current senator leland yee. >> there were reports in the newspaper about various board members being nominated. we were concerned about how the conflict of interest laws would apply to them. very specifically for foreign issues. perhaps there would be six board members who would be not able to bridge as a paid in a successor mayor selection and appointment process. we would lose quorum. we have to contemplate how we would then bring back quorum. i went to bed every night with it on my mind. i woke up with every morning. >> time was running out. there were no more meetings scheduled in november due to the holidays, and the board did not meet again until december 7. san francisco citizens again waited on the mayoral selection. >> we want someone who has the greater good of the people of

san francisco in mind, not just business owners. >> i am here today basically to urge you to select an interim mayor who will prioritize our nonprofit sector coming here in san francisco. >> supervisor daly once again called for a discussion of mayoral character polities and possible nominations. >> it would be a good idea to try this mechanism out and see how it works. >> the daily would again be disappointed. supervisor maxwell motion for the question to be tabled until next week. >> the motion to continue passes. >> they did not want to push the envelope and vote until they had it in the bag, and no one was able to get all that in the bag, so without that, people were afraid to take the vote. if he took it and your friend was not picked, and of story. >> for maxwell bought determination to delay the voting, one thing she wanted to

do was to make sure she could find a consensus candidate. >> the next week in december, the board met again for the last in the meeting of the board. still without a mayor selected or even nominations made. time was running out on the current board, but december 14 seemed like a rerun of december 7, with supervisor maxwell again making a motion to continue to the last board meeting in early january. >> colleagues, i ask that we continue this item. i think we have three weeks to have somebody floating out there for that amount of time is not going to be to our best interest. it will give us an opportunity to really think about, in the next few weeks, what is ahead of us. it allows the board to step back and take a breath and wait this heavy decision that we were just

about ready to make. >> there was no one lined up. that was one of the most fascinating and frustrating things about the process. no one knew what was going to happen. everyone was asking. it was amazing. do you know what is going on, do you know who has the upper hand? >> after the holidays, and jerry brown was sworn in as cal.'s next governor. but the tenant gov. elect gavin newsom played his delight card and was not sworn in. some saw humor in in his delight. >> i am proud, from your the tenant governorship, if and when it begins -- >> others disagreed with the decision. i think he should have been sworn in on monday. that seems to be in the spirit

of the state of constitution of california. >> the next day, the board had one last chance to nominate their twice for interim mayor on january 4. >> when the board finally got around to actually nominating people for, and taking up the issue of inter mayorship, the first thing people should know is it was late at night. the board really put this off as light as they could. people were tired and cranky. that is the first thing people should know about this meeting. >> they said they would take nominations according to who was on the roster first. so it became a game of jeopardy where the question was, who could press the button first? then it became this sort of strategy. >> having run out of time, board members began the first round of nominations. >> i would nominate former mayor art agnos. >> current city administrator ed lee.

>> everyone is expecting hennessey to have the sixth vote. >> i would like to request a 20- minute recess. >> perhaps an explanation? >> i would like a recess. that is my explanation. >> colleague, can do that without objection? >> he took sophie maxwell and they started walking down the hall, across the hall to room 200, the mayor's office. when it came down to it, bevan dufty said, after talking to the mayor, newsom made an argument as to why edwin lee should have the job. >> supervisor daly, having witnessed several progressives vote for a moderate saw the progress of dreams away. >> we ostensibly had a majority on the board of supervisors.

we had an opportunity and we made the biggest fumble in san francisco political history. >> once it became clear that ed lee had the votes to win, nobody wanted to pull the trigger. so they stopped the meeting -- at midnight -- and decided to have another meeting that friday. at the end of the day, so many people had been put up for consideration, and here is the one person that had not and he ends up being the person who the board ends up with. that is a huge shock. >> when the board finally made their appointment, i was joyful because i thought it would be much more difficult. >> supervisors avalos and, thus ask that the meeting be recessed until friday to allow for a meeting with ed lee. >> i have not had a chance to talk to ed lee, any more than him, to my office and telling me that he was not interested in

doing it. that was my last conversation with him. ed lee is currently in china. i would like to see if i can have a conversation with him before we make any kind of determination. >> the current board had run its term. they return for one last meeting to begin -- finish what they began on tuesday, nominating ed lee. >> i will support mr. lee. >> it is for those reasons i will be supporting mr. lee's nomination. the reason why i wholeheartedly support ed lee is because he is a qualified person and he is the right person to lead san francisco. >> we have engaged in an orderly transition of leadership. this is what separates us, as a democratic society, from other less democratic societies. and i am so proud of us for what we are about to do today. so with that, colleagues, thank you for being part of this historic moment.

