Cable Car Carnival

By Lucius Beebe

Originally published in 1951, this is a richly illustrated paean to San Francisco’s cable cars dating from the years when they were in jeopardy and were eventually saved (though not entirely) through the efforts of activist citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787204638

Lucius Beebe

LUCIUS MORRIS BEEBE (December 9, 1902 - February 4, 1966) was an American author, gourmand, photographer, railroad historian, journalist, and syndicated columnist. Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a prominent Boston family, he attended both Harvard University and Yale University, where he contributed to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1926. He published several books of poetry before becoming a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Telegram, and the Boston Evening Transcript. He was also a contributing writer to many magazines such as Gourmet, The New Yorker, Town and Country, Holiday, American Heritage, and Playboy. In 1950, Beebe and his long-time friend and partner, photographer Charles Clegg, moved from New York City to Virginia City, Nevada, where he and Clegg co-wrote the “That Was the West” series of historical essays for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper, a fabled 19th century newspaper that had once been the employer of Mark Twain, which the pair relaunched in 1952. Beebe wrote over 35 books, dealing primarily with railroading and café society. Many of his railroad books were written with his long-time companion Charles Clegg. Beebe died in 1966 at the age of 63 of a sudden heart attack at his winter home in Hillsborough, California. He was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1992.

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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CABLE CAR CARNIVAL

BY

LUCIUS BEEBE

AND

CHARLES CLEGG

POWELL STREET OPEN CAR

1902 POPULAR FOR THE SUNDAY TRIP TO GOLDEN GATE PARK. 1906

OMNIBUS LINE COMBINATION CAR

1889 THE LAST OF OLD LINES TO BE GRANTED A FRANCHISE. 1901

POWELL STREET CABLE CAR

1888 IN OPERATION TODAY, THIS LINE IS A DESCENDANT OF THE FERRIES & CLIFF HOUSE RAILWAY, THE POWELL STREET RAILWAY, UNITED RAILROADS, AND THE MARKET STREET RAILWAY.

JEARY STREET DUMMY AND CAR

1880 THIS LINE OPERATED AFTER THE FIRE UNTIL 1912, WHEN IT WAS REBUILT AS AN ELECTRIC LINE. 1906

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 8

FOREWORD 9

THE SETTING 11

GETTING A GRIP 22

FRENZIED FINANCE 35

CABLE CAR CARNIVAL 47

HILL OF THE NABOBS 82

FOLKLORE 98

CABLE CAR WAR 114

APPENDIX 131

DIRECTORY OF CABLE CAR LINES 134

TRACK GAUGES 135

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 137

FOREWORD

The genius of the cable car, in the classic meaning of the word: i.e., the titular spirit of a place or being, is the genius of San Francisco. Although cable cars flourished briefly elsewhere in the land, their native habitat is San Francisco and a cable car in Chicago or Kansas City is as out of place as one of Boston’s celebrated swan boats would be anywhere save in its proper Public Garden bounded by Charles and Arlington Streets.

In a grandiose moment San Francisco selected as its heraldic emblem the phoenix rising from the ashes, although, as the most combustible of American municipalities, an Amoskeag steam fire engine would have seemed equally appropriate. But better than either of these 4-11 alarm symbols, had the town’s civic herald been possessed of an authentic sense of fitness, would have been the image which to the world at large is the quintessential expression of San Francisco’s altogether admirable individualism, a cable car nosing abruptly over the profile of one of its incomparable hills. After all, has not the adjacent state of Nevada incorporated into its Great Seal the image of the once fragrant Virginia & Truckee Railroad as it spanned Gold Canyon in the days of the Big Bonanza?

It has seemed to the authors of this brief chronicle that in the story of San Francisco’s cable cars the mere factual record of events and institutions is not enough. There are several recognized source books concerned for the evolution, flowering and gradual decline of the cables, their philosophy, economic structure and mechanical detail. What interests the authors more than the mere existence of an engaging and characteristic type of transportation is some glimpse of the times and people it served, the institutions with which it was coeval and the part it played in the lives, imaginations, habits and manners of the people who rode it.

