125 Years of Geneva Car Barn

Today, April 22, 2026, is the 125th anniversary of what locals call the Geneva Car Barn. Tonight, we will celebrate in the restored Powerhouse. 

More than 150 people have registered to attend, so you run the risk of not getting a seat if you just show up. But you might give it a shot. It is just half a block from the Balboa Park BART station.

Neighbors have worked for decades to have the former transit complex turned into a hub of arts, culture, and youth services for the community. For the anniversary they wanted a book to both tell the history of the car barn and inspire action to complete its restoration. I was very honored to create that book.

While I am listed as the author, Geneva Car Barn: The Past and Future of San Francisco’s Geneva Office Building and Powerhouse, is a child of many devoted parents.

Writers, researchers, photographers, designers, biographers, power-brokers, community activists, project managers, rail fans, and preservationists have all given some of themselves in telling the story of the car barn.

My job in many ways was just to fit it all in an attractive book of less than 200 pages. Of all these wonderful contributors I have to offer extra effusive gratitude to Lisa Dunseth, Emiliano Echeverria, Bridget Maley, Jeremy Menzies, Ray Muther, Amy O’Hair, Gee Gee Platt, and Dan Weaver. 

Below, mixed in with a few photos, is the introduction. If you aren’t making it tonight, I hope you consider picking up a copy of the book at your local shop (Green Apple, Bird & Beckett, Dog Eared Books, Charmed Coffee on Ocean Ave...).

Or order it online from the Friends of the Geneva Office Building & Powerhouse, the all-volunteer group still trying to get this project done. All profits from the book go directly to them and their mission.

Introduction

We all know our landmarks. They don’t have to be officially designated by a government agency or given some endorsement through educational institutions or media. They may be creations of wealth and skill or they may be humble places imbued with a community’s collective life. They can be at the locus of power or on the margins of an overlooked neighborhood. They can be empty, dislocated from their origins, or adapted for a surprising new purpose. They might barely be holding on or so connected to daily life that they are indispensable. In every form and condition, they are known and seen by the people near them.

This is a book about a landmark.

The Geneva Office Building and Powerhouse is a complex of two brick buildings built at the dawn of the twentieth century on the southeast corner of Geneva Avenue and San Jose Avenue.

Industrial, classical, utilitarian, and somehow also romantic, the red brick buildings have been place-makers for generations of San Franciscans who have lived in the Excelsior, Mission Terrace, Ingleside, and Ocean View neighborhoods with their smaller enclaves of Geneva Terraces, Columbia Heights, and Cayuga Terrace.

A brick “barn” with 20 tracks to store streetcars originally stood adjacent to the buildings before it was torn down in the 1980s and replaced by a modern facility. After the old streetcar-house’s demolition, neighbors continued to call the brick complex the Geneva Car Barn. Many still do today.

For most of its 125 years, the Geneva complex was the large-ish building in a landscape of single-family houses and cottages. It was brick in a quilt of stucco. It was a center of blue-collar employment: men in overalls, streetcars rumbling in and out, turbines spinning.

Together, the office building and powerhouse are the last best standing remnant of a technological innovation in San Francisco: the introduction of streetcars powered by electricity. The history of transportation—from horses to steam trains to streetcars to automobiles to BART trains—has unfolded just outside its tower’s windows.

The Geneva complex’s location—outside of San Francisco’s center and off its tourist routes—has left it mostly unknown and unappreciated by many of the city’s leaders and by many of the city’s residents. Most are unaware of the important connections the building and the land hold to technological innovation, municipal expansion, monopolistic powers that shaped the West, and to San Francisco’s most influential and notable African American businesswoman of the nineteenth century.

Significant transformation and revitalization have taken place at the Geneva complex in the past decade, but there is still much to do. The future of Geneva is not written. There are drafts and schemes and some brilliant plans ready to be reset in motion. This book tells a history that is yet to be finished and, in the telling, asks you to be part of that future.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

April is kind of a killer month for me, but my May schedule is looking lighter. Are you free to have a beverage with me, entirely paid for by the Woody Beer and Coffee Fund? Good people like Linda G. and Jamie N. (F.O.W.s) have already set us up.

Let me know when works for you.