A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  THE BIGGEST FURNITURE HOUSE ON THE PACIFIC COAST announces one huge banner on top of a store shortly to be consumed, and housing, no doubt, chairs and tables and overstuffed sofas that would provide a most agreeable fuel. LENGFELD’S PHARMACY proclaims another, on top of a four-story building right on the square on Stockton Street. And then, most wretched of all, there is the wall of a thus-far-untouched building on Powell Street, off to the right of the panorama, with an immense painted notice announcing that GOLDSTEIN AND CO., THEATRICAL COSTUMERS, NOW AT 733 MARKET STREET, WILL OCCUPY THIS ENTIRE BUILDING MARCH IST. Needless to say, they didn’t, or for not that long. Neither 733 Market nor this building on Powell would survive the fire that swept in later on the day that the picture was taken.

  (But it is worth noting, according to the San Francisco Crocker-Langley Directory of the following year, that both businesses did survive, with Goldstein moving to new premises on Van Ness Avenue, and Lengfeld’s* to Fillmore Street, both well to the west, and away from the charring and the ruin. The California Pacific States Telephone Company announced that the exchanges for many of the new businesses would be called Temporary: One asked the operator for TEmporary 839, for example, to reach the Pinkerton’s Patrol Center, TEmporary 3780 for the Union Lithograph Company.)

  Perhaps the most famous of all the panoramic photographs of the event was that taken in the middle of Wednesday morning by Arnold Genthe, and titled simply San Francisco. April 18th, 1906.

  Genthe was the German-born draftsman-artist (though he had a Ph.D. in philology) who was later to make his name with the 1908 book Pictures of Old Chinatown. He had taken these photographs much earlier in the century, out of frustration at being endlessly forbidden from sketching the mysterious Celestials, as they were regarded, who inhabited the nine square blocks west of Portsmouth Square. He had abandoned the all-too-visible pursuit of sketching, and instead bought himself a tiny camera with a decent Zeiss lens; like Cartier-Bresson half a century later, he took his pictures quietly, fading himself into the background.

  Unlike Cartier-Bresson, however, Genthe often retouched his pictures, to remove such things as might dilute the Chinese-ness of the images: All English-language billboards and electrical wires had to go, for instance. The pictures were published after the fire’s near-total destruction of the ghetto: They have an elegiac quality to them, and the portrait they offer of the vanished world of Tangrenbu—of men with pigtails and old women with bound feet and the rows of trussed ducks and strange market fare and monstrous Manchu guards on sentry duty outside the dozens of opium dens—is intensely romantic, offering a shot of Oriental galangal to viewers in today’s vanilla America.

  The earthquake shook Genthe awake, as it did almost everyone else in the city. He was something of a swell—a well-born Berliner, the son of a classicist—and had finely decorated bachelor quarters on Sacramento Street, as well as a Japanese manservant. (Genthe never married.) In the first few moments after the earthquake had tumbled him from his bed and broken most of his impeccable collection of Chinese porcelain, and after Hamada, his imperturbable and admirably foresighted Jeeves, had announced he was heading off to stock up with food, he pondered just what might be the most suitable attire for attending so astonishing an event. He settled on khaki riding clothes and, after checking on his studio (it was ruined, though a sixteenth-century Buddha had fallen and was sitting in the midst of the wreckage looking “serene and indifferent of fate”), headed downhill with a pair of friends to see if they all might get breakfast at the St. Francis Hotel. It was here he supposedly met the fur-coat-and-pajamaclad Caruso and heard him make his “’ell of a town!” remark. There was hot coffee, and a simple cold breakfast was being offered free, so long as the food held out.

  Then he decided he should be taking pictures—except that he swiftly realized he had no camera. So he went to his dealer, a man named Kahn on Montgomery Street, and asked to borrow one. Kahn was only too well aware of the fires licking hungrily toward him, so told Genthe to take anything he wanted—anyway, it would all be molten scrap in a few hours at best. And so Genthe took a 3A Kodak Special, hurried off up the hills that looked down on the city-center destruction, and began to work. Later he wrote of the one picture taken from the upper end of Sacramento Street, close to where his house would soon be consumed by fire. He was peculiarly fond of it:

  There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the first morning of the first day of the fire (on Sacramento Street, looking toward the Bay) which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed onto the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, “Oh, is that a still from a Cecil DeMille picture?” To which the answer has been: “No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself.”*

  Genthe’s picture is interesting on many levels—not the least being the haunting, captivating contrast between the calm voyeurs occupying the foreground, and the terrible and spreading calamity in the back. But it also offers evidence of the peculiar behavior of the fire, which is here known to be heading west in spite of the morning’s fresh westerly wind. In the picture the smoke from the blaze is actually shown being blown away, wafting eastward toward the Bay, as it should be under the wind’s influence. The fire, on the other hand, is creeping inexorably westward, toward the watchers and toward the place where Genthe is standing—in fact by late afternoon it would reach halfway up the hill.