Alone and in a vacuum the cable car is interesting enough as a venture into the realm of transcendental transport. Integrated to the pattern of San Francisco during the splendid era which saw its rise, it is possessed of a compelling fascination and heart-warming intimacy.

It is with apologies, therefore, to the tractive force, cylinder dimension and drawbar pull school of railroad aficionado, that we commend this book to the even more numerous readers to whom the fact of San Francisco itself must always be a dominant article of faith and the cable car its native manifestation and most distinguishing symbol.

There are numerous collectors of the lore and legend of the grip, but the repository of almost limitless resources of photographs and anecdote to whom the authors applied themselves most fruitfully is Roy Graves of San Francisco whose archives in such matters are as bottomless as his generosity in their disposition. Uncle Roy is the repository, spiritual heir and grand old man combined of the San Francisco cables and, like the cables, is himself a reminder of the city’s unique synthesis of mature urbanity and perennial youth.

Another source, less venerable than Mr. Graves, but dynamic to a degree, was Mrs. Hans Klussmann, to whom all good San Franciscans may be grateful that today there is a single grip in operation on their storied hills. Without her forceful offices the sterile and dreary forces of economy and what passes for progress would long since have done away with what is at once San Francisco’s most valuable tradition and most valuable—indeed priceless—tourist attraction.

Others who have been generous with their historical resources and to whom the authors never turned without gratification of their least necessity were Ted Wurm, Brian Thompson, Alvin Graves and Audrey Thompson of the editorial staff of the publishers of this book; Mrs. Rogers Parratt of the California Historical Society; Herb Caen of The Examiner; Robert O’Brien of The Chronicle; Jack MacDowell of the Call Bulletin; and Jerry Wickland and Miss Katharine Harroun of the Wells Fargo History Room.

Still others to whom the authors are indebted are Gilbert Kneiss of the Western Pacific Railroad and the ranking authority on the railroads of the old West; J. J. DeMoor of the California Street Cable Railroad Company; and Dr. J. O. Haman, president of the same institution; Frederic Shaw, San Francisco architect, author and cartographer of note for his cable car map and scale drawings of cable cars; and the invaluable Evelyn Curro, court painter of the cables and their most distinguished portrait artist, for permission to use the plates of her "Annual Americana Calendar for 1951’ for our end papers.

To these we extend our most distinguished thanks and the wish that the cable cars may never in our time cease to roll past their personal or metaphorical doorways.

LUCIUS BEEBE

CHARLES CLEGG

John Piper’s House

Virginia City, 1951.

THE SETTING

THERE WERE MANY PROPERTIES of the San Francisco of the closing decades of the nineteenth century which might have been selected as the hallmarks or symbols of the city and its life. So gracious are their memories that they have become a part of the national consciousness and are incorporated in the American legend forever. A generation which never knew them still lives, by association as it were, amidst the glamorous enchantments of the city whose souvenirs probably lie closer to the American heart than those of any other metropolis. It dines in imagination among the rococo splendors of the first Palace, daringly situated on the south side of Market Street, bowing gravely across the storied dining room to Governor Leland Stanford or exchanging a genial time of day in the bar with White Hat McCarthy. It envisions in the mind’s eye San Francisco Bay as seen from the telegraph station located, with complete appropriateness, on the very top of Telegraph Hill, at a time when the sidewheel steamers of the Pacific Mail were still in operation and windjammers of a score of national registries were tied up along the Embarcadero.

It steps in fancy into the Montgomery Street counting rooms of Wells Fargo & Company, to post a letter by that incomparable firm’s own private mail, so vastly superior to the service of the government Post Office. It hoists a Pisco Punch with austere and gentlemanly Duncan Nicol in the Bank Exchange or pauses outside of the show window of Shreve and Company, to marvel