citymaus

“As Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, describes in his new book, The Great American Transit Disaster, US public transportation has lurched from one crisis to the next throughout the past century. 

“Americans ignored transit problems and created cities favorable to cars thanks to public policy choices rather than inevitability or secret conspiracies. The same mobility, planning, and social decisions are before Americans today as they face the challenges of meeting equity goals and a global climate crisis.”

“- In the book you wrote, “It's uncomfortable to admit it, but American political representatives have kneecapped mass transit.” So transit’s decline was not inevitable?

Correct. You didn’t have to build systems of parkways and highways that were so comprehensive that you sacrifice neighborhoods. You didn’t have to completely demolish your downtowns, create massive federal programs that paid for parking ramps and give tax breaks on downtown parking. These are political choices.

- In city after city, you tell a similar story about a decline in transit revenues leading to higher fares and poor service, which leads more people to leave, forcing still higher fares and worse service. Why was it so hard for the agencies to pull out of these downward spirals?

Remember that in the 1930s transit was still run by private companies, with a few exceptions like Boston, San Francisco and New York. So there was a hope even within the private companies that service could somehow reach a sustainable level.

“- What was the appeal of diesel buses compared to streetcars?

There were a few things going on. First, buses were a very advanced technology for their time. They have rubber wheels, they’re not dependent on the electrical wires and they provide a kind of flexibility of routing. They can theoretically run very fast, and they can run new routes, serving areas of lower density.

- Do they require less staffing too?

Yeah, absolutely. Transit went from two-man streetcars to one bus driver collecting fares. They also didn’t have to continue maintaining the streets after they shifted from streetcars to buses. There were all these talking points for the bus industry, and they were also used by public transit.

But I will say this: On the public policy side, a lot of the impetus was driven by the goal of getting the streetcars off the streets.

- Because they got in the way of car drivers?

Exactly. They were definitely seen as being in the way of cars and slowing down traffic.

“- In your acknowledgments, you wrote, “Let us all make sure transit agencies get the operating and capital funds that they need to thrive in the coming years.” Based on your read of history, do you have any suggestions for how agencies should go about securing that money?

I think always the compelling case for greater ridership is the aggravation of driving. (The aggravation factor must be very high for drivers to force them onto transit. Boston and San Francisco did that more than most places. ) For that reason, the most positive things might be rezonings, the multifamily boom, and the end of parking minimums. If we remove highways in certain areas, there’s an opportunity for transit to be competitive. But barring that, it’s very hard to know what an agency on its own can do because they’re now in survival mode.

At the end of the day, someone’s got to fund transit. Otherwise we can end up with almost nothing.”

read more: bloomberg, 27.04.23. 

market/third street, san francisco. grand army of the republic parade, aug 1903. 

opensfhistory via brokeassstuart, 22.10.19. 

australian tourists diana sotts and ned trippe at ocean beach san francisco, 1982. photo by gary fong, sf chronicle. 

via san francisco’s ocean beach history: the 1960s to 1980s. thethirdself, 31.01.2021. 

protest against building more freeways in san francisco, 1972. 

“In the early 20th century, Lew Hing bucked the odds to become one of the wealthiest Chinese immigrants in America. His business acumen allowed him to amass wealth and political power that few other Chinese Americans had at the time. 

Born in China, Lew Hing was only 11 years old in 1869 when his family sent him by boat from Canton to San Francisco's growing Chinatown to help at his eldest brother's goods store. Lew was one of many Chinese migrants who came to the United States a year after both countries signed the Burlingame Treaty, which allowed free migration between the two nations. America was looking for labor to help build the transcontinental railroad, and China was looking for protection for its nationals in the United States. 

Despite the systemic racism and discrimination, the young Lew was able to find a path to power and respect in the San Francisco Bay Area. After arriving in the U.S., Lew's business skills helped his eldest brother's shop in Chinatown. One thing Lew understood even at an early age was to become a truly successful businessman in America, he would have to sell goods that served not only the Chinese community but also the majority white population in America as well...

