A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  In several buildings huge iron safes—the most popular being those of the locally based Hermann Safe Company, which operated until the 1980s—fell through floors, gathered momentum, and went rocketing downward, smashing huge holes in the structures as they did so.* The Majestic Theater, “particularly bad in design,” was practically demolished; the Post Office, “badly racked”; the Rialto Building, “badly racked … cracked … brick facings thrown off.” The Wells Fargo Building, despite being grotesquely twisted out of true, its terra-cotta spalled, its marble wainscoting thrown down and its cast-iron stairways considerably damaged, somehow stood, six storys tall and defiant.

  Some buildings were very lucky indeed. The infamous Monkey Block of low-rise stores and bars—the hangout of many of the city’s best-known writers and more amusing scoundrels—got away unscathed. There was much amused perplexity at the survival of A. P. Hotaling’s whiskey warehouse on Jackson Street, down by the waterside—the amusement derived from the evident caprices of a deity who permitted so plainly immoral a business to keep on running, while the city itself was punished for its self-evident sinfulness.† And the U.S. Mint, which had $300 million in specie in its vaults, survived—being both well built (its nickname was the Granite Lady) and provided with a well, which provided water when it was most needed. (The building, its massive blocks fire singed, remains standing today, on the 500 block of Mission Street. But it is empty and unused, because the city of San Francisco cannot afford to bring it up to today’s earthquake-proof standards—an irony that historians of the 1906 events will find more than a little droll.)

  THE THOUSANDS of black-and-white photographs of the event’s aftermath, both from San Francisco and from communities well beyond, have a sad eloquence all of their own. This, after all, was the world’s first major natural disaster to have been extensively photographed: It was the seismic equivalent of the Civil War, a tragedy made more poignant and immediate because the whole world was able to share its images within moments—more easily once the city’s broken telegraph links with the outside had been repaired*—of their being taken.

  The photographic community did not get off scot-free. Many studios were smashed, cameras ruined and photographers hurt—not the least of them being one who, for entirely understandable reasons, was actually not involved in capturing images of this particular event. Ansel Adams broke his nose that morning. He was four years old.

  The Adams family lived in the far west of the city, in a house set down quietly among the sand dunes. His experiences of the quake remained with him all his life—the waking, the shaking, a vast noise, chimneys falling through the greenhouse roof, an eerie silence except for the sea, which was suddenly louder because all the windows had broken. Kong, the Chinese cook, tried to start a fire in the kitchen stove, but was ordered out into the garden with the rest of the family, where he prepared the food. Ansel was in the charge of his nanny, Nelly. He remembered enjoying the garden, waiting for aftershocks, and learning how to interpret the signs of their imminent arrival.

  And then, just as Kong had finished cooking and there came the call to breakfast, Ansel was running toward the table when there came a violent shock: “I tumbled against a low brick garden wall, my nose making violent contact, with quite a bloody effect.” The doctors advised against fixing it, and it never was. His famously chiseled profile was created in that instant.

  In considering the damage small and great, from the nasal septums of artists to the pilasters of City Hall, one sobering reality is often overlooked: The direct and immediate effects of the earthquake itself, while great in absolute terms, were, in relation to the disaster as a whole, relatively small. It was estimated by the federal government at the time that only between 3 and 10 percent of the damage done to San Francisco was directly attributable to the earthquake. It was the subsequent, indirect effects—a distinction of which the insurance companies made much, as we shall see—that brought about the greatest loss by far.

  For it was these subsequent and indirect effects that caused the bulk of the destruction of half a billion dollars’ worth of property,* killed at the very least 600 people (some estimates today put the figure as high as 3,000, and there are accusations that the casualty figure was massaged downward to ensure San Francisco enjoyed a good reputation for investors) and rendered more than 200,000 homeless, many for months and years to come.

  And the first of these subsequent and indirect effects came within seconds of the first vibrations, when, all over the afflicted area, the cast-iron water pipes broke.

