Market Street Railway Mural

Mural of the Past Roars Up Market Street and Into the Future
Joel Pomerantz

May 2004

"Kids used to steal rides right here, on the cow-catcher," says Sam Yeramian, wagging his finger at the sepia-toned detail work on car 798. "In confidence," he whispers, "that includes me."

Yeramian suddenly hears a clatter and looks up, instinctively stepping out of the way of an oncoming ladder carried by muralist Mona Caron. Neither the quick-footedness nor the ear-cotton needed on 1920s Market Street is necessary here: the 'roar of the four' era rests quietly and in great detail, alongside colorful slices of other historic moments in Market Street's bustling history.

Market Street Railway Mural by Mona Caron. Click on details for full view.

After much searching, the Market Street Railway Mural found a wall on the Groceteria corner store, Yeramian's building at 300 Church Street (at 15th Street). Here he stands beaming with pride, and reminiscing with onlookers who stop daily to muse and guess at what will be included in the next section—and add their ideas.

The mural, a minutely detailed sweeping fisheye view of Market Street through time, has been underway since September and is expected to be completed in the next few weeks. In the meantime, neighbors are eagerly anticipating each of the multi-hued segments. "I watch day after day as people stop and discuss and marvel at the work in progress," said James, one of the mural's neighbors.

Caron, an illustrator and muralist known for leading the art team on the multiple award winning Duboce Bikeway Mural (at Church & Duboce), is surrounded by admiring onlookers as she focuses on the brush strokes that will bring back to life seven period street scenes. These seven include the 1934 general strike, a 1980s gay pride parade, and—the section she is currently rendering—the February 15, 2003 global demonstrations against the impending Iraq war.

An eighth section will depict Caron's vision of what is yet to come for Market Street, including suggestions for transport of the future.

The work explores architectural and transportation history, while illuminating "ways in which our urban street can be used as a place of human interaction and expression, whether it be freedom of self-expression or of collective expression (and, occasionally, repression)," says Caron.

"I like to do representational paintings rather than abstract ones," she explains, "combining literal and symbolic imagery to convey the message."

Segments of the mural cover a celebration, a formal parade, a riot, a mass demonstration, and not-so-humdrum daily life as it was lived in various parts of the last ninety years. Each of the mural's eight vertical sections is a different era. They intersperse normal daily life with sections that show specific events.

The first depicts four noisy sets of tracks that once pierced downtown—Municipal Railway on the outer tracks and "Whitefront Cars" (Market Street Railway) on the inner set. The panel features a sampling of architectural high points, including the Humboldt State Bank building and the Call newspaper building with its ornate, post-quake rebuilt cupola.

The second color band, shows the riot of July 5th 1934, a.k.a. "Bloody Thursday," in which longshoremen, sailors and supporters took to the streets, where two were killed in fights with police.

Tinted greenish, the next band shows a regimented Labor Day parade which occurred every year on Market Street from 1934 until the mid 1950s. This procession is frequently misinterpreted by onlookers as some sort of sailors' pageant, due to the uniforms traditionally worn by Labor Day marchers during that period.

The forties are shown in black and white with streetcars traveling alongside the "new" diesel buses and cars.

The fifth section, colorful but with lavender hues, shows an early gay pride parade including a troupe of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence comedic spoof nuns, which greatly pleases a man who stops upon seeing the mural to tell the artist he is one of them.

"The other Sisters will be so excited to hear about this," he spiritedly declares.

The sixth stripe includes miniature portraits of bicyclists who Caron met through her work on the Duboce mural. The Grant Building (at 7th and Market) is the backdrop. It contains the offices of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and Shaping San Francisco, a local history project on which Caron relied for source material. Caron describes this segment as full of "subtle clues to the tensions of politics and culture in our day." A delivery truck is marked "Globalisation".

"The other sections also have small references to certain events, which are left for the viewer to discover," says Caron, cryptically.

The colorful seventh panel is underway now, with myriad protesters and theatrical props of a demonstration that spanned the world in anticipation of U.S. war against Iraq.

"I tried to show the urban street as a place of creative outlet, where fashion, lifestyle, artistic expressions, and political views are formed and spread."

"This is meant as a tribute," continues Caron, "to the urban center as a place uniquely suited for active democracy, and irreplaceable as such. It is a place where history happens, where abstract concepts such as democracy or power struggle become visible at times."

Caron also considers her twelve by thirty-eight foot painting to be a tribute to Dave Pharr, one of San Francisco's leading streetcar preservationists, who supervised the restoration of the aforementioned locally-built streetcar 798. Produced in San Francisco, the "California Comfort Car" is represented crossing "time zones" in the mural since its use on the streets actually did span those years.

The artist knew Pharr as a neighbor and supporter of the Duboce Bikeway Mural project, two blocks away on the back of the Church and Market Safeway building—and across from the rail yard used for preservation work.

Pharr passed away in October 2003, unaware that the Market Street Railway Mural had found a wall, and not having seen the design.

"I thought I would surprise him with it! I never got a chance," Caron says with a sigh. As of the date of his passing, she had begun piecing together only the 1920s section of the mural.

It is clear that Pharr would be proud to see such attention to the biography of the streetcar. "To see the age of transport, the '20s, is wonderful," says neighbor Janice Gendreau, "and the labor battles were pivotal."

"Ah! Look at this!" exclaims Del Wakefield, former director of Zion Hospital, who happened upon the mural-in-progress during a visit from her home in Belvedere. "I watched Diego Rivera paint one of his murals, too! This is fantastic!"

Tourists may also soon be flocking to the new mural. Yumi Koyama, a pharmacist visiting from Nihon University in Japan, offered to translate materials about the mural into Japanese for tour books back home.

Caron has posted a sign saying she will have a party to celebrate the mural's completion, and welcoming people to see her other murals, including one in Brisbane about local social and natural history, visible on her Web site.

Mona Caron, originally from Ticino, the Italian-speaking southern part of Switzerland, has made her home in San Francisco since 1991. She attended the Academy of Art College as a student and now holds a teaching position there in the illustration department. Her freelance work occupies much of her time, with magazine and book covers, posters, private and public murals and other diverse projects.

Caron compares this project to her work on the Brisbane mural: "I had the amazing experience of witnessing people respond to the mural with moving intensity. People stopped and thought about the history of their town, their role in building their community. Some had bouts of nostalgia mitigated by a critical evaluation of history. These experiences give meaning to my work. To me, the greatest accomplishment of the public mural is creating a dialogue among viewers, discussing not the painting per se, but the subject matter that I'm illustrating. I love it when this happens while I'm still painting, because I get to witness and participate in that discussion."

"It's really a lot like public performance art," she muses.

The Market Street Railway Mural received startup funds through a $6,000 grant from the Mayor's office's Neighborhood Beautification Fund based on a proposal by J-Church streetcar line user David Hochschild. Further funds are accumulating slowly—mostly in the form of local donations—as the work becomes noticed and more people become involved.

The project has taken a significant part of the artist's time during nearly six months. "It's my own fault," says Caron, as she dabs into existence the lapels of yet one more of the hundreds of people she is depicting in the mural. "Nobody asked me to make the design this complicated."

But some of the things asked of her in the "performance art" that is public muraling, are indeed difficult. A passerby named 'Sara' scrutinized the seven outlines of the past and present, glanced at the eighth—as yet unpainted—section of the mural, then deadpanned, "I hope the future is realistic."

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