the cable cars are 151 years old
Showing posts with label San Francisco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Francisco. Show all posts
Saturday, December 07, 2024
Monday, September 16, 2024
no one is surprised to learn that an infamous San Francisco tow truck company intentionally wrecked cars to cash in on insurance money.
charged with money laundering and fraud after federal prosecutors said they purchased a wrecked car, then cashed a $34,000 insurance check for it after falsely claiming they were in an accident. The couple own and operate multiple towing companies in San Francisco
The new indictment alleges that Badillo loaded a vehicle carrier with four cars and in August 2019 purposefully drove them off the road in San Mateo County. After Badillo reported the supposed accident to his insurance company, and he, Afanasyev, and Naraja made false or misleading statements to a representative of the company, according to the indictment.
The insurance company denied Badillo’s claim as fraudulent but paid one of his towing companies $5,210 for recovering, towing, and storing the vehicles involved.
As part of a second scheme, Afanasyev, Badillo, and Respicio are accused of submitting a fraudulent insurance claim on a wrecked car that Afanasyev purchased in May 2019. The indictment alleges that the car was not drivable when Afanasyev bought it. Respicio obtained an insurance policy for the vehicle before Afanasyev, posing as Respicio, falsely reported to the insurance company in August 2019 that he had been in a single-car accident, authorities said. Badillo is alleged to have falsely documented that his company towed the car after the fake accident.
The insurance company approved the claim and sent Respicio a check for $47,856.34, according to the indictment.
The insurance company denied Badillo’s claim as fraudulent but paid one of his towing companies $5,210 for recovering, towing, and storing the vehicles involved.
As part of a second scheme, Afanasyev, Badillo, and Respicio are accused of submitting a fraudulent insurance claim on a wrecked car that Afanasyev purchased in May 2019. The indictment alleges that the car was not drivable when Afanasyev bought it. Respicio obtained an insurance policy for the vehicle before Afanasyev, posing as Respicio, falsely reported to the insurance company in August 2019 that he had been in a single-car accident, authorities said. Badillo is alleged to have falsely documented that his company towed the car after the fake accident.
The insurance company approved the claim and sent Respicio a check for $47,856.34, according to the indictment.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
the FBI conducted a series of raids on Specialty Towing related to an ongoing federal investigation
In February, City Attorney David Chiu suspended Speciality Towing and two other companies from bidding on or receiving city contracts, accusing them of illegally towing cars from private lots.
The three companies — Auto Towing, Jose’s Towing, and Specialty Towing and Recovery — were all owned and operated by Abigail Fuentes and Jose Badillo.
On Thursday, United States Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey charged two people — one of them being Badillo, 31 — alleging insurance fraud and money laundering under his two companies: Jose’s Towing LLC and Auto Towing LLC.
Monday, April 15, 2024
an example of how crazy and desperate things are in San Francisco, a tow truck driver tried to snatch a car that was driving in traffic
A Corolla was idling at a stoplight, just out running errands, when this notorious tow truck company unit tried to snatch it, as they have been specializing in attacking Spanish and Cantonese people's vehicles then making it difficult for them to retrieve their vehicles and pressuring them for payments in cash.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Tuesday, July 04, 2023
Tuesday, January 03, 2023
wow, hell of a big service bay. 1932 Goodyear service station, San Francisco.
The garage area had two pits where gas fumes would settle, creating a fire hazard. Pits were banned and grease monkeys began to use hoists in the new service garages. The "large round thing cast in concrete" was probably an exhaust fan with an explosionproof motor.
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Sunday, February 21, 2021
it's been 50 years since moving houses was a common thing, so today when one old house was moved in San Francisco, it drew a big crowd. A 139-year-old San Francisco Victorian home inched its down Franklin Street Sunday as crews delicately moved the structure to its new setting on Fulton Street.
The house’s quarter-mile journey has been in the planning stages for years.
“We had to get 15 different city agencies to agree to this,” said veteran house mover Phil Joy. “Maybe it was 18 agencies. I’m not really sure.”
Along the route, parking meters were ripped up. Limbs from an overhanging laurel tree were trimmed. Traffic signs were relocated. Overhead traffic lights are coming down and overhead wires that power the 5-Fulton Muni line will be turned off and unstrung. No-Parking-tow-away-zone signs have been plastered all over like bad checks.
Joy, who has moved scores of houses over the years, says each move is different. This one will be tricky because of the house’s length — 80 feet — and because the first part of its journey on Franklin Street involves going downhill.
