Street, where Marina Middle School is now).
South from Broadway, streetcars continued two miles along Fillmore under electric power, and then along Duboce Avenue, south on Church Street crossing Market, and then east along 16th Street through the Mission District to an initial terminal at Bryant Street. In 1898, the Fillmore streetcar was connected to another line, which jogged over Potrero Hill via 17th and 18th Streets to reach what was then called Kentucky Street (now Third Street) in the area now known as Dogpatch. The combined line was promoted as a “Bay to Bay” line: from Bay Street (which was where the Bay’s shoreline was then), to the shipyards.
Except for a 1925 extension from Bay Street to Marina Boulevard after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition moved the shoreline north, this core route of the 22-Fillmore endured with almost no changes for a century and a quarter.
Quake makes Fillmore cool
Before the 1906 earthquake and fire, United Railroads, the then-owner of the Fillmore line, split it in two. Neighborhood growth made the single-truck cars too small to carry the loads on much of the route. But only single-truck cars could use the Fillmore Hill counterbalance. So the otherwise obsolete ‘dinkies’ were retained on the Fillmore counterbalance line and larger, double-truck streetcars took over most of the service on the rest of the Fillmore route.
The quake and fire devastated the entire northeast quadrant of the city, of course. To replace the downtown business center during reconstruction, the city’s best-known merchants relocated to either Van Ness Avenue or Fillmore Street. The latter immediately morphed from a neighborhood commercial street to a citywide shopping haven. With Downtown a construction site for years, the Fillmore line was a lifeline between the districts that had been spared the brunt of the fire’s damage: Potrero Hill, the Mission, the Western Addition, and Pacific Heights. It was a high point in the line’s utility and prestige.
In 1908, the Fillmore line, like almost all the city’s streetcar lines at the time, was assigned a number: 22. For a time, some workers referred to it as “the double-deuce”.
Witness to change
In 1921, United Railroads morphed into the Market Street Railway Company (for which our nonprofit takes its name) but the 22-Fillmore line changed very little. Some of the neighborhoods it served, however, changed significantly.
The namesake street of the line attracted many Jewish settlers right after the earthquake and fire and was viewed as a center of the city’s Jewish Community for decades.
In the 1910s, thousands of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans began populating the blocks around Geary and Fillmore. By 1941, the neighborhood, known as Japantown or Nihonmachi, was one of the largest settlements of ethnic Japanese outside Japan. The following year, that came crashing down, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, removing all people of Japanese birth or descent, including American citizens, from the Pacific Coast to internment camps inland.
Many of the homes that internees left behind in Japantown were rented to a new wave of immigrants to San Francisco—African-Americans, mostly from the south, who came west for wartime jobs. One who lived in the neighborhood went to work as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco—Marguerite Johnson, later known as Maya Angelou. Several jazz nightclubs sprang up in the Fillmore blocks just sough of Geary, attracting artists such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. ‘The Mo’ became the unquestioned center of African-American life in the city.
The Fillmore district also provided a home for the 22-line streetcars at the Turk and Fillmore carbarn, whose adjacent powerhouse still sounds, empty and neglected for decades (largely because it would require very expensive seismic retrofitting).
Through the Mission
The southbound route took the 22-line streetcars over a substantial hill, crossing the 21-Hayes and 5-McAllister lines, along with the 6, 7, and 17 lines on Haight Street. At Duboce Avenue, the 22-line ran out of Fillmore Street and jogged east a block to reach Church Street. When the City-owned Muni built its N-Judah line in 1928, it had to negotiate with rival Market Street Railway for a block of joint trackage, enabling both lines to use Duboce. The agreement was a far different outcome than had been the case eleven years before in 1917, when then-owner of the 22, United Railroads, refused to let the streetcars of Muni’s new J-Church line share the 22’s tracks between Market and 16th Street, where the 22 turned east. As a result, Muni installed its J-line tracks on those two blocks of Church Street outside the 22’s, creating the second four-track street in the city (along with Market Street, of course).
Once on 16th Street, the 22-line was fully in the Mission District, which in the early decades of the 22 had large Irish and German populations (including the author’s great-grandparents). In fact, just one block east of Church, 22-line streetcars passed Mission Dolores. Then the line shot straight east, with a major transfer point at Mission Street. Several blocks farther east, the 22-line passed Seals Stadium, home of the city’s Pacific Coast League team. During the 1930s, the park was often packed to see such Seals stars as young Joe DiMaggio of Martinez, and the city’s own Lefty O’Doul. After World War II, the Mission began its gradual transformation into the center of San Francisco’s Hispanic culture.
