Mrs. Friedel Klussmann was a prominent member of San Francisco

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

 society. She is credited with leading the campaign that saved the San Francisco cable car system

San Francisco cable car system

The San Francisco cable car system is the world's last permanently operational manually operated cable car system, in the US sense of a tramway whose cars are pulled along by cables embedded in the street. It is an icon of San Francisco, California...

 in the 1940s and 50s, and the foundation of the San Francisco Beautiful organization in 1947.

Friedel Klussmann and the Cable Cars

In 1947, Mayor of San Francisco Roger Lapham

Roger Lapham

Roger Dearborn Lapham was a shipowner and businessman who served as the 32nd mayor of San Francisco from 1944 to 1948.-Life and career:...

 proposed the closure of the two Powell Street cable car

Cable car (railway)

A cable car or cable railway is a mass transit system using rail cars that are hauled by a continuously moving cable running at a constant speed. Individual cars stop and start by releasing and gripping this cable as required...

 lines, which were owned by the city as part of the San Francisco Municipal Railway

San Francisco Municipal Railway

The San Francisco Municipal Railway is the public transit system for the city and county of San Francisco, California. In 2006, it served with an operating budget of about $700 million...

. In response a joint meeting of 27 women's civic groups, led by Friedel Klussmann, formed the Citizens' Committee to Save the Cable Cars. In a famous battle of wills, the citizen's committee eventually forced a referendum on an amendment to the city charter, compelling the city to continue operating the Powell Street lines. This passed overwhelmingly with 166,989 yes votes to 51,457 no votes.

In 1951, the three cable car lines owned by the private California Street Cable Railroad

California Street Cable Railroad

The California Street Cable Railroad was a long-serving cable car operator in San Francisco, founded by Leland Stanford. The company's first line opened on California Street in 1878 and is still in operation, being the oldest cable car line still in operation.The company remained independent until...

 (Cal Cable) were shut down when the company was unable to afford insurance. The city purchased and re-opened the lines in 1952, but the amendment to the city charter did not protect these lines, and the city proceeded with plans to replace them with buses. Again Mrs Klussmann came to the rescue, but with less success this time. The result was a compromise protected system made up of the California Street line from Cal Cable, the Powell-Mason line already in municipal ownership

Municipalization

Municipalization is the transfer of corporations or other assets to municipal ownership. The transfer may be from private ownership or from other levels of government. It is the opposite of privatization and is different from nationalization.-Services:There have been two main waves of...

, and a third hybrid line made up by grafting the Hyde Street section of Cal Cable's O'Farrell, Jones & Hyde line onto a truncated Powell-Washington-Jackson line (now known as the Powell-Hyde line).

When Mrs Klussmann died at the age of 90 in 1986, the cable cars were decorated in black in her memory. In 1997, the city dedicated the turntable at the outer terminal of the Powell-Hyde line to Mrs Klussmann.