Carville by the Sea - by Darren Mckeeman - Long Wharf

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Carville by the Sea<br>It used to take a concerted effort to destroy the character of a San Francisco neighborhood.

Darren Mckeeman<br>Jun 01, 2026

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From the SF Public Library History Annex, my favorite part of the library at the main branch.<br>There is a house at 1740 Great Highway, on the western edge of San Francisco, where the city runs out of ideas and gives up to the ocean. It doesn’t look like much from the outside — two stories, kind of Craftsman-ish, wedged between the dunes and the park. The kind of place you’d scroll past on Zillow without stopping. What you wouldn’t know, unless someone told you, is that you’re looking at a structure assembled from three nineteenth-century transit vehicles. Two cable cars from the 1880s form the upper floor. A horsecar from the 1870s is bolted onto the side. The whole thing was built in 1908, and it is, as far as anyone can determine, the last surviving building from a settlement of two hundred street cars that once housed two thousand people in the dunes behind Ocean Beach.<br>The settlement was called Carville by the Sea.<br>You’ve probably never heard of it. That’s the point.<br>In 1895, the Market Street Railway Company placed an advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner.<br>Horsecars for sale. Ten dollars. Twenty with seats.<br>This was not a subtle business proposition. The city was electrifying its transit lines, and the horsecars — the old cable-pulled and horse-drawn cars that had run the previous generation — were scrapped. Somebody had to get rid of them. If you wanted one, they would basically give it to you.<br>Colonel Charles Dailey wanted several.<br>Dailey was a Civil War veteran, formerly a government agent in Arizona, which is a combination of credentials that suggests someone who had gotten comfortable with improvised solutions to inhospitable terrain. He had been renting a plot of land from Adolph Sutro — that Sutro, the one who built the Baths, the one who was briefly mayor — out on the western edge of the city, where the dunes ran down to the beach, and nobody else wanted to be. He rented three horsecars from Sutro and bolted them together into a coffee saloon. He decorated it with shells he found on the beach.<br>He named it The Annex.<br>The Annex sat at the western terminus of the Park and Ocean Railroad, which had been running steam trains out along Lincoln Way to the beach since 1883. The train brought day-trippers. The day-trippers found The Annex. The Annex served coffee and whatever else Dailey felt like selling, in a building made of public transit, on a patch of beach rented from the mayor. This was, in 1895, completely normal.<br>Within months, other people started showing up with horsecars.<br>By 1897, there were enough of them that the area had acquired a name: Carville. By 1901, you had fifty families, a two-story church, cafés, private homes, bed-and-breakfast operations, and at least two major artistic clubhouses. By 1908, the population was two thousand people, and the Chronicle was calling it “the oddest village in the world,” which, from a San Francisco newspaper, is saying something.<br>The economics were not complicated. A horsecar cost ten dollars. A lot in the dunes cost $7.50 a month. If you wanted two cars on your lot, the whole package ran you $35. Charles Stahl — a gripman on the Ellis Street cable car line, which means he ran cable cars for a living and apparently thought living in one sounded like a reasonable next step — bought three North Beach & Mission horsecars in 1897 for a combined total of $45. He connected them into a house on 20th Avenue between Judah and Kirkham. For forty-five dollars. In San Francisco.<br>This remains, as far as I can tell, the most efficient housing acquisition in the history of this city. Nothing may ever come close.<br>The people who moved into Carville were a specific type.<br>Jack London lived in a converted car. He was not yet famous — this was the mid-1890s, before The Call of the Wild , before anything. He was a young man from Oakland who liked to drink and argue about literature and had strong opinions about most things, which is a description that would fit about a quarter of Carville’s residents at any given moment.<br>George Sterling, the poet who would later become the unofficial poet laureate of Bohemian San Francisco, was a regular. Maynard Dixon — the painter known for the American West, who also spent years illustrating Jack London’s books — rented a car as a studio. Ina Coolbrith, who would eventually become the first state Poet Laureate of California and who had spent years mentoring London when he was a teenager, borrowing books from the Oakland library, was in the mix. Xavier Martínez, tonalist painter and teacher, set up shop. Gelett Burgess was around; he was the editor of The Lark , which was an iconoclastic magazine of the 1890s.<br>The historian who documented all this coined a term for this loose circle of writers and...