  The three-foot main that brought water in from the reservoir lakes, which, somewhat ironically, lay in the very valleys that had been created by the fault line to the south of town, all fractured and split; and those few that were carried on trestle bridges across streambeds and other small and inconvenient valleys ruptured when the bridge supports gave way. Then the smaller-diameter water pipes that routed this same water through the maze of streets inside the city limits broke also, turning thousands of water taps—and all of the hundreds of cast-iron street-corner hydrants—suddenly and creakingly dry.

  At the very moment this was happening, and as the breakages were suddenly denying water to those who had no thought that they might need it, the second wave of subsequent and indirect effects of the earthquake hit. All across the city utility poles broke and toppled, and the high-tension electrical wires they were carrying fell to the ground—where they writhed and hissed “like reptiles”—then crossed and arced. Gas pipes broke, chimneys fell and spilled hot coals onto hundreds of wooden floors, cooking ranges tipped over, fuel tanks ruptured and spilled thousands of gallons of oil, gasoline, and kerosene down stairs and into basements and toward the arcing wires—and in a matter of moments, in locations from one end of the city to the other, the region erupted in fire.

  By this point the earthquake’s shaking had ceased, and the main-shocks had wrought their immediate damage. There would be aftershocks, which would collapse still more weakened structures and further induce fear in the terrified and demoralized citizenry. Now the longer-term side effects of the earthquake, of which the fire was by far the most infamous and the most lethal, would begin to compound the misery of the moment—and over the next three days they would compound it by what would seem a thousandfold.

  THE STRICKEN CITY

  And within five seconds of the end of the shake twenty or thirty fires broke out all over the lower parts of the city. On leaving the hotel I found that the earthquake had smashed the water mains in the upper part of the city and that therefore the splendidly equipped and drilled fire brigade of San Francisco was utterly powerless. There was however no fire near the Office, and it appeared to be in no immediate danger of burning, but it was badly cracked. A little later, however, a fresh fire started in the rear of the Office and in a few moments the Consulate-General was a mass of flames and is now a wilderness of brick and crumpled iron girders. Just as the building caught Mr. Chambers, the Chief Clerk, arrived on the scene and rescued a few papers, ships’ articles, Registers, Fee Book, &c. These he turned over to me and they were placed in the safe of my Hotel which subsequently burned down. What is their fate cannot yet be known. With this possible exception nothing was saved from the wreck. The loss of furniture &c. was mainly covered by insurance. I have made arrangements for guarding the safes, &c., which contain many confidential documents. I am without fee stamps, official seals &c … I now have temporary offices in Oakland.

  From a diplomatic telegram sent on April 25, 1906, from

  SIR COURTNEY BENNETT, His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General,

  San Francisco, to Sir Edward Grey, Bart., &c., &c.,

  Secretary of State for Foreign and Colonial Affairs, London

  “There is no such thing as a fireproof building,” declared the U.S. Geological Survey’s Report on the Effects on Structures and Structural Materials, which exonerated the firefighters of all blame for what happened as the San Francisco fires raged, at first wholly unchec
ked, for the next three days. For, though the conditions in the city after the quake were, in the survey’s words, “highly unusual”—with, thanks to the broken pipes, no readily available water for the firefighters to use—the situation was made impossible because of the sheer number of fires that erupted all across the city almost simultaneously. No fire department anywhere in America, or probably anywhere in the world, could have possibly dealt properly with this conflagration, had they all the water that they could use. The 1906 fire was essentially uncontrollable, somewhat akin to the firestorms that ruined Dresden and Tokyo, and that raged in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The San Francisco fire burned across almost 2,600 acres, utterly destroyed 490 city blocks, and brought America’s greatest West Coast city almost to its knees.

  It began quickly, within seconds of the arrival of the shock waves. It may seem presumptuous and more than a little risky to turn to fiction for an illustration of what occurred, but there is a scene in the climactic moments of San Francisco, W.S. Van Dyke’s well-regarded 1936 film, that manages to distill what seems to have happened into one unforgettable and precisely observed moment.

