There is no motor on a San Francisco cable car. There is a moving steel cable under the street, a slot between the rails, and a person holding a lever. Everything else is wood, brass and judgment.
The cable runs in a loop beneath the pavement at a constant 9.5 miles per hour. To move, the operator pulls the grip lever, which closes a clamp around the cable through the slot and lets the car be dragged along. To stop, they let go and brake. That operator is the gripman, or just the grip, and the work is physical enough that you can hear it from the sidewalk.
One early morning on Clay Street
Andrew Smith Hallidie ran the first test at 4 a.m. on August 2, 1873, on Clay Street. The story told about him is that the idea came four years earlier, watching horses lose their footing on wet cobblestones while hauling a streetcar up Jackson Street. Public service began that September.
The idea spread fast. Within two decades, competing companies had laid 53 miles of cable track across the city. Then electric streetcars came along, cheaper to build and faster to run, and the 1906 earthquake finished the argument almost everywhere except the hills too steep for anything else.
The vote that kept them
In 1947, Mayor Roger Lapham proposed scrapping the remaining lines. Buses cost less. A resident named Friedel Klussmann formed the Citizens' Committee to Save the Cable Cars and made a case that is now standard civic thinking and was then fairly new: the cars were worth more to the city than they cost to operate. Measure 10 passed in a landslide that November.
The system was named a National Historic Landmark in 1964, which makes it a landmark you can board. It closed for a full rebuild in 1982 and reopened in June 1984. Three lines run today, Powell-Hyde, Powell-Mason and California Street, with a working fleet of 40 cars.
Worn, not toured
We drew the cable car twice. The Cable Car Boxy Tee is the car itself, black, boxy and blunt. The Public Stroller T-Shirt is the quieter one, a small chest graphic for people who ride it to work and would rather not be asked for directions. Both live in Artifacts, and both share a shelf with the F Line T-Shirt, our nod to the vintage streetcars that have run on Market Street since 1995.
Sources: SFMTA cable car history and the Cable Car Museum, which is free and sits on top of the working powerhouse at Washington and Mason.
