Cable Car Turnaround

You're watching something that exists nowhere else on Earth. This is the world's last manually operated cable car system. Every other city that had them — and dozens did — ripped them out decades ago. San Francisco almost did, too.

The whole thing started with a man named Andrew Hallidie and a rainy night in eighteen seventy-three. Hallidie watched a horse-drawn streetcar struggling up a wet cobblestone hill. The horses were being whipped, slipping, bleeding. One fell. Hallidie, who happened to manufacture wire rope, thought there had to be a better way. He designed a system where cars would grip a continuously moving underground cable. The first test run happened at four in the morning on August second, eighteen seventy-three — they went early because the gripman took one look down the hill and lost his nerve, so Hallidie reportedly rode the first run himself.

By the early nineteen hundreds, San Francisco had over six hundred cable cars running on twenty-three lines. They crisscrossed the entire city. Then came the nineteen-oh-six earthquake, which destroyed most of the infrastructure. Electric streetcars were cheaper to rebuild, and the cable car system shrank and shrank. By the nineteen forties, the city was ready to scrap the whole thing.

That's when a woman named Friedel Klussmann stepped in. She was a San Francisco socialite who launched a citizen's campaign to save the cable cars. She argued they were a piece of living history, not just a transit system. She won. The voters backed her. And that single act of stubbornness is the reason you're standing here watching a gripman manually haul a cable car around this turntable by hand, the same way it's been done for over a hundred and fifty years.