Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  6:05 P.M., Columbus and Green. Looking west behind Russian Hill, I see a huge hanging pall of orange and black. I jump back on the bike. I’m going to check out that fire. Big smoke—this is kind of serious. I head out Columbus, over Bay. Bay is pretty clogged. I squeeze past the cars and turn right on Fillmore.

  6:15 P.M. I see it. It’s the first evidence, the first of a long accumulation of events and visions that gradually dig a dark tunnel under the exaltation of being alive and at large. It’s at the corner of Cervantes and Fillmore. A big three-story apartment house, one I’ve gone by a thousand times on the way to Marin or the Marina, has completely buckled. The building has been brought to its knees. It leans over at a demented angle. The first story was squished, crazed, splintered; in parts it’s only two feet high. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone could have survived in there. It doesn’t seem possible that I’m seeing this.

  (I later found out that a three-and-one-half-month-old infant and two adults, a 40-year-old woman and a man, died in there. That was one hour earlier.)

  The police turn me back after Fillmore. I circle around Chestnut, come in at Pierce. I keep riding. The flames are getting closer, casting dancing patterns on the pavement.

  A policeman named Harry Walsh, standing on Mission Street, looked east toward the docks to see dozens of frenzied long-horned cattle stampeding toward him. Some Mexican vaqueros had been driving a herd of cattle from the wharves to the stockyards in the southern part of town; when the earthquake hit, they ran off, leaving the panic-stricken animals to fend for themselves. As the maddened cattle ran along the sidewalk between Fremont and First, a warehouse collapsed, killing most of them. Walsh shot the wounded cattle to put them out of their misery, but realized he had only six bullets left and more longhorns were rushing toward him. He asked a man named John Moller, who owned a saloon on the street, for ammunition.

  “There was no time to think. Two of the steers were charging right at us while I was asking him to help, and he started to run for his saloon. I had to be quick about my part of the job because, with only a revolver as a weapon, I had to wait until the animal was quite close before I dared fire. Otherwise I would not have killed or even stopped him. As I shot down one of them I saw the other charging after John Moller, who was then at the door of his saloon and apparently quite safe. But as I was looking at him and the steer, Moller turned, and seemed to become paralyzed with fear. He held out both hands as if beseeching the beast to go back. But it charged on and ripped him before I could get near enough to fire.” Moller was fatally gored.

  6:25 P.M., Beach and Divisadero. The stench of gas is heavy; a lot of mains have ruptured. It’s a four-story apartment building that’s lighting up the sky. I’m across the street and the heat is so intense I’m sweating. Eighty or 90 firefighters are there. It’s a five-alarm fire. (Each alarm brings one truck and three engines.) Big yellow five-inch hoses, 1,000 feet long, are running down the street. They vanish around the corner, where they connect up to a fireboat pumping water out of the bay. Later a fire marshal praised that fireboat, which had been in mothballs. “She saved the Marina,” he said.

  As the west wall falls in with a crash, I think, There’s nothing anthropomorphic about nature. It fucks you, or it doesn’t fuck you. And you don’t get to say anything about it. The world is not made to man’s specifications. In the next few days the whole city dimly realizes this, feels the weird backwash of this meaningless force, and everybody is uneasy for a long time.

  I ride off. Darkness is falling. A block away from the fire, at Scott, a house has collapsed forward, leaning off-line seven or eight feet. My God, there’s damage everywhere here. People are still streaming on foot or on bike toward the flames, but now the cops are starting to turn them away. A crowd is gathered at a roadblock. A Latino man of 40 or so is shouting at a cop. “You have to let me go in there! My family is in there! Before I do something crazy!” He’s on the edge of hysteria.

  An old woman, standing in front of a house with severe cracks in it, says something angrily to her daughter in Italian. Her daughter shakes her head and says back with exasperation, “No, Mom, you can’t light candles!”

  On the way back home, for the first time I realize what it’s like to be in a big city without lights. A motor scooter almost runs me down. Intersections are unknown pools. Approaching headlights are completely blinding. I wish I had lights. I’m riding on faith.

