How San Francisco Was Destroyed
 | | Fire at the corner of Grand and Palace after the 1906 earthquake. | | (Library of Congress) |
It began a hundred years ago this morning. At precisely 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the San Francisco Bay Area was hit with a massive 7.9 earthquake, followed by three days of fires. The destruction unleashed is difficult to comprehend.
Great seismic waves moved outward from the epicenter at an astonishing 8,000 miles an hour, causing violent shaking and ruptures for 300 miles along the San Andreas Fault, with some openings more than 20 feet wide. A total of 25,000 buildings were toppled in less than a minute, 490 city blocks destroyed, in a still young but thriving port city considered to be the most important in the West. It was the one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit United States soil, let alone a densely populated urban area. It is believed that some 3,000 people died (though the official count is much lower), and more than half of the city’s 400,000 residents were left homeless, some for years.
A San Francisco policeman named Jesse Cook was chatting with a vegetable vendor on his early-morning rounds when he heard a “deep and terrible rumbling” and then turned to see the city streets undulating toward him like great ocean waves, which caused the earth to actually rise under him. At the same time, a swimmer in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach felt the upward surge of the sea bottom. As he clambered frantically onshore, he saw that he was trailing incandescent sparks in his wake. Other reports describe horrific scenes—victims buried alive, thousands of horses dead from falling buildings and, later, from exhaustion. Witnesses told of fires that weren’t merely fires but great sucking, roaring vortexes that picked up large objects and debris in their wakes.
Buildings on “made ground”—former bay water that had been filled in with all manner of substances—sank when the earth liquefied, actually drowning their residents. Cobblestones popped out of the street like popcorn, and seemingly indestructible buildings collapsed like so many houses of cards. Those who had the luxury of observing from a slightly safe distance had no idea just how terrible the disaster was until the fires started spreading. Many went on about their business as usual, or went back to sleep. The future photographer Ansel Adams, four years old, was romping around his backyard in the outskirts of the city when an aftershock made him fall and break his nose.
After the earthquake—immediately recognized by several geologists as the seismic event of a lifetime—came an eerie moment of quiet and disbelief. By 6 a.m., less than an hour after the quake, all telephone and telegraph communications had ceased within the city, effectively cutting off San Francisco from the rest of the world. The water supply was destroyed by the quake and aftershocks, and the power system was shut down almost immediately.
General Frederick Funston—temporarily in charge of the Presidio military base while his superior, Major Adolphus Greeley, was in Chicago for his daughter’s wedding—quickly took control and at 6:30 a.m. ordered all available troops to report to Mayor Eugene Schmitz at the Hall of Justice. Funston, like many other key figures in the earthquake, was alternately criticized and praised for his actions during the calamity. The press at the time called him “the man who saved San Francisco.”
By now the first of 52 fires had begun. Thousands began fleeing toward the ferry building, which was damaged but still standing. It was reported that chaos reigned on Market Street until the military took control and closed down the saloons; however, most eyewitness accounts described polite and orderly streams of refugees, not drunken looters. In any case, soldiers and deputized civilians alike wielded bayonets and patrolled streets at all hours. Fire Chief Engineer Dennis Sullivan was mortally wounded during the first tremors, when the dome of the California Theater and Hotel crashed through the fire station while he and his wife were still in bed. He managed to cover her with a mattress, and she survived, but he died days later from his injuries. His second-in-command, John Dougherty, took over. He would have his work cut out for him.
Around 10 a.m. a second fire started, in Hayes Valley, near City Hall. Dubbed the “Ham and Eggs” fire, because it supposedly started when a woman tried to cook breakfast without realizing the chimney was broken, it went on to destroy St. Ignatius Church and College and finish off the rest of City Hall and many residential blocks. The firefighters were able to do very little.
Desperate pleas for help were finally sent out after telegraph operations were patched together, and President Theodore Roosevelt named the Red Cross as the official organization to help the stricken city. Red Cross president Mabel Boardman, Clara Barton’s recent successor, protested that the struggling organization was not equipped to handle a calamity of such magnitude, but nonetheless the earthquake became the charity’s first full-scale disaster relief effort after the Galveston hurricane of 1900.
Dynamiting, authorized by Funston and Mayor Schmitz to keep the fires from spreading, began around 2:30 p.m. near the Mint at Fifth and Mission Streets, just off Market, adding to the chaos. The dynamiting only fed the fires, creating a lethal cocktail that would nearly destroy San Francisco. Whole city blocks were blown up, after reluctant residents were forced out of their homes at gunpoint. There were firestorms for three days. The novelist Jack London toured the city on foot as it burned, taking photographs and writing in a journal. “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed,” he wrote. “San Francisco is gone.”
By Saturday, April 21, the fires had essentially burned themselves out, with the Van Ness firebreak considered to be the one success of the dynamiting (though many believe a change of winds was what finally stopped the fires’ progress). Then came several days of rain, too late to douse the flames but just in time to make the homeless refugees cold and miserable. Relief had begun arriving from around the country and even the world, and the slow, painful process of rebuilding would soon begin.
In April 2006 the San Francisco Bay Area commemorates the centennial of the earthquake with several weeks of events, conferences, and exhibitions. International consortiums of geologists, architects, and engineers are gathering in the Bay Area to discuss “1906” (as it is called for short) and the possibility of its repeat. Stanford University (which was heavily damaged in 1906) and the University of California at Berkeley (which was not) have teamed up with the U.S. Geological Survey to map the exact path of the quake and recreate the shaking of 1906 on a supercomputer in order to get a handle on what it might mean to today’s Bay Area. At 5:12 this morning, April 18, 2006, a crowd of more than 5,000 is expected to gather at Lotta’s Fountain, on Market Street, as crowds have been doing every year since 1908 in a San Francisco tradition.
Looking at the poignant black-and-white images of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fires, it is almost possible to romanticize the saga. There’s something about those well-dressed people standing in front of their classical-looking ruins that makes San Francisco seem an urban Titanic—beautiful, garish, and doomed. And the fact that the Italian opera star Enrico Caruso, who had performed to a packed house the night before, became a sort of symbol of the event adds to its cinematic quality. There were even rumors that he sang arias out of his window at the Palace Hotel as it crumbled—in full costume. But the reality of the situation was anything but pretty, even for Caruso, who was as terrified as anyone. Indeed all over the Bay Area walking tours, photography exhibits, reenactments (bucket brigades, refugee tent encampments), and ceremonies honoring survivors are unfolding as residents and tourists alike get to experience—from a safe distance—what those terrible three days were like.
It is a more recent tragedy that makes it all believable and somehow real. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes in 2005 echoed the San Francisco disaster in many ways. Both cities are sited on famously precarious ground—ticking time bombs, really, awaiting nature’s wrath. New Orleans lies on a rising water table in a Bermuda Triangle of hurricane danger, and the Bay Area sits squarely on the volatile San Andreas Fault. One crucial difference of course, is that New Orleans usually gets a day or two of warning, and San Francisco none. That both towns have engendered reputations as havens for anything-goes behavior is perhaps beside the point, except that many have believed that each city was actually being punished by God for its sins.
But Bourbon Street and the Barbary Coast notwithstanding, both cities were pitifully ill-equipped to withstand their major disasters. In 1906 San Francisco’s water supply was known to be sorely inadequate should a major fire strike (and the city had endured many up to this point), and most of the quickly constructed buildings had no chance of withstanding a major earthquake. Even the monumental neoclassical City Hall, which had taken 20 years and millions of dollars to build, crumbled in about two minutes. Nearly a hundred years later, New Orleans’s levee system was famously out-of-date, and it’s no secret that city and government officials had been pleading for upgrades to prevent just the kind of disaster that happened. Cassandras had been warning for years that the Crescent City might sink into the ocean, like Venice. The levees breached, and the city did was submerged.