>> the supervisor campos? there are 10 ayes, one no. [applause] >> the motion for edwin lee passes. [applause] >> you are talking to one of the happiest people in san francisco. this was an extraordinary an historic vote. but it was symbolic. remember, the new board of supervisors who convenes tomorrow will make the actual decision on who the next mayor will be. >> everybody came down to ed lee with the expectation that it will be done in the most intellectually honest way and in a way that role and order is respected. i think we discussed a few nominations and came down to

this one by a common denominator. >> i had a sense of urgency because i did not want to see anyone being acting mayor in the presence of the board of supervisors. that is not the kind of transition i talked about. we need to have a transition -- legislative branch separate from the executive branch of san francisco. that is the best way to do our work. people would not like the situation of having an acting mayor and president of the board of supervisors. >> now the dominoes in this chain of political events were falling day-by-day. the next day, january 8, new board members were sworn in. >> congratulations. [applause] >> and on monday, gavin newsom

was finally sworn in as lieutenant governor of california. >> the duties upon which i am about to enter. [applause] >> the very next day, january 11, the new board of supervisors met for the first time, with the historic first decision of their new term. >> item 3 is a motion to ratify the appointment of a successor mayor due to the occurrence of a vacancy in the offense of a mayor expiring january 8, 2012. >> i am hoping for is, as we look forward to the confirmation of mr. lee, that we will also, leaving behind the kind of tactics that were used last week, that i thought really made the process feel more clumsy than it should have been. >> this is ed lee's day. i have said a lot about my perspective of this man who

comes from the community, who is rooted in our community, who has a tremendous breath and death of city experience. colleagues, at this time, i hope and ask that we unanimously vote for ed lee to be our next mayor. >> supervisor campos? president to? supervisor chu? supervisor colon? supervisor elsbernd? there are 11 ayes. the motion is approved a [applause] . >> colleagues, i am going to move that we recessed the meeting and we conduct the swearing in ceremony of the new mayor in the rotunda of city hall. [applause] >> so ended one of the greatest challenges the board of supervisors has ever faced,

resulting in the first interim mayor in san francisco in 32 years. >> we had a real sense of belief when the full board made the final appointment to successor mayor. we thought there were some and gaps in our knowledge about how to appoint a successor mayor. by the time it was actually done, it seemed almost easy, but it was not, to be honest. we had planned for different types of variables to occur, and none of that actually happened. no conflict of interest laws came into play, no inquiry issues. >> i thought they did a good job, actually, trying to figure out something that had very little precedent in our city's history, something that was very important. >> angela and her staff did an extremely professional job. she was on the hot seat, under a tremendous amount of pressure.

i did not see a lot of the back room arm-twisting, hair pulling, chest pounding that was going on, the pressure she was under, but when she walked out into the board chamber, when she walked into the hallway and the reporters were chasing after her, she was precise and professional. >> in the end, there were some questions about the charter of san francisco. >> our charter spells out a formal process, but lee is pretty silent on that application process. >> this has happened in 32 years, but i think we need some better certainty on how we deal with this decision of succession. >> the charter has worked several times during times of vacancies like this. it certainly worked during aftermath of mayor mosconi and harvey milk. >> so we may be seeing more of these successor issues coming up, certainly something we do not want to legislate. i hope that we can trust people

to be grown up about it, but if that is not the case, we can spell that out. >> going through the first time with little knowledge and information was difficult. now that we have got our record of how to do this, i think the next clerk and the city will be much informed with having our process and having our archives to look too. >> and that is how san francisco government worked out the kinks, twists and turns, bombs in the road, to select its new interim mayor, ed lee. san francisco's first asian- american mayor. >> this has been an unprecedented and historic transition of power here in san francisco. i am so happy the board of supervisors came together to select an outstanding choice along many outstanding candidates to lead us over the next several years. >> over the past several months when this issue has come up, it had been agonizing. the board has been put into a

