by Gary Kamiya
8 P.M., Jackson and Jones. The entrance to my apartment building is terrifyingly dark. I’d been so hedonistic at the beach I’d forgotten to buy candles. This is like a play emergency. I roast a chicken with garlic and lemon and cook couscous. My beer is miraculously cold. What a quake. Send money.
11 P.M. Stir-crazy. I ride through silent North Beach; it’s still blacked out. A few people are drinking in Gypsy’s. I head out the Embarcadero, using the headlights of passing cars to see if the road is safe. I circle the base of Telegraph Hill, pass Pier 39, and go through Aquatic Park and out to the end of Municipal Pier. The foreground is black, but downtown—including the Transamerica Pyramid, which sits in the exact center of a gentle bowl—glitters. It looks like a great ship just coming over the horizon.
Midnight. I head down Divisadero near Hayes. The whole north side of town is dark and dead. I want some warm place with lights and human beings. Two ragged kids in black leather are going into the Kennel Club. It seems too young and vicious in there. I head over to Haight, a bit warily. A friend lives on Baker and Fulton; she said that when one of her neighbors went out to the car to listen to the radio, a guy appeared, stuck a gun in his face, and said, “Give me the car, motherfucker.”
I go into Nickie’s BBQ. It’s packed. Great calypso music is throbbing. I don’t feel like dancing. Being in here is like watching your last candle going out in a cave. The darkness is pressing in from the outside.
By Thursday, San Franciscans had begun to realize that the entire city might burn. Tens of thousands of people flooded into parks, squares, any open spaces where they would be safe from the flames.
As most of the city fled, one sound was heard everywhere, a monotonous noise so omnipresent it almost drove some people mad: the scraping sound of trunks being dragged along the ground.
Firemen made a desperate stand on Powell Street, hoping that Union Square would provide a firebreak. But they had to give up when the flames jumped the street and ignited the roof of a building on Bush Street. Nob Hill was now doomed. Within hours, the ornate mansions that had once thumbed their noses at the city below burned to the ground. The last chance to stop the fire would be Van Ness, two blocks away.
More photographs were taken of the San Francisco disaster than any event in history to that time. The most famous photographer in San Francisco was Arnold Genthe, a poet with a camera whose photographs of old Chinatown are as eloquent as Eugène Atget’s photographs of fin de siècle Paris. Genthe’s studio and apartment was on 790 Sutter Street, and all his small cameras were damaged by falling plaster. So he walked down to a camera shop on Montgomery and asked the owner if he could borrow a camera. “Take anything you want. This place is going to burn up anyway,” the owner told him. Genthe took a 3A Kodak, stuffed his pockets with film, and wandered through town taking photographs. At some point he stopped on Sacramento Street just east of Taylor, near the summit of Nob Hill, and shot a picture looking downhill at the flames consuming downtown.
The resulting photo was voted one of the 10 best news photographs of all time. What makes it so striking is the strange contrast between the inconceivable destruction—the vast billowing clouds of smoke that cover downtown, the apartment building whose front wall has fallen off, the heaps of rubble in the street—and the group of people sitting casually on chairs in the foreground, looking for all the world like they are watching a movie of a disaster instead of the thing itself.
Friday, October 20, 11 A.M. The weather has changed: It’s gusty, moist. Rain is coming. I bike to the top of the steepest street in town, Filbert at Hyde. I ask an old man there if he suffered any damage. Not a thing, he replies, except a big brass amphora that went spinning around. Two minutes later, at the bottom of the hill across Gough, I see houses severely damaged on Francisco Street.
11:10 A.M., Marina Middle School. This is a disaster-relief point. The schoolyard is a hive, with long lines of mostly patient, almost all well-to-do Marina residents. (Joe DiMaggio stood in line here, I later learned.) City officials are sitting at little school desks. It’s bureaucratic chaos. “Three days!” shouts out a man. “You haven’t cleared me to go in, and my house isn’t even damaged!” Inside the school, dozens of clean-cut young people are volunteering for the Red Cross. I talk to an old, laughing man leaning on a handcart. “I lost my wife!” he says. “I hope I don’t find her!” He’s going to get some things out of his sister-in-law’s house in the cordoned-off area.
Inscribed on the walls of the school are a number of immortal names—Pericles, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Aristotle, and Archimedes. It was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.”
As firemen began blowing up the buildings on Van Ness, the fires to the southwest raged out of control. The Ham and Eggs fire had joined the South of Market fires and raced deep into the Mission, killing the people trapped in the Valencia Hotel who had not already been crushed or drowned. The flames consumed almost everything between South Van Ness (then called Howard) and Dolores as far south as 20th Street, and were threatening to climb over the hill and burn the entire district.
Then, miraculously, a hydrant at 20th and Church, at the panoramic top of Dolores Park, was found to be working.
A small group of exhausted firemen began pulling their heavy engine up Dolores Street. Yelling like soldiers charging into battle, 300 refugees who were camped in the park ran to join them. Inch by inch, blocking the wheels after each pull, the crowd and the firemen dragged the engine up to the hydrant. It took more than an hour. When the firemen connected their hose to the Greenberg hydrant and a great jet of water shot out, the crowd cheered again. Finally armed, the firemen dragged the hose down the hill to the flames on Guerrero and Lexington and faced down the raging inferno along 20th Street. Three thousand San Franciscans joined them. Shoulder to shoulder, San Francisco’s finest—firemen, policemen, and citizens—battled the flames. It took seven brutal hours, but they held the line. The fire would not cross 20th Street.
