Highway 101: The History of El Camino Real

THE BAYSHORE HIGHWAY

Before El Camino Real was a highway, before it was even paved, it was a narrow trail up the San Francisco Peninsula to Mission Dolores.

In the middle of the 19^th century, all roads—or what few there were—led to the mission, which was then the epicenter of activity in the Bay Area. Foremost among those roads was El Camino Real, which carried travelers via stagecoach and on horseback in those days.

This was long before the era of gas stations (the motorcar had yet to be invented, after all), and modern rest stops were even further in the future. But travelers still needed to take a load off—even more so than today—on a rutted road that ranged from dusty during summer to mucky and muddy in the rainy season.

The first stop on the County Road, as it was also called back then, was Abbey House in Daly City. Its distance from San Francisco accounted for its other name, 1 Mile House, and milestones farther down the road took on similar names based on how far they were from the mission. There was a 7 Mile House in Colma, a 14 Mile House in San Bruno, and a 16 Mile House on El Camino Real at Center Street. A mile farther south stood the 17 Mile House, at Millbrae Avenue.

The most significant of these was 14 Mile House, known as Thorpe’s Place when it was built at the dawn of the Gold Rush in 1849. Like the other way stations along the trail, it wasn’t much to look at: just a square cabin that measured a dozen feet in both directions, about the size of a modern bedroom. The proprietor (named Thorpe, naturally) also built stables where travelers could leave their horses as they stopped on their way to and from the city.

What was important about Thorpe’s place was its location. It was there, in 1858, that a group of investors saw an opportunity to create a new road branching off from the main highway eastward toward the bay. The idea was to charge a toll for traveling along this shortcut, which would shave several miles off the journey to San Francisco.

There were reasons no one had created such a shortcut before: The chosen route traveled through marshlands and across the San Bruno Canal, which road crews conquered using a drawbridge. Workers were forced to cart in tons of dirt and gravel to fill in the marshes, and they also had to contend with thick stands of willow trees that lined the canal. Still, they persevered.

The road they created, an arrow-straight cutoff that’s known as San Mateo Avenue today, continued along the path of what would become Bayshore Boulevard and modern U.S. 101 on toward San Francisco. The toll section of the road came to an end in Visitacion Valley, east of San Bruno Mountain, at a tollhouse called 7 Mile House—not to be confused with the other 7 Mile House in Colma. Like Thorpe’s at the other end of the toll road, it became a hub of activity, and it remains in business today, the only surviving mile house from the period.

The 7 Mile House, like other roadhouses, had a colorful history that included no small amount of wild doings and shady dealings. The so-called Hayes Valley Gang, which remained active into the late 1920s, paid the place a visit in August 1876 to harass passersby amid a rampage of theft, assault, and homicide centered on San Francisco’s Mission District—an event that is believed to have helped inspire the terms “hood” and “hoodlum.”

Then, during Prohibition, the area around the roadhouse became a hotbed of moonshining. The business has also housed a brothel, as well as a bookmaking operation described as the largest west of the Mississippi. (On two separate occasions, the FBI raided the 7 Mile House in response to illegal gambling and Mafia connections.)

This ad invited travelers to patronize the Brisbane Auto Camp and Trailer Space, 15 miles from San Francisco on the Bayshore Highway.

Another roadhouse from the pre-highway era managed to hang on for nearly a century. The oldest building in Millbrae, the 16 Mile House at El Camino Real and Center Street, was demolished in 1970 after a group of preservationists failed to raise the $40,000 needed to move it from land targeted for a paint store. The city had declined to pay for the project, bowing to opponents who objected that it had once housed a brothel and a tavern and derided it as a “disreputable pile of junk.”

The current 16 Mile House on Broadway reproduces the look and flavor of the original (minus the shady reputation), serving up a menu of steak and seafood.

It does, however, still offer a full bar.

The 14 Mile House, isn’t around anymore either, but it had a long run of its own, well into the 20^th century. Original owner Thorpe expanded it into a two-story hotel before selling it 1871, with the new owner—a man by the name of Gamble—adding a dining room and renaming it the Star and Garter. The new name, however, only lasted a few years. Gamble needed a cook for his new restaurant, and he found one in the person of Thomas Rolle, a former slave who was heading south to take a job in Searsville. He never made it that far, and it’s probably just as well: You won’t find Searsville on any modern map, because what remained of the town was inundated when the Searsville Dam was built in 1892. Instead, Rolle took a job from Gamble and, just four years later, parlayed it into ownership of the establishment—which he renamed Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This pre-1914 photo shows a sign for Uncle Tom’s Cabin along El Camino Real. Public domain.

The roadhouse retained its name after Rolle’s tenure ended and became the site of some noteworthy historical events. In 1883, with the completion of a telephone line between San Jose and San Francisco, Uncle Tom’s Cabin received the first telephone in northern San Mateo County. Later, in August 1912, workers right in front of the roadhouse dug the first shovel of dirt in the state’s new highway system—which would help pave the way (literally and figuratively) for the network of federal highways that would put U.S. 101 on the map in 1926.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin finally met its end in 1949, when it was torn down to make way for a Safeway supermarket.