  The picture thus illustrates the often unrealized truth: that fire in cities is not necessarily blown by wind but often spreads, because of its ferocious concentrations of heat, anywhere nearby that has combustible material. In the specific case of this photograph two things can be said: First, there is nothing further to burn in the direction that the smoke is blowing, because that is where the city ends and the Bay begins; and second, the hungry fire will find a veritable banquet of delights in the direction of the photographer—domed buildings, wood-framed houses, wall-less rooms bulging with sofas and pianos and pictures and beds, barrels of oils and bottles of liquor and overturned wooden drays, all of them unprotected and ready to lure the flames westward. So this was the way the fire chose to spread, notwithstanding the direction of the winds. In forest fires, winds counts for much in the way a fire spreads; but in cities a host of other factors comes into play, and this is assuredly what happened in San Francisco.

  The fires lasted for three days. They were sometimes beaten back and checked at their perimeters, but rarely extinguished by the men trying to fight them. They eventually burned themselves out on Saturday, and only after everything flammable had been consumed. They were prevented from spreading still farther by the efforts of the soldiers who had been called in to create firebreaks with dynamite; by the efforts of firefighters who had made some saltwater hydrants work; and by others who discovered the very few freshwater hydrants whose supply pipes had not fractured. And then, at the end of the week, the weather turned damp and cold, as it so often does in spring in San Francisco, and then it began to rain, and the fires were slowly snuffed out despite the mud of black ash everywhere and the dreary appearance of thousands upon thousands of gutted and ruined buildings, and despite the dripping misery of hundreds of thousands of refugees in their tent cities and out on the grasses of the parks. At last the city could begin to think again of what it might do next.

  It is known that 28,188 buildings were destroyed; almost 500 people were officially said to have been killed—a figure that has risen over the years to well over 3,000; and of the 400,000 people whom the last city census had counted as living in San Francisco, 225,000 were homeless. The great majority of these last were men, women, and children seeking refuge—m
en, women, and children who were, in other words, now of a class that the “promised land” had never imagined it might see created within its own domains. They were Americans seeking refuge from the calamity, and thus they were American refugees. Not until the migrations enforced by the midwestern miseries of the Dust Bowl would such wretchedness be seen again.

  THE HUMAN RESPONSE

  Considering the catastrophe that descended upon San Francisco without a moment’s warning, conditions here are simply marvelous.… So far from being prostrated by misfortune, the citizens have banded together in a determination not only to reconstruct, but to establish a San Francisco that will be known as the most beautiful and attractive city in the wonderland of California.

  From a front-page editorial in the

  San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, April 22, 1906

  Seldom does an entire and very large urban community fall victim to utter disaster. Most great catastrophes tend to be relatively local—an explosion will devastate an awesome number of city blocks here, a fire will wreck a neighborhood there, a flood will inundate the lower-lying parts of a town, terrorists will wreak mayhem in a crowded urban quarter. But once in a mercifully rare while there are those events that enfold and ruin in full the complex engine work that is an established, fully developed urban society. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most obvious. The Great Fire of London in 1666. The Black Death. The wartime destruction of Berlin and Dresden. The volcanic ruin of Santorini, of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Martinique’s St. Pierre. The huge earthquakes in Lisbon and Tangshan—and then, in 1906, in San Francisco.

  The biggest of these cities survived. The smaller communities—Pompeii and St. Pierre, for example—lost their raison d’être once their buildings were gone, once their monuments were buried and their byways obliterated. But the world’s big cities generally exist for reasons that go far beyond the accumulation of buildings that is their outward manifestation. Their presence in the place they occupy is invariably due to some combination of geography—they lie by a river crossing, in a bay of refuge, at the mouth of a mountain pass—and of climate, together with some vague and indefinable organic reason that persuades humankind to settle there.

  Trials of any kind—war, pestilence, natural or human violence, with wholesale death or total physical destruction, or both, being the harshest of all—may slow that growth or cause some other setback; but such things are just setbacks, and before long the original reasons for a city’s existence reassert themselves. Life returns, buildings and roads are rebuilt, new monuments spring up or old ones are found and dusted off, and before long the city returns to its old self, ready to see what more fate can hurl at it, to challenge and strengthen and temper its will to survive. It may not always entirely regain its predisaster status—San Francisco had to cede much to Los Angeles, for example. But generally, so far as their respective quiddities are concerned, great cities always recover.

  It is a different matter when there are no cities—when disaster afflicts rural communities that lack settled centers of great consequence, as happened when the Sumatran tsunami swept across the Bay of Bengal at the end of 2004. In cases like this the return to normality is more shaky, less certain. A city has an uncanny ability to shrug off catastrophe; a devastated countryside, without a city to help it pull itself up by its collective bootstraps, can remain ruined for generations.

  So whether it is Manhattan, Falluja, Warsaw, Coventry, or Hiroshima, it seems true that though cities may on occasion lose their heart, they seldom also lose their soul; and San Francisco was no exception. All that its shattered, wearied, and suddenly impoverished citizens needed was leadership, someone to take charge, someone to lift the demoralizing burdens of wreck and ruin from their shoulders, and show them the possibilities of remaking the place that they had called their home.

