A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  It was an ambitious, extravagant scheme, to which I will return. It was a plan that called for grand monuments to be sited on the summits of peaks, broad boulevards to be bulldozed through neighborhoods, and scores of parks, fountains, marble piazzas, and wrought-iron elaborations to be built. All this, the critics said, would take far too long to achieve and would present an image of San Francisco utterly at variance with what it truly was. For the city was not a Paris or a Washington or a Buenos Aires; it was a place that made its fortune from making things, importing things, shipping things, and having endless decadent fun with all the wealth that these most basic activities brought. The Burnham plan was too pretty for it, too chic, too frothily pompous; it dressed San Francisco up as though it were Savannah or Charleston, when what it really wanted to be was a West Coast version of New York.

  On that Tuesday this grubby, corrupt, decadent young city of 400,000 people was, in other words, considering how to manage itself should it ever suffer the calamity of being grievously damaged; and it was about to consider how it might rebuild itself, the proposed style thought by some to possess an elegance appropriate to its status, and by some to be merely overwrought. And 350 miles to the south a handsome sum of money was on its way to a group of people in Italy who were suffering their way through the aftermath of a mighty volcanic eruption.

  But just before dawn of the following day the events in San Francisco brought a sudden and urgent need for all three of the commodities that had been on offer: an emergency needed to be dealt with, a city needed suddenly to be rebuilt, and money was needed, in abundance—but for thousands of victims at home rather than for uncounted numbers thousands of miles away.

  As it happens, the cleverest of banking telegraphers managed to see that this money was actually stopped in its tracks, and instead made its way up from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Although, as it turned out, the inhabitants of the city on the Bay were going to need a very great deal more than $10,000 worth of Los Angeles largesse.

  NINE

  Overture: The Night Before Dark

  THE EVENING OF TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1906, WAS A TIME almost devoid of portents, except for a change in the weather that hinted at the long-awaited end of winter. At four o’clock or so a stiff sea breeze sprang up, driving away the clouds that had dulled a hitherto dreary day. A westering sun could at last be seen, inching its way down behind the Golden Gate, dimming the rocks at Land’s End and Point Bonita, and making the Farallon Islands a misty silhouette on the Pacific horizon. This dusk had turned out to be a pretty one, a fitting finale to yet one more Californian day rolling to its contented close.

  San Francisco was by now indisputably the greatest city in the American West. And even if there were a fretful few who did think about earthquakes from time to time, only a small scattering of these could ever have had their fears compounded by real experience. The last time an earthquake had hit San Francisco hard was four decades before, and so youthful had the city’s population now become that only a very small number who had lived through that earthquake of October 1868 could possibly have been around for the second.

  That earlier earthquake was a bad one, right enough. It had struck early in the morning, a few minutes before eight on October 21, and killed thirty-five people. Only five of these victims were in San Francisco itself, however—the remainder died in the collapse of buildings on the far side of the Bay, in what were then small settlements like Hayward and San Leandro. And the reason for this—though it was not readily ascertained at the time—is that the rupture in the earth that caused it occurred not on the San Andreas Fault but on one of its neighbors known as the Hayward Fault, which runs exclusively up the eastern side of the Bay.

  It was a warm, humid mid-October morning, the sun just up, when the minute-long shaking began. People rushed out into the streets, many of them “in a state of semi-nudity.” They remained there, terrified, while buildings crumbled, streets rose and fell in waves, horses panicked; there was a general air of turmoil and confusion. Their only experience of anything similar had been a relatively small event three years before, also in October, which ruined a handful of buildings; and though several engineers had forecast that more earthquakes might well occur and so had begun to think, at last, about making buildings strong enough to withstand them, the ordinary person—the man out in the street, as it were—found the happenings of 1868 unexpected and terrifying.

