>> 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.