The 7 Mile House, meanwhile, remains in business on Bayshore Boulevard just south of Geneva Avenue. It’s mellowed significantly since its seedy heyday as a brothel, gambling haven, and biker bar. Today it’s a sports bar and restaurant that serves up Filipino and Italian food along with performances by musical acts such as jazz trumpeter Al Molina. In late 2016, its website even touted a “Holi-Dog” photo contest, with a prize of a “Dog Birthday Party & Photo Session” to one lucky customer.

How times have changed.

APPROACHING THE GOLDEN GATE

Before the Golden Gate Bridge came along, San Francisco was all but a deadend for motor vehicles. The city’s geography, surrounded as it is on three sides by water, made it the equivalent of one giant cul-de-sac. Sure, you could take a ferry across the bay, but as more and more cars hit the road during the 1920s, the wait time increased.

At the dawn of the motor age, a single north-south thoroughfare funneled traffic into San Francisco: El Camino Real. But that artery, which generally followed the course set by today’s Mission Street and State Route 82, soon became clogged as it strained to accommodate an everincreasing number of motor vehicles. It was quickly clear that alternative routes would be needed, and thus began an era in which the label “Highway 101” bounced from one road to another so often it was hard to keep things straight—even with one of those handy road maps you picked up at your local Richfield or Shell station. At various points in time, there were even multiple alignments from which to choose. Do I take 101 East or 101 West? The 101 or the 101 Alternate? The 101 or the 101 Bypass?

It was easier to tell the players without a scorecard at a Seals game than it was to find the proper highway between San Jose and “the City.” (Remember the Seals? They were San Francisco’s baseball team before the Giants came along; they even had a player named DiMaggio on their roster.)

There’d been an early alternative to El Camino Real even before the age of the automobile. Because the state wasn’t paying for roads in those days, a group of private investors set about clearing a path for a new thoroughfare, planning to recoup their money—and more—by charging a toll to the coachmen who used it. The San Bruno Toll Road was completed in 1860, veering north-by-northeastward from El Camino Real just south of San Bruno along what is now San Mateo Avenue. For a good portion of its length, it ran roughly parallel to the route that would be taken by the later Bayshore Boulevard—a future alignment of U.S. 101.

Roadhouses with practical names like 3 Mile House, 7 Mile House, and San Bruno House opened to cater to travelers along the length of the new road, which provided a more direct route into the big city.

But the explosion of roads in the area didn’t occur until the advent of the automobile.

If you’re not familiar with the Bay Area, imagine a three-pronged fork, and you’ll have a very rough approximation of the road system that developed to take the burden off El Camino Real as the automotive age moved into high gear. To the west was Skyline Boulevard, which became part of the state highway system in 1919 and morphed at its northern edge into the so-called Great Highway. Originally numbered as State Route 5, it became SR35 in 1964 to avoid confusion with the new Interstate 5, but it was never part of U.S. 101.

The central prong in the fork was El Camino Real, while the eastward prong was Bayshore Boulevard (later Highway and still later Freeway), which ran along the western edge of the San Francisco Bay.

U.S. 101 originally split into two branches at San Jose, with 101W heading northward into San Francisco on the western peninsula. Meanwhile, 101E took a parallel course on the east side of the bay, moving up through Oakland and across the Carquinez Bridge before veering westward along modern State Route 37 to rejoin the western branch near Novato. The federal highway system dropped the 101E designation in the 1940s, with that route subsequently becoming State Route 17 and, later, Interstate 880.

But that’s not the end of the confusion.

El Camino Real was signed as U.S. 101 until 1937, when signs were removed from that route and transferred to the newly completed Bayshore Highway. El Camino Real was relegated to the status of U.S. 101 Alternate (101A)—a development that didn’t please merchants along that route who feared the second-class status would mean a loss of business. To their way of thinking, the federal highway planners were sacrificing the merchants’ financial fortunes on the altar of the need for speed.

“It is the purpose of the highway maintenance division to speed the motorist to San Francisco by the shortest route,” Judge Charles Carlstroem of Sunnyvale said, showing off pictures of directional signs diverting motorists to the new Bayshore Alignment—and away from the established route. “They are preventing the tourist from reaching El Camino Real.”

The political pressure apparently worked: Two years later, the 101 designation had been restored to the old alignment, with Bayshore getting a new designation: the U.S. 101 Bypass. But even that didn’t turn out to be permanent, because in 1964, the Bayshore Alignment went back to being just plain U.S. 101 again, with El Camino Real moving over to the California highway system as State Route 82.

But back to the Golden Gate.

As traffic grew by leaps and bounds in the roaring twenties—and even, despite the Great Depression, into the 1930s—the ferries that took drivers across the water to the north side of the bay struggled to keep up. In 1936, the year before the Golden Gate Bridge opened, as many as 60 million people crossed the bay on nearly 50 ferries, and 250,000 passengers each day made their way through San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

Traveling on a ferry was, in a way, like being caught in rush-hour traffic. The massive vessels, powered by steam engines until the advent of diesel in the 1920s, moved at a leisurely pace—barely 17 miles per hour.

The concept of relieving that congestion by building a bridge to span the bay wasn’t a new one. In fact, the bridge idea even predated the automobile. As far back as 1872, a railroad executive had suggested building a span for trains across the water, but the cost even then was prohibitive. Estimate: $100 million.

Fast forward to 1919, when San Francisco officials asked city engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy to revisit the idea—this time, with the automobile in mind. But it would have to cost far less than the $100 million price tag that had been bandied about for more than four decades. O’Shaughnessy consulted with other engineers on various approaches and attracted the attention of Joseph Strauss, who insisted that such a bridge could, in fact, be built for somewhere between $25 million and $30 million.

In 1921, he did even better: He submitted a design for a cantilever-suspension bridge hybrid that he said could be built for $17 million. “In the simplest language,” according to one newspaper report, “the proposed structure will consist of two cantilever bridges sustaining between them a suspension bridge.”

The Golden Gate Bridge under construction. Public domain.

The idea was to have the best of both worlds. By reducing the length of the suspension section, engineers could overcome what they believed at the time to be an insurmountable problem: No suspension bridge had yet been built that was more than 1,600 feet long, and the distance that had to be covered across the bay was nearly four times that length. The hybrid design would reduce the length of the suspension portion to a more manageable (if still unprecedented) 2,640 feet, with the cantilever design bearing more of the load on either end. Two towers were envisioned even then, as they were in the final plan, and the newspaper report boasted that the design had “the endorsement of the leading bridge engineers in the country.”

There was just one problem: It was ugly as hell. One local writer said it “seemed to strain its way across the Golden Gate,” describing it as “a ponderous, blunt bridge that combined a heavy tinker toy frame at each end with a short suspension span.”

Fortunately for the San Francisco skyline—and those of us destined to admire it—the hybrid design was scrapped in the late 1920s when engineers demonstrated that a suspension bridge spanning the entire length of the crossing was, in fact, feasible after all.

But engineering wasn’t the only hurdle that had to be overcome. By 1930, the proposal had attracted 2,300 lawsuits seeking to stop it. Famed Yosemite photographer Ansel Adams and the Sierra Club thought the bridge would be a blot on the area’s natural scenery. And the Southern Pacific Railroad had a very big stake in the game: It owned majority stock in the ferry company that transported cars from one side of the bay to the other.

But the ferry itself was part of the problem. The public was getting fed up with enduring the long waits and jampacked boats that were the by-product of ever-increasing vehicle traffic across the bay. A 1930 campaign pamphlet for the bond measure that would fund the Golden Gate Bridge lamented that the ferry system had “reached its saturation point” even with ferries “closely packed” to an average capacity of 73 vehicles.

Workers toil on the partially completed Golden Gate Bridge in 1935. Public domain.

“The congestion at the Marin shore due to inadequate transportation across the bay has caused thousands of motorists great delay and inconvenience on Sundays and holidays,” the brochure declared. “The ferry schedules cannot be increased without immense cost and even then the inadequacy of ferries as compared with a Golden Gate bridge is apparent to all.”

So, after a decade of planning, they built that bridge—and it wasn’t just any bridge, either. The orange suspension bridge with its instantly recognizable twin towers became the symbol of San Francisco, photographed more than any other bridge in the country, its silhouette emblazoned on everything from souvenir T-shirts to the uniforms of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. It didn’t come cheap, though: It cost a whopping $74 million (including $39 million in interest), and it also cost 11 construction workers their lives.

It could have been worse: Safety netting broke the fall of 19 other workers who lost their footing and plummeted toward the bay—creating what was known as the “Halfway to Hell Club.” Of the 11 who did perish, 10 of them died when a scaffold fell and ripped through the netting, leaving nothing between them and the water below.

When it was built, the Golden Gate was taller than any building in San Francisco, the roadway itself suspended by a pair of cables more than 7,600 feet long. More lives were lost, tragically, but not because of any safety problems with the bridge. Instead, the fatalities—an estimated 1,600 of them as of 2012—were due to suicide leaps from the bridge’s lofty span. When it comes to safety, though, the engineers got it right: The bridge not only survived the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake unscathed, it withstood an unprecedented number of vehicles that crossed in the wake of the disaster. On October 27, 1989, a record 162,414 cars traversed the bridge heading both directions.

In all, more than 2 billion (yes, billion) vehicles have crossed the bridge during its history. And not only that, the bridge isn’t the eyesore it might have been had the original design been implemented, but a soaring monument to grace and style.

One interesting note: Even though traffic on both sides of the bridge enters it from U.S. 101, the bridge itself isn’t technically part of the highway, which ends at the north abutment of the bridge and 1,000 feet south of the bridge toll plaza. Still, it’s a key part of the highway’s history, providing a vital link from north to south and from past to present.