Revealed! New photograph of the Sunnyside Powerhouse

See the rest of these fabulous new photos here.

Thanks to the sharp eye of David Gallagher of Western Neighborhoods Project, this early photo of the Sunnyside Powerhouse has been unearthed from an album at the San Mateo County Historical Association. The association had not identified it, but David recognized Sunnyside’s lost landmark and kindly alerted me.

The photo was taken, to the best of my estimation, shortly after construction of the powerhouse and car barn was finished in April 1892. That month saw the opening of the pioneering streetcar system, the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway, the first one powered by electricity in the city.

Unlike many other extant photos of the powerhouse, taken long after its prime and in states of decay, this one shows a pristine building, just completed, the paint still glistening in the sun. The view is unusual—the iconic smokestack is missing from the image.^[1] The photographer climbed up the dirt hillside across the street, for a view looking southwest and downward. Sunnyside Avenue (now Monterey) is in the foreground, and Baden Street at the far right. (This block is now all houses, built in the 1940s.)

Dating the Photo

The ceremonies that marked the opening of the new street car line and the powerhouse began downtown on Tuesday 26 April 1892 at 10 am in the morning. Since the shadows here indicate that it is just about this time of day when the photo was taken, it may be the day before the big event.

Taking as a starting point the idea that the photo was taken sometime just before the big day, I used shadow angle and length to calculate that the day and time when it was taken was about 9:40 am on Monday 25 April 1892.^[2] Maybe the big bosses are here to make sure the place is in shape for the crowds the next day. (It certainly looks like someone needs to tidy away those ladders next to the building.) That event kicked off downtown on Tuesday morning, with the cars taking their inaugural ride packed full of the city’s business and legislative gentry, followed by a lunch and speeches here at the powerhouse.

But the day before, perhaps, a few of the company luminaries of the new system posed for this photo, which was taken by a photographer hired by the Risdon Iron Company that provided the engines for the system.^[3]

Behrend Joost et al

Looking closer at the figures in front in the detail photo above, we see John Wesley Hartzell, prominent in his girth and wide-brimmed hat.

After success with other electric lines in the Midwest, Hartzell came to San Francisco to design and engineer the system, although he left the city and the company a few months after the line opened, to work on new systems elsewhere in California. When the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway opened, the SF Chronicle called Hartzell “The Man Whose Perseverance and Skill Built the Road.”^[4] (Read more about Hartzell in this post.)

On the left in the photo detail above is Behrend Joost, president of the railway, and the Sunnyside Land Company as well.

Joost provided the money for the project, but his terrible management and inept book-fiddling proved his downfall, and he lost the streetcar line to creditors.^[5]

Joost’s rangy form, prominent nose, and voluminous whiskers in the detail are recognizable from another less flattering depiction in a satirical cartoon a few years later, below.^[6] Joost had got himself into more trouble by erecting fences on public roads and other people’s land in another part of the city, in his own neighborhood (now Eureka Valley).^[7]

On the right in the photo detail above is Rudolph Mohr, the diminutive, modest, but brainy secretary of the land company, and Joost’s right-hand man during these years. (More about some of Mohr’s work in Sunnyside here.)

By contrast, when another newspaper’s cartoonist picked on Mohr, he was shown to be so shy that he turned his back on the audience while performing a horn solo at a festive gathering of prominent Germans in the city.

Mohr may not have had Miles Davis’s prodigious talent, but he too was a sensitive soul. However, it was nothing that lager beer administered by funnel couldn’t solve, we are told in the column detailing the event.^[8] Joost on the other hand was “an extreme temperance advocate” in a town that did business over a glass.^[9] While Joost named Sunnyside’s longest street after himself, Mohr, typically, named streets for his first-born child (Edna) and his hometown (Hamburg, now Ridgewood Ave).