  The origin of this earthquake was supposed, according to most of the newspapers of the day, to be somewhere on the far side of the Bay, at the base of a range of hills—though the only reports from this unsettled corner of California came from “cow-boys riding the range.” Over on the San Francisco side there were enough residents for plenty of eyewitness accounts. The spire of a synagogue on Vallejo Street was toppled, pills and potions were thrown into “a perfect jumble” in W. Pickering’s pharmacy on Stockton Street, and the premises of Messrs. Stone and Hayden, saddlers and harness makers, had all their chimneys shattered. The windows of the Empire Restaurant on Sansome Street were smashed while the patrons were taking their breakfast. A Chinese man named King Young was fatally crushed when the Scientific American magazine offices near Leidesdorff Street collapsed on top of him. Brokaw’s Mills, the Donohue Foundry, and the City Gas Works were so badly damaged that they had to be demolished. And the front of City Hall looked like “a dilapidated ruin,” with the rooms of the Twelfth District Court and the Probate Court wrecked.

  AS EVENING FELL on that April Tuesday in 1906, a few may have been abroad who had memories of that last quake. But most people, as usual, were more concerned with the mundane. Everyone seemed to be grumbling that the weather had been poor for so long: It was the tail end of an unusually damp chilly winter, and for most of this April day clouds hung over the hills, replaced later by a cold Pacific fog. But at teatime the wind had sprung up, the mists were blown away, and the skies cleared. The sun briefly warmed things up, then duly set, as a waning moon rose to take its place. People spoke happily of this pleasing conjunction—the clear skies, growing warmth, the setting sun, the pretty moon—as signs of the approaching change of season. Spring was coming; and for this and for a multitude of other reasons, it looked likely to be a pleasing night for many in the city.

  There was no doubt about which was the most celebrated event in store for the city’s glittering classes: the opera. The Metropolitan Opera of New York was in town for a second visit, and the tenor who had opened every season in New York since 1903, and who would do so until 1917, was in San Francisco to sing the role of Don José in Carmen. He was Enrico Caruso, at thirty-three the most admired tenor of his time, and a man amply endowed with all the manners of the primo.

  He was put up at the seven-story Palace Hotel on Market Street, a short walk from the Grand Opera House on Mission Street—both enormous buildings built in the 1870s. The 800-room hotel, the largest in the country at the time, advertised four “rising rooms,” or hydraulic elevators, which at the time were distinctly newfangled. It was also widely regarded as fireproof, with 700,000-gallon iron water tanks built under the roof. All the visiting grandees stayed there*: Caruso was apparently delighted upon being shown to a room once used by President Grant, and it was reported with great deference that he found the marble fireplace, the gold brocade upholstery, the furniture carved from local laurel, and the floors made of pine and redwood entirely to his florid Neapolitan taste.

  Yet he was not in the best of moods. He had come out from New York by train, and had found the weeklong journey irksome. Naples, his hometown, was being hammered by the eruption of Vesuvius, and he was fretful about his family’s safety. And even though it was said he vowed never to sing in Naples again after the poor review he was once given for L’Elisir d’Amore, he displayed a very public sympathy for the city’s plight, and had briefly toyed with the notion of scrubbing his West Coast tour and going to see if he could help.

  He had been in town a few days now, and was said to be none too impressed
with the San Franciscans. The audiences seemed to him largely composed of oafs, crowds very different from the sophisticates back on the East Coast—and the poor reviews of the company’s previous night’s performance of The Queen of Sheba confirmed his suspicion that he was in the midst of a largely artless rabble, no more than provincial arrivistes, well able to pay $10 for a ticket but hardly worldly enough to appreciate what they had come to hear.

  And, if all that were not enough to irritate this chubby, generous, driven little man—the third of five children, and not the eighteenth of twenty-one, as legend has it—he had a terrible time at rehearsals with the 200-pound Swedish-American mezzo-soprano Olive Fremstad, who was Carmen to his Don José. She had not sung well—a stagehand had dropped a vase, and the breakage made her lose a note—and Caruso worried that the night would go badly as a consequence.