Lew took a job at a canning company where he learned everything he could about the industry. Eventually, he developed his own canning method and in 1888 opened the Pacific Fruit Packing Company with other Chinese investors. Lew gave his cannery a non-Chinese name to hide its origins.

pacific fruit packing co. at 804 stockton, on right, next to the chinese consulate in san francisco's chinatown.

“The cannery quickly proved successful. It eventually grew to occupy four buildings on Stockton Street. However, its success attracted the attention of the Bay Area media, which spread unsubstantiated rumors that Lew abused and treated his white workers poorly. 

After several years of negative press, Lew finally decided he had enough. 

"He sold the cannery in 1902 because of all of the racial problems that he was encountering with the media in San Francisco," explained Quan. "He went off to China, ostensibly to retire, in 1902. He came back in 1903 and, with his longtime attorney W.A. Richardson, started to think about opening a cannery in Oakland." 

For his second attempt at running a canning company, Lew had learned his lesson: He needed prominent and connected white businesspeople to help him succeed and appear as the face of the company. Richardson introduced Lew to brothers William and James Rolph. The Rolphs owned a shipping line and were prominent members of the San Francisco business community. Their political power grew substantially several years later when James became the mayor of San Francisco.  

the pacific coast cannery on 12th/pine street in west oakland in 1905. the location now houses “pacific cannery lofts” condominiums. 

“In 1904, Lew had Richardson incorporate his new company, the Pacific Coast Canning Company, in Oakland. Although most company shareholders were Chinese, the majority of Pacific Coast Canning Company's public officers were white and included his old friend Bellingall. "He did that deliberately so that he could disguise who the real owners were of the cannery," Quan explained. 

The only non-white officer on the board was Lew Hing himself.”

lew hing with children thomas and rose, with ralph on his lap, at idora park in oakland in 1908.

"Laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the Alien Land Act of 1913 and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone slowed down the immigration of colored people—but what could be done to drive away those already in California? One way was to strangle their economic development opportunities." 

—Bruce Quan Jr., Lew's great-grandson, authored a book about Lew and his family's history in America entitled "Bitter Roots: Five Generations of a Chinese Family in America.” 

read more: sfgate, 01.02.22. 

“The vote of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was unanimous and without comment. The resolution was approved on the first day of the Lunar New Year and amid a steep rise in assaults and harassment directed at Asian Americans. 

The approved resolution is to apologize to Chinese immigrants and their descendants, becoming the fourth city in the country and in California to do so in the last year.

The San Francisco Bay Area city of Antioch was the first to offer a formal apology in May, followed by the city of San Jose in September and Los Angeles in October.

More than a third of San Francisco’s estimated 900,000 residents are of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, with Chinese Americans making up the largest share.

mural by amy nelder on 827 stockton street, showing chinese railroad workers. flickr/wallyg

The resolution apologizes on behalf of the board and the city for “systemic and structural discrimination” and targeted acts of violence. The board of supervisors in the past passed numerous laws to harass Chinese immigrants, including more than a dozen ordinances to restrict Chinese-run laundries, according to the resolution. 

mural depicting life in san francisco chinatown in 1889. flickr/flickeringability

They couldn’t use traditional gong percussion instruments in performance because the instruments produced an “unusual noise disturbing the peace,” the resolution states.

mural showing past lives in san francisco chinatown. flickr/dianneyee

The resolution’s chief sponsor, Supervisor Matt Haney, and Chinese American civic leaders plan to rally Wednesday for increased budget investments in the community.”

read more: ap, 02.02.22.

two days after the san francisco fire, larkin/golden gate avenue, city hall on the left. 20.04.1906. 

from the collection of bob bragman. 

70 years of photos of san francisco’s famous fog. 

see more: sfchronicle, 30.12.2021.

the transamerica pyramid, san francisco. 

designed by william l. pereira & associates, and construction by the hathaway dinwiddie construction company started in 1969 using kaiser steel, established by henry j. kaiser. 

read more: sfyimby, 16.12.21. 

san francisco cable car ride in the 1960s. [remastered, 3mins] 

via prelinger archives and sfgate, 26.11.21. 

