This story aired in the April 16th, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents
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On most weekdays, the echoes inside San Francisco City Hall are made up of a mix of city officials rushing to meetings or locals patiently waiting for government services.
But lots of people also use the building’s famous Beaux-Arts interior as a background for professional photos. Weddings, quinceañeras, graduations —it’s a beautiful place to take pictures.
And right now, it’s a great place to see pictures, too. On display at city hall is an exhibit called Moving San Francisco. It features images from over a century of the San Francisco Municipal Railway, better known as Muni. Our transportation reporter Zain Iqbal has this story on why seeing the history of Muni through photography feels important right now.
TRANSCRIPT:
Steps inside San Francisco City Hall
REPORTER: I’m standing in a grand, indoor courtyard at city hall, with sun streaming in from a ceiling of skylights. And I’m looking at two photographs that tell a tale of two earthquakes, both taken by MUNI photographers!
Jackie Im: So we have one image that's directly after the 1906 earthquake.
REPORTER: Jackie Im from the San Francisco Arts Commission is looking at a black-and-white image OF dozens of people standing in Alamo Square park. They're not looking at the famous Painted Ladies. Instead, their gaze focuses on a towering plume of smoke from downtown from the fires that followed the quake.
Jackie Im: Directly next to it is a vertical image of a train of Muni buses on the Bay Bridge.
REPORTER: This color image was taken only a month after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake took down a section of the eastern span. You can spy Muni’s distinct, ‘80s bright orange livery as the buses line up in anticipation of the bridge’s reopening.
The photos continue downstairs…
Steps inside the exhibit
REPORTER: In a long corridor on the ground floor, the exhibit stretches from one end of City Hall to the other. It’s almost like looking at a strip of film through time. Or, if you’ve never seen a strip of film, think about scrolling back and forth on an Instagram grid. Jackie co-curated the exhibit.
Jackie Im: We're actually standing in front of one of my favorite photos.
REPORTER: A black-and-white image, this time of the celebrity Cable Car bell ringing contest in 1977.
Jackie Im: You have cameramen, you have photographers, you have this huge crowd of people, and then tucked in, in the middle of the photo is a guy dressed like Cookie Monster. Well, it's Cookie Monster.
REPORTER: Other highlights in the collection? This recent, crisp, high-res moody nighttime shot of an open-top streetcar along the Embarcadero—with a cheeky message on the destination sign that says “Nowhere in Particular.”
There’s a mix of color and black-and-white photos from just before the digital era, featuring construction of Muni Metro to sightings of San Francisco royalty, like former mayor Dianne Feinstein and Tony Bennett sporting jaunty Muni berets.
There’s one image I'm drawn to almost immediately – a contrasty, black-and-white photo of rubble on Nob Hill with the burnt out shell of the Fairmont Hotel in the background.
Jackie Im: This is after the sort of devastating effects of the 1906 earthquake and fires. And San Francisco is really in the full throes of rebuilding.
REPORTER: The only thing that is recognizable in the devastation? A cable car track.
The photo was taken in December of 1906 by John Henry Mentz, the photographer for the rail company that preceded Muni.
Jackie Im: I think what these photographs tell about Muni and by extension about San Francisco is just, uh, you're seeing the development of San Francisco kind of coming up.
REPORTER: This photo—and the whole exhibit — really illustrate how the city and Muni evolved in tandem.
Jackie Im: So it's not just developing the downtown area and the ports, but also coming out to the Sunset, coming out to the Richmond and to all these other neighborhoods that start to define what the city is going to look like.
REPORTER: The exhibit features about 100 photos. But Jackie tells me this is a tiny sampling of a historical record of over 200,000 photos which live in the basement archive of Muni’s headquarters on Van Ness Street. I’m a photographer myself, so when I hear Muni has a photo archive? This I’ve gotta see.
A bell jingling a and door opening
Jeremy Menzies: My name is Jeremy Menzies. I'm the SFMTA staff photographer…
REPORTER: …and Jeremy’s been working with Muni for over a decade. Part of his work has been to digitize all of Muni’s old photos. He worked with Jackie Im to select the photos for Moving San Francisco from this very archive. It’s a treasure trove for photography nerds like me. There’s equipment.
