Tourist guides working on "hop-on hop-off" buses usually speak a lot of information about the place. As such they can spark interest in other ways of exploring a city. The blond lady who guided us through San Francisco city was a lively person: she interacted with people and things on the spot. Shortly before leaving the tour, I heard her asking each one of us: " have you tried cable cars?". Two passengers had. The rest of us were new to the city so we had not tried this ride.
24 hours later, taking her suggestion seriously, I decided on a visit to the Cable car museum. As a pedestrian, I stopped in order to observe cable cars going up or down the road. I wanted to listen to the sound that preceded the car and the sound that lingered on the road after the cable car had passed. was curious to see how people get on and off this means of transportation, how car drivers reacted, how frequent routes were.... And that is where my own fascination with cable cars started.
The museum itself is the implementation of an exciting idea: let people see how cable cars move, what kinds of tools technicians use, what are these cables, what sound they produce... The small, L shaped museum grabs the visitor by the ears: the sound is ongoing, monotonous and deafening... It is only because the visitor can bend over any spot of the L shape floor and look down to observe big wheels working endlessly and cables rolling. This is the source of energy for cable cars. No representations, no reflections but only real things. Reality is "museumised" as much as all objects related to cable cars and coming from the past. This museum is an excellent sample of the past sliding into present time and hence confirming continuity: The concise labels and descriptions can easily be observed right downwards: what moved cable cars some decades ago is still moving them.
As for cable cars themselves, the "surrounding discourse" is like magic to me: there are 3 routes left out of 8 nowadays. Cable cars are very frequent and usually full of tourists, either sitting or standing or even holding tight from iron bars to the sides of the car. Each car is operated by two "drivers" who communicate between themselves by pulling a cord once or twice, depending on the message.
It takes a special kind of art to push or pull the black and red handle, especially when going up or down the roads of San Francisco. This "art" as a passenger called it, is inextricably linked with drivers' sense of responsibility to passengers, pedestrians and other cars. Witnessing drivers' extra care for passengers and strong reprimanding on careless pedestrians, I could not but be surprised.
Cable cars are obliged to go by the nature of the roads. This means that they can stop at crossroads where the place is flat. They stop in the middle of the road. Taking these two together gives other car drivers a difficult time, as they have to drive their own vehicles to the right or the left of the stopped cable car so as to move on. I enjoyed this moment when the dominant vehicle was a colorful cable car and traffic was channeled accordingly. It is a sign of locals' relation to their "heritage" and to tourists.
Stop signs stand on pavement and contain useful information. Some of them are in Chinese.
When the cable car reaches the final destination, another "ritual" takes place: both drivers take it to a wooden round platform. They both come off the car and push it so as to turn it around. The platform moves along with the car until the cable car faces the way up.
Cable cars became the most exciting feature of San Francisco because of all these processes that I witnessed and photographed. What is the core essence however is an emotional turn to this tourist attraction: cable cars stand for locals' love for them and their struggle to preserve them from total extinction some time in 1947 and a further struggle to restore them in the 80s. Freidel Klussman, the lady who leaded efforts to reconstruct cable cars and reset them in locals' hearts- as the text puts it in the museum's display case- is a legacy: there is special reference to her in the museum and in peoples' hearts.
While browsing through the artifacts in that little peculiar museum, under the sounds of wheels and cables, another visitor remarked: " I have travelled all over the US. San Francisco is chaos but there is no other place like it. These guys are history". Indeed so: history well and alive....
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