TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/103089/10308900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.0 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 50

First the Shaking, Then the Flames


Even after 83 years, the Great Quake reverberates in San
Francisco's memory

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.