 How many of you took public transit to get here tonight? Good. You're part of a San Francisco tradition that extends back to before the Civil War, a very long time. Let's take a look at how transit built our city. Early San Francisco focused on connections with the world because there was very little around the immediate city. It was a maritime place. The first ferry building seen here at the foot of Market Street emphasized faraway destinations. You can see some of the, can't really read it here, but it says Chicago, New York, Boston. Imagine getting on a ferry and thinking, well, I'm going to Boston. You're actually going to the Transcontinental Railroad. You can go to San Jose on a boat and land in Alviso. But closer to home, people needed housing in the fast-growing city. And the early buildable land near downtown was gone within 25 years of the gold rush. So to grow, the city needed transit. It started with steam. The first rail transit was actually a steam dummy that looked something like this on Market Street downtown, started at what's now the Palace Hotel. Later, this very unit was used to power an extension of cable service from Valencia to Castro Street on Market. This is taken near Castro and Market, early 1880s. The problem with steam is it's very loud. It's very dangerous. Imagine running a steam engine on your main street. I imagine they had Nimbis back then, too. And I imagine there were quite a few protests. The first posh neighborhoods in Old San Francisco were within a walking distance of downtown. South Park was the best known. But as flatland filled up, the hills beckoned. Andrew Hallity invented the cable car in 1873 on Clay Street. But it was soon eclipsed by the California Street line two blocks south, built by Leland Stanford, to reach his mansion atop Knob Hill. That's said to be Adolf Sutro standing there, the letter to the mayor of San Francisco. And this gent in the top hat has been identified as Mark Twain on a visit to San Francisco. So famous people rode the cable cars even then. So Stanford built this line in part to reach the mansions of he and his plutocrat friends on top of Knob Hill. And the private transit wars were underway. It's hard to believe, but cable cars were once the dominant rail technology, not just on hills. They were twice as fast as horse cars. And they had fewer emissions. So London, New York, Los Angeles, dozens of cities used them within 15 years of Hallity's invention of them as the primary transportation lines on flat ground. And so besides opening Knob Hill, Russian Hill, and even Telegraph Hill for development, cable cars first opened Hayes Valley, the Western Edition, Mission District, and Noe Valley to development. By 1891, San Francisco had the world's most extensive cable network. And more than any other street, Market Street guided the direction of development in San Francisco. Wide, it split two city grids. Jasper O'Farrell created really the perfect main stem for the city, roughly following the old Mission Road, which Len went from the Portsmouth Square to Mission Dolores. It connected the ferry terminal to every part of the city at that time. Market Street gave its name to no fewer than four transit-related organizations, starting in the 1880s and lasting until 1944. Today, the nonprofit organization Market Street Railway that I had is named in honor of those Market Street Railways. This is one of my favorite photos. It's so evocative. This hole in the ground here is the old Lucky Baldwin Hotel, which burned in a spectacular fire in 1898, I believe. This was taken in 1900. The flood building, which we still have today and which coincidentally houses our nonprofit's offices, was built on this site in 1994. And the framing survived the earthquake. What's really interesting about this, Market Street was home to all kinds of parades, especially in those years. And what we have here, although you can't really see it that well in this slide, unfortunately, is a circus coming up Market Street. You see the circus wagons here. You even see right down there in the corner a group of elephants. This was taken about 1900. And in six years from now, everything on Market Street would change. The private transit operations like Market Street Cable Railway Company provided solid middle-class employment to men, and they were all men. And they actually made a profit, even with a 5 cent fare. Records show that San Franciscans of the day considered a job as a cable car gripman or conductor or later as a streetcar motorman to be not only respectable, but in some cases even prestigious, almost the captain of one ship. Workers could generally afford to live in the city itself and the many working neighborhoods that now are skyrocketing in price. Houses were built to house working class folks like the transit employees. Later, the successor to this company, Market Street Cable Railway, also called Market Street Railway, built actual housing for its employees in this neighborhood right next to what is now the Geneva Car House at Geneva and San Jose Avenues. Those houses are gone, by the way. Market Street was also the dividing line between New and Old San Francisco. It was a dividing line for transit as well. Cable cars absolutely ruled Market Street until April 18, 1906. They were obsolete by then and been replaced in every other major city already by electric streetcars because electric streetcars were twice as fast and then the cable cars in terms of maximum speed and cheaper to operate because you didn't need the exhaustive underground machinery that it takes to run a cable system, which also requires very high maintenance. In San Francisco, the city beautiful movement, which opposed any overhead wires downtown, had kept streetcars successfully off market. Some said put in an underground wire like they had in Washington, DC, but the transit company rejected that as too expensive. So there was a stalemate. After the earthquake, there were some well-placed payments from the transit company to certain public officials, many of whom went to jail later. And San Francisco got streetcars onto Market Street. And San Francisco very quickly became a streetcar city. This is a fascinating picture that we found a few years