Map makers labeled the area on the coast the "Great Sand Waste" in the 1860s. Since it was about a city block away from the beach, you can understand why. It was on what is now 47th and 48th streets, the first couple of blocks from the "great highway", along the Pacific
Charles Stahl, a gripman for the Ellis Street line, showed the potential of the abandoned cars. On a lot he purchased at today's 20th Avenue between Judah and Kirkham (then unmarked sand dunes), Stahl connected together three old North Beach and Mission horse-cars he bought for $45. He mounted the edifice on stilts to keep it above the shifting sand, and his family moved into their unique abode in the summer of 1895.
In 1895 the Market Street Railway Company placed a newspaper advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner offering horse cars for $20 ($10 without seats). It seems they either sold the lot to the Mayor, or gave them to him as a mutual favor where they were clear of them, and the mayor owed them a favor.
Mayor Adolph Sutro, who owned the land, encouraged the arrival and development of Carville as a way to collect temporary rents on his property.
By September of that year the cars were already put to a wide variety of uses, including: a backyard children's playhouses, a real estate office, and a shoemaker's shop. Also notable was "The Annex", a "coffee saloon" operated by Colonel Dailey in one of three abandoned horse cars he rented from Sutro, at $5 a month.
Colonel Charles Dailey, a Civil War veteran and a former government agent in Arizona, was a friend of Adolph Sutro's, and ostensibly chose his eccentric life at the beach for his health, but though he founded Carville, he never actually lived in a streetcar.
Dailey made his home in a former realtor's shed, which he expanded with driftwood from the beach and proceeded to decorate with shells and curios washed up from the sea.
Mayor Sutro expanded his real estate ventures to include Lands End and built an open estate overlooking his new public bath complex, his Cliff House restaurant, and Ocean Beach.
Mayor Sutro, in trying to convince people to buy his extensive sand-covered properties, highlighted what wasn't at the beach: "...no smoke, no sewer gas, no decaying matter---nothing to injure the health."
Spurred by a real estate agent named Jacob Heyman who advertised ocean lots for $7.50 a month, with two old horse cars thrown in for $35, the little colony began to grow.
By July 1899, there were an estimated 70 streetcars in Carville. Heyman sank a well, hit an aquifer and provided Carville with water. By 1900, the price of a lot and two cars at the beach had soared to $600.
The neighborhood gradually expanded south and into Carville. By 1901 over 100 cars were occupied by 50 families.
One of the earliest tenants was a women's bicycling club known as the Falcons. San Francisco was pulsating with bicycle fever in the last years of the 19th century, and the Falcons soon filled several abandoned cars and added a lean-to for bike parking.
In the early years of the 20th century people began to make Carville home. After the 1906 earthquake and fire a number of refugees settled in Carville, including for a while Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and major instigator of the graft prosecutions against Ruef and Mayor Schmitz. Many people stayed and the neighborhood became more formalized. The Oceanside Improvement Club, founded in 1903, had by 1910 managed to establish electric, gas and water service for residents, as well as grading and paving streets, and had also laid plans for a sewer line.
By 1908 Carville had an estimated population of 2,000 and featured wildly creative structures made up of as many as 10 cars, stacked on each other or arranged in various L- and U-shaped configurations like children's blocks.
By 1910, realtors finally made progress where Sutro hadn't: people began buying "real" homes in the area. None of Sutro's hoped-for mansions went up, but instead modest cottages arose here and there.
The neighborhood didn't really develop extensively, however, until the 1928 extension of the Judah streetcar line to the beach.
While Carville didn't immediately disappear, it gradually melted into the neighborhood. As people built more conventional homes, some of the cars were simply hidden in the framework, shingled or spackled invisible. The empty lots of the area filled in with aggressive homebuilding in the 1930s and 40s. Soon Carville was mostly forgotten, its ghost revived only on the odd occasion when some remodeling project uncovered wheels under a living room floor!
In 1999, Preservation magazine did an article on the Carville houses which featured lines such as "...the Sunset may be [San Francisco's] only neighborhood without a trace of apparent charm or history, a vast, drab tract of stucco houses sloping down to the sea."
A San Francisco State student creating a special study report, James Heisterkamp kept a detailed diary of his 1994 search for Carville's "last remnant". He chatted with people in libraries, people on walks, people he met in cafés and laundromats.
Locals he met had never heard of Carville. "During my trekking up and down 47th, 48th, and the Great Highway, looking for the elusive remnant Carville cable cars, I was amazed by the number of people who never heard of the previous history of their own neighborhood. One man, in his forties or fifties, lived in the area about a half a block from a previous Carville address, for over 20 years and was unaware of cable cars ever being a part of some of the structures in his area."
During a realtors open house on the last Carville home, Heisterkamp had the opportunity to take photos and chat with the owner. The old railcars made up the second floor, with the front door opening on a large room of two cable cars side by side, their interior sides removed.
an entire article about it
http://www.outsidelands.org/sw19.php
Enter Scott Anderson, a filmmaker who lived in an apartment in the neighborhood. Anderson walked by the home one day, saw the "for sale" sign, and took a look inside. Stunned and entranced, he ended up buying the quirky structure.
Anderson's tenant gave Heisterkamp the great privilege to walk around inside his home, I marvel at the amount of original, historical fabric inside. One wall has the wooden benches of the old cable car still built in where passengers in the 1890s sat, under the original tongue-and-groove slat ceiling, peering out side windows. Glass lanterns, old kerosene lamps, hang over the space, and it doesn't take much to believe the room is about to rumble down a pair of rails. The bedroom and bathroom are an intact horse car, complete with a sliding panel door separating the two.
But you can't tell how cool the interior is from the exterior, which wouldn't give the normal pedestrian any idea that there are old street cars making up the house they're walking past.
and the view from the back, that is pretty cool, isn't something anyone can see unless they use Google Maps, Google Earth, or are on a nearby high roof
but way back when, in 1999 Bob Swanson with Preservation Magazine took some photos, and this was the same house he phtographed
https://thebolditalic.com/photos-from-sf-s-abandoned-streetcar-neighborhood-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-6256d394db22
http://www.outsidelands.org/sw19.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carville,_San_Francisco
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=CARVILLE:_Suburban_Bohemia_in_Fin_de_Siecle_San_Francisco
http://www.carville-book.com/bonus.php
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/From-S-F-s-past-a-crazy-car-colony-in-the-dunes-4676168.php#photo-4938032
