First The Shaking, Then the Flames

By Frank Trippett

In 1906 San Francisco with its 400,000 souls was the undisputed gem of the Pacific Coast, a bustling, pungent, polyglot city enjoying corrupt government, splendid libraries and wonderful restaurants. As a hub of international finance and society, it rivaled New York City and Paris, and it took perverse pride in its reputation, well earned by the depravity of the carnal Barbary Coast, as "the wickedest city in the world." The evening of April 17, when the nonpareil Enrico Caruso sang in Carmen at the Grand Opera House before repairing to the fabulous Palace Hotel (a telephone and bath for every room, no less), was simply the glittering usual. As the populace drifted to sleep that night, all was well. Who could have dreamed that in only a few hours little would remain of this luminous metropolis but some blackened hills and charred ruins by the Golden Gate?

The devastation of San Francisco -- and a calamity for Santa Rosa and San Jose and every other California city from Eureka to Salinas -- began at 5:12 a.m., at the first light of what would have been a lovely day. A dreadful howling sound shattered the dawn, as the earth suddenly rumbled, vibrated, heaved and pitched, wobbling in a demonic dance. "The whole street was undulating," recalled police sergeant Jesse Cook. The quake shook the city, in words that became folklore, like a "terrier shaking a rat."

In two distinct stages lasting a minute and five seconds, the quaking stunned the populace out of sleep into an incomprehensible terror of showering plaster, scattering bric-a-brac, breaking dishes, shifting furniture, toppling walls and collapsing roofs. Waterfront houses lurched and fell apart, hotels hopped off their foundations. In the working-class district south of Market Street, tenements turned into tangled splinters, and four hotels capsized and collapsed, trapping scores. An added blast rattled the area, as the city gas plant blew up. Thousands of chimneys plunged through roofs. Many residents drowned, trapped, in deluges from ruptured water mains. An elaborate new city hall disintegrated. When the Richter scale was devised later, experts rated the quake at a tremendously potent 8.3.

The shuddering pandemonium abruptly ended in an uncanny stillness "almost as awesome as the dreadful sound of the quake," William Bronson relates in The Earth Shook, the Sky Burned. Dazed men still in nightclothes stumbled out of dwellings along with women holding babies. The air was powdery. Many streets had gaping fissures. Few residents could get any idea of the extent of what had happened. People milled about, as an observer put it, "like speechless idiots." Beyond view, the injured and trapped began to cry out, and gradually the able-bodied undertook rescues.

Many well-built structures survived with minor damage, but 90% of all buildings were of frame construction. Wooden dwellings in the congested area south of Market (where most of the dead would be found) were reduced to heaps of kindling, which were quickly set afire by overturned stoves. Scattered blazes began to burn at once. Yet the city's troubles had hardly begun.

The well-drilled 585-man fire department proved all but useless: broken mains left the city without water. Scattered blazes soon converged into fire storms that gobbled up huge swaths of the city. The inferno spread despite desperate attempts to create firebreaks by dynamiting whole blocks of homes and businesses. Writer Jack London, who lived in Sonoma County, said what everyone saw: "I knew it was all doomed."

In the first day, 250 city blocks were incinerated. Not until the third day did the last of the fires sputter down. By then 514 city blocks (4.1 sq. mi.) had gone, 28,188 buildings, including the homes of 250,000. Libraries, theaters, restaurants, courts, jails, the financial district, South of Market, the fabulous Palace -- all gone. North of Market, little remained of Chinatown but a labyrinth of underground chambers once home to brothels and opium dens. About 2,500 had died.

Now it was a city of refugees. More than 100,000 had fled, and 250,000 remained, encamped in parks and fields. Rich and poor alike stood in line at improvised soup kitchens and mess halls. Policemen, soldiers and armed citizens proved all too eager to act on Mayor Eugene Schmitz's order to shoot looters. A few miscreants were killed, and ordinary citizens were forced at gunpoint to work in the cleanup. America and most of the civilized world mourned what ranks as one of the greatest calamities suffered by a U.S. city. In the New York Sun, Will Irwin wrote a eulogy to "the gayest, lightest hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent."

San Franciscans, however, were not ready for burial. They zealously pitched in to what must rank as one of the greatest comebacks in history. By April 23, plans for the first new downtown building were published, and others followed at a dizzying pace. They moved so fast that within weeks about 1,000 makeshift saloons were doing business and political fighting had broken out again. Ex- Mayor (also ex-Governor and ex-U.S. Senator) James Phelan, who lost a fortune in the disaster, led an attack on the corrupt municipal government with one hand and with the other helped get the reconstruction moving. Checks drawn on San Francisco banks were all but useless right after the quake, but within six weeks every banking house in the city was back in operation.

In three years, 20,000 buildings went up, all bigger and stronger than the 28,000 that had burned. San Francisco's assessed evaluation was half again as much as it had been. In 1915 the city sponsored the spectacular Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In only nine years, San Francisco had bounced all the way back.