ago in the San Francisco Public Library main branch in their San Francisco history room, which if you've never been there is a wonderful place to visit and while away in afternoon. Nobody knew what this was. It looked like an overcrowded streetcar, which of course it is. But what people didn't recognize was that this was the very first run of the very first car of the very first municipally-owned transit system in America. In that light, this is a truly historic streetcar, a picture indeed. The man in the motorman's cap there is Mayor Sonny Jim Rolfe, who personally piloted that first car, car number one, which our organization has helped preserve and still runs on the F Market and Warf's line on occasion, has been fully restored. It is a Smithsonian quality artifact, except that you can actually really ride it instead of just look at it, which makes it unique in all of American transit. This streetcar, and others like it, opened the Geary Street service of the municipal railway of San Francisco at a time when public utilities were really unheard of in terms of transit. Private companies, as I mentioned, ran transit systems, and they ran them for profit. The city's idea was to run it as a public service, whereas some private transit companies, like the Sutro Railroad, was built primarily to serve Adolf Sutro's properties at the Cliff House and what became Sutro Baz, Land's End. And others in other cities, like Sacramento, streetcars were run by the electric utility, in this case PG&E. And in San Francisco, the transit agency that was dominant at that time, Transit Company, United Railroads, was owned by a conglomerate in Chicago that also owned a lot of other electric and water utility companies. It was seen as something to make profit with. But the city had different ideas. Even though it was called socialistic by some, they pressed ahead. Muni's first guiding spirit, I think it's fair to say, was the city engineer, Michael Moriso Shaughnessy, MM, as he was called by most people, or just the chief. He had laid out an aggressive expansion plan for Muni with the help of a consultant named Beyond Arnold to compete more effectively with this behemoth, the private United Railroads. The first focus was to provide links to the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition which was being built on reclaimed land in what's now the Marina District. The Stockton Tunnel, shown here, was built primarily for streetcars. And it carried the original F line, F Stockton line, from Stockton and Market to the Fairgrounds. And it became a real tool for development of the Marina District later on. Muni's Twin Peaks Tunnel, opened in 1918, and brought the entire southwest quadrant of the city within commuting distance of downtown. From Castro, and here we are at Market and Castro, this building is still there. This is a 1935 photograph. From Castro to the Sand Dunes, which was the other end called West Portal, it was more than two miles. It was the longest recar in the world at the time. Before that was built, if you wanted to get from downtown out to what's now what we call the Sunset and Parkside Districts, you came all the way down Mission Street on the old 14 Mission Streetcar, which stopped at every block and ran right past the side of this library. And or you would take the 12 Ocean, which came down as far as Ocean Avenue, passed here, turned up Ocean, and went all the way out Slope Boulevard to the beach. It took a long time to get downtown. The Twin Peaks Tunnel enabled me to open three new lines, the K, the M, and here we have the L at 48th and Terraval. Those tracks are still there, by the way. They're the oldest original tracks still in San Francisco. The L line was switched to go down to the zoo in the 1930s, but our nonprofit fought to keep the original tracks as an emergency. We're very proud that at least something of the original system is still here. In other cities, you would have private transit companies would build something like this, but only if they owned all the real estate around the extension so they could profit from the development. The city said, no, we're going to just put the line in and operate it, and then we'll leave it to private builders. Henry Dolger is one many of you know and others who built out the Sunset and Parkside districts in the subsequent decades. The streetcars were great, but you needed a certain volume of passengers to justify them. And it was too expensive to build streetcar tracks. Muni tried buses starting in 1918, as you see here. This is the corner of Tenth and Fulton. That house is still there, by the way, as are most of these. The streetcar has come up Geary and turned up Tenth on the old A line, where it terminated, and it met the bus, which then took it across the park and into the Sunset district before Muni built the N. O'Shaughnessy was determined to extend the tracks straight through the park. This was not intended to just be a permanent terminal of the line. They wanted the streetcar tracks to go right by what's now the bandstand through the side of the old 1894 World's Fair in the middle of the park, where the De Young and the Academy are now, and then up 9th Avenue. But he was the irresistible force, and he ran into an immovable object named John McLaren. And the fight was legendary and monumental, and McLaren won. The streetcars stayed out of the park. These new streetcar lines funneled millions of riders every year onto Market Street. Muni's growing network needed its own set of tracks on Market Street, which it laid down next to its private competitors. The constant rumble of the heavy streetcars over this quartet of tracks earned the name Roar of the Four. And oh, yes, the wealthy few who could afford automobiles at that time were also starting to squeeze onto market as well, as you can see in this view at Lauders Fountain in 1922. And that is the traffic cop kind of doing nothing, standing in a box. In the afternoon commute, up to 800 streetcars took the loop around the ferry building, coming downtown to drop off people in the afternoon to catch the ferries and picking them up in the morning to take them downtown to work. It was an incredible activity. And it was at its height in 1930, the