in with the fire. but they were trying to announce they were a new neighborhood. they didn't want to be called carville anymore. they wanted to be called oceanside, which sounded a lot more romantic. and so here we looked at that picture. there's a couple of car houses still around in the early 1910. but just 15 years later it really starts filling in. the stucco homes we think about in the sunset district. the merchant builders start building. the row houses start taking over in the 1920's and 1930's. and soon people start forgetting that carville was even there. the cars that do remain are kind of derelict. they've been in the elements for 20 years. they're really warn down. mostly they're rented to people who were too poor to rent to other places. so instead of these judges and lawyers and doctors renting cars you had people really on the fringes of society using them, which doesn't help the whole reputation of carville or these cars with the neighbors.

they're getting beat up. this is by 1925. a lot of cars, they get pushed back in the backyards of house of lots. so somebody might build a conventional house and just push their old car house in the backyard. this was on 48th avenue in the backyard. it's an old cable car house. guy who lived there in the early 1960's, he had a boyfriend named cliff. they paint it yellow. when he got a new boyfriend named dennis, they painted it red to get rid of cliff. but it was a beautiful little car. he still remembers it. it disappeared, we think, sometimes in the 1970's. but this is what keeps my hopes up. this actually isn't in carville. this is in the richmond district on ninth avenue. people say, are there any car houses left? are they all gone? have they disappeared? this is an example of how one can surprise you. this is on ninth avenue in the parking lot behind the old coliseum theater.

before that park being lot was there the city was looking for houses, spaces, near merchant corridors to create these little parking lots. they bought this house from a mrs. suggs because they wanted to tear it down and put the parking lot in. when they started tearing the house gown, they realized that this kind of boring house was made up of three old cable car trailers. even though the granddaughter who played in the house didn't know that it was made of cable cars, it was hidden behind the stucco. so these little things can surprise you. look at this house. this is in the rear of a lot on great highway. you can't really see it from the street. but if you looked at the front of it you wouldn't think there was anything spemble about it. it's essentially a shingled box. but if you got around to the back of it, you'll see it's actually made of two cable cars and a horse car on the second floor. this is how it's sort of put together. we're look at the backyard here. two cable cars are put together and they basically removed a wall from each to make one large room, a living room.

then the horse car is still complete as a bedroom off to the side. this is photographs -- perhaps the last greatest carville house left. it's really a neat place. so with the cable cars, you know you have that little pop-up roof in the middle. what they did so you wouldn't have to duck is they removed that wall and they pushed up the side roof to sort of make this dome feeling inside. and the seats are original. they're still in there. the little ventilator windows. the woodwork is all in place. it's just really a neat thing. i'd love to live there. i can't afford it. and if you get up into the attic, you can see the crowns of the cable cars still show. it's just an amazing place. so that's my hope, you know, that this book i wrote, this story gets out, we're on sfgov tv. somebody will say, i have a cable car house, nobody asked me. come take a look at it. because right now we're down to one or two maybe that are still

around when we're talking about there used to be hundreds. >> essentially into a generation of tearing them down. no more construction. complete replacement. >> yeah. in the 1910, about 1913, 1914, they really started pushing to get rid of them. when that open block that sutro rented, right on the edge of the sunset, when that cleared out, it eliminated the visibility of carville. we talk about a whole block of car houses that were still there. when that gets replaced by apartment buildings, suddenly you have a car house here, one there. just where people haven't taken the time to tear it out or build a conventional home. in the 1920's or 1930's, things were booming house building wise out there. so if you have a little empty lot that has an old car house on it you'd be stupid not to

build a stucco house there and make a quick buck. by the 1920's, they're mostly gone. there's just a couple here and there. >> so, woody, sometimes the railroad seems to be finding old cars and rebuilding them. have -- are any of these actually rebuilt and used again? >> some of them they have saved because they've popped up now and then. like the ones on ninth avenue. those three cable car trailers. they were saved by ed zelinski who took them and donated them to the maritime museum. think one still sits in a warehouse waiting for somebody to do something with it. but other old cars have been rescued and taken to parks where they've been restored. there's one down in san jose in kelly park. it's an old horse carrie stored that runs around on the weekend. -- car restored that runs around on the weekend.

on the one hand, you're in this foggy neighborhood, there's not much insulation. on the other hand, you've got 30 windows, and the sunshine in the day could just make the place broiling. and at night all of those windows let in the cold. so they advised people to put up curtains. they'd have little oil lamps, coal stoves, little oil/coal stoves. but it was a challenge. it was sort of part of the romance i think. it's like camping. >> how long did the fad last? >> the height of it, this all really takes off around 1897, 1898. the height of it is really the turn of the century. 1900 we're talking about 200 cars. after the earthquake in 1906, that's when it starts declining a little bit because more conventional houses start taking over and more people live permanently year-around. they're not just using it as a party pad. so it's after the quake it starts declining a little bit. >> is there a d.b.i. record as

cable cars were moved to a site that there wou before the earthquake, you often don't have a record. then, yeah, you're right. it goes down to some of these pictures i found by basically finding the names of people who lived in carville and then tracking down their desendends and asking, do you have anything? we had people who said, yeah, lots of photos and stories. but it takes a lot of leg work. it's not like you can just walk into a city department and get that info. >> i know you actively solicit the -- solicited people for stories. there's a wonderful newsletter what is it called? >> it's our organizational newsletter.