  But there was no need for anxiety. In terms of sheer spectacle, the night was a tour de force. Journalist Marcelle Assan published an account of it in Paris two years later:

  The spectacle of the room was wonderful. One would have to recall a similar evening at the Paris opera during the Empire to equal such beauty and majesty: everywhere were diamonds, white shoulders, magnificent eyes, sylph-waisted women wrapped in lace worthy of a Queen, with lustrous Oriental pearls wrapped around lovely throats. It was all breathtakingly beautiful. In front of the audience Caruso, the Italian tenor, inspired by the glinting eyes of his rich American admirers, sang as he never had before, his acting imbued with Italian ardor, and elevated the enthusiasm of his public to the point of delirium. People applauded wildly, threw flowers …

  Charles Aiken of Sunset magazine was to write later:

  All society—with a big S—was out in force. Beautiful women gorgeously gowned, with opera cloaks trimmed with ermine, and diamonds on hands and hair; men with pop hats and the conventional cast-iron sort of clothes that mean joyous discomfort; here were wondrous bunches of orchids and roses; the singing and acting that charmed and the deafening applause. Then came the hoarse shouts of the carriage numbers, the strange melody of automobiles, the clang of electric cars; then tuneful orchestras at the Palace palm garden, or at Tait’s, or the Fiesta, or Techau’s, and oysters poulette and Liebfraumilch, Welsh rarebit and steins of Munchenbrau or terrapin Maryland and Asti tipo Chianti. And after all came the home-going in the early hours, with down-town streets still crowded, and the dazzling electric signs swinging wide over welcoming portals, making the garish city shame the modest moonlight.

  Carmen went as well as it ever had. The audience, stolid and moneyed though they might have been, exhibited raptures of enthusiasm, and Caruso returned their adulation with polite charm. But there was no public afterparty for him: He slipped away, driven off in what passed in 1906 for a limousine, and spent the rest of the evening in a local restaurant drinking, eating pasta, and listening to the twenty-three-year-old Elsa Maxwell—a fat girl from Iowa who would later become America’s best-known society hostess—play the piano.

  He waited for the early editions of the papers, which, whether out of respect or sagacity, wrote rave reviews—though William Randolph Hearst had issues with the Met and was said to have tried, in vain, to have the exuberant notice in his Examiner watered down. After reading the papers Caruso—Erri, as he was known—then called for one of the rising rooms to beam him up to his fifth-floor suite, where he took himself to bed. It was 3:00 A.M. He would sleep for no more than 120 minutes.

  John Barrymore was in town as well. This debonair young man—“The Great Profile,” as he was known to his fans—was on the verge of thespian greatness, even then. But only on the verge. In San Francisco he had performed few of the Shakespearean roles that later would make him so famous, and had come to town merely to appear in a small-time play called The Dictator by the noted war correspondent Richard Harding Davis. The company that had performed it perfectly ably on the Bay was now about to sail off across the Pacific to try it again 7,000 sea miles away, in Australia.

  John Barrymore’s main interest—both then and for the rest of his life—appears to have been winning the favors of the local chorines, and that Tuesday evening he had found one, a woman who, like him, had come to listen to Caruso. Impeccable in his white tie and tails, he would have been a dashing companion—but it happened that he was low on funds and had to ask a newspaperman for a loan, which he did not get. One might suppose he would have taken the young woman back to his room at the St. Francis, for reasons both of amusement and economics; but he did not, and since he then wrote what he later admitted was an entirely fictitious account of his experiences of the following day, it can never be certain what he did, to whom, and where. All that is really known is that Caruso was at the opera and John Barrymore was in the audience.

  After the last arias had died away and the carriages had collected the good and the great, Marcelle Assan headed for the most fashionable restaurant of the day, Delmonico’s.

  In its great gilded and mirrored rooms, in its thickly carpeted stairwell, by the light of its electric candelabras, through the crack of the heavy doors left ajar, only joyous parties of men and women could be glimpsed and overheard enjoying themselves.

