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Tag: streetcar
Monterey East of Foerster: 1941 and Today
1911: Snapshot of life on Monterey Boulevard
On 5 January 1911, a photographer named John Henry Mentz came out to Sunnyside to take some shots on a chilly, partly cloudy day. He was the skilled official photographer for United Railroads of San Francisco (URR, which became Muni later). His photos documented the streetcar tracks, but naturally other things were included. Thanks to the availability of high-definition scans of these three images from SFMTA, we can glimpse life on that day in Sunnyside history, complete with a family on the way to the shops and goats grazing on the railroad tracks. The photos were taken on the first block of Monterey Boulevard, near Circular Avenue. First the photos with details, then a comparison to today.
A Thursday Afternoon on Monterey
First Mentz took this image, with a large 8×10 camera and a glass-plate negative positioned squarely in the middle of the unpaved road, facing east (towards what is now Glen Park).
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The Sunnyside Powerhouse and San Francisco’s First Electric Streetcar
Update Feb 2021: See additional new images of the Sunnyside Powerhouse, including the engine rooms
Sunnyside played an important role in the development of the first electric streetcar in San Francisco. The pioneering enterprise was initiated in 1890 by streetcar-railway engineer John Wesley Hartzell, with financial backing from millionaire real-estate speculator Behrend Joost. Before that, horse-powered and cable-driven streetcars were the norm in the city. Soon the newly introduced technology would power many of San Francisco’s many privately-held transit lines.
But the San Francisco and San Mateo Railway was the first electric railroad in the city, and central to the project, producing the electric energy to run the line, was the Sunnyside Powerhouse, located on the flatiron-shaped block at the eastern end of Monterey Boulevard, then called Sunnyside Avenue.
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