The Cable Cars Of San Francisco!

If you go to Minnesota it seems like every business has the word “Lake” in it.  In Montana, you can’t escape the words “Big Sky” on shops and bars.  For the record, it is aptly named because it really does seem like the sky is big in Montana.  In San Francisco, the cable car dominates our local civic zeitgeist.  Within the city, you will find multiple representations of, “…the little Cable Cars, that climb halfway to the stars.” As Tony Bennett sang.

The Cable Car

San Francisco’s cable cars obviously creep into the greater pop culture.  The aforementioned Tony Bennett immortalized the cable car in, I left my Heart in San Francisco.  Not much more to add to that. They have been the subject of an uncountable number of paintings found in galleries and hotel rooms around the world.

As far back as 1922, silent film star Buster Keaton was seen almost defying gravity while hanging onto the back of a moving cable car. Humphry Bogart’s character hops on, then off an empty cable car in Dark Passage from 1947.

James Bond arrives in San Francisco for the first time on a cable car in the 1985 film, A View to a Kill.   It’s not the best one, but the only one made in San Francisco.

Ever since the car chase scene in Bullitt starring Steve McQueen, car chases became a staple of action movies shot in San Francisco.  From Foul Play to The Rock, seeing cars “Catch Air” flying over the city’s hills is commonplace.  However, the best of them for my money is the cable car chase sequence in the little-known 1997 thriller Metro, starring Eddie Murphy.

Cable Car-Themed Outdoor Seating

You would expect to find cable car key chains, snow globes and T-Shirts in the tourist trinket shops at Fisherman’s Wharf or Union Square.  However, the ubiquitous cable car drifts into the everyday-lives of regular San Franciscans as well.  There is a Cable Car Coffee Company, Cable Car Pizza, and even a Cable Car Cleaning Janitorial Service.  Since 1949,  everyone passes under the Cable Car Clothiers shop at Powell and O’Farrell Streets.

Cable Car-Themed Restaurants

And if that wasn’t enough you can visit the Cable Car Store at Pier 39.   That’s right, and entire retail operation dedicated to our little rolling national monuments.

As the guidebooks will tell you, the cable car was invented in 1873, originally to transport heavy material from the waterfront to the top of Nob Hill where the “Big Four” railroad barons were building their palatial mansions. When all public transportation became municipalized in 1912, the cable car became the first public rail transportation in the United States.

 The Cable Car At 150

2023 was the 150th anniversary of the cable car.  If it wasn’t for the poster-sized signs on the cable cars, and a display I happened upon on the sixth floor of the library, I would have never known of this historic anniversary.

In 2023 I looked at SF Travel, the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau website.  Two pages in, and half way down I found this statement: "Celebrate the 150th anniversary of San Francisco's famous cable cars and explore the city. From now until Oct. 30, enter to win incredible San Francisco prize packages."

That's it?!

It would have been great if the mayor, (and notable San Franciscans like Governor Gavin Newsom, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi) could maybe have mentioned the cable car was 150 years old in 2023?  They were quite eager promoting the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake almost two decades earlier, and it would have been nice if they shared a little of that enthusiasm for the cable car's anniversary.

The San Francisco cable car, the one symbol of San Francisco known the world over, as recognizable as that of the Coliseum in Rome or the Pyramids of Egypt.