A City Of Cars - article about San Francisco's "Carville" - Pearson’s Magazine v5, #29, May 1898

Pearson’s Magazine v5, #29, May 1898 (England)

I recently wrote a post about "Wheelmen's Rest" and "Carville". I'd heard about Carville before - the little community out in the dunes of west San Francisco where the old horse-drawn trolleys from cities around the bay were abandoned, after the switch to electric cars, used as living quarters and vacation houses. This is near today's Beach Chalet and the west end of Golden Gate Park and the Zoo. I saw a few pages from Pearson's Magazine, an English magazine, on ebay, titled "A City of Cars" about Carville, and I hadn't seen these pictures or words in my internet searches, so I bought them and scanned them. Here they are. Carville thrived as a community, until it was burned on July 4th, 1913 to make way for developed housing. I'm a bit less interested in cable cars and San Francisco infrastructure, but maybe you are more interested in those things, or the view English people had of San Francisco in the 19th century. Merriden Howard wrote for various publications at the time. Outside Lands has a great post about Carville and a podcast episode about Cycler's Rest, near Carville.

A CITY OF CARS.

By Merriden Howard.

CARVILLE is on the Pacific Coast, close to the Golden Gate of San Francisco Harbour. It is one of those odd corners of the earth that seem to escape observation as successfully as if they were designed to avoid public scrutiny. In San Francisco itself there are hundreds of people who have never heard of the existence of Carville, who are quite ignorant of this curiosity in their immediate vicinity. It is exactly what the name implies—a City of Cars. Not a city in the English sense, certainly, but in California the title lacks a good deal of its English dignity.

It is easy to describe Carville in this way, but it does not convey much to one who has never seen such a place, and I doubt whether there is another of the same kind in the world. What is a City of Cars? Well, it is a town with streets (in the Californian sense) but no houses. The part which houses of some sort usually play in a town is taken by disused road-cars.

One is naturally surprised at first that anyone should prefer to live in an unwheeled car to occupying a rational house. But in reality one might as well be surprised that the owners of residential palaces on the banks of the Thames should voluntarily take up their abode in a house-boat. Besides, a dozen people or more can make themselves quite comfortable travelling together in a single Pullman car for seven or eight days; and the American roadcar is really commodious compared with an English tram.

Carville is the property of a well-known American millionaire, Mr. Adolph Sutro, who is famous, among other things, for having built quite close to this little town of his the biggest and most sumptuous swimming-bath in the world. The rent he asks for a car is only £1 a month, a mere bagatelle, and yet neither love nor money would buy one of these cars or the site on which it stands.

If a tenant requires to have the prospect of his house improved, it is a simple matter—the cars are merely supported on easily-erected wooden platforms. However, this facility cannot justly be urged as an advertisement for Carville, since even the big houses in San Francisco are shifted from one site to another: it is a matter of everyday occurrence to see a street blocked by a mansion being slowly drawn along to a new location.

Carville boasts a somewhat mixed society. Some of the cars are rented by rich people who use them merely as a Saturday to Monday resort, bringing their food and other necessaries with them; but, on the other hand, some belong to persons who live in them for the sake of economy, and also partly for the sake of the beautiful climate.

The surroundings to anyone but a Californian would hardly be attractive, for the cars are erected on a desolate stretch of billowy sand dunes, with rough scrub and occasional patches of rank grass. But then, to be sure, there is the Pacific close at hand, and Mr. Sutro's wonderful park always open to the public, while the location of Carville is really the neglected end of the most magnificent public property in the World—Golden Gate Park.

Car belonging to a ladies' cycling club.

Inside those cars belonging to wealthy tenants luxury abounds—and yet the most sumptuously-fitted of them all—that belonging to Mr. Wm. Coward—did not cost more than thirty pounds to furnish. Close to his car is another belonging to a fashionable ladies' cycling club a bicycle wheel jauntily placed on the roof as a sign. Yet even with this added attraction, the ominous notice “Cars to let” is always to be seen up against the city fence.

It must not be supposed that Carville is altogether out of the world. An electric railway runs from the Cliff House close by into San Francisco, a distance of rather less than six miles. And it is from San Francisco that Mr. Sutro obtains his cars. If the population of Carville were to increase by hundreds every week, I fancy there would be no difficulty in obtaining the necessary number of cars to accommodate them.

San Francisco is the first city in the world for street-cars. I have never seen there, as one may in Boston, a whole street blocked with cars as far as the eye can reach, as if there were half-a-dozen long railway trains creeping down the centre of the roadway; but when it comes to a calculation of the actual number of cars running in the streets, San Francisco is without a rival in America, or in any other country in the world.

The cable-car was invented for San Francisco, and practically every street has a line running down it. Where there are not cable-cars, there are electric cars, and here and there, looking very insignificant beside the others, one may see trams drawn by horses. But there are fewer horses in San Francisco than in any other city of its size. Such a thing as hailing a passing cab in the streets is altogether unknown. You can get cabs, but you have to order them beforehand from the livery stables, and there are plenty of places in the city where a horse could not take you.

San Francisco is built upon numberless hills—they were once sand-dunes like those of Carville; the greater number are too steep for a horse to travel over at any pace, and, as I have said, not a few are quite impassable to horses. In fact, it is only with the greatest difficulty that a human being can struggle up them afoot, and as to walking down them sedately, that is out of the question. You might just as well try to walk sedately down the roof of a house. Thus it comes about that grass may be seen growing down many of the principal thoroughfares in the city, and one or two of the sidestreets off Nob Hill—the fashionable quarter—would afford pasture for half-a-dozen cows if they could keep their feet long enough to lick up the herbage.

Market (the Americans have no time for Market Street—it would be an unpardonable waste of energy) is comparatively level, and there are four parallel lines of cars running up and down it. Most of the others—even the steep streets like California—have two lines, an up and a down.

A photograph showing how the cars are fixed in position.

It would be impossible, I fancy, to make anyone, who had never been to San Francisco, picture to themselves how precipitous many of the main thoroughfares are, or what they look like with the cars flying up and down them like flies on a window pane. That is one of the principal advantages of the cable-car—it runs as quickly up hill as it does down hill, and the sensation to anyone who is accustomed to driving behind horses is quite peculiar.

Most of the streets are practically a series of terraces, and resemble on a large scale a slip of a terraced lawn belonging to some country house. There is a long, steep slant, a few yards perfectly level, and then up again. These level intervals are caused by the intersection of transverse streets. The motion of a car as it negotiates them is something like that of a snake continually straightening out the clinks in its back.

The interior of a car.

The Clay Street cable line has a gradient of 1 in 6, the cars rising in the course of about a mile 300 yards above the level of their starting point. In Filmore Street the rise is 1 in 4, electricity as well as the cable system being employed to raise and lower the cars.

The cable system, practically unknown in England, is almost universal in the United States.

The cable, which is an endless wire-rope, runs from a vast drum in the power house along a series of little wheels laid beneath the street, and finally turns and comes back up another thoroughfare or on the opposite side of the same street. The pedestrian can catch sight of the rope whizzing along,

through a narrow slit between the two iron flanges which are like a third line laid between the two on which the wheels of the car run, but split down the centre.

To start a car, an instrument like the tongue of a fly shoots down through these flanges, and takes a grip of the cable. Thus the car bounds forward at full speed—the speed at which the cable is unceasingly running, generally in San Francisco about ten miles an hour. It seems dangerous enough at first, flying up and down these hill sides at such a pace with other cars cutting across the track at right angles every few hundred yards.

But at each important crossing a signaller is stationed with two flags and a whistle, and it is quite exceptional for a serious accident to occur. Indeed, travelling up and down the steepest hills at what seems a break-neck speed, the cars can always pull up within their own length.

Each car is provided with three brakes. At a signal to stop, the driver releases the grip from the cable, and with the same movement two little hands, as it were, catch on to the underside of the central steel rail. Simultaneously heavy brakes are applied to the wheels, while wooden blocks are also forced down into the lines. By these means a car can be held stationary at any angle and stopped practically instantaneously.

There are over 100 miles of cable-car line in San Francisco, constructed at a cost which in many cases has exceeded £24,000 a mile. The longest single cable-wire in the city is 30,000 feet in length.

It may be imagined that it is no small task to lay such a rope as this—merely to draw it through the street on its big drum needs a team of seventy horses! And yet such a cable will be worn out in five months.

Car riding is not an expensive amusement. I found you could go any distance in one direction through San Francisco or out into the suburbs for five cents (less than threepence), and an ingenious system of transfer tickets enables you to change from one line to another. The whole distance from Market to Carville—six miles of luxurious and rapid travelling—can be covered for this same five cents.

This alone, if inducements were required, ought to insure the popularity of the City of Cars.

A "street" in Carville.

Here's another article Merriden Howard wrote about "Singular Cycle Tricks", also in Pearson's Magazine, v3, June 1897: