Photographer unknown / Car no. 1079 representing Detroit, Michigan, on Market Street in San Francisco, date unknown
San Francisco is among the only US cities to run heritage streetcars as part of regular daily operations, and the only city whose fleet includes not only its own historical trolleys, but streetcars from around the US and the world restored to their original cities' designs and colors. The F-Line Market & Wharves could be seen as a transport museum on wheels, but I think it is better to call it a refusal of museumification, an insistence that robust technologies of the past—and all they connote in memory and provoke in imagination—remain part of everyday life.
For me, riding the F-Line induces certain states of wonder and curiosity. I ask myself: what is it to roll through your age, and what is it to do so at a certain age? What carries you from one end of a reality to another end—the inner reality of your own awareness, to take the streetcar's passage through the city as metaphor—and how does an end slice itself away from the greater nothing it touches? What part of your memory becomes loss when it blurs, and what part is always blurry, and should be, and must be? What part of childhood set you into rolling relation to a just image of yourself, and what part of your adult mind cannot face the world you once saw plainly through the windowpanes? What are the colors of the question "why" surrounding you continuously? What about your life takes the shape of a wish? And what is the shape of a wish anyway? And would you know the wish of you if you saw it?
San Francisco, 2026