Twin Peaks Tunnel, at 100, showing its age
Saturday is the 100th anniversary of San Francisco’s biggest bore, the 2.7-milelong Twin Peaks streetcar tunnel.
The tunnel, which is bored through solid rock, was part of a city building boom in an era of change that opened up 16 square miles of San Francisco’s western side to new development.
The tunnel cut 20 minutes off the travel time for those coming from the area of the city west of Twin Peaks, and turned huge expanses of sand dunes into the Parkside and Sunset districts. Acres of brush and rolling hills became Forest Hill, St. Francis Wood, West Portal and the districts around Lake Merced.
When it opened on Feb. 3, 1918, the Twin Peaks Tunnel was hailed as “a great municipal work,” and it is still a key piece of the city’s transportation network. About 55,000 passengers ride the K-Ingleside, L-Taraval and M-Ocean View lines and the S-Castro shuttle trains every weekday.
But a century of service has taken its toll. The Municipal Transportation Agency, which runs the Municipal Railway, says the tunnel “needs extensive work to its interior,” including new tracks and drainage systems. Prelimi-
nary work was done last year, but major work will begin this summer.
The city is so busy getting ready for the repair project, it hasn’t planned much of a party for the tunnel’s centennial. The only birthday event scheduled so far is at the annual neighborhood party at the West Portal branch library Saturday.
A century ago, the Great War — what we call World War I — was raging, and an army of young American men were on their way to Europe, but still thousands of San Franciscans were on hand to see the first Muni K car make its way through the Twin Peaks tunnel.
Mayor James Rolph Jr., known as “Sunny Jim,” was at the controls of car 117, which was brandnew, like the tunnel itself. The passengers included city engineer M.M. O’Shaughnessy, members of the Board of Supervisors, and other bigwigs. The trip from Castro and Market streets to West Portal took 6½ minutes.
The Municipal Railway itself was only 6 years old, and Rolph, who loved to drive streetcars and wore a motorman’s cap for the occasion, said the trip was “bully.”
He was full of praises for what The Chronicle called “one of the greatest street railway tunnels of any city in the world.” When the tunnel was bored through in 1917, Rolph called it “the last tunnel which reveals to the eyes of the people of the East the golden shores of the Pacific.” He quoted Bishop George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.”
The Twin Peaks Tunnel was more than a developer’s dream. It was part of a huge city improvement project “designed to help San Francisco hold its place as the leading city on the West Coast, and it worked,” said Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a community historical group.
The tunnel cost $4 million and took 39 months to complete. There were two stations — one at Forest Hill has been refurbished and is still in use.
The other, at Eureka Valley, was closed in 1972 so the Twin Peaks tunnel could be connected to the new Muni Metro subway. The station is still there — a ghost station that can be glimpsed as Muni cars rumble past.
The money to pay for the Twin Peaks Tunnel was raised by assessing property in the affected area. In addition, the city built $2.8 million worth of new roads and streets, and developers sold $3.15 million worth of new houses. It paid off, too. Assessed valuation in the new neighborhoods rose by $4 million in the first six years the tunnel was open.
The K line was extended into Ingleside, and the new L line ran out Taraval Street, eventually through the remaining sand dunes to Ocean Beach. The new rail lines made the area develop quickly.
Not long afterward, the city built the Great Highway, the zoo and the famous Fleishhacker Pool, the largest public swimming pool in the world.
In the dozen years since 1906, when San Francisco was nearly destroyed by an earthquake and fire, the city had built a new transit system, began work on the Hetch Hetchy water and power project, completed a new Civic Center, including a City Hall, civic auditorium and public library, and mounted the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition.
“It was a true boom time,” LaBounty said. “You have to think of how farsighted those people were.”