Blown Fuses and Wild Flowers

The opening ceremonies began on Tuesday 26 April at 10 am downtown. The first of eight streetcars set off from Steuart and Market, holding all the top brass–San Francisco’s supervisors, the company directors, the press, and of course Behrend Joost, president, and JW Hartzell, secretary and general manager. Reporters from the Chronicle, the Call, and the Examiner were there, and the next day their articles all included little drawings of the novel electric streetcars.

The Examiner added a little drawing of the Sunnyside Powerhouse itself—although the flag may be artistic license; I can’t see how the pole on the conical tower could have had a flag run up it.

The three reports contained much of the same material, with notable differences. The Chronicle reporter may not have been in the first car, perhaps in retaliation for his paper giving little support to Joost’s enterprises in those years—an animosity that persisted, as the paper never lost an opportunity to make fun of him (see cartoon above). No mention was made by the Chronicle of the exciting fact, as reported by the Examiner, that that first car blew “eight or ten” electric fuses while trying to ascend the Guerrero Street hill with its burden of esteemed guests. Joost and his fellow luminaries were made to get out and walk to the top of the hill, to be re-boarded when the empty car reached them and could go onward again.^[10]

The Call reporter, who tactfully neglected to mention the difficulties of the Guerrero climb, made many more notes than his colleagues about the features of the land from Thirtieth Street down to the county line, an area very largely uninhabited then, including Sunnyside and Oceanview—and sounding a bit like an estate agent plumping for a sale. (The Call was always ready with a boost for Joost in those years.)

The car sped along at six miles an hour “through a part of the country that is comparatively unknown to the residents of San Francisco….through the Mission, Fairmount, Visitacion Valley, with its many well-cared-for gardens, the lands of the Sunnyside Company, and past the company’s magnificent power-house, the Industrial School and House of Correction [Ingleside Jail], Ocean View, from which the passengers…obtain a fine view of the great Pacific Ocean, by the lands of Joost, Mertens & Co.,” et cetera, giving Joost’s loan-sharking property company a shout-out.

The Call threw in a peek at the wildflowers that grew in profusion in these areas then:

“After passing the House of Correction, there are beautiful pastures of high golden California poppies, purple lupins, buttercups, and other wild flowers.”^[11]

About noon the entourage of eight streetcars reached the Holy Cross Cemetery, described by the Chronicle as “red-sorrel-covered, white-fenced lots,” the first terminus for the line, which was later extended to Baden (now South San Francisco).^[12]

Death Threats and Maimed Children

The Examiner’s account had a sharp edge on it, noting that Behrend Joost’s brother Fabian, who had put $200,000 into the enterprise, had been known to regularly, and apparently playfully, threaten the life of JW Hartzell when he was feeling stressed about the fate of the project.^[13]

The Examiner also didn’t spare a mention of the lawsuits that were already piling up, and included a note at the end about the first child to be maimed by the new streetcar. But the reporter didn’t stint to tell his readers that the new cars were quiet and smooth:

“Horses do not scare at the electric cars…this pioneer road does not make the whirring sound that is so disagreeable at San Jose and Oakland; and the electric cars start and stop much more smoothly than the cable cars.”^[14]

The Sheep and the Goats Tuck In

After the cemetery stop, the caravan of cars made the one-hour journey back to the powerhouse. When the throngs had been shown the “splendid engines” made by Risdon Iron Works—the company that commissioned the photograph at the center of this article—a luncheon was finally served. The “400 to 500” invitees were stratified by class—“There was an undemocratic dividing of the sheep from the goats,” quipped the Examiner reporter. The special people were served plenty of fine food and wine in an inner room, while the goats made do in another room with “zinfandel, and none too much of that.”^[15]

Then all gathered in the capacious car house for speechifying. Joost’s nephew and corporate attorney Constantine Foerster was master of ceremonies. Praise was heaped on Joost and Hartzell by several speakers, including Dr Thomas Addison of the Thomson-Houston Company that made the electric generators at the heart of the powerhouse. Never mind that that company would soon be forced to sue Joost, as he refused to pay for what he bought.

It was a glorious moment, and a cutting-edge technology had been launched upon the city, soon to squeeze out the other modes of streetcar propulsion.

