good afternoon. i m with the department of building inspection. we are approaching the sixth year of our brown bag lunch series here at the department of building inspection where we talk about topics related to construction in san francisco. we invite you to join us on the third thursday of every month here at the building department. we have an exciting lineup of shows this year. and one of them, today, is going to be really exciting because we have a terrific guest today. mr. woody labounty. thank you. woody is the founder of the outside lands? the western neighborhoods project. we ll talk more about that. excellent. and the author of a recently published book, which i have a copy of and it s really fascinating and wonderful. he s going to talk about carville by the sea today. we ll look at slides. he ll tell us about the history of the outerlands, previously uninhabitable area of the city. we will invite your questions. so, please, you in the
in the richmond guess i ain t that cool when i was a kid, my father told me those were machine gun nests up there put in during world war ii to fend off japanese attackers. these two structures were build in 1943 by the u.s. army. also, these were spotting positions for the big post artillery gun batteries. the stations would work together. say win here and one at fort funston. using telescopes, they named a ship and target. and the two different sightings allowed them to trianglely position the ship at sea. so it was a lookout, essentially it was a lookout. i doubt if we saw a japanese ship today it would probably say toyota on the side of it. they are really fun. if shows you what can you do in 60 seconds. the pri sidot maps. people presidio maps. people keep forgetting that the army was a major presence. before the city was functioning, the army was functioning. and there are maps from the 1800 s that show the farmhouses in the valley, the eureka
other little communities came up here and there all across the united states, actually. but after the earthquake and fire, 1906 earthquake and fire, there was a little sister community, you might call, called carzonia. and this was a dr. charles cross set up 10 old cable cars on california street. between california and cornwall street, fifth avenue and fourth avenue in the richmond district. he assured the neighbors who were very agast at the idea of these old cable cars being set up that they would be very tasteful and artistic. and essentially, yeah, it was like one room with a little bathroom attached made up of old cable cars. dr. cross thought he was hitting on something. there were hundreds of thousands of people who were homeless, looking for new places to live in the aftermath of the earthquake and fire. so he thought why not use these old cable cars. it only lasted about 10, 12 years. guess it wasn t a big hit. he built a more conventional apartment building after t
didn t care. they were a group of seven married women who went bicycling. they would finish their ride, rest in the long seats there in the clubhouse. they started having dinner parties there. they became quite fashionable. and they sort of tricked it out with all the victorian fill debris they could cox up filigri they could come up with, japanese fans, curtains, cushions it became sort of a fashionable, bohemian thing to do that other people took up the idea, rented these clubhouses from sutro, and many of them were there were superior court judges, clerks who rented these. it was sort of a weekend get away. there were all sorts of cars lined up on the great highway. again, these people were renting. so they can t do too much to the cars. they can kind of fix up the inside. but the outside pretty much has to stay the same so they do look like old horse cars or street cars on the great highway. this car in the center was mrs. gun s. mrs. gun ran a restaurant there with p
mother-in-law. and you could meet in the middle in that sorted of connecting section for breakfast. they did similar things. they d put like four in a cross with a connecting part in the middle. and you could see these are not exactly a.d.a. accessible. they re up here on these platforms above the sandunes. you can probably guess why. if you can t, i ll give you another view here. this is the same view pretty much. so you can see that car up above the sandunes. but here it s getting sort of buried. the sand would shift. and it would blow around and they talked about if you lived in a car house how you might get up in the morning, open your door, and there would be a three-foot drop. or if you made the mistake of having your door open out, you might not be able to get out because the sand billowed up against the door in the night. so they build these car houses up on stilts just to keep them above the sand and above the fray. this idea of buying your own lot and getting your c