San Diego History · Bankers Hill and Uptown
San Diego had cable cars, and the men who built them were running the bank that killed them.
Opened in 1890 with the governor in the first car. Dead inside two years. All records sourced and cited.
Opened in 1890 with the governor in the first car. Dead inside two years. All records sourced and cited.
San Diego had cable cars. Real ones, gripping a moving cable under the street, the same machinery San Francisco is famous for. They opened in June 1890 with the governor of California riding in the first car.
They were dead inside two years, and the reason is not that nobody rode them. Two of the men who built the line were also running the bank that went under and took the railway down with it. The Journal of San Diego History puts it in one sentence: the road "was strangled by its big debt to that rotten bank."
Two other things worth knowing before the story runs. The cable itself was twenty three thousand eight hundred feet of steel, an inch and a quarter thick, weighing twenty six tons, and getting it into the ground took twenty horses. And the line did not close by decision. Something broke.
George D. Copeland started it. In May 1889 he took out the franchise for an electric car line, and then he sold it on.
The buyers were D. D. Dare, J. W. Collins and John C. Fisher. Fisher took the vice presidency and the general manager's job. A man named Frank Van Vleck ran construction and the engineering.
Dare and Collins had another business. They were the men behind the California National Bank. Hold onto that.
The San Diego Cable Railway opened on a Saturday afternoon. Mayor Douglas Gunn started the ceremonies at half past one. The first car out was called El Escondido, and it carried the City Guard Band and a load of dignitaries including Governor Waterman.
The fare from the foot of Sixth Street to Mission Cliff Gardens was a nickel.
The route ran north on Fourth Street to University, east to what is now Park Boulevard, then north to Mission Cliff Gardens. Coming back it took Sixth Street down to C Street, east to Fourth, and north again to the powerhouse. The powerhouse split the line into two sections and ran them at different speeds: eight miles an hour through downtown, twelve on the run out to Mission Cliff.
Twelve cars were built for it in Stockton, thirty to forty feet long, seating forty to fifty. They had names, not numbers. El Escondido. San Juan Capistrano. Montezuma. La Jolla. Alvarado. San Ysidora. Las Flores.
The powerhouse was solid brick and it was not small. A hundred feet of frontage on Fourth, two hundred on Spruce, forty on Third. Thirty thousand dollars with the machinery in it.
Inside were two Corliss steam engines, coal fired, turning a wheel twenty five feet across.
The cable that wheel pulled was twenty three thousand eight hundred feet long and about an inch and a quarter in diameter. It weighed twenty six tons. To thread it into the conduit under the street they hitched up twenty horses and dragged it through.
That is the part people miss about cable traction. The cars have no engine. The cable never stops moving. Every car on the line is just a clamp, opening and closing on a wire that a coal fire two miles away keeps turning.
The company's taxes went delinquent in 1891.
The California National Bank, the one Dare and Collins managed, failed. The railway owed it a great deal of money, and the debt did not disappear when the bank did. The Journal's account is blunt about what that meant: the road "could make running expenses, sometimes a little better, but was strangled by its big debt to that rotten bank."
The timing was already bad. San Diego's boom had broken in 1888 and people were leaving. A transit line built for a city that was still filling up found itself serving a city that was emptying out.
In March 1892 the company was declared insolvent.
Here is how a cable railway actually ends.
The cable snapped.
Service stopped, and nobody started it again. There was no final run, no ceremony, no vote. A wire under Fourth Street parted, and the company that owned it had no money to fix it and no reason to try.
The whole thing went to public auction and sold for seventeen thousand dollars.
The buyer was George B. Kerper of Cincinnati, Ohio. He put motors in the cars, installed his own machinery in the old cable powerhouse, and ran the line as an electric railway under the name Citizen's Traction Company.
So the route survived. The cable did not. What had cost thirty thousand dollars to build as a powerhouse alone came back as a streetcar line under a man from two thousand miles away, for a little more than half that.
The line is gone but the reason those streets exist is not.
Fourth and Sixth are the spine of the neighborhoods above downtown because a cable railway ran up one and down the other, and the blocks along them filled in around a transit line that had already been built. Mission Cliff Gardens was the destination at the end, and the run out to it is why the streets north of downtown developed when they did rather than a decade later.
That is the thing worth knowing if you are looking at a house up there. The grid you are standing in was laid out to serve a machine that stopped running in 1892.
The current numbers are on the downtown market report and the North Park market report, and the wider picture is in Metro and Central.
How much cable. This piece says twenty three thousand eight hundred feet, which is the figure in the Journal. A figure of about fifty one thousand feet circulates elsewhere and would roughly correspond to counting the loop in both directions rather than the single run. We have printed the Journal's number and named it as the Journal's.
How long it ran. Sources split between about thirteen months and about two years. The documented bookends are the June 7, 1890 opening and the August 1892 break, which is twenty six months of calendar time, but service was interrupted before the end. We have printed the two dates rather than a duration.
Whether the bank failure alone killed it. The Journal names the debt to the California National Bank as what strangled the road, and also describes a city losing population after the 1888 collapse. Both are in the record. We have not ranked them.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.