  The leader who first emerged was a forty-year-old career soldier, a braggart and bully with a controversial record of recklessness and impetuosity—just the right man for the job, some would argue—named Frederick Funston.

  It was only by the purest chance that Brigadier General Funston was on duty at the time. The resident commander of the American army’s Pacific Division, based in the San Francisco Presidio beside the Golden Gate, was Major General Adolphus Washington Greely—a man who had ample personal reason to hope for the chance of meeting a challenge, such as restoring order after an earthquake. Twenty years before he had led a military expedition to the Arctic that had gone badly wrong—nineteen of its members had starved to death, and there were rumors of cannibalism, kangaroo courts, and drumhead justice. Greely’s reputation and career had in consequence gone into a decline, and he must have known that skillfully organizing a military response to a major catastrophe would do much to restore his standing. But it happened that in April 1906 he was away on leave in Chicago, at his daughter’s wedding, and he was able to get back to his command only by way of a slow transcontinental train, four days later. By this time General Funston, his deputy, had matters pretty much in hand.

  Funston had a lively reputation. He had won his spurs both in the Cuban revolutionary army and in the Philippines, where he led so cunning and courageous a campaign against the nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in his thirties and promoted to one-star general. But there were always dark rumors: that he took no prisoners, that he engaged in summary executions, that he looted Catholic churches for the amusement of his Southern Baptist troopers, that he had an “advertising bureau” to promote his image as a man of courage and dash.

  There was a brief suggestion that he might be Teddy Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1904 election;* but the bombast and braggadocio he displayed during a whirlwind speaking tour across America—threatening to establish “bayonet rule” in the Philippines, for example—put an end to that, and it brought a warning from the White House for him to pipe down. He was then sent off to be Greely’s deputy commander in San Francisco, in the hope that he might fade, if briefly, from public view. To his presumed delight, and to Greely’s presumed chagrin, the earthquake saw to it that he did no such thing.

  Funston and his family had quarters on Washington Street, halfway up Nob Hill. On being awoken by the shudderings he ran to the summit of the hill, then down the steep slope of California Street toward the flatter reclaimed land beyond Montgomery Street. As he went, so he saw the fires beginning—smudges of smoke, flickers of flame, some of them already starting to coalesce into larger and more dangerous blazes. He quickly surmised that the water mains had broken; he imagined that very shortly there would be overwhelming demands made on the city’s civil authorities—the police, ambulance squads, fire department. He knew that the city telephone systems were down, and that there was no immediate hope of making contact with either Greely or any other senior federal official.

  So he was the senior soldier in the area, in charge of many hundreds of well-drilled soldiers. He suspected he might have to use explosives to limit the spread of fire, and knew full well how to get his hands on them and the military engineers who could use them; and he understood that he would have to commit his troops, to ensure they were fully armed to deal with who knew what, and to commit them without further ado.

  A policeman he encountered told him of the ruin of City Hall, and cleverly predicted that it was most likely that the mayor, Eugene Schmitz (a man who also rose to the occasion, and organized matters quickly and very handily), would use the so-far-little-damaged Hall of Justice Building on Portsmouth Square as his operational headquarters. And so, almost without thinking, General Funston acted.

  He needed first to send out orders, and from an army base. He tried to flag down cars and wagons that were speeding by, but was ignored. (He was a moderately sized man, and at this moment was in mufti, without much appearance of authority. And besides, most drivers had more urgent business.) He ran back up the ten steep blocks to the army stables at the corner of Pine and Hy
de Streets, and from there wrote hasty messages to his two senior commanders—a Colonel Morris at the Presidio main base, and a Captain Walker at the smaller army detachment at Fort Mason. He gave the notes to his coachman, saw him mounted on a carriage horse, and told him to ride like fury. The messages read: “Immediately send all available troops at your disposal to the Hall of Justice, and make them at the disposal of the mayor and of the chief of police.”

  All went like clockwork. The first troops left their barracks at 7:15 A.M. and arrived half an hour later—initially Captain Walker and 155 soldiers, all in field equipment and each with twenty rounds of ball ammunition, reported to Mayor Schmitz at 7:45 A.M. They found him in a fighting mood—one born perhaps out of his initial bewilderment at what was going on. The city clerks who had turned up at the wrecked City Hall at 6:00 A.M. were astonished that their mayor wasn’t already there. They drove with difficulty to his house three miles away on Fillmore Street, then back to City Hall, then on to the Hall of Justice. From this point on the mayor was seized with determination: Clearly, those around him said, he was not going to let his early puzzlement inhibit his ability to issue commands.

  And so he did, with staccato efficiency. If Funston took immediate charge, Mayor Schmitz promptly joined him in equal stature. He first declared that soldiers should cordon off all burning areas and keep onlookers away. A strong detachment would go immediately to City Hall, bayonets fixed, to secure the Treasury, with its millions of dollars in cash and specie. He ordered that looting, instances of which he had already seen on his drive to work, was henceforward a capital offense, and that soldiers would be ordered to shoot on the spot anyone they found stealing from ruined stores and houses. Saloons would close. The sale of liquor would be prohibited. Naked candles would be banned.