A San Francisco broker and the owner of the Victorian had to pay about $200,000 for assorted permissions and fees involved in the move that took an hour, plus another $200,000 for the move itself
The former site at 807 Franklin St. is to become a 48-unit, eight-story apartment building while the transported Victorian will be anchored at 635 Fulton St. and will become a 7 unit residential
Finally, it was backed onto a new foundation in the middle of a row of low slung stucco public housing units, and next to a historic former mortuary that had been slid over 14 feet to make way for its new neighbor,
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-parade-follows-139-year-old-Victorian-s-15967684.php
Friday, May 31, 2019
Monday, May 06, 2019
In November 1974, Dave Glass, along with an imaginably large crowd of onlookers, witnessed the monumental task of moving twelve San Francisco Victorian houses approximately one mile
These precarious moving houses were documented by photographer Dave Glass in late 1970s San Francisco. What we’re looking at is essentially the result of a thirty year urban renewal scheme for the Western Addition neighbourhood of SF, particularly the Fillmore District, which after the Second World War, had become a cultural centre for the city’s African American community. It was a center of jazz with grand Victorian architecture that had survived the 1906 earthquake, but due to overcrowding and a high proportion of low-income families, the area was considered a slum and targeted for redevelopment. A “nice new neighbourhood” was promised by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and in the mid 1950s and 60s, entire blocks were cleared, destroying up to 2,500 Victorian houses, along with the neighbourhood’s character.
By the 1970s however, San Francisco started to wise up. Pioneers of historic preservation who had been tirelessly protesting for years against the destruction of the city’s heritage, finally began to win the battle. The Redevelopment Agency agreed to find new homeowners for the Victorians, who would agree to rehabilitate and help conserve the homes. The tired old Victorians could be purchased for one dollar– relocation and restoration costs not included!
They were moved in groups of four over three weekend, the majority joining the Beiderman Place Historic Area. Telephone lines were moved, trolley wires were cut, streetlights removed, thirty police escorts and thirty tow trucks were called to clear the path, all to make way for the Victorians. The sight was compared to watching great ships moving through an inland waterway.
thanks to Maurice for the video!
https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/10/14/the-moving-houses-of-san-francisco/
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
West San Francisco had a street car neighborhood, made when the Market Street Railway Company gave the mayor the old horse-pulled railcars they which he rented out on his sand dunes property, as they upgraded to the new electric and cable-driven streetcars. 1 remains
Map makers labeled the area on the coast the "Great Sand Waste" in the 1860s. Since it was about a city block away from the beach, you can understand why. It was on what is now 47th and 48th streets, the first couple of blocks from the "great highway", along the Pacific
Charles Stahl, a gripman for the Ellis Street line, showed the potential of the abandoned cars. On a lot he purchased at today's 20th Avenue between Judah and Kirkham (then unmarked sand dunes), Stahl connected together three old North Beach and Mission horse-cars he bought for $45. He mounted the edifice on stilts to keep it above the shifting sand, and his family moved into their unique abode in the summer of 1895.
In 1895 the Market Street Railway Company placed a newspaper advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner offering horse cars for $20 ($10 without seats). It seems they either sold the lot to the Mayor, or gave them to him as a mutual favor where they were clear of them, and the mayor owed them a favor.
Mayor Adolph Sutro, who owned the land, encouraged the arrival and development of Carville as a way to collect temporary rents on his property.
By September of that year the cars were already put to a wide variety of uses, including: a backyard children's playhouses, a real estate office, and a shoemaker's shop. Also notable was "The Annex", a "coffee saloon" operated by Colonel Dailey in one of three abandoned horse cars he rented from Sutro, at $5 a month.
Colonel Charles Dailey, a Civil War veteran and a former government agent in Arizona, was a friend of Adolph Sutro's, and ostensibly chose his eccentric life at the beach for his health, but though he founded Carville, he never actually lived in a streetcar.
Dailey made his home in a former realtor's shed, which he expanded with driftwood from the beach and proceeded to decorate with shells and curios washed up from the sea.
Mayor Sutro expanded his real estate ventures to include Lands End and built an open estate overlooking his new public bath complex, his Cliff House restaurant, and Ocean Beach.
Mayor Sutro, in trying to convince people to buy his extensive sand-covered properties, highlighted what wasn't at the beach: "...no smoke, no sewer gas, no decaying matter---nothing to injure the health."
By July 1899, there were an estimated 70 streetcars in Carville. Heyman sank a well, hit an aquifer and provided Carville with water. By 1900, the price of a lot and two cars at the beach had soared to $600.
The neighborhood gradually expanded south and into Carville. By 1901 over 100 cars were occupied by 50 families.
One of the earliest tenants was a women's bicycling club known as the Falcons. San Francisco was pulsating with bicycle fever in the last years of the 19th century, and the Falcons soon filled several abandoned cars and added a lean-to for bike parking.
In the early years of the 20th century people began to make Carville home. After the 1906 earthquake and fire a number of refugees settled in Carville, including for a while Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and major instigator of the graft prosecutions against Ruef and Mayor Schmitz. Many people stayed and the neighborhood became more formalized. The Oceanside Improvement Club, founded in 1903, had by 1910 managed to establish electric, gas and water service for residents, as well as grading and paving streets, and had also laid plans for a sewer line.
By 1908 Carville had an estimated population of 2,000 and featured wildly creative structures made up of as many as 10 cars, stacked on each other or arranged in various L- and U-shaped configurations like children's blocks.
