Time Machines

Weirdly but ceaselessly, for nearly four decades, Ed Zelinsky’s antique mechanical sideshow has ticked along in a rundown room on the seaward side of the Cliff House. Maybe you’ve seen it and thought it was a dream.

Maybe you once visited the famed tourist-trap restaurant at the ocean’s edge and wandered into the white, cold fog behind it. And maybe a huge, scary, laughing clown suddenly materialized from a misted doorway. Then you would have heard Zelinsky’s Seeburg Style K Nickelodeon wheezing--the “Skater’s Waltz,” maybe--and seen the rows of rickety, coin-operated peep shows and found yourself peering into the gypsy fortuneteller’s mechanical face.

If so, you weren’t as alone as you probably felt at that moment. In the past couple of weeks, thousands of San Franciscans have come forward to share their attachment to Zelinsky’s bizarre, beloved Musee Mecanique.

Since word leaked that a planned renovation of the Cliff House would force the collection from its crumbling quarters, a minor blizzard of letters, e-mail and petitions has swirled about the city. Public hearings have convened. Editorials have circulated. The other day, a DJ on the rock radio station KFOG-FM ranted on the air about it and 100 soul-patched, combat-booted listeners showed up at the doorway with fists full of quarters.

“We’ve gotten thousands of calls--thousands,” marveled San Francisco County Supervisor Jake McGoldrick. “You wonder what taps into people. Believe me, you want to put up 500 units of affordable housing in this city, you don’t get thousands of calls. You want to improve the transit system, you don’t get thousands of calls. You say, ‘Hey, how ‘bout helping us out with the homeless,’ people go, ‘Ahh, get outta here, we’re sick of the homeless.’

“But this just seems to have touched something in people. Nostalgia seems almost too superficial a word for it. People just have these wonderful memories.”

The Musee’s situation has actually developed over some years. The three-story Cliff House, now in its third incarnation, is not only notoriously seedy but seismically unsafe. The National Park Service, which owns the land, plans to tear down the restaurant and gift shop in September and rebuild the complex to look as it did in 1909, when it was a low-slung roadhouse. The new restaurant has no room for the Musee.

Rich Weideman, spokesman for the service’s Golden Gate Recreational Area, says the plans call for the Musee to be moved eventually into a new visitor’s center up the hill from the restaurant. The rebuilt quarters, however, won’t be completed for at least two years, and possibly longer--the project is now only in the feasibility phase and the Park Service is hoping to finance it, at least in part, with private donations.

Although Zelinsky, the 80-year-old collector who owns the Musee, says he barely breaks even on the arcade, the rules for such renovations leave private, for-profit businesses to find their own homes in the interim.

Zelinsky, a dapper painting contractor and real estate investor who claims to be a fifth-generation San Franciscan, says he started his collection when he was 7 years old.

“I had gone to a matinee on Fillmore Street at the Princess Theater and they had a drawing at intermission,” he remembered. “To my amazement, they called my name, and I won the grand prize--five quarts of motor oil!

“Well, I sold the motor oil to my piano teacher for 75 cents, and with that money, I went down to Golden Gate Avenue, a section of the city that, at that time, sold slot machines and jukeboxes. And I bought myself a penny machine that you got five balls for a penny and you tried to get the balls into the target. And after a while, my friends wanted to play it, and when I had collected enough pennies from them, I went out and bought another machine.”

Today, Zelinsky--whose penny machines now mostly cost a quarter--has what is believed to be one of the world’s largest collections of two-bit arcade antiques. Lined up in the Cliff House back room are rows and rows of player pianos and Mutoscopes and gear-operated gizmos that test your sex appeal and strength and give little peep shows and tell fortunes.

“Play Golf! See How Good You Are!” the machines say. And: “See What The Belly Dancer Does On Her Day Off!” And: “Opium Den!” And: “Real Motion Pictures featuring HAROLD LLOYD in ‘ON THE BEAM’!”

All are generations old, and still--miraculously--in full operation, thanks to Zelinsky’s son, Dan, who maintains the collection, along with some vintage video games such as Ms. Pac Man. In the doorway stands Laughing Sal, a huge, mechanical, straw-hatted clown with a creepy, incessant guffaw. The lurid hobo had once guarded the door to the Fun House at Playland-at-the-Beach, an amusement park that spread out near the Cliff House and was torn down in the early 1970s. Zelinsky bought the clown, which, as of last week, was still evoking strong memories and terrifying small children.

“Are you kidding? I grew up with Laughing Sal,” said Sean Scallan, 39, who had come by the Musee on a recent Friday to pay his respects with his ashen-faced, 4-year-old daughter. “We used to live down on 44th and Balboa and you could hear her laughing at our house, six blocks away.”

Only about half of the 300 machines in Zelinsky’s collection are in the Musee. The rest are in storage. But Zelinsky says it’s use-it-or-lose-it for those now on display. The oldest--a century-old tableau that shows a “Message from the Sea” being delivered to a general at a ball--has hand-carved wooden gears and leather pulleys that make the partygoers dance and rock the boat of the messenger.

“The problem,” Zelinsky said, “is that you can’t put these machines into storage for that long. They’ll fall apart on you.”

Moreover, he says, the profits from tourists defray the high cost of maintaining the machinery. Thus, the new home cannot be in just any location; it must be in a clean, large space with lots of tourists, particularly the seniors who pump the most quarters into the older games.

So the search for a temporary home is on. So far, Zelinsky said, three private property owners have offered buildings. The city and park service are also looking into vacancies on their properties. A supervisorial committee held a fact-finding hearing this month and has ordered city staff to report back in May on options for keeping the Musee open. “We haven’t identified a place yet, but I’m optimistic,” Zelinsky said.

And in the meantime, the place is besieged as never before by visitors with cameras--not tourists, but locals bent on preserving their memories. Not every city would hold such esteem for its inner carny, but then, not every city is San Francisco.

“Even after they restore it, it won’t be the same,” said 50-year-old Patty Warren, who was wandering the Musee on a recent lunch hour with a camcorder. “It’ll just be encased in amber, in yet another layer of self-consciousness.

“I mean, look around. Such a wonderful reliquary! Just so magical and wistful and funky!” She lifted her camera to pan the walls.

Great, blistered ribbons of lead paint unfurled from them. A band of albino monkeys tooted mechanical trumpets, but the tune was obscured by the nickelodeon, which was huffing “After You’re Gone.”