Quaint Village of Condemned Street Railway Cars on the Ocean Beach. - San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco, California · Sunday, October 04, 1896
Quaint Village of Condemned Street Railway Cars on the Ocean Beach.
An Odd Collection of the Flotsam and Jetsam of the Sea in Robinson Crusoe's Backyard.
THERE'S a thriving little suburb half way between the Cliff House and the Ocean Side House. [The Ocean Side House was at what is now Great Highway and Ulloa St. - MF] As yet it is nameless, for it is only a quintet of houses, hugging the beach for protection and threatened sometimes with being swallowed by the drifting dunes. One never knows, after a night of wind, but what he may have to excavate his dwelling, as is the fashion at Pompeii and Herculaneum, or burrow out in Esquimau fashion with sand for snow. Uncertainty, they say, lends zest to life. Perhaps it is as spicy as variety. That is why the tent on the beach is so popular.
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Three years ago Colonel Dailey took a deserted real estate office for his cabin home. He excavated his front yard and paved it with pounded shells, with the paths traced by big ones. That was to make it certain that the front door would not be hermetically sealed every gusty morning.
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| Charles E. Daily in an 1897 - 1898 San Francisco City directory |
The Colonel was not at all well when he became monarch of all he surveyed. He was troubled with insomnia, and at midnight he used to wander up and down the beach with a lantern and a basket in search of treasure trove. He always found it. The Colonel no longer has insomnia, but he still walks the beach. Now he goes in the early morning, coming back with dripping baskets overflowing with the fruits of old ocean.
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| Guide Map Of The City of San Francisco, 1897, Southern Pacific Company, georeferenced on a modern map, showing where Colonel Dailey lived at "cor 49th Av and H," now La Playa St. & Lincon Way |
There is a fence around the cabin built entirely of cocoanut husks washed on this untropical shore. One could imagine them the brown scalps of South Sea islanders, strung by the hundreds - queer rosaries of a pagan faith.
Over the entrance to the cabin - the back way - hangs a yoke for two horses, with dangling iron chains and rusty rings and horseshoes. Outside is a pile of drift wood, bleached skeletons of ships, wood, white with the salt death, light and dry as chips - the very best fire wood in the world, after its bath in the spray. One can almost hear the subdued crackling of the flames as one passes the heap, piled high in Indian wigwam fashion. There is the possibility of an infinite number of cheerful winter fires in this comical mound.
Robinson Crusoe's back yard is a cheerful place. There are numberless sleepy, stretching cats, queerly mottled as though life on the beach made them different from your ordinary land cat. On top of the drift wood pile a green parrot talks and sings and weeps and says silly little ditties to the waves, which are too busy with their own chorus to stop and listen.
The back yard is paved with matting; some hardy plants and sugar maples, red as an Eastern autumn, grow in the sand. There are cabbages and onions sprouting, and everything, except the vegetation, came from father ocean, who is almost as bountiful a provider as mother earth.
The inclosure is very like the old curiosity shop. Colonel Dailey saves everything, though he has a wife, instead of a man Friday to help him pick up.
Part of the cabin is flotsam and jetsam, too. There is a black and gold bit of the hull of the City of New York, one of her cabin doors, bits of nameless ships wrecked on a far shore, pieced together in a mariner's crazy quilt. At first Mrs. Dailey cooked out of doors, with a chimney of clay, but the winds blew her pots and kettles away unless they were ballasted, so the Colonel built a kitchen around the stove, reversing the ordinary process. Then he dug a cellar, not for wine, but for a dining-room. He had a good deal of difficulty with the sand, which would cave, but he has trained it now, and it behaves very well.
In the living-room the Daileys have stored their treasures. They have all sorts of queer bottles that came in on the waves. None of them ever had life histories or stories of shipwreck or wills in them, but their materials and designs give them interest. There are long-necked, round-bellied glass bottles from Italy, and tall, pale green ones, reminiscent of the fatal green devils, from France. Some squatty things are from Germany. Chianti bottles, cloaked and hooded, have come bobbing in. All are treasured because of their long journey through the waves, for nobody knows how many times these travelers mounted to the crest of a wave, then receded, now forward, then far backward, laughed at and tormented by the waves, until at last they found a haven in the warm white sand.
