Wheeled Thievery and Sandbaggery

Bicycle thieves were a problem in the Mission in 1905, but not quite in the way you might expect.

Basically these guys would ride up on their bikes and hit you over the head with a sandbag and rob you.

“They keep In the shadows, creeping along on their silent, rubbber-shod steeds until they are almost alongside him.”

Uh oh.

“The two have neither lamp nor bell upon their bicycles. Their method Is to follow a pedestrian along the lonely roads in the Mission.”

That’s not good.

This via the archives of the San Francisco Call in the historo-panopticon that is the California Digital Newspaper Collection.

Alas this particular crime seems to have taken place not quite in the Mission, but on a bridge that passes over the Bernal Cut connecting Glen Park to the Lost Tribe of College Hill. This was not, however, the Richland or Highland bridges — from the SFPL archives, we know they weren’t built until 1928/1929.

Longtime readers will remember that the Bernal Cut was much, much, much narrower (and was once the main route for the Southern Pacific Railway, until the Bayshore Cutoff was completed in 1907.)

I stitched together a bunch of the 1899-1900 Sanborn Maps to get a better view of the Bernal Cut.

While it looks like there are two bridges across the cut, the one at Fairmount is actually for a water main.

The bridge where our friends were attacked by nefarious bicycle thieves was most likely Charles Street:

Before you go about visualizing two guys on foot being chased by two guys on bikes wearing caps (one wearing a red sweater),  I just realized that the Charles St bridge above looks different than the Charles St. bridge you can see in the background of the Fairmount water main photo:

These photos aren’t dated, but from looks of the trusses in the photo below (dated 1910), it looks like the Charles St Bridge was rebuilt.

Anyway, if you are wondering how in the world I found this article, I was actually trying to look up references to the sandbags that were used to mark out the streetcar stops.

It turns out that sandbagging was quite a popular way to attack people from 1880 to 1920.

While I had visions of thieves scooping up the streetcar sandbags, @daudig points out they preferred the sausage-shaped variety.

Of course, that begets the question of where they got the sand: