Cable Car San Francisco Quotes

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is.

Three cable lines are still active in SF and these are as follows: California and the two Powell Cable Lines. The last two are most popular among locals and tourists as they even travel to the sheer area in the north, including the Lombard Street. Riding these cars can be pretty fun, but lines tend to be long at times especially during late mornings and afternoons.

Where is God? I used to take some comfort from the image of cable cars in San Francisco. What enables those cable cars to move up and down the steep hills of San Francisco? There are powerful cables that run underneath these ups and downs. When the cable car wants to move, it latches on to the cable, which pulls it up or down the hills. If you look down into the opening that runs down the middle of all these streets, you will see that, underneath, the cable is always running. God is the force of life that runs through our lives, day in and day out—in the inexplicable force that gives a person the simple, heroic courage to open the door.

San Francisco is still the loveliest city in the world for my money, despite how they've tried to ruin her. Yeah, it attracts all the weirdos, and some of them aren't harmless like they used to be in days gone by, but for the most part the people are lovely and easygoing, and there is a romanticism that exists in San Francisco that you can genuinely feel as you walk around. The wonderful things about her still remain; the wharf and fabled Pier 39; the little cable cars climbing upward toward the stars; the Painted Ladies of Victorian Row; the thousand or so acres of Golden Gate Park; and the up-and-down streets where Steve McQueen once hopped in his '68 Mustang and chased the bad guys in their '68 Dodge Charger. Tony Bennett left his heart here for good reason.

It’s like San Francisco,” Paige breathes at our incredible first view of Venice. Which breaks the spell for a moment. We wrench our eyes away from the Grand Canal and turn to gawk at her instead. “San Francisco?” I ask. “Really?” I mean, I haven’t been to San Francisco, but I’ve seen it in lots of films. Amazingly steep streets, cable cars, Alcatraz Island out in the bay, a huge red bridge they call Golden for some reason. Does she mean Venice is like San Francisco because of the bridge? “Never a dull moment with Paige,” I mutter to Kelly as an aside.