“The lack of public restrooms in the U.S. hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2011, a United Nations-appointed special rapporteur who was sent to the U.S. to assess the “human right of clean drinking water and sanitation” was shocked by the lack of public toilets in one of the richest economies in the world. A full accounting of truly public facilities is elusive, says Soifer, but government-funded options are exceedingly rare in the US, compared to Europe and Asia; privately-owned restrooms in cafes and fast-food outlets are the most common alternatives. According to a “Public Toilet Index” released in August 2021 by the U.K. bathroom supply company QS Supplies and the online toilet-finding tool PeePlace, the US has only eight toilets per 100,000 people overall—tied with Botswana. (Iceland leads their ranking, with 56 per 100,000 residents.) 

So how did Americans end up with so few places to go? Understanding this requires a look back at the societal and sanitary conditions behind public restrooms in American cities—and the moral panics that propelled both their creation and downfall... 

segregated public restrooms remained fixtures of towns and cities in the US south in the 1960s.  

“1920s: Upper- and middle-class white women gradually gained access to hotels, theaters, train stations, and, most notably, department stores. These privately owned establishments offered a far more enticing option—“public” restrooms designed to mimic the design and comforts of home, with lounges full of sofas and vanities for freshening up.

But out of all the amenities this new class of restrooms provided, few had the appeal of their exclusivity. These weren’t pay toilets, per se, but the expectation was that the people using them had purchased tickets to a play or a railway journey, or beverages while socializing in a hotel, or spent the afternoon shopping in a department store. The latter, Baldwin says, were the most accessible to customers of varying classes. So, in an effort to keep well-heeled patrons of high-end retail establishments content, “bargain basements” opened on lower levels — giving less-affluent women a place both to shop and use the facilities without mingling with wealthier clientele.

This line of thinking—a contributing factor to the decline of public restrooms — involved a shift from believing that the government should be responsible for providing bodily privacy, toward what Baldwin calls a consumer model of privacy. “If the individual wants to purchase privacy, you go right ahead,” he says. “You go to that restaurant, and you buy your coffee so you can use the bathroom. But [providing bodily privacy] is not the responsibility of the taxpayers. And that seemed to be America’s choice.”

BART to reopen bathrooms at powell, 19th street stations that closed after 9/11. read more: sfchronicle, 21.11.19. 

“Fears of crime and vandalism in the 1960s and ’70s sped the mass extinction of many city-run facilities, which had acquired an unsavory reputation as sites of drug use and sexual encounters. By the early 1980s, most of the restrooms located in New York City’s 472 subway stations were locked, and have largely remained inaccessible since. A final blow came in the form of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompting the closure of public restrooms across the country for security purposes.”

read more: citylab, 05.11.21. 

the dumbarton rail bridge was the first bridge crossing the san francisco bay. it opened in 1910—”Newark and Redwood City were at long last put on the map. The rail bridge continued to transfer freight trains from Stockton into San Francisco for decades, until the early 1980s.” 

read more: sfgate, 19.11.21. 

the san francisco-oakland bay bridge opened for traffic 85 years ago on november 12, 1936. the dignitaries at the celebration included governor frank merriam and former president herbert hoover. 

via neal parish.  read more: sfchronicle, 13.11.16. 

“some screenshots of recently digitized 8mm film my grandpa took in SF in 1965!” twitter/linamlion

“The War Era: 1940 to 1950

Prior to World War 2, Berkeley was a fairly affluent city of professionals who worked in Oakland and San Francisco. In 1940, the Black population of Berkeley numbered around 5,280. Here’s the earliest Census neighborhood map of Berkeley taken in the year 1940. The federal government-sponsored Homeowners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) alerted lenders and home buyers if non-whites were moving into a neighborhood by highlighting the borders of diversifying areas in red on maps, a practice later known as redlining. These redlining maps referred to the Black enclaves in the Bay Area as “slums under infiltration” but distinguished South Berkeley, nicknaming it “Negro Piedmont” and described it as where the Bay Area’s Black professionals lived.

