Cable cars staying in until it’s safer
San Francisco’s most recognizable icon, the cable car, likely won’t glide up Powell Street again until a coronavirus vaccine is widely available.
For now, the orange and burgundy beasts are gathering dust in a brick barn on Mason Street, where they’ve been hibernating since shelterinplace orders clamped down in midMarch.
“The cable cars require the operator to have the most direct interaction with passengers, and we have no way to protect our operators on cable cars,” transportation chief Jeffrey Tumlin said in an interview Friday. His Zoom background showed the interior of the California Street cable car, an homage that Tumlin described as “masochistic.”
As the virus rages on, officials at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency have opted to play it safe, running a skeletal system of buses with Plexiglas barriers to protect the operators. Officials also suspended the Art Deco streetcars because most of them lack partitions. It’s unclear when they might return, said spokeswoman Erica Kato.
While cable cars are not the most severe transit casualty of COVID19 — which might permanently eliminate 40 Muni bus lines — their disappearance shows how deeply the pandemic has unsettled city life.
Conceived in 1873 as a more hightech form of transit than the horsedrawn carriage, these vehicles carried workers over the city’s hills and into a blossoming Financial District. They starred in a 1940s culture war that pitted tradition against progress, when neighborhood activists scuttled a City Hallled effort to remove the ancient vehicles. In the ensuing years, San Francisco built a cheaper and more efficient bus net
work, yet the cable cars thrived as a tourist attraction. They drew 16,900 riders every weekday in fiscal year 2018.
In a city with a vast visual iconography, cable cars stand out, as much a fixture as the Painted Lady Victorians or the Transamerica Pyramid. The PowellHyde, PowellMason and California lines trundled each day from one historic landmark to another, cresting Nob Hill and delivering tourists to crooked Lombard Street or Ghirardelli Square. Every year a handful of gripmen and women compete in a bellringing contest.
Cassandra Griffin fondly remembers the time she stepped up to compete in 2016 — the first woman to ever jockey for the coveted bellringing title. She wore black heels with her uniform.
“I was just so happy to leave my print there for my kids,” Griffin said, recalling her soft, improvised melody that captivated onlookers, even though she didn’t win. Griffin grew up in San Francisco’s Ingleside neighborhood, and has worked as a cable car conductor for 19 years. By Muni standards, she’s a seasoned veteran: it takes five or six years to build enough seniority to enter the cable car division.
The symbolism of cable cars is so potent that at times they’ve become shorthand for San Francisco values. In 2017, the PowellHyde line appeared in a series of GOPfunded political ads in Georgia, which portrayed Democratic congressional candidate Jon Ossoff as a tool of San Francisco liberals.
“They’re such a part of our culture,” said John Konstin, coowner of the oldtimey Union Square restaurant John’s Grill, which sits a block and a half away from the Powell Street turntable. He has wistful memories of the cable cars despite their tragic history at the restaurant — legend has it that one of the original coowners, John Monaco, died after a cable car ran him over.
“That’s the way I want to go,” quipped the restaurant’s publicist, Lee Houskeeper, noting that “only a true San Franciscan” dies under the wheels of a rattling 9mileanhour contraption.
Cable cars do emerge occasionally, leaving the barn at 1201 Mason St. for maintenance runs.
Longtime gripman Rico Ellis said he’s sitting at home in the Ingleside waiting for the PowellHyde line to start running again. He worked on cable cars for 20 years and even started an R&B band with fellow operators.
Ellis vividly remembers his last run in March, from Market Street to Union Square, up Nob Hill and down to Hyde and Beach streets.
“I’m ready to come back,” he said.