ferry terminal because of the combination of the boats and the streetcars was the second busiest transit terminal in the world to only London's Charing Cross Station. Now, here's the same scene 18 years later. The streetcars haven't changed at all. Investment in equipment was never a strong suit of either Muni or its private competitors. You see, the automobiles, they're still lined up, but they're newer. And there were more of them than even 1922 because more and more people could afford to buy their own. Muni's private competitor, Market Street Railway, in those days, had the inside tracks on market. And they painted their cars bright white on the front and actually put lights on the front as a safety feature, which they managed to patent. Muni's streetcars, on the other hand, were battleship gray, literally, and were very hard to see. And there are some who believe that that accounted where they competed head to head for a differential in ridership. But by 1940, these streetcars were getting very old. Muni's first group of streetcars was more than a quarter century old. Many Market Street Railway streetcars were older than that. And Market Street Railway itself, as a financial entity, was crumbling. At the height of the streetcar era, they ran to every corner of town. They ran right through upscale neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and far off corners of the city like Visitation Valley. This is very close to where I live. It's the Cal Palace, freshly painted and brand new, seen from Arlita Avenue. This streetcar was headed from the county line, as they used to call it, all the way up to the ferry building via Kearney Street. And then it went over Broadway. And then it came back down to get to the ferry. It was a very long line. And it got increasingly expensive to operate. In the 1930s, Market Street Railway tried single operator streetcars. Instead of having a motorman and a conductor, they combined the functions. The unions took them to court and won. And they were forced to put that second platform operator on the cars. And that cost them an awful lot of money. And they really ceased to become financially viable about this point. Here's the Market Street Railway map from 1939. I know it's hard to see, but you all know what the city's contours are. The solid red lines are streetcars. Here's where we are, right here. And the 14 went down as far as Daily City, top of the hill. And beyond that, there was a line called the 40, which was an interurban line. It started at 5th on Market, came all the way out Mission Street, all the way down to San Mateo. On what are now the tracks, used to be able to see the tracks until just a few years ago at the intersections of El Camino Real and Colma, which was sort of the last remnant. But generally, once you got to South City, they ran parallel to what's now the Caltrain tracks, all the way from Milbury to San Mateo. And it was too much for a nickel, so they charged a minimum of a dime to ride all the way down there. But the interesting thing about this was this was the Market Street Railway map didn't show any of the Muni lines. If you got a Muni map, it didn't show any of the Market Street Railway lines. And of course, we didn't have phone apps, and next Muni, or all that other stuff. So if you wanted to get around town, you had to carry both maps. This photo captures the essence of the unlevel playing field between San Francisco's two primary transit companies. This is Carl Street in what's now Col Valley, one of a few places where the two companies actually shared tracks for a couple of blocks. The N Judah on the left here has just come out of the sunset tunnel where it's made a speedy trip from Market and DeBose. It may not seem like that if any of you were N riders now, but believe me, it was actually quite fast back then. And it went under Buena Vista Park, the six-line street car, now the six-part NASA's trolley bus, owned by Market Street Railway, wasn't allowed to use Muni's tunnel, city forbade it. So it has the meander over the hill and go downtown, and it's just a whole lot slower. So if the fare is the same, you're basically going to pick the faster car. At the end of 1944, after repeated attempts to get voters in San Francisco to approve the purchase of Market Street Railway, which was, as I say, financially destitute, voters finally approved in 1944 acquisition of Market Street Railway. And Muni took it over late that year. When they did, they took stock of their acquisition. The heavy ridership in World War II coupled with the really inability to afford proper maintenance of the cars had driven most of its competitor street cars into the ground. On a couple, one of these end platforms, like you see here, actually fell off while the car was moving. There was a lot of duplication, also, of service. Like here, Playland at the beach, you had the seven, which ran across the edge of the park down to Lincoln Way, and then went downtown to Haight and downtown via Haight. You had the five, which ran in on Fulton. Those were both Market Street Railway lines. Then you had to be Geary, which was Muni's heaviest line, which also reached Playland by Cabrillo at the end of its run, and then Balboa and Geary. Beyond those problems of the cars, the track and power supply were also worn out, and there was no money to replace any of it. Meanwhile, a lot of veterans were coming home. Many were starting to move to the suburbs. The GI Bill helped immensely with that. And that meant, in turn, more automobiles coming into and out of the city. Commuters, in other words. And streetcars already went just about everywhere they could in San Francisco. They can't climb hills as steep as cable cars. So in places like Diamond Heights, there in the background, cried out for development, only a bus could really do that job. This is the end of the 11 line, which ran down 24th Street through Noe Valley. Speaking of cable cars, the postwar passion for modernization almost snagged the cable cars as well. And I think many of you already know this story. One of the best known stories in the city's transit history is how Mayor Roger Lapham, that's him with the grin, not for long, tried to junk the Powell Street cable