  The neighborhood now called South of Market used to be called South of the Slot (after the “slot” of the Market Street cable car). It was the poor side of the tracks. In 1900, the population density there was second only to that of Chinatown, making it one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the United States. Thousands of poor, transient, immigrant, and working-class San Franciscans were packed into the wood-framed hotels and apartments that lined streets like Sixth, Howard, Folsom, and Harrison and alleys like Shipley, Clara, Natoma, and Tehama. Most of this area was built on what used to be a tidal marsh surrounding Mission Bay, part of the vast stretches of San Francisco that had been reclaimed from Mission Bay, Mission Creek, and the swamps, marshes, streams, and pastures that used to surround them. This “made land” was known to be unstable as soon as it was created.

  A striking thing about the 1906 disaster is the way that death and destruction stalked the city’s vanished waters. Like an unforgiving palimpsest, horror traced the places that had once been beautiful. It’s as if nature had taken revenge on the city for having profaned her.

  Sixth Street is now one of the last remaining vestiges of San Francisco’s old Skid Row, filled with crazy people, parolees, street hustlers, and assorted lost souls. In 1906 Sixth Street was less Bosch-like but still pretty rough around the edges. Four cheap boardinghouses lined it between Howard and Natoma. They stood on what had once been a marshy pond known as Pioche’s Lake. The five-story, 300-room Brunswick House stood on the corner of Sixth and Howard. Lined up next to it, going north toward Natoma Street, were three other large boardinghouses: the Ohio, the Lormor, and the Nevada. More than 1,000 people were living in these buildings, and most of them were asleep at 5:12 A.M.

  The shock waves, coming from the west, hit South of Market like an enormous sledgehammer, literally shoving the land up against Rincon Hill to the east. As the earth jerked violently to the east, the watery soil under the cheap structures liquefied. Their foundations sank unevenly into watery sludge, the intolerable pressure cracking joists and vertical beams.

  The Nevada House was the first to go. It began tilting crazily to the south, then completely collapsed onto the Lormor. The Lormor in turn fell over against the Ohio, and all three buildings collapsed like dominos against the Brunswick, which fell over on Howard Street like a drunk.

  Two doctors were staying nearby and arrived at the Brunswick House within minutes. “There was a terrible, low, heart-rending cry of utter resignation” from the people trapped in the building, one of the doctors reported. Many of the people on the top floors managed to crawl out. But hundreds in the floors below were either crushed to death or trapped beneath tons of beams and plaster. Those who survived cried for help. Rescuers began frantically digging at the rubble. But they did not have much time. For almost as soon as the Brunswick House fell, it started to burn.

  8 P.M., Jackson and Hyde. As I pass a little candlelit bistro, a voice yells out my name. Wonderful coincidence in the hot darkness: It’s my cousin Jonathan, who’s sitting and having a beer. I use the phone of his friend to call my parents. Everybody’s fine, including my sister, who lives in Santa Cruz, and my brother, who owns a home right next to the Cypress Structure. I have finally figured out what that means—a section of the freeway.

  10:45 P.M. Jon and I jump on our bikes. No lights, hardly any cars. There’s a very strange but familiar quality about this night. Heading down the eastern edge of Nob Hill, we both realize what it is: We feel like we’re in the High Sierra. The warm smell of burned wood, the darkness, the stars. The buildings loom up like mou
ntains. You can imagine these hills without buildings. The city has temporarily returned to the land.

  11 P.M., Rincon Hill. We race past the big 76 clock at the Harrison Street entrance to the Bay Bridge. Up the ramp, onto the bridge. “This is the only time in our lives we’ll ever get to do this!” my cousin shouts at me. I see flashing lights coming onto the bridge from the west. The monstrous gray structure is abandoned. We lose our nerve and go back after a few hundred yards.

  11:30 P.M., Sixth near Bluxome and Townsend. Harsh moonlight yellows the police barricade that cordons off this little street, which runs parallel to the freeway. I know Bluxome well. It’s a few hundred yards from the Yellow Cab lot where I worked for years. A building partially collapsed here, raining tons of brick and metal onto cars below. Five people died, including a man decapitated in his car. You can see the devastated roof to the east of the alley.

  The hulks of two flattened, chewed-up, burned-out cars sit in the middle of the street, well beyond the building that collapsed. We ask a cop how they got out there. He says they pulled them out there to try to recover the bodies.