>> it also has in it a mystery photograph that maybe somebody submitted. can you imagine where there is? tell us where it is. but also soliciting these histories of photographs and recollections. >> it's history groups. like we're a history group for the west side of town so we interview old-timers and get donations of photographs and stories. and there's other groups like that through the city. it's up to a lot of volunteers and people who care about the neighborhood to track this stuff down. >> so the question about house moving. house moving used to be very common in san francisco. i think you once were looking at that as well. is that right? >> well, we saved some earthquake shots. lawrence helped us get the pormeyit to move them. we pulled out the ledger, you know, with like the official city ledgeser of moving houses. there were tons of them. i don't know, at some point it just kind of petered out and somebody moves a house like once every 15 years now. >> so we in our digital age, issue house moving permits once every couple of years.

i pull out this little book. it's got a piece of carbon paper in it. you put the carbon in and you write, you know, house moving permit number, you know, 36. you say from here to there. we charge a fee. a very low fee. it's really right out of the turn of the century before. >> yeah, it has that dusty, old-school feeling. >> actually, we maintained that. i tried to maintain this little book. we still do it that way. >> would the post earthquake installation of building codes and building requirements have impacted carville to expand? and ultimately was that part of the demise as our desire and need to have structures that were earthquake safe and fire safe? did that have an impact on it, i guess? >> well it seemed more that they were health issues. they were really not happy with the plumbing in carville. yeah. that shows up a lot more than

anybody worried about building integrity or anything. the thing that comes up a little later and we talked a little about, these earthquake refugee cottages. after the 1906 earthquake, the relief corporation that was attending to these refugees built thousands of these small little redwood cottages for the refugees. then when the camps closed after a year, people could take the cottages to these empty lots and set them up. it was a far bigger outcry about whether those were appropriate and what the code would be because most of them weren't put on foundations. they were just dragged out to empty lots. they were combined together. sometimes lifted up off the ground even. so you'd find articles about that far more often than finding anybody having a problem with these cars which were actually pretty sturdy. we talk about they're used as public transportation all the time. they're made of some hefty material. so people weren't too worried about them. at least it doesn't come up with the historical records. >> do we have any left? and how are we recognizing and

preserving them? >> well, there's that one left that's great that we saw the interior of. and that is not a city landmark. the guy who owns it is very aware of its significance as maybe the last and best example of a carville house. he really wants to take care of it. i don't know if he would go forward with any landmark designation just because like a lot of homeowners he doesn't want to be at all boxed in with what he can do. but that's kind of where we are. i think it is a landmark. if anything had to come up, i would definitely nominate it as one. the other examples of carville houses, there's one on 47th avenue where the cars have been basically removed and all you've really got left is perhaps the floors of a couple of cars. it was a great example until, i guess, the late 1950's. and whoever bought house decided to take out most of the woodwork. that might be the only one, the

one on great highway. >> i mentioned one of the problems with plumbing with these carville homes. i was wondering at what point in history did outhouses become illegal in san francisco? >> i'm not sure of that. but outhouses were the big part of carville. you see these early shots. there are outhouses like right next door. >> i found out, when i moved to my current house, my house had been moved from the reservoir site at holly park to where it was. there was a woman, this was 20 years allege, who had seen the move. she was a kid. she described it coming on a wagon, pulled by a mule. it was basically being breaked by the mule. because it was coming down a hill. and that was just information in my neighborhood from a woman who had lived there for a long time as a kid. and the time is getting further and further away from when these existed. but i think the best thing is humans. and maybe tchutch societies

that have senior members. >> yeah. no, if you go to almost -- almost all of our members -- we're a nonprofit organization. so we have a whole membership program. almost all of our members are these kind of people you're talking about. people who grew up in the city, are getting on in years and have these memories. they point us to a lot of other people, people that maybe aren't on the internet who live in their neighborhood. we interview them. if you go to outsideland.org, you'll see some examples of the interviews we do of the feedback we get, of the messages that these seniors post. when we have an issue like we're trying to find out about earthquake cottages or carville, we do put out an all points bulletins to seniors who might have some relation to it, some memory of it. one reason we starteded this organization is the western neighborhoods -- started this organization is the western neighborhoods are the newer neighborhoods in san francisco. the creation and development is in the living memory of a lot of people still. so we want to start this organization and capture those

memories before those people are gone. >> it's a really, really neat thing i think they're history minutes? >> yeah. one-minute videos where we give a little history of some building or site or event. >> we're in seal rock. this used to be adolph sutro's estate. these weren't there then. >> ♪ in the richmond guess i ain't that cool ♪ >> when i was a kid, my father told me those were machine gun nests up there put in during world war ii to fend off japanese attackers. >> these two structures were build in 1943 by the u.s. army. also, these were spotting positions for the big post artillery gun batteries. the stations would work

together. say win here and one at fort funston. using telescopes, they named a ship and target. and the two different sightings allowed them to trianglely position the ship at sea. >> so it was a lookout, essentially >> it was a lookout. >> i doubt if we saw a japanese ship today -- >> it would probably say toyota on the side of it. >> they are really fun. if shows you what can you do in 60 seconds. >> the pri sidot maps. people -- presidio maps. people keep forgetting that the army was a major presence. before the city was functioning, the army was functioning. and there are maps from the 1800's that show the farmhouses in the valley, the eureka valley, and mission district

that were done by the army. so the army is its own resource for the history of the city before there was a building department. they would have everything. you could find out what was the original house in an area. again, this is the 1800's more than the 1900's. but the earthquake obliterated a lot of records. >> there's the survey map that the government did. that's a great resource to just kind of show -- you know, we saw that map on the grid pattern. they had that, like i said, on maps in 1968. but there's no streets yet. but the coast survey map will show you where there are streets put in and buildings sometimes. there's lots of great resources out there. >> that was terrific, woody. thank you so much. >> i couldn't have enjoyed it more. [applause] >> we'll see you next