Greg Dewar over at The N-Judah Chronicles has written a post that just can’t be improved, so I’m going to quote it in full:

Blast from the Past: The ORIGINAL Plan to Build a Market St. Tunnel – in 1935!

I have an RSS reader full of wonderful news and blogs, and one that never fails to provide the transit pr0n is The Overhead Wire, which reports on transity goodness from around the country.

Thanks to the good people at TOW, I caught this YouTube video of the first proposal to build a Market Street subway system. It is interesting to watch and see SF as the “City That Knows How,” a city that built things and made things happen (as opposed to now, where it’s the City That Knows How To Bitch).

It’s also interesting to see the argument for bus service (also called “trackless trolleys”) which were touted as a way to speed things up. If you’ve ever been stuck on a herky-jerky janky bus, you know that didn’t quite work out as planned.

Anyway, check out the video, and hat tip to The Overhead Wire!

The newsreel, in all its historically-rich awesomeness, can be viewed on The N-Judah Chronicles or here on YouTube. Of course, the proposition failed, as would others. BART construction under Market Street eventually began in 1970, and the Muni subway opened in 1978. Thanks, Greg!