difficult situation. there are a lot of differences of opinion on how to run the city, how to mass make a decision, who should be in place, 11 people to agree on that is a challenging thing. i think we have done the best we can do in the process, considering the difference of opinions. >> the people of san francisco can now choose their mayor, the direction they want to go. that is why this decision was so appropriate. >> the other big shock is that the moderates seem to have won this round. people thought, progressives have themselves on the board. there is no reason that they will not get together and take a noted leader who is a progressive to be interim mayor, and then stayed there for another term. the great thing about being in term mayor is to get to run as an incumbent. the fact that the progressives could not get together to get somebody into office as interim mayor in their own self-interest was very surprising for a lot of us. >> what happened in the last

month in city hall was an incredible show of democracy that was part policy, part politics, and it all came together, and more than anything -- not just from a reporter's perspective, often was this? but there was a public interest as well on what was going on in san francisco government. we take it for granted a law that there is a city government here. this was something that brought people together. you heard people talking about it at the cafes, park playground, people who do not always pay attention. in that $0.10, it was the best thing we could have done for city government, even though it was a little bit messy. it was a lot of fun and an eye opener. it got people interested again.

>> good afternoon. i'm with the department of building inspection. we are approaching the sixth year of our brown bag lunch series here at the department of building inspection where we talk about topics related to construction in san francisco. we invite you to join us on the third thursday of every month here at the building department. we have an exciting lineup of shows this year. and one of them, today, is going to be really exciting because we have a terrific guest today. mr. woody labounty. >> thank you. >> woody is the founder of the outside lands? >> the western neighborhoods project. we'll talk more about that. >> excellent. and the author of a recently published book, which i have a copy of and it's really

fascinating and wonderful. he's going to talk about "carville by the sea" today. we'll look at slides. he'll tell us about the history of the outerlands, previously uninhabitable area of the city. we will invite your questions. so, please, you in the audience if you have questions, let us know. woody can help. thank you, woody, for being here. >> thank you. so we're going to talk a little bit about carville by the sea today. carville was a unique community out on the edge of san francisco. as you can see by the slide, it was made up of old street cars and horse cars that people used for residences, bars, restaurants, clubhouses. it had its peak in the 1890's, around the turn of the century. i should mention that you see this is a color shot. none of these photos were originally colorized. i essentially put color in there for the book just to make

it pop a little bit. so don't be fooled. before we get started i'd like to talk about the organization that i helped found 10 years ago, the western neighborhoods project dedicated to the history of western san francisco. we have a very popular website, outsidelands.org where we have old photos, stories, over 15,000 messages put up by people remembering their time in the richmond district, the sunset district, west of twin peaks. i couldn't fit everything into a book so i decided to have a little companion website. so if there's new things that come up, if there's corrections, god forbid, it will show up on this website. old photos that i maybe couldn't fit in so visit that you if can. that's carvillebook.com.

how do we start with carville? well, we start with the building material, essentially. how does carville get started? it starts with when old forms of public transportation become obsolete. now, the earliest forms of public transportation were omnibuses, which were really large coaches pulled by horses. but in the 1860's people came up with the new idea, the horse car. a horse car was essentially a little car that horses could pull but it used rails, on the ground. rails reduced traction. so horses could pull larger loads. horse cars really started taking over all across the united states in the 1860's, but they had some draw backs as you might imagine. can anybody think of something that could be a bit of a problem with horses pulling cars? yes. well, for one thing, horses were living animals and they could get sick. so some industries, some companies, lost thousands of horses to disease, which was just terrible for business. the other thing is a horse can

drop up to 10 pounds of fecal matter on the street every day. so you're talking about up and down market street, tons of these cars going back and forth every day. it was just a public noose -- nuissance, you might say, and pratches a health hazard. so people were excited to find new forms of transportation. and they came up with one we're all familiar with, the cable car. so here on the left you'll see a cable car next to the horse car on the right. the cable car was a great leap forward because it cut the horses out of the equation. cable cars were a lot more energy efficient. they were very popular in cities all across the united states, including chicago. and they really took over in san francisco because cable cars could climb hills were horses couldn't, opening up development in parts of the city where before there hadn't been any. but cable cars had their drawbacks, too. a cablecar can only go nine miles an hour, as fast as the cable under the street pulling it. cables have a hard time pulling

backwards, changing direction, investing in the infrastructure to put the cable in the street is very costly. so you have a lot of upfront costs. if a company wanted to run just one cable car, they had to start up the power house to get the cable car rung through the street. so it energy efficient issues as well. this is an interest street car. that was the new modern, exciting form of transportation. it was very energy efficient. each street car only used enough energy from the wires that it needed. it didn't have to run a power house. people were a little scared of them at first. the technology was a little heywire in the beginning -- haywire in the beginning. they could go very fast, but people thought they were too dangerous. but eventually trolley cars starting taking over. and in the early 1890's, the railway company started buying up transit companies across the city. wherever they could, they tried to replace the old forms of technology, horse cars and cable cars, with these cheaper, more energy-efficient electric

