The golden age of the cable car came to an end starting with the 1906 earthquake and fire. Over the next four decades, one proud line after another shut down or converted to electricity.

The Geary, Park and Ocean line closed in 1912. In 1929, the Pacific Avenue line - which ran down an elegant street still lit by gas lanterns - vanished. Twelve years later came the demise of lines that ran on Castro and Fillmore streets. In 1942, the Sacramento-Clay line made its final round trip between the Ferry Building and the Western Addition.

That left only two cable car companies - the California Street Cable Railroad and the Market Street Railway Co. - operating a total of four lines and a Tenderloin shuttle, which collectively ran from downtown over Nob and Russian hills to Aquatic Park and the Western Addition. But even this vestige of a once-mighty system was too much for Mayor Roger Lapham.

An East Coast shipping tycoon who had been elected on a platform of modern efficiency and "progress," Lapham had "all the sentiment of a Pismo clam," as Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote in the 1951 book "Cable Car Carnival." In his January 1947 annual message to the Board of Supervisors, the mayor demanded that the Market Street Railway's cable cars, which the city had acquired in 1944, be immediately removed and replaced with diesel buses.

At first, it appeared that Lapham would get his wish. As Michael Phipps chronicles in his article "Cable Car Wars: The Battles to Save San Francisco's Cable Cars (1944-1954)," which appeared in the summer 2012 edition of the historical journal the Argonaut, the mayor had the backing of the city's heavy hitters. The Board of Supervisors, the city Public Utilities Commission and the San Francisco Real Estate Board were all behind him.

Compliant press

And the press rolled over. Under the headline "Junk the cable cars!," The Chronicle reported that the cable cars, "chronically ill for many years, finally are dying. ... They are surely dead." The Call-Bulletin was equally feeble, bleating, "We suppose (with a sigh) that the new progress must have its way."

But resistance came from an unexpected quarter. Friedel Klussmann, a member of an arts group called the San Francisco Federation of Arts, was outraged.

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Klussmann, then 51 years old, organized the Citizens Committee to Save the Cable Cars. The group, made up mostly of women, deluged city politicians with letters of protest. Their motto: "There'll always be cable cars in San Francisco."

Lapham's attitude toward his society-lady adversaries was condescending, bordering on contemptuous. "The horsecar had to go, the cable cars have to go," he lectured Klussmann. "Waving petitions in the face of progress can no more stop it than could King Canute stop the waves by royal decree.

"Those of our citizens who take delight in bumping the bumps and riding the curves will have to find their enjoyment in the chutes, the scenic railway, or the 'Spinno-Rocket' at the beach," the mayor said - the last a reference to a ride at the now-vanished Playland amusement park. He followed that up with a heavy-handed publicity stunt, driving a horsecar down Market Street to illustrate how old-fashioned the cable cars were.

But Lapham's smirk soon vanished. Klussmann's committee gathered the 40,000 signatures needed to place a measure on the November 1947 ballot to amend the City Charter and protect the cable cars.

Coverage shifts

The local papers, sensing which way the wind (and their advertisers) were blowing, began to run pro-cable car stories. The venerable San Francisco import emporium Gump's ran an ad in Time magazine that proclaimed, "This isn't a private fight anymore," and called for readers across the country to write in.

Hollywood celebrities like Irene Dunne supported the cable cars. Eleanor Roosevelt praised them, as did Salvador Dali. National Geographic magazine distributed 3,200 copies of a piece about the cable cars to teachers around the country, who solicited 300 essays from schoolchildren, all but six in favor of keeping them.

"Letters of support poured in from ... such far-flung places as Norway, Denmark, India, Guam, England, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada," Phipps notes. One man, writing from postwar Germany, said, "Let the would-be abolishers of your cable cars come over to Europe to find out how many good old things have gone, utterly gone. ... I think, men should not deliberately lay hands on such things."

Too expensive

Officials argued that the cable cars were expensive and that "finances do not permit of subsidizing a tourist attraction."

But no one was listening.

On Nov. 4, 1947, the people of San Francisco spoke. Measure 10, the Save the Cable Cars Measure, passed overwhelmingly - 170,000 in favor to 50,000 opposed.

Sadly, the story didn't end there. City officials were still determined to get rid of the cable cars. Thanks to a 1954 ballot measure - spearheaded by a public relations man who was on the city payroll and created Astroturf groups advocating for the cable cars' abolition - they eventually managed to kill several lines and truncate others, removing three-quarters of the remaining tracks.

The O'Farrell, Jones and Hyde line and the Jones Street shuttle, which carried passengers through the Tenderloin, died that year. The last car on the 70-year-old Washington-Jackson line rolled into the barn in 1956.

Some of the route covered by the O'Farrell, Jones and Hyde line was covered by the new Powell and Hyde line that opened in 1957. But as Klussmann, one of the city's great heroes, once said, "Cable cars, once removed, are lost forever."

The wars end

Times change, and so do city officials. In the 1980s, San Francisco's mayor wasn't trying to kill the system - instead, Dianne Feinstein led the rebuilding of what was left. Klussmann, no longer the enemy of City Hall, was astounded, telling a reporter, "They are doing what I said years and years ago should be done."

Eleven years after Klussmann died in 1986, the city dedicated the turntable at the Beach Street end of the Hyde Street line to her.

It's hard to imagine that the city's three remaining cable car lines will ever be scrapped as long as San Francisco exists. But it's equally hard not to think that "progress" would have been better served if San Franciscans today got around the same way they did in 1890 - riding all over town on open-air wooden cars, pulled by a whirring rope, at a human speed.

Editor's note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.