Jeremy Menzies: So the top shelf is a couple of projectors. We have a few cameras.
REPORTER: A pile of negative holders.
Jeremy Menzies: I made, actually made like a fake negative and put it inside one of the film holders so that I could show people this is how the technology worked back then.
REPORTER: There are processing materials.
Jeremy Menzies: A timer, and some very old, uh, chemistry bottles.
REPORTER: There are old logbooks — handwritten metadata — from Muni photographers who documented the system and the city decades ago.
Jeremy Menzies: A cabinet opens –The oldest ones are these big heavy bound books.
REPORTER: While the size of the archive is impressive, it’s the moments of everyday life, captured in each frame, that tell the story of Muni’s history, and San Francisco's. That's what Jeremy wanted to share with the public. He pulls out a print of an image that’s in the exhibit, taken in 1969.
Jeremy Menzies: The photographer's probably at the curb looking out towards Market Street and just taking a photo of people at the boarding platform. And it's just one of these times where you get lucky and there's like a street car that's kind of approaching the stop…
REPORTER: In the photo, there’s a woman with short, cropped hair sitting crosslegged on the platform. With her are two kids…
Jeremy Menzies: …who’ve gotta be, I don’t know, three and two, and one of the little kids is kind of like pulling away like following the motion of the streetcar, and I was just like, ah, this is such a fun, like this moment, I just picture her being like, no, that's not the one we're catching. And the kid's like, ah, streetcar, you know? But there's a lot of little moments like that that you find that are kind of fun.
REPORTER: He says: sharing a moment in time like this was the point of the Exhibit.
Jeremy Menzies: Show some of those like everyday kind of moments, photos that kind of point at like why we have the system or who the system's for, or who it serves, which is everybody.
REPORTER: Jeremy says this is an archive that not many people outside of a handful of city employees knew existed.
Jeremy Menzies: Like this collection, uh, in the scheme of things has been relatively hidden for a long time. It's files in a city department somewhere.
REPORTER: It’s not at a library, or even in a museum.
Jeremy Menzies: It's not somewhere that people see history and see photos. So, yeah, just getting it into the light of day, I guess so to speak, was part of it.
REPORTER: Part of the inspiration for the exhibit. Jeremy says looking at these images, reflecting on the past, helps us take the long view of the Muni system, and consider its future.
And that feels especially relevant right now, as Muni faces difficult questions about funding and ridership.
Echoes of conversation inside City Hall
REPORTER: Back at City Hall, the Moving San Francisco exhibit and its programs have attracted the general public, and especially folks who have a stake in Muni. Val Lupiz has been a cable car grip with Muni for 27 years. He’s seeing something really familiar in a photo of Muni operators all riding as passengers in streetcar.
Val Lupiz: This is my friend Mike. He was there. This is like two in the morning. I think they were out till till the wee hours, but yeah, that's really, I never, that's cool. It's so cool. Oh my goodness.
REPORTER: Val explains this was taken on the day the city retired their fleet of PCC cars—President’s Conference Committee cars. These are the old school, streamlined trolleys that you might see running up and down Market Street or along the Embarcadero today.
Val Lupiz: The PCC car was built specifically to compete with the automobile, braking, acceleration, comfort, all of that stuff. And in 1930, the PCC actually could hold its own against a model A or model T (Reporter: And so it sounds like this was the, this was the day it was retired in 82?) Yes. They ran PCC cars here in San Francisco from 1951 up until 1982.
REPORTER: These cars were mothballed in 1982 when light rail came in. What this photo doesn’t show is that they came back in 1995 as part of the historic stable of street cars on the F Line.
Muni’s reinvention is a theme that runs through almost every photo in the exhibit. Writer and artist ZH Leonard says, while they moved through the gallery they thought about how Muni has connected us through time.
ZH Leonard: It's how we get from place to place, but it's also a ritual we engage in. And the way in which we do it in San Francisco is specific to the histories of the place, specific to the technologies of this place, and specific to the topography of this place. You can see the speed at which we move. And you can imagine, looking in every single one of these photos, you can imagine yourself in any moment in time in San Francisco — because we're all riding the bus.
REPORTER: And this exhibit reminds us that San Francisco – with all its buses, streetcars, light rail and people – is a city in motion and in evolution.