My sister-in-law had never taken a cable car ride and was determined to do so despite having arrived in San Francisco at the height of the summer tourist season. I gently warned her about the huge line of tourists waiting at the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market streets, how the combination of street hustlers, cacophonous boom boxes, glacially slow passenger line and the urge to take a food or potty break could wither the resolve of even the most patient visitor.She would have none of it. This was, after all, a grizzled veteran of standing in line with her grandchildren at Disney World and Busch Gardens in Florida. No wait for a Toonerville Trolley in a pleasant little tourist town was going to defeat her.Still, I had a backup plan. I suggested that we take the ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco, disembark through the newly refurbished Ferry Building at the foot of Market St. and then hop an old-fashioned streetcar on Market St.’s F Line to the cable car stop.I didn’t say much more about the parade of old streetcars that San Francisco’s transit authority, the Municipal Railway (which San Franciscans affectionately call “Muni” – and not so affectionately, “the Muniserable”) runs up and down Market St. year-round. The fleet of cars, restored and spiffed up in their original colors, have been collected over the years from such distant cities as Melbourne, Brighton, Lisbon, Philadelphia and St. Louis.
The Brighton streetcar, an open-air tram from an English sea resort, is one of people’s favorites. With no roof to block views, tourists riding it can marvel at lower Market St.’s procession of skyscrapers, including architect Philip Johnson’s impressive 48-story cylinder at 101 California St. and the wavy aluminum façade and garden terraces of 444 Market St.But the core of Muni’s streetcar fleet is a collection of old PCC “torpedo” cars, a 1936 design that virtually every big city rail system ran in the 1940s and 50s. They were probably the finest light rail cars ever built – sleek and quiet, they seemed to float down the tracks.(By the end of the 1950s, most major cities had ripped up their tracks and replaced streetcars with diesel buses. The old PCCs were junked, many of them burned to ashes on towering pyres where the stripped vehicles were piled ignominiously atop one another, three or four cars high.) It was a fairly cool day as my sister-in-law and I crossed the Embarcadero, the broad boulevard that runs along San Francisco’s eastern waterfront, to reach Market St. and wait for a streetcar. The Brighton car wasn’t in sight, which was fine with me – as Mark Twain notoriously didn’t say, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Standing in 55-degree air, I thought that whoever had authored the sentiment had been spot on.So, thankfully, we drew an enclosed PCC “torpedo,” a green-and-white-liveried car, No. 1055, from Philadelphia. As soon as the double doors in front winged open to let us in, I could see my sister-in-law’s eyes widen. She had been born in 1941 and clearly remembered cars like this.
We took a seat about halfway back, fitting into old seats whose cushioning had been contoured by countless tushies before us. We were eager to partake of the twin visual feasts of Market St.’s sights and the faces of excited people as they boarded.The driver clanged the bell and eased back the hand control that engaged the old PCC’s electric motors. The combination of whine and whoosh that streetcars make as they accelerate, something you never forget, nudged us back into our seats. All these years later and this car still could step smartly off the line. Soon we were clack-clacking down Market, riding in a metal cloud, gazing out at the street’s tumult of shoppers, bike messengers, careerists, tourists, vendors and street people.Market St. is San Francisco’s boulevard of dreams and disappointments in one. As the city’s main drag (named after Philadelphia’s most important arterial) it has always been the focus of boosters’ efforts to build a grand avenue that would amaze and astonish Parisians and New Yorkers. If an instant city 3,000 miles on the other side of a mostly empty continent could build a great thoroughfare, they reasoned, flanked by soaring office towers, fine hotels and posh emporia, what else might it do?
But San Francisco’s innate raffishness always managed to foil the dreamers’ attempts at gentility. Over the decades, for every block on Market St. that boasted fine buildings and tony addresses, there were other blocks distinguished by their flophouses, bargain-bin five and dimes, sweatshops and the dingy second-floor offices of private eyes and lawyers who had lingered over one drink too many in their lives.But the profane and the sublime made for one jumping thoroughfare. During World War II, Market St, was an all-night avenue, with tens of thousands of servicemen, teenagers and fun-seekers thronging the street’s bars and movie houses. The greatest of them all, the palatial “Fabulous Fox Theater,” was the West Coast flagship of the 20th Century Fox Studios theater chain, and considered by many architectural historians to be the finest movie theater ever built in the U.S.The Fox could hold 4,300 people. It was so grand it featured an onsite hospital, nurseries for lactating moms and ushers decked out in elaborate uniforms with epaulets and gold braid. (In 1963, the same year that Penn Station in New York was destroyed and dumped into the East River, the Fox was razed and replaced with a residential high-rise so soulless and ugly that most people wince and look away from it whenever they see it.)