  In the film the earthquake has just taken place, surviving after-theater party guests have all run screaming into the streets, and a bewildered, bloodied, and distraught Blackie Norton (Clark Gable) is searching for Mary Blake (Jeanette MacDonald)—he suspects that she has died in the ruins. He is clawing back bricks from where he supposes she is buried. For a moment there is quiet, save for a haunting scene of a nameless man running by, screaming out, “Irene! Irene!”

  And then there comes an aftershock. People shout a warning. Blackie steps back from his frantic clawing—just in time to avoid being crushed by yet another fusillade of falling bricks, but not in time to avoid being swallowed by a deep chasm that suddenly opens up in the roadway behind him, and in which one sees, vaguely, pipes being broken and water cascading into the fathomless pit.

  Blackie—being Clark Gable—is naturally pulled to safety, to act out the film’s climax. But, the moment he reaches the surface, another pipe breaks, this time gushing town gas—and, as it snaps, a pair of falling power lines cross, there is a cannonade of sparks, the gas ignites, and a huge fountain of orange flame hurtles up into the air, scorching the timbers of a still-standing building like a flamethrower. From that moment on, Blackie Norton’s search continues against a background of unending inferno, with flames, smoke, ashes, and sparks in every scene, making the broken city resemble nothing more than a hellish vision of war.

  Many of the early fires had names when they were born. There was the Chinese Laundry Fire, the San Francisco Gas and Electric Fire, the Girard House Fire. And, most infamous of all, the Hayes Valley Fire—better known locally as the Ham and Eggs Fire, if only because of the seeming need for storytellers everywhere to bring human scale to some almighty tragedies, to catastrophes too large to comprehend. It helped that the Great Fire of London of 1666 was comfortably begun in a place called Pudding Lane. The Chicago Fire of 1871 was supposedly started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. The Baltimore Fire of 1904 began when someone tossed a lighted cigar down through a grate, and it was stopped most agreeably down beside a waterfall. And here in San Francisco the Hayes Valley Fire was begun by a woman at 95 Hayes Street who was cooking herself breakfast in a building with a badly broken chimney (or so it is said—there is only circumstantial evidence, and not very much of that). The cozily domestic name allows the fire to be remembered today almost with affection, though it was a particularly vicious blaze, among the very worst.

  Over the city the wind was westerly, and, as the sun came up, it began to freshen. And the fires, some of them big and named, others small and of seeming insignificance (at least fifty were identified as having broken out in those first few hours), took hold and began to join hands with one another. And as these isolated fires became larger and larger, and joined one another to grow larger still, they began to suck more and more oxygen from the atmosphere and to create winds of their own, eddies of superheated air that sucked ever more of the islands of fire together. By midday there was a wall of flame a mile and half long to the south of Market Street, and the wall of smoke rose at least two miles up into the sky, visible across all the counties of the bay and horrifying thousands.

  An early map purporting to show the spread of the blazes looks like a diagram of the Maelstrom, with a turmoil of fire engulfing almost everything in the bustling eastern quarters of the city. In the slums south of Market Street, where whole wooden buildings had slithered out onto the streets, the fire that would soon present itself to that mile-and-a-half-long front is shown roaring its way eastward, which would be expected, as the wind was westerly. Residents, terrified and stunned by the collapse of their homes and hotels, stood helpless out in the streets. Then, as the fires came, they scattered and began to flee, not knowing which way to run to avoid being trapped by a wall of flame. A writer named Charles Caldwell, a man clearly unaccustomed to seeing the poor up close, described them in unkindly fashion as looking “like rats startled out of their holes, this beer-sodden, frowzy crew of dreadful men and even more dreadful women. A breed that has passed out of American life completely—red-faced, bloated, blowzy.”