At Potrero Avenue, the 22 crossed Muni’s H-line streetcars and left the Mission for the city’s industrial area. The 22-line reached the waterfront by crawling over Potrero Hill. The 22-line jogged south twice, first to 17th Street, then to 18th. The neighborhood was working class when the line was built, taking on a distinctly immigrant flavor after the earthquake as Russians and Slovenians burned out of the South of Market area moved south into the largely Irish Potrero Hill neighborhood.
At the eastern base of Potrero Hill stood the infamous Irish Hill, just a bump really, which housed many Irish immigrants in rooming houses next to the many factories lining Third Street. It was a very tough part of town, and neighbors did not lament the leveling of Irish Hill for bay fill in 1918. (A tiny remnant of Irish Hill can still be seen near Illinois and 22nd Streets.) The 22-line turned south onto Third Street (named Kentucky Street when the line opened) and shared tracks with the north-south lines until 23rd Street, where it terminated by looping through the ramshackle car barn.
Double wire for double deuce
The 22-line did not escape the mass conversion of streetcars to buses after World War II. The 22 had always been very busy, as might be expected of a major crosstown line. In fact, when Market Street Railway won the right to operate streetcars with a single operator in the mid-1930s, the 22 was one of the few crosstown lines to stick with two-person crews. The volume of transfers issued and collected was one of the highest in the system, and a conductor was a must.
In fact, the most famous conductor in San Francisco streetcar history (with the possible exception of Ms. Angelou) worked the 22-line. His name was Francis Van Wie and he became notorious in the 22’s waning streetcar days by courting and marrying more than a dozen of his riders—at the same time. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane turned Van Wie’s story from local news to a national sensation by dubbing him “The Ding-Dong Daddy of the D-Car Line,” a play on a Louis Armstrong song title (alliterative albeit inaccurate, since Van Wie’s flirtations actually took place aboard the 22-line).
The “Ding Dong Daddy” story, which transit historian Grant Ute brilliantly documented for us, was perhaps a good sendoff for the streetcars. July 31, 1948, was their last day on the 22-Fillmore. The Fillmore Hill Counterbalance, which had been extended to Marina Boulevard in 1925, had been replaced in 1941 by an extension of the Divisadero Street bus that avoided the Fillmore Street Hill by jogging over to Steiner, a block west. Muni (which had taken over the 22 and other Market Street Railway lines in 1944) restored the through-routing along Fillmore with buses—motor coaches for several months, while double wire was strung along the route, then with electric trolley coaches starting on January 16, 1949.
Except for the Steiner Street jog to avoid the Fillmore Hill, still used by trolley coaches today, and a one-block rerouting via Waller Street to get off Duboce Avenue, the 22-Fillmore line in the bus era followed the same route streetcars established in the 1890s!
Until 2021.
Mission Bay beckons
Looking at today’s map, it would seem odd to some that the 22 didn’t continue straight along 16th Street to reach the Bay instead of meandering over Potrero Hill a few blocks south. But when the 22 opened in 1895, the eastern part of what’s now 16th Street was marshland, and right after the 1906 earthquake, Southern Pacific filled much of Mission Bay for a rail yard and rerouted its Peninsula Main Line to run north-south next to Seventh Street. When trolley buses took over the 22, the double-deck commuter coaches, later taken over from SP by Caltrain, were too tall for trolley wires to cross them.
But technology solved the problem. New trolley coaches with robust onboard battery packs allow operation along eastern 16th Street and across the Caltrain tracks without overhead trolley wires. On January 23, 2021, the 22-line started running straight down 16th to Third Street, serving the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, the Kaiser medical facility, thousands of new residential units, and the Warriors’ Chase Center, with the Giants ballpark and three new waterfront parks just a short walk away. (Parts of the old Potrero Hill route were taken over by the 55-motor coach line, which connects to the BART Station at 16th and Mission Streets.)
Perhaps that rerouting is fitting. So very much has changed along the 22’s route in the last half-century. African-Americans were largely forced out of the Fillmore District in the 1960s by ‘urban renewal.’ The jazz clubs closed, though rock music gained a temple in the 1960s in the form of the Fillmore Auditorium, run by impresario Bill Graham. Neighborhoods along the route that were once solidly working class, including the Fillmore, the Mission, and Potrero Hill, have become filled with wealthy, largely young, workers as the tech industry has boomed. But there is continuity, too. The 22, which once served generations of baseball fans seeing games at Seals Stadium (including the Giants’ first two seasons in San Francisco, 1958-59) now has its eastern terminal at within easy walking distance of the Giants’ current home, Oracle Park.
Following the Covid pandemic, the 22-Fillmore, aided by its rerouting into Mission Bay, has made a complete comeback, now carrying more daily passengers than before the pandemic. A great 130th birthday present for the venerable transit line.
Absolutely great article, and fantastic pictures too.