There are still ugly things about the street, though it manages to make you overlook them with its energy. For instance, in the 1970s, after San Francisco dug up Market St. to build a subway and then re-covered it, it decided to tart up the newly asphalted street by paving its sidewalks with bricks. An internationally renowned landscape architect somehow thought that red brick was an appropriate material for a heavily walked street. Thirty years and tens of thousands chipped, cracked and gum-smothered bricks later, the idea still stinks. Fortunately, though, most people don’t look at their feet on Market St. and they just pretend that the bricks aren’t there.In its heyday, Market St. boasted four railroad tracks. The two outside lines accommodated streetcars run by the city-owned Municipal Railway while the private Market Street Railway operated the inner two. Prior to that, when it was possible to reach huge stretches of the city via cable cars, Market St. had several “slots,” the narrow openings through which the cars would extend grippers to clutch the miles-long cables that ran underground. Once the grippers glommed onto the perpetually moving cables, the cars would be pulled along for the ride.Referring to the cable car lines, pre-1906 earthquake San Franciscans called the great warehouse and manufacturing district below Market St. “South of the Slot.” These days the more common expression is “SoMa” (South of Market), but you can still occasionally hear old-timers calling it “south of the slot.”The streetcar emerges from the shadows of lower Market St.’s skyscraper canyon and passes the Palace Hotel, one of the city’s most treasured landmarks. The seven-story building, erected in 1875, for a time was the biggest building west of the Mississippi, and certainly the largest hotel. It was from the Palace that a shaken Enrico Caruso emerged on the morning of April 18, 1906, after the great San Francisco earthquake, proclaiming as he fled that he would never return the apparently doomed city – a promise he kept. It was also here in 1923 that scandal-plagued President Warren Harding died from a heart attack.
Sheraton Corp. bought the Palace years ago and insisted that because it now owned the property that it had the right to insist that everybody call it the Sheraton Palace. But nobody over the age of four calls it that, any more than locals called Candlestick Park “3Com Park” after a got-bucks dot-com company decided to buy its way into public consciousness in the late 90s.We soon approach Powell St., where, the plan goes, we’ll catch the cable car. But I’ve been watching my sister-in-law ever since we boarded the “torpedo.” Her body language tells me she likes the feel of the old seats, and her constant head turning – to look out onto the street and sidewalks, and to observe and smile at people who are excited to be onboard – tells me the cable cars might wait.I’m right. She sees the long line of people waiting, their faces blank, if not glum, and makes her choice. “Let’s come back later,” she tells me, as the streetcar slips past the intersection. “Maybe there will be fewer people then,” she mutters to herself unconvincingly.Now we’re in Market St.’s other-side-of-the-tracks stretch. The people here are not as prosperous as the ones downtown, and the signs on the storefronts are loud and unsubtle: SALE! SALE! VENTA! VENTA!; XXX Tapes Here; Oficina de Dentista de Credito; Chinese-American Food To Go. As rough at the edges as the neighborhood is, the facades of the five and six-story buildings from the 1920s show some fine lines. A little bit of thoughtful refurbishing will someday restore them to their previous proud role as offices for thriving small companies.We ride the line out past the Zuni Café, a local favorite that some say makes the best roast chicken in California, then past the U.S. Mint, a hulking gray fortress that sits atop a little rise, as though basking in an aura of being slightly above it all.
The cars run all the way to the Castro, the old Irish working-class neighborhood that in the 1970s became an internationally famous gay enclave. As gays won increasing social acceptance and began moving out to the suburbs in search of lawns and detached homes, the Castro’s reputation for good shopping, easygoing ways and cultural amenities made it a magnet for straight singles and families. Though the neighborhood still has a large gay presence, it’s on its way to becoming a quintessentially mixed San Francisco neighborhood.(One of the Castro’s most endearing institutions is the movie theater of the same name, a Mecca for movie buffs who like to see restored classics, especially silent films from the 1920s that are accompanied by an uncannily good organist who plays the music that was specifically scored for them all those years ago. It doesn’t hurt that most of the people who attend the Castro are savvy movie buffs who get the inside jokes of almost every flick ever made.)My sister-in-law never did take a cable car ride. The Muni’s perpetual Streetcar Festival had quietly turned her head. She later asked me if our ride on the torpedo was better than what she would have experienced on a cable car. I told her the think of it like going out with a hankering for a rib eye steak and deciding instead at the last second to have the superb grilled salmon you see other diners enjoying. Is salmon better than steak? Nah. Sometimes you’re just in the mood for fish.
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