  It’s a horrible sight. These lives were ended by bricks or fire for no reason. At least it must have been fast.

  This is feeling more and more insane. It’s hot, we’re riding around on flimsy silent vehicles through an empty, dark city under a lurid moon, and in a few utterly unconnected places there are these sudden endings. It’s completely random, like the V-1 bombs that fell on London during World War II.

  The 1906 earthquake ravaged San Francisco, but it was the fire—or rather the 52 separate major fires that were caused by the quake—that destroyed it. Whether or not the city could have been saved is a question still debated today. San Francisco’s firemen had been the pride of the city since the Gold Rush days, and the fire department one of the finest in the world. But the fire department was betrayed by the negligence of the city fathers and let down by two crucial decisions by unprepared leaders.

  Fire chief Sullivan had pleaded with city officials for years to modernize San Francisco’s water system and stockpile dynamite that could be used to create firebreaks. But the corrupt and incompetent administration of puppet mayor Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and the Board of Supervisors—a bunch of paid-off hacks who were so greedy that they would, in Ruef’s immortal phrase, “eat the paint off a house” (Ruef would have eaten the primer)—refused to allocate the money for the necessary improvements. Then, when the quake hit, most of the water mains broke, leaving the firefighters with empty hoses to fight the largest urban conflagration in American history. The tragic death of Fire Chief Sullivan left the department leaderless in its hour of need. Finally, Mayor Schmitz and General Frederick Funston made two fateful decisions. First, Funston called in the U.S. Army and Schmitz ordered troops to shoot looters on sight. Second, the authorities decided their only recourse was to try to stop the fire by making widespread use of explosives—even though they lacked dynamite and had no experience in using the weak explosives they did have. The two decisions were understandable, but together they probably doomed the city.

  Former fireman and firefighting expert Dennis Smith argues in San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire that the presence of often undisciplined and trigger-happy troops, combined with Schmitz’s draconian shoot-to-kill order, prevented San Franciscans from fighting the fire themselves—which they could have successfully done. (The old Mint at Fifth and Market, for example, was saved by its workers.) Again and again, residents or neighbors were needlessly driven from their houses or offices by zealous troops and police, and the buildings they had been defending were left to burn or blown up. San Francisco archivist Gladys Hansen estimates that 500 people, many of them innocent, were shot by soldiers—one-sixth the total number of casualties. Another historian of the earthquake and fire, Philip Fradkin, agrees with Smith and Hansen that Schmitz’s looting order was disastrous. He also concurs that the incompetent use of explosives created more fires than it stopped—including the fire that consumed Chinatown and the one that destroyed Russian Hill and North Beach.

  Different decisions might, perhaps, have saved much of San Francisco. But nothing could have saved the hundreds of people trapped in the wreckage of the buildings near Sixth and Howard.

  In the moments after the quake hit, a third-floor lodger in the Nevada House named William Stehr tried to decide whether to jump out the window to the roof of the Lormor House next door. As he thought it over, the Lormor House suddenly collapsed with a tremendous roar. Then he heard the Brunswick House collapse. He reached for the door and tried to open it. At that moment, Stehr said, “I felt the floor tilting and sinking under me, and I knew the house was going down like the others. So I hung on instinctively to the door handle while the whole floor dropped. As it sank, I felt three distinct bumps as the lower floor collapsed in turn under the weight of the roof and top story. With each bump came a frightful crash and cracking of timbers and glass and the cries of other people in the house who were being destroyed. The cries of the people who were being killed, especially the women, were dreadful to hear.”

  Stehr was knocked unconscious but managed to drag himself out of the wreckage when he came to. He could hear the horrible screams of people as the fire caught them, then an equally horrible silence. Rescuers hacked frantically at the rubble with axes, trying to free a little girl. As the flames became intolerably hot, other men held a wet blanket between them and the fire. They pulled the little girl to safety just as the flames raced over the spot.

  Most of those trapped were not as fortunate. Another man who managed to escape one of the collapsed boardinghouses said he overheard a conversation between two people trapped in the rubble. One person said, “I’m not hurt, but there’s a beam across my back and I can’t get out from under it.” The other replied, “I’m caught too, it’s my wrist. Don’t worry, they’ll get us out.” They did not know that flames were already beginning to eat at the timbers that trapped them. Minutes later, they were burned alive.