  Jack London, as vivid a writer as they come, and a Sonoma Valley neighbor, described matters for Collier’s a month later:

  By Wednesday afternoon, inside of twelve hours, half the heart of the city was gone. At that time I watched the vast conflagration from out on the Bay. It was dead calm. Not a flicker of wind stirred. Yet from every side wind was pouring in upon the city: East, west, north and south, strong winds were blowing upon the doomed city. The heated air rising made an enormous suck. Thus did the fire of itself build an enormous chimney through the atmosphere. Day and night the dead calm continued, and yet, near to the flames, the wind was often half a gale, so mighty was the suck.

  Immediately north of Market Street the blazes coalesced and spread eastward; around City Hall they formed vortices that raged in all directions; on Russian Hill they stormed westward, directly under the influence of the prevailing wind of the day; and in North Beach, Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, and along the Embarcadero they seemed to burn back inshore again. It was all very confusing for both the residents and the firefighters. Time and again, since almost every one of the hydrants proved to be dry, the firemen could only look on impotently and suffer the jeers of the crowds, which at first just could not understand why nothing was being done to contain the inferno.

  Most dreadful, though, was the plight of those who were pinned and trapped in the wreckage and thus unable to get out of the path of the inexorably advancing flames. Stories abound of such victims being put out of their misery by passersby with guns, policemen especially. The coroner’s reports, however, remark on the almost total lack of corpses with gunshot wounds, casting a certain skeptical shadow over these suggestions. It is generally accepted, though, that bodies consumed by fires that often reached more than 2,000 degrees would barely be recognizable as bodies at all.

  The four-year-old Ansel Adams, bruised but unburned near the Golden Gate, knew from the family cook, Kong, that Chinatown had been particularly badly hit. This dignified old man had gone off to look for his family moments after preparing breakfast for his employers, and probably after helping to nurse young Ansel’s newly broken nose. Hours later, bone weary, he returned to the relative peace of the great house among the dunes. “He had found no one, and fire was everywhere,” Adams later wrote. “He never discovered what happened to his family.” Probably they died; what happened to other Chinese families in the aftermath of the fire was to have, as we shall see, considerable consequences for American society.

  ONCE AGAIN it is the pictures that offer most poignantly the portrait of a city being rapidly burned to death. There are thousands of them, made as amateurs and professionals alike—for simple cameras were inexpensive and photography a growing hobby—snapped at the blazes, turning tragedy into spectacle, a
nd in doing so perhaps minimizing, at least for themselves, its impact at the time.

  And the odd thing that many noticed was that a large number of those watching the fires rage (and perhaps taking pictures) seemed to be not so much perturbed by the unfolding events—unless they had suffered an irreversible personal loss—as they were awed by them. The esteemed Harvard psychologist William James was visiting Stanford University and very much hoping—professionally speaking—for an earthquake; he was delighted to be caught up in one.* He wrote later that people did indeed remark on how “awful” and “dreadful” the event was; but they were nonetheless full of some kind of wonder at being able to be part of so majestic a catastrophe. They eagerly watched it, James noted; they took pictures of it; and they thought themselves lucky to be enfolded in an event of truly historic significance.

  Four years later James went on to write the famous paper “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” and claimed, among other things, that, by taking photographs of the realities of the event, the city residents were undertaking what nowadays are called “coping strategies,” placing their agonies in an easier perspective, by way of the recorded reactions of light on silver nitrate–covered paper. There is one image in particular that captures this notion to perfection: A pair of young women, pretty, behatted, and beaming, pose to have their portrait taken while the sky behind them is a pall of rising smoke. They might as well have been standing in front of Half Dome, or under the Eiffel Tower, or on the Great Wall: Their city was being destroyed, yet the catastrophe—at least for that brief moment—was for them little more than background.

  Some of the pictures are on an epic scale—most of them panoramas taken from rooftops, some managing to make the tragedy look both gargantuan and human, awe-inspiring and prosaic. One taken from the roof of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, looking northeastward along Market Street, toward downtown and the docks, shows immense billows of smoke rising like a huge volcano, enveloping everything in the middle distance. But then, close up, one can see the billboards of merchants—billboards that the day before might have read as jaunty and proud proclamations, but that now, since their owners are about to be burned out, seem no more than bitterly pathetic.