By 1910, realtors finally made progress where Sutro hadn't: people began buying "real" homes in the area. None of Sutro's hoped-for mansions went up, but instead modest cottages arose here and there.
The neighborhood didn't really develop extensively, however, until the 1928 extension of the Judah streetcar line to the beach.
While Carville didn't immediately disappear, it gradually melted into the neighborhood. As people built more conventional homes, some of the cars were simply hidden in the framework, shingled or spackled invisible. The empty lots of the area filled in with aggressive homebuilding in the 1930s and 40s. Soon Carville was mostly forgotten, its ghost revived only on the odd occasion when some remodeling project uncovered wheels under a living room floor!
In 1999, Preservation magazine did an article on the Carville houses which featured lines such as "...the Sunset may be [San Francisco's] only neighborhood without a trace of apparent charm or history, a vast, drab tract of stucco houses sloping down to the sea."
A San Francisco State student creating a special study report, James Heisterkamp kept a detailed diary of his 1994 search for Carville's "last remnant". He chatted with people in libraries, people on walks, people he met in cafés and laundromats.
Locals he met had never heard of Carville. "During my trekking up and down 47th, 48th, and the Great Highway, looking for the elusive remnant Carville cable cars, I was amazed by the number of people who never heard of the previous history of their own neighborhood. One man, in his forties or fifties, lived in the area about a half a block from a previous Carville address, for over 20 years and was unaware of cable cars ever being a part of some of the structures in his area."
During a realtors open house on the last Carville home, Heisterkamp had the opportunity to take photos and chat with the owner. The old railcars made up the second floor, with the front door opening on a large room of two cable cars side by side, their interior sides removed.
an entire article about it http://www.outsidelands.org/sw19.php
Enter Scott Anderson, a filmmaker who lived in an apartment in the neighborhood. Anderson walked by the home one day, saw the "for sale" sign, and took a look inside. Stunned and entranced, he ended up buying the quirky structure.
Anderson's tenant gave Heisterkamp the great privilege to walk around inside his home, I marvel at the amount of original, historical fabric inside. One wall has the wooden benches of the old cable car still built in where passengers in the 1890s sat, under the original tongue-and-groove slat ceiling, peering out side windows. Glass lanterns, old kerosene lamps, hang over the space, and it doesn't take much to believe the room is about to rumble down a pair of rails. The bedroom and bathroom are an intact horse car, complete with a sliding panel door separating the two.
But you can't tell how cool the interior is from the exterior, which wouldn't give the normal pedestrian any idea that there are old street cars making up the house they're walking past.
and the view from the back, that is pretty cool, isn't something anyone can see unless they use Google Maps, Google Earth, or are on a nearby high roof
but way back when, in 1999 Bob Swanson with Preservation Magazine took some photos, and this was the same house he phtographed
https://thebolditalic.com/photos-from-sf-s-abandoned-streetcar-neighborhood-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-6256d394db22
http://www.outsidelands.org/sw19.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carville,_San_Francisco
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=CARVILLE:_Suburban_Bohemia_in_Fin_de_Siecle_San_Francisco
http://www.carville-book.com/bonus.php
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/From-S-F-s-past-a-crazy-car-colony-in-the-dunes-4676168.php#photo-4938032
Thursday, March 09, 2017
A movie film recorded 4 days before the 1906 San Francisco disaster, from the front of a streetcar during filming on Market Street from 8th, in front of the Miles Studios, to the Ferry building. Your coffee and donuts morning video
thanks Jeff!
From the you tube video notes:
The origin of the film was an enigma for many decades, and it was long thought to have been shot in September of 1905, after being dated as such by the Library of Congress based on the state of construction of several buildings. However, in 2009 and 2010, film historian David Kiehn, co-founder of Niles Film Museum in Niles, California, dated the film to the spring of 1906 from automobile registrations and weather records. Kiehn eventually found promotional materials from the film's original release and dated the film to April 14th, 1906, and finally gave credit to the filmmakers, the Miles Brothers.
Accuracy: Automobile sounds are all either Ford Model T, or Model A, which came out later, but which have similarly designed engines, and sound quite close to the various cars shown in the film. The horns are slightly inaccurate as mostly bulb horns were used at the time, but were substituted by the far more recognizable electric "oogaa" horns, which came out a couple years later. The streetcar sounds are actual San Francisco streetcars. Doppler effect was used to align the sounds.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Saturday, October 12, 2013
San Francisco, 1906 earthquake and present day, photo mashup of then and now, by artist photographer Shawn Clover
Since 2010, San Francisco photographer Shawn Clover has been working on a striking series of then and now composite photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. To create the series, Clover collected archival photos of the earthquake’s aftermath. He then replicated the photos himself, down to the location, camera position and focal length (to the best of his estimation). The resulting composite photos hauntingly combine stark images of the earthquake’s devastation with modern scenes of life in San Francisco.
found on http://pixtale.net/2012/09/composite-then-and-now-photos-of-the-1906-san-francisco-earthquake/
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
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