Though it happened nearly a hundred years earlier, the sad aftermath of San Francisco is easier to visualize after viewing footage from Katrina—the streams of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the bodies in the street, the largely inept handling of the disaster by both local and federal officials. There was overwhelming generosity, both public and private, in donating goods and services, and there were moments of human kindness mixed in with callous disregard for life (like the shooting of looters). The ugliness of racism and segregation reared up in both tragedies—directed largely at the Chinese and Japanese in 1906 San Francisco and at poor African-Americans in New Orleans in 2005.
Refugees who did not flee San Francisco on foot or by ferry were housed in tent camps, some better than others but most of them miserable. There were no services of any kind for weeks—no running water or sanitation or heat to ward off the chill. The injured and sick were taken to the dreary, foggy Presidio Military Hospital and vaccinated against typhus, which began to spread due to the unsanitary conditions. A hundred years later, very similar scenes would play out in Louisiana.
Eileen Keremitsis, a San Francisco historian and tour guide, is leading a small group around the Civic Center area as part of a special 1906 series of tours. It’s a typical spring day in San Francisco—misty rain mixed with cold wind and fleeting moments of sharp sun. “Phoenix Rising,” the name she has given this particular tour, refers to the destruction and rebuilding of City Hall before and after 1906, with lots of juicy local politics from the period peppering the tour anecdotes. Keremetsis obviously relishes sharing stories of “Handsome” Eugene Schmitz, the mayor during the earthquake, who, like Funston, has been alternately praised and blamed for his comportment during the crucial days.
It was Schmitz who authorized the controversial (and illegal) proclamation that all looters be shot on sight. He and his right-hand man, Abraham Ruef, were removed from power less than a year after the earthquake in a sort of coup d’etat engineered by local business leaders, including the former mayor James Phelan and the businessman Rudolph Spreckels. Schmitz and Ruef were famously corrupt politicians, but they also were pro-labor and pro-union (and allegedly no more corrupt than most other politicians of the day, and maybe less) and therefore viewed as a threat to business interests. They toppled (not unlike City Hall) in a scandalous trial that actually landed Ruef in prison. In the ensuing months, chaos and confusion reigned. At one point there were actually three mayors of San Francisco at once.
Keremitsis moves from political intrigue to practical matters, pointing out special big blue hydrants that indicate the city’s emergency water supply—not for drinking or bathing but solely in case of another big fire. She then explains how the City Hall leveled in 1906 had been the victim of so much graft and corruption that it was hewn together with cement mixed with local beach sand, and therefore crumbled like a sandcastle when the quake struck. It had hollow brick walls filled with rubble, and a wing that missed connecting with the main building by a foot. The geologists who surveyed the damage wrote: “The building was a monument of bad design and poor workmanship, and was not, therefore, of such a character that it could be expected to resist successfully the effect of earthquake or fire.” San Francisco’s current architecture, though not beautiful by all standards, is at least more earthquake-proof.
Keremitsis is one of 200 volunteers who guide visitors and residents on such walks. She describes herself as a “disaster tourism” specialist, and not surprisingly she makes many comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and 1906. She says that until Katrina, 1906 represented the single biggest insurance payout for a natural disaster in the United States. Her favorite tour is called “It Can’t Happen Here,” which recreates the first few terrifying moments of the quake. She is so mild-mannered (except for a whimsical purple hat) and scholarly that she is hard to picture terrorizing her followers. “I really try to give people a sense of what that must have been like, to actually frighten them,” she admits.
San Francisco did of course rebuild itself, making its formal debut as in the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exhibition, a world’s fair visited by millions from all over the world. The city never regained its status as the capital of the West, losing that title to Los Angeles, but it did, for all effects and purposes, come back. One can only hope that New Orleans will do so, and as triumphantly, too.
—Amy Weaver Dorning is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
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