trolley cars. the question was what to do with all the old cars. they had an idea. they took an ad out in the paper. they said the market street railway had all of these old cars. you could buy one without seats for $10 or with seats for $20. they had some suggestions with what people could do with the old horse cars and cable cars. they could be used for news stands, fruit stands, lunch stands, play houses, poultry houses, tool houses, coal sheds, conservatories and polling booths, etc. and it really is a testament to the market street railway's imagination that these cars essentially got used for all of these different purposes. here's a shoemaker in oakland. he opened up his little cobbler shop in an old horse car in his backyard. he locked it up at night with a long nail going through. he said, who's going to steal old shoes? a little bit more dramatic, a man named james mcneal took four old horse cars and put them on a pontoon to make a

house boat near bell very deer. he called it the nautilus. he rent it out to people, tricked it all up in the inside for rich people to come have a little summer vacation in a very novel setting. and a watch maker. there was a realtor who used a car as a real estate office. we'll talk more about him in a second. charles stall took three and put them in the sun dunes of the -- the sandunes of the sunset district, created a little ouse -- house out there. and this guy on the bottom left, charles daley opened a place called the annex. he really called it a coffee saloon. you might call it a cafe of its time. does anybody here know where the sunset district is? a couple of people. good. over there. well, on the map you can see the sunset district is this big block south of golden gate park. this big grid pattern. it's very large. it's one of the largest districts in san francisco. this map, this grid pattern was

actually created way back in the 1860's with the streets going -- crossing each other at right angles. we have numbered streets and lettered streets. but, even though this map was created in the 1860's, if you went out to the sunset district as late as the 1890's, you wouldn't see these nice grid streets. what you would see is something like this. the sunset district was almost completely sandunes with little patches of scrub here or there. it was thought to be uninhabitable by a lot of people. some people actually put that on the map, called the great sand waste or the great sand bank. it was cold, foggy. there was no infrastructure out there, of course, in the 1890's. no gas no. real good transportation. no sidewalks. people didn't want to live out there. however, what it did have is a steamtrain line that ran out lincoln way to the beach. it was basically built to bring

picnicers, who wanted to get away for the weekend, to go to the beach for a sunday. right here at the end of the sunset district, at the northwest corner, is where carville gets its start, on a little strip of land, a little block that the mayor at the time owned. and that's where colonel daley put up his little coffee sal yoon -- saloon, using that old car. that's where carville takes off. so who's responsible for carville? we said the mayor of san francisco at the time. very wealthy land owner. owned at one point i think they say 1/12 of san francisco in land. most of it was in the west side of the city. robert fitzgerald was called the king of carville. he was an early settler to carville. jacob heyman that realtor, started being called the father of carville. we'll see why in a second. and this guy on the left, colonel daley, was often called the pioneer father of carville. he really gets a lot of the

credit. here's colonel daley in his little shed. how do we describe him? he's sort of a 1890's bohemian, a bit of a herm yit. most importantly, he was a friend of adolph sutro's. and sutro had a real estate shack on the northwest corner of the sunset. he let colonel daley squat in there essentially. he went out every morning, walked along the beach. whatever washed up he brought back to his shed and created quite a large little compound of old bottles, shoes, anything that washed up. a ship wreck. provided a bunch of lumber. he made a sleeping loft in his cabin. for a while he had a wife. she didn't wash up in the waves. but she did eventually wash out. she couldn't handle cooking in the sandunes every night, creating a fire.

so she left him sometime in the late 18920 -- 1890's. but daley took one of those cars we were talking about and opened this little coffee saloon where he sold sandwiches, doughnuts, and little items to the picnicers who came out to the beach on the weekends. and soon other people, they kind of were charmed by this little old horse car that was being used as a store. and they asked if it was possible that they could rent a car on his land. and he said, ok, $5 a month you can have a little car clubhouse in the land that he owned at the beach. so you see off in the distance that white shed. that's the colonel's shaq. the little car in the distance in the middle is his coffee saloon. and this red car is one of the first cottages rented by a bunch of lady bicyclists. you like the lady