Back in the early 2000s I was living on 24th Street between De Haro and Rhode Island, the steepest street of Potrero Hill and — by this amateur sleuth’s estimate — the seventh steepest street in San Francisco.
It was still surfaced with cobblestone, a final remnant of what was once a city crisscrossed with cobbled byways. Many of the original stones were brought in as ballast on Gold Rush boats.
A few decades earlier, the block had even caught the eye of the production crew of The Streets of San Francisco, who shot key scenes there for at least two episodes.
A popular 70s TV show, Streets made Michael Douglas a star as the younger partner in a two-man cop team who careened up and down the city’s hills in a Ford Galaxie. His sponge-nosed, fedora-topped older partner was Karl Malden, who parlayed the Streets spotlight into his most famous role: pitchman for American Express travelers checks (“Don’t leave home without them”). It was more famous, alas, than his Oscar-winning turn in A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Marlon Brando.
The show brightened San Francisco’s star, too, in living rooms across the country. But by the time my partner and I moved there, the cobblestoned block of 24th Street, like so many fading screen idols, was showing its age.
The stones were originally laid at an angle to boost traction, but not much surface area of the rock met the rubber of tires. Many stones were missing, and even when they weren’t, slippery moss filled the cracks.
Cars would regularly slide down the hill, slowly tapping the bumper of another car before they stopped. At least a half a dozen times we were woken up in the middle of the night because someone parallel-parked behind us and had to ask us to move so they could get out. Good thing we had a 4-wheel-drive truck.
One day we caught wind that the city was going to pave the road with concrete: much safer and easier to maintain.
People complained. Someone slipped a flyer under our door. A local meeting had been called, to be hosted at my next-door neighbor’s house, which makes a cameo in one of the Streets of San Francisco episodes.
People in San Francisco take pride having the old with the new.
former supervisor sophie maxwell
When we walked in, Sophie Maxwell was there. She was District 10 supervisor from 2001 to 2011. Reached this week, Maxwell remembers the issue well. The street was “in disrepair, hazardous, and the city didn’t think anyone would care” if it was paved. “What a mistake,” Maxwell tells The Frisc.
The head of the Department of Public Works and a few other local government types joined her to listen to concerns and explain next steps. It was obviously going to be them explaining to us about liability and why the road needed to be fixed. Besides, they said, the city did not have any more cobblestones, and dozens on our street would need to replaced. “It wasn’t going to be a hard case,” says Maxwell now.
Until Pete spoke up. “Wait a minute!” crackled his voice from the back of the room. I couldn’t track down his last name, but his first name was definitely Pete, and he was probably in his 80s or even 90s.
Heads turned in his direction. “I’ve been living here since 1942 and I’ve been collecting cobblestones for just as long,” he told us. He would grab the leftovers every time DPW would fix the road. “I pick them up and throw them in a pile in my backyard.”
He said he had a hundred or more. Plenty to patch the street.
Pete was the kind of guy who, if he saw you were stuck on a particularly slippery stone, would come help push until your tire could grab more traction.
I remember Maxwell cracking a smile in disbelief. On the spot, she and the DPW chief agreed: if Pete in fact had the cobblestones, the street would be spared the concrete. He led the DPW folks across the street to his backyard. Pete single-handedly saved one of our last cobblestone streets from being paved over on that day.
[UPDATE: The folks at DPW responded to our query. This block is the city’s only stretch of cobblestone in their records. There might be more out there, but “those would be streets maintained by the adjacent property owners, and not Public Works,” DPW’s Rachel Gordon told The Frisc via email.]
A couple of months later we noticed an ambulance across the street. Pete had passed of natural causes. We didn’t feel sad, because Pete wouldn’t have. He lived in the moment, even if the moment was inconvenient.
“It would have been smoother and easier for them” to go along with the paving, Maxwell says now. “But that’s not what they wanted. People in San Francisco take pride having the old with the new.”
Alex Lash contributed reporting to this story. While you’re here, subscribe to our newsletter.