The historic context of trolleys and Golden Gate Park is both interesting and controversial.

The only passenger transit tracks that ever 'sullied' the famed Park were actually laid before it looked like a park. A steam train line opened in 1883, carrying passengers from Stanyan Street—the end of the Market & Haight cable car line—skirting the south edge of the park reservation (then almost all sand dunes) via what was then called 'H Street,' now Lincoln Way. Just before reaching the beach, it turned north into the park, emerging on the other side to a terminal on what is now LaPlaya Avenue, within walking distance of the only attraction in the vicinity in those days, the Cliff House.

Gradually, the famed pair of William Hammond Hall and John McLaren turned the sand dunes to green within the park boundaries, framing the track right-of-way with foliage, and even building a stone bridge over the top of what was then called Main Drive. Sometime before the earthquake of 1906, the steam line was electrified and combined with the route 20 streetcar line, which ran from the old Southern Pacific Depot at Third and Townsend by a roundabout route including Ellis, Devisadero (as it was then spelled) and Oak Streets to reach Haight and Stanyan. It is quite possible that the oldest car in Muni’s historic streetcar fleet, 1895 San Francisco car #578, ran this line all the way to the beach early in its life.

If it did, it rumbled over siding switches that carried special streetcars into the park at various places. They didn’t carry passengers, they carried dirt. These 'street sweeping cars,' the trolley equivalent of a dump truck, picked up 'street dirt' (actually mostly horse manure) from a downtown collection point near Seventh and Brannan Streets, and hauled it to the park, where it was used to fill in gullies. The natural fertilizer also made plants sprout faster. Their job was finished around 1906.

The new Muni aims for the Park
After the earthquake, the old Market & Haight cable line was also electrified, and by 1916, it had taken over the outer end of the 20-line, running proudly with the handsome 100-series deck roof streetcars of United Railroads as the 7-Haight & Ocean line. Meantime, on the other side of Golden Gate Park, the new publicly-owned Municipal Railway was aiming for the park as well. The tracks of its first line, the A-Geary, stub-ended on Tenth Avenue at Fulton, the park boundary. A comprehensive 1913 study of the city’s transportation needs, by consultant Bion Arnold, recommended extending those tracks right through the park, past the deYoung and Music Concourse, and out on Ninth Avenue to Judah to join the as yet unbuilt N-line. Arnold went to great lengths to allay fears that the trolleys would damage the park, including drawings of possible right-of-way treatments to minimize impacts, and listing parks in other cities that coexisted with streetcars.

McLaren 1, O’Shaughnessy 0
City Engineer M. M. O’Shaughnessy was an irresistable force in those days, punching tunnels under Twin Peaks and Stockton Street for trolleys, even plunging through a park—Mission (Dolores) Park—to build the J-Church line in 1917. But when it came to Golden Gate Park, he met an immovable object in John McLaren, by now park superintendent and the unquestioned master of 'his' park. After years of sparring, O’Shaughnessy finally gave up. Muni ran a bus line from the end of the A-line across the park instead, later to become the 10-Monterey, and then, ironically, the 44-O’Shaughnessy.

But the 7-line remained, turned over with the rest of United Railroads to successor Market Street Railway Co. in 1921. By this time, it attracted quite a bit of traffic as a prime route to the bustling fun center, Playland-at-the-Beach. When Muni took over MSRy in 1944, the 7-line’s days were numbered. In 1947, streetcars stopped using the right-of-way through the west end of the park, turning back at 47th Ave. and Lincoln Way. Buses ran the final leg of the route via Great Highway. The next year, the streetcars were gone from Lincoln Way, too, replaced by a bus line numbered 20 (the original streetcar line’s number). The 7-Haight became a trolley bus in 1949 and runs the same route today—Ferries to Haight and Stanyan—that it ran as a cable car more than a century ago. And the old right-of-way through the park? It survived quite nicely, and is still visible—and useable—today as a walking path, cutting directly behind the now revitalized Beach Chalet.

But the 7 and J weren’t the only streetcar lines in San Francisco to run in park-like settings. Muni’s D and E lines (now essentially the 45 and 41 trolley coach lines) both ran on private right-of-way deep into the Presidio from a gate at Greenwich Street until the late 1940s. And Muni’s H-Potrero trolleys (later the 47 trolley bus) ran through the greenery of Fort Mason until the Army kicked them out in 1948. Today, plans are moving forward to extend historic streetcar service from Fisherman’s Wharf through Fort Mason, and perhaps all the way into the Presidio (see story).

With growing recognition that well-maintained historic streetcars can provide attractive public transportation to San Francisco’s open spaces, it may just be that streetcars in the parks is an idea whose time could come—again.