cars only a couple years after Muni took them over from Marcus Street Railway. And of course, it's history now that Frito Klusman was the spearhead of what was really the city's first woman-led political campaign, and it was heavily dominated by women, to say, no, that's not going to work. We're not going to go for that. Voters passed a measure to protect the Powell Street cable cars, which these buses, one of which our organization has preserved, were bought to replace. And never got to run on their intended line, thank goodness. But in the same election that saved the cable cars, voters passed a very large bond issue for the day to modernize the rest of Muni, and involved converting a couple dozen of existing streetcar lines, including the 14 mission, by the way, to buses, mostly trolley buses. So by mid-century, most streetcars vanished from places San Francisco residents were used to seeing them, such as in front of City Hall, and replaced by buses. Many downtown streets became one way. Boulevard's and freeways were built, as we know, until San Franciscoans yelled stop a decade later. And we're still undoing some of that. One other note, San Francisco has always been a strong labor town. And as I mentioned, unions fought successfully for years to keep two crew members on each streetcar, even after other cities had converted to the streamlined modern so-called PCC streetcar, which is the kind you see on the F line on Market Street today. Conductors who didn't have to watch the road, because obviously there was a motorman to do that, often became favorites of their regular riders. One of them, in fact, even gained some international fame after the war by meeting and marrying 16 women, all at once, from his perch on the platform. His name was Francis Van Wee. But thanks to Chronicle Wider, Stan Deliplane, he became literally world famous, as the ding-dong daddy of the decar line. Although historic research shows he probably was actually working the 22 Fillmore, but that wasn't quite as alliterative. By 1952, the vast majority of the city's transit service had been converted to buses, and the remaining streetcar lines were under siege because of the cost of the two-person crews. Only the lines that used tunnels that were too narrow for buses, like the Twin Peaks Tunnel, looked safe. And even when Munich bought its first modern PCC streetcars, they, among only a handful of transit companies, insisted on, because of the strength of labor in this town, operating them with two operators. In 1954, those voters allowed modern streetcars to use a single operator, which took a lot of the financial pressure off Munich. And it's important to note today that until about 1950, Munich actually made an operating profit. There are people today who think, gee, there must be some lines that actually make a profit at Munich. Well, no line in the city makes a profit. They're all subsidized to varying degrees. And if, in my opinion, they hadn't changed that rule and allowed streetcars to have the same number of crew members as buses were allowed to have, one, we probably would have lost our remaining streetcar lines sooner or later. The single operator PCC streetcars, you see them here, soldiered on for another quarter century, even through construction of the long anticipated Market Street subway. I saw that picture earlier with that little modest portal coming up to Castro Street at Market, whereas if you looked at the other end of the Twin Peaks tunnel back then, you saw this monumental, beautiful portal. The reason the portal on Castro Street was so simple was because it was designed to be easily connected to a future Market Street subway. And there was a station called the Eureka Valley Station that was just inside the tunnel a few hundred feet only. By the time they got around to building the subway, they realized that's not going to be big enough. So they skipped that little station, which you can still see if you go through. You see the platforms if you go through on Munich Metro today. And they built a much bigger station under Castro Street, Castro on Market. And that necessitated this roller coaster of a connection. And if any of you happen to have taken that, that was really quite a ride to look down into the abyss at the window of your car. When the subway opened, it was basically considered to be the end of surface street cars on Market Street. The JKLM and N went into the subway. We got these new light rail vehicles from Boeing, which if any of you rode them, you know they never worked right. But there were some in this town that felt that surface street cars played an important role on Market historically. And they would be excellent circulators through the length of Market Street, relieved from their burden to carry people all the way to the outer ends of the city. So with help from the Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Diane Feinstein championed a demonstration project in 1983 called the Historic Trolley Festival that brought in street cars from around the world to run on the old tracks. It was a huge success, leading to the permanent F-line from Castro to the Wharf that continues the tradition of rail transit on Market that began before the Civil War. And today, the F-line is America's most popular traditional street car line. Barnon, it carries more than 23,000 riders a day. The vintage street cars still use reliable, traditional technology. They've been renewed over the years so that most of them were like new with decades of life left. The first group that was just restored, partially restored 20 years ago to open the F-line is now up for full restoration to have another 20, 25 years before they do it again, much like the cable cars are renewed. Our nonprofit support group, Market Street Railway, has 1,000 members. And we help Muni make the most of its historic street car assets. And we work on enhancing the cable cars as well. We wrote this book to tell you the full story of these museums in motion. And I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. I'd be glad to sign copies of the book. I can answer any questions you have about Muni, about our transit history, or whatever you'd like. And thank you very much for attending.