“As a matter of fact San Francisco now has the best equipped electric road this side of the Rocky Mountains,” concluded the Examiner.

The desperate straits that Behrend Joost and his beloved railway would soon be in lay months in the future.

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See the rest of these fabulous new photos here.

Read more about the Sunnyside Powerhouse and the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway.

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Thank you to David Gallagher of Western Neighborhoods Project, railway expert Emiliano Echeverria, and Debra Peterson of San Mateo County Historical Association.

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ENDNOTES

1. I don’t know where the 100-foot smokestack is, so prominent other images. Maybe retouched out of the photo. A note about two prominent flaws in the print or negative: they both on the conical corner hat tower, one at the base and one near the arched openings on the balcony above. They shouldn’t be mistaken for marks on the structure itself. ↑
2. My calculations regarding the time and day by using Behrend Joost’s shadow: I used this calculator, which is in German, translating the local time to German local time and removing the city, putting the coordinates as 37.73, -122.44. Then I drew this, putting the east-west line parallel to the streetcar tracks on Monterey in front, and the north-south line parallel to the line of the building. Joost was 5’ 6” in his bowler hat (5′ 4 1/2″ according to the San Francisco Voter Register of 1892.) This combination, shadow 75% of height (~4’ 2”), at ~303 degrees, would of course only occur twice a year, at points equidistant from the Equinox. I’m betting it was April not August. ↑
3. The entry for the photo at the San Mateo County Historical Association has this note: “Album has ink stamp from the Risdon Iron Works at the corner of Beale and Howard Streets in San Francisco. Album later owned by Edwin A. and Catherine Ruhl of San Mateo who donated the album to the Burlingame Public Library.” ↑
4. “First Electric Road: San Francisco’s Pioneer Line Successfully Opened for Business,” SF Chronicle, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
5. Read more about Joost and his short-lived management of the new electric line in this post: The Sunnyside Powerhouse and San Francisco’s First Electric Streetcar. Read more about his life in this post about him and his nephew Foerster. ↑
6. Joost Has Trouble with Uitlanders,” SF Chronicle, 11 Nov 1899. ↑
7. In the years between 1890 and the early 1900s, Behrend Joost was in near-constant conflict with his neighbors around his house, now the Miller-Joost House on Upper Market. Access and resources like water and quarried rock were at issue. The most famous spat was with Alfred ‘Nobby’ Clarke, read some of that story here. Erecting fences to prevent access on Corbett Road was just one chapter in his tiresome story. As a contemporary biographer put somewhat euphemistically, Joost “never placed himself in a position to be ruled by the opinions and actions of others.” (A History of the New California, 1905.) ↑
8. “Neptune Welcomes the Arions,” SF Call, 14 Aug 1899. ↑
9. “Pickles, Gore and Pie: Joseph Scheerer and Behrend Joost have a Fracas in a Restaurant,” SF Call, 5 May 1896, p13. After his downfall, he got into a surprising number of public fisticuffs, despite his advancing age. ↑
10. “To the Sepulchre by Wire: The Electric Road is Running to Holy Cross Cemetery,” SF Examiner, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
11. “The Electric Road: Opening of the New Means of Transit to San Mateo County,” SF Call, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
12. “First Electric Road: San Francisco’s Pioneer Line Successfully Opened for Business,” SF Chronicle, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
13. “To the Sepulchre by Wire: The Electric Road is Running to Holy Cross Cemetery,” SF Examiner, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
14. “To the Sepulchre by Wire: The Electric Road is Running to Holy Cross Cemetery,” SF Examiner, 27 Apr 1892. ↑
15. Attendance numbers and engine description from: “First Electric Road: San Francisco’s Pioneer Line Successfully Opened for Business,” SF Chronicle, 27 Apr 1892. Description of feast from: “To the Sepulchre by Wire: The Electric Road is Running to Holy Cross Cemetery,” SF Examiner, 27 Apr 1892. ↑