  A few blocks away, near Mission and Third, another man was trapped under tons of rubble, with only his head protruding. Flames from a fire that had started in a Chinese laundry two blocks away on Howard Street were rapidly approaching. “Don’t leave me here to die like this,” the man begged again and again. A large middle-age man stepped forward, leaned over, and spoke quietly to the trapped man for a minute, his hand holding the back of his head. Then he stood up, drew a revolver, took aim, and killed the man with a single shot to the head.

  More people died near Sixth and Howard than anywhere else in the city. The total number of fatalities will never be known, but it was probably at least 300, and possibly 500 or more. For decades, the official death count for the entire disaster stood at only about 450 people. This low figure served the needs of city officials and businessmen, who as soon as the flames were out began trying to convince the world that all was well, San Francisco was open for business, and there was nothing to fear. It was not until 1980, when Gladys Hansen began trying to compile a complete list of all those killed in the earthquake and fire, that the absurdly low death total was revised up 3,000—and that historians began to grasp how dreadful the carnage was South of the Slot.

  Midnight, Folsom and Sixth Streets. Sixth has been hit hard. It’s buckled up in the middle, sloping away on each side. There’s heavy damage around here. We swing down Shipley Street, a bizarre little South of Market alley whose buildings offer the most dramatic remaining evidence of the 1906 catastrophe. Shipley subsided by as much as five feet after the quake, taking the buildings on the street down with it. When the streets were raised, many of the buildings ended up half-buried. Some of them also lean noticeably to one side or the other, or backward. They’re still inhabited. They seem to have made it through this one okay.

  Wednesday, October 18, 12:30 A.M. We hear the sound of sea lions barking as we come over Leavenworth on Nob Hill. We light candles and fall asleep.<
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  While the South of Market fires raged out of control, a slower-moving blaze had started in the wholesale district, near Clay and Davis, and begun methodically moving to the west. Firemen hoped to hold the line at Sansome Street, but soon had to fall back, fighting block to block. Meanwhile, a catastrophe had erupted behind them. At 9 A.M. that morning, an unknown resident of a house at Gough and Hayes kindled a fire in his or her kitchen stove, not knowing that the flue had been damaged. Sparks ignited the wall. Because all the firemen were fighting other blazes, the fire quickly spread to the west, south, and east. The “Ham and Eggs” fire, as it was called, would eventually burn a larger area than any other fire.

  11:30 A.M. Hot again. Steamy. Impossible to get a paper. I walk 15 blocks—Polk, Van Ness, California, Broadway. A pile of bricks has fallen off a roof and smashed the back window of a car on Clay. Finally I give up and listen to the radio.

  It’s useless to work. I get on my bike and ride out with a friend to the beach and the park. In Golden Gate Park a bizarre holiday atmosphere prevails. At 25th Avenue big piles of masonry litter the street. Many buildings are damaged. It’s amazing that more people who had been walking on the streets weren’t killed.

  Baker Beach is crowded. Naked bodies. Apocalyptic tales and sentimental anecdotes fill the airwaves. I feel like I should be more disturbed. All the national media say I should be. Pious pronouncements are everywhere. A pathetic moralizer in the sports department at the New York Times says they should call off the Series. I am, however, unhappy to discover I have only $9.25 in the bank.

  Along the waterfront and in the old Barbary Coast, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Frederick Freeman led his men in an all-out fight to save the city’s streets and its vital wharves, hauling heavy hoses over the hills, blasting sea water pumped out of the bay, rushing to every hot spot without orders or authority, taking it on himself to try to save what he could. Working for three days with almost no sleep, Freeman was everywhere, his trademark cry—“Okay, men, let’s sock it to ’em!”—inspiring those he commanded to find strength when strength was gone. As Smith movingly recounts in his book, Freeman never received official credit for his actions during the fire. Later this decent man’s life took a terrible downward spiral: Suffering from depression and with a drinking problem, he was abruptly cashiered from the Navy after a ship under his command was torpedoed. He was denied medical help and a pension and died of cancer, a sad and forgotten man. But in San Francisco’s most desperate hour, he was its greatest hero.