  Champagne corks popped amid bursts of laughter and both sibilant and animated voices. The restaurant was filled on every floor, and everyone was playing all the most exciting games while tipsy from champagne or cocktails. Husbands and wives no longer knew each other, nor did they want to: it was merriment totally free and American.

  There were more modest amusements for the less well-off. The Columbia Theater on Powell Street—convenient for the cable car, which passed right by—was showing the three-year-old (but since then quite indestructible) musical Babes in Toyland by Victor Herbert. For a mere dime you could have yourself an evening of vaudeville at the Orpheum. The entirely beloved Australian singer and actress Nellie Stewart was having great success with a production based on the life of Nell Gwynne, Sweet Nell of Old Drury.*

  In the Mechanics Institute pavilion—a huge, ornate, and prettily fretworked wooden structure close to the hospital in the City Hall basement—a local sports promoter was staging a masked roller-skating contest, which continued well past midnight. The doctors in the hospital across the road did a roaring trade from the scores of skaters who managed to land unhappily on the vast redwood floor and found themselves in sudden need of splinter removers.

  And for the less physically inclined, there were a dozen smaller theaters ranged along Market Street and Broadway, and hosts of restaurants and clubs and whorehouses, all doing trade that evening that could be described as healthy or not, depending on your point of view. It has been said that Tait’s, Delmonico’s, Sanguinetti’s, the Pup, and Tortoni’s were doing good business that night; and that theater patrons crowded particularly into the Alhambra, Fischer’s, and the Alcazar—others attending in lesser numbers the little plays being staged at the Majestic and the Valencia.

  But Wednesday was a normal working day, and so the saturnalia that invariably gripped the city on Friday and Saturday nights was not in its fullest flower on a Tuesday. Aside from the gaiety of the opera—with well-dressed swells in their phaetons and hansoms and diligences swinging home via the better supper places, thus keeping some establishments going well beyond midnight—a pleasant quiet had settled on the city by one or two in the morning, as it usually did.

  There were a couple of fires, which irritated the fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, who had in consequence to attend to duties until at least 3:00 A.M. One was at a warehouse on Market Street, and Sullivan ordered three of his horse-drawn wagons out to extinguish the blaze. The city had eighty fire stations (though none at all among the densely crowded tenements of Chinatown), and 700 men, most of whom were paid and so obliged by more than mere civic duty to fight any fires that might break out.

  The insurers had long thought such kinds of preparations insufficient, however. As we have seen, the National Board of Fire Underwriters had remarked only the year before,
after an extensive survey, that the city remained a tinderbox, waiting to be consumed once again as it had been six times already in the half century of its existence. Chief Sullivan concurred, often vehemently. Such was the flammability of its structures, the lack of water, the vulnerability of the supply, and the eccentric siting of some of the fire stations that insurers found the risks barely tolerable. There were only thirty-eight steam-powered fire engines in service, and tests had shown they could deliver water at only 70 percent of their rated capacity—much too low for comfort. The men who manned the engines were poorly trained. There were too few hydrants, and the old cisterns that long before had been built to store water below intersections in the city center were rusty and empty. So poorly equipped was the city, the board declared, that it had violated all underwriting traditions and precedents by not burning up.

  And then there was the wind. In all six of those earlier devastating fires the prevailing wind had been westerly, blowing in from the sea, setting to the east. On this Tuesday night the wind backed slowly during the night from northwesterly to westerly. As Chief Sullivan took himself to his small box bed on the third floor of the Bush Street Fire Station, he must have noticed it—noticed that if any night was the least ideal for the tackling of a major fire, it would be a night with a wind setting like this.

  So the bars closed down, the streets emptied of their stragglers, the lights in the hotel rooms snapped off, one by one. The gas lamps in the city streets hissed and sputtered. The churches pealed the quarters and the hours, announcing the times in a soft clangor of amiable disagreement.