Star fishes stud the walls, with bits of coral, filmy mosses and dried kelp in strands and bunches like herbs in a New England garret. Here is a huge sponge, flat as a toadstool and far bigger, which washed to the Colonel's feet one day. An old revolver, clumsy and warlike, a few fine pipes, an assortment of hats from, broad straws to Tam o' Shanters - all washed up - a pair of ocean-given opera glasses - these complete the mural decorations. Above is a freize of kelp, whispering hoarsely as a breath of air rattles it, and below canaries in a sunny window.
The bunks are under the ceiling, reached by a white-painted ladder and flight of steps. The ladder leads to the Colonel's loft, and he draws it up after him - more and more like Robinson Crusoe. Here this Alexander Selkirk of the beach has his books, and here he is going to write an autobiography, with the sweep of the ocean as an inspiration.
Regrettable it is, but the truth must be told. There is nothing at all in that terrible warning about houses built on the sand. Sand makes about as good a foundation as other things.
So much for the original squatter.
In course of time it occurred to the man who owns the land along the ocean boulevard that other people might like the moan of the sea and the salt tang in the air. So he caused to be hauled a number of deserted street cars, once the property of the "octopus." These cars are rented, and all four have found tenants...
The first one is the wayside Inn of the Falcon Club - a company of bicyclists composed of seven married ladies. The windows are curtained with blue and white denim in delft designs. Inside the long seats are upholstered and covered with Japanese matting with a valence of blue and white cloth, like your grandmother's bed. There are pictures of the sea and of the wheel between each window, blue and white matting on the floor, lamps fixed to the walls and a little porch with a sea view in front.
At the back is a kitchen, with a lean-to for a wheelhouse. In the kitchen are three coal oil stoves, sufficient to boll and brew and bake for twenty-five. Turkeys have been roasted there, and the savory smells, blown to Colonel Dailey's parrot, plunges that emotional bird into thoughts too deep for tears.
Every Sunday morning the club and the seven husbands appertaining thereto breakfast in "Our Car." Last week they gave a whist party there, and last Thursday a New England dinner was preparing in the kitchen. For menu there was the good old boiled dish, succotash, a delicious salad and a dessert of apple pie, sharp cheese and black coffee.
The car is admirably adapted for entertaining. There is not much room down the sides, but there is a front door and a back door, and you can reach anything by a little run around the house.
Sometimes the club women, after a run, take siestas on the soft, long seats. Sometimes they use the car for a bathing machine, and, choosing a moment when the beach is deserted, watch their chance for a delightful wade.
Another car is Colonel Dailey's "Annex." This he opened at the request of the wheel people, and he dispenses fruit, sandwiches, crackers, cigarettes, chewing gum and soft drinks.
Judge George P. Gough keeps bachelor's hall in a red car at the end of the row, and Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mr. and Mrs. White, two ladies from the Falcon Club, have taken the fourth car cottage. It used to run down Valencia street to the ferries in ante-cable days. Now it is used for observation purposes and it has a glorious view of the "sunset gates, open wide, afar in the crimson west."
Behind the car are two bedrooms - one blue, one pink - and a buff kitchen for al-fresco affairs. All the walls are made of paper matrices, with matting for ceilings. It's a quaint and dainty place.
But, best of all, the inhabitants of the place love it when storms beat and howl. When the ocean is lashed to fury and the spray dashes high, then the cottagers, snug and warm in their firmly anchored cars, watch the ocean, ugly as a caged beast, but fine and fierce, too.
Then Colonel Dailey in a seaman's great coat, with cap at a nautical angle and a stubby pipe, goes forth and finds. These are the times when shells like rose petals and sea anemones come in, and it pays to comb the beach.
It makes one feel like a wrecker stripping the dead.
Then is the coast at its best and the beach-dwellers behind their barricade are at their happiest. The smoke comes down the chimney discouraged and the houses rock in the storm, but nobody cares.
"Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather," which applies to
the strip of land along the margin of the Pacific as well as to that leafy
place - the forest of Arden.
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