But Black newcomers faced endless hostilities in the housing market, which was heavily sponsored by the federal government. The FHA was subsidizing white people into homeownership while refusing to lend to prospective Black homeowners or in their neighborhoods, viewing their presence as a threat to federally-backed mortgages. Thus Black people often paid more expensive mortgages at higher interest rates than their white counterparts for the same house.

2135 ward st., south berkeley. flickr/mateox

“The White Flight Era: 1950 to 1960

White flight in the 1950s reversed much of the white in-migration that occurred in the 1940s in the flatlands. The attempt to stop Black residents from moving into Central Berkeley that McGee-Spaulding neighbors had started in the early 1940s failed, and 1,000 white residents left the area while 500 Black and 400 people of color moved in.

The red line containing Black residents to southwest Berkeley unofficially dissolved and Black residents poured into West Berkeley, Central Berkeley and gradually into the Northwest neighborhoods right up to the Albany border. Census 1960 data reveals the newly-permitted areas for Black residents became everything west of Sacramento Street in North Berkeley and everything west of Shattuck Avenue in South Berkeley, having moved east from Grove Street (now MLK Jr Way).

In contrast to the previous decades, home construction did not follow the Black population. New construction was almost exclusively private single-family homes in the Berkeley Hills and a few dingbat apartments in the white neighborhoods of eastern South Berkeley, Bateman and the west side of Elmwood.

But the primary culprit for the lack of Black residents in new development was discrimination. Landlords in new apartments did not rent to Black tenants if the housing was located outside of Black areas. As the local NAACP president said to East Bay business leaders: “And where in the non-ghetto areas can a Negro buy a house less than 20 years old in metropolitan Oakland?” Black residents were confined to new housing only in the redlined areas, or were charged higher rents in older housing than white tenants as a racial surcharge by landlords in white areas. “I don’t rent to Negroes or beatniks,” one Berkeley landlord told the San Francisco Chronicle.

2807 shattuck ave., south berkeley. flickr/mateox

“The Radical Era: 1960 to 1970

In 1969, white youths conducted a now forgotten third People’s Park-styled occupation of a vacant lot in South Berkeley, intending to turn it into a youth hostel and garden called “People’s Pad.” Though the Black Panthers tried to be open minded with the hippies, Black residents and community boards angrily feuded with them during negotiations and eventually forced them to give up, causing the demise of the short lived People’s Pad. 

Black South Berkeleyans were recorded saying that they didn’t want another “Haight-Ashbury” in their neighborhood. But one prominent neighborhood activist, Mable Howard, recognized the larger demographic significance occurring in South Berkeley: “You white kids are in a sense returning to the ghetto to atone for the sins of your parents. When we blacks moved in, years ago, your white folks moved out. Now you're coming back, and some of us blacks are wanting to play the same game your parents played."

The Black population continued to increase, but growth slowed down to 5,571 new residents. With de jure discrimination by race in housing struck down in California by Byron Rumford’s fair housing law and the Supreme Court, the Black population grew more fully into Northwest Berkeley and Westbrae. Census 1970 reveals that over 100 Black residents gradually extended east towards the middle-class white Upper North Berkeley neighborhood bounded by Shattuck Avenue and Hopkins Street. 420 Black people resided in the white lower-middle class North Berkeley flatland neighborhoods bounded by Shattuck and Cedar—mostly as renters. Over 100 Black residents moved into all-white communities like Northbrae between Solano Avenue and Hopkins Street—mostly as homeowners. The Berkeley Hills were finally in sight and a couple dozen Black homeowners made it there. Black residents had composed half the city geographically and were bound east by 1970.

But this is as far as Black people would go in Berkeley.”

read more: darrell owens, 25.10.21. 

a glimpse into yosemite's chinese history. [7mins]

“Tie Sing was hired to cook for a 1915 lobbying trip for conservationists, industrialists and senators to Yosemite. His meals were apparently so impressive that he helped convert the group to the cause of nature recreation, leading to the formation of the National Park System.”

Chinese laborers also built many roads, tunnels, and railroads in the Sierra.

read more: nytimes, 15.09.2021. 

denver, colorado: 1920s before allowing cars to dominate, and 1970s.