The so-called golden hydrant is still there. It is painted gold every April 18.
11:30 A.M., Pierce and Chestnut. The cops won’t let me in, but I luckily run into a friend who lives there. In one collapsed building you can look right through a smashed wall at a big white chair and an ottoman facing a TV. The sight is somehow obscene.
People are packing their belongings. Ahead of us, two old women walk with dignity in their best clothes. The older one, who is at least 80, is carrying a tightly furled umbrella.
We go into my friend’s trashed apartment. “Let’s drink everything,” she says. We sit there and toss down the last of her cognac, then take care of her Bushmills miniature, then her E&J brandy, then her rum.
Saturday, October 21. I hear they pulled someone alive from the Cypress Structure.
The fire that burned Nob Hill roared to the west, but a mighty stand along the Van Ness corridor stopped it. That should have been the end. But in a bitter final twist, just when the fire had been contained, the unnecessary demolition of a building filled with inflammable chemicals at Vallejo and Van Ness started a new blaze. This fire, blown by westerly winds, climbed Russian Hill—where a few houses on the summit were saved by determined owners and neighbors—and burned North Beach to the ground. Only a few houses atop Telegraph Hill, soaked with wine, survived. In a life-and-death evacuation on the northern waterfront, as many as 30,000 refugees were saved from the advancing flames by a motley flotilla of boats, including junks, lanteen-rigged Ligurian fishing boats, tugs, pleasure craft, naval ships, and anything else that would float. It was San Francisco’s Dunkirk.
Then it was all over, and there was nothing for San Franciscans to do except look around at what someone called “the damndest fine ruins” and start rebuilding.
The 1906 earthquake and fire was the greatest disaster ever to befall an American city. The Galveston hurricane of 1900, which is estimated to have killed at least 6,000 people, is its only possible rival, but Galveston’s p
opulation was 37,000; San Francisco’s was 400,000. Outside of war, the blaze that destroyed the heart of San Francisco was the largest metropolitan fire in history. During the four days that the inferno lasted, more than 3,000 people were killed, 28,188 buildings were burned, 522 blocks leveled, and 200,000 people were left homeless. San Francisco’s entire downtown (except for one small area), its three most historic neighborhoods (Nob, Russian, and Telegraph Hills, except for a few blocks on the summits of the latter two), the Civic Center, much of Hayes Valley, a big swath of the Mission, and the entire South of Market area down to Townsend Street—all were utterly destroyed. The 4.7-square-mile, 3,000-acre burned area was six times larger than that consumed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, and twice as large as that lost in the Chicago fire of 1871. Its perimeter was 9.3 miles long. If you lay a map of the burned area over a map of Manhattan, it would run from Houston Street all the way to 65th Street and cover at least half of the east-west area between them.
The ruins looked like the bombed-out wastelands of Dresden, Tokyo, or Hamburg in World War II. It was the closest thing to an urban apocalypse this country has ever seen.
Midnight, October 19, Clay and Jones. The end of another day spent chasing the quake, across a once-familiar place that has become big and unknown. I look down the steep hill into Chinatown. The bridge is stretched across the darkness. The lights on its suspension cables abruptly end at the point where it has collapsed.
Thousands of buildings rest on the unquiet earth. The lights in downtown have come back on, but Nob Hill is cloaked in a strange intimate darkness. For a moment it is absolutely still.
Atop that silent hill, it seems fitting that the titanic forces that created this fragile sand castle at the edge of the sea should be the same ones that destroyed it once before, and have just tried to destroy it again. We are drawn to this place because of its beauty. But that beauty is the tip of a deadly iceberg. At the beginning of the Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote, “For beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.” The line could be posted on top of every hill in town.
San Francisco offers a rare gift: a chance to live face-to-face with the inhuman universe. That gift comes at a price. But it is one that those of us who live here are willing to pay. To dance on the brink of the world …
I push off into the night. The hill takes me, the wind whistles past. As I fly down, I want to say some words in homage to my city. And to the earth—restless, carrying its weight of unknowable power—that lies beneath it.
Chapter 36
City Beautiful
Grant Avenue and Post Street
Christmas shopping. That’s the first and only thought that came into my mind when I walked down to Grant and Post a few days ago. For years, I stood here at retail shopping ground zero, another consumer in the madding crowd. Fancy stores, money changing hands, full shopping bags, “Angels We Have Heard on High” wafting from somewhere, well-dressed people walking fast, foggy afternoons in late December. I don’t have any associations with this corner beyond those. But I do have an impression. Every time I’ve been on this corner, I’ve always had a subliminal feeling of urban elegance. I never knew why I had that feeling. Now I do. And that knowledge has permanently altered the way I see not just this intersection but San Francisco’s entire downtown.
Downtowns are usually invisible. You’re too busy shopping, running errands, trying to get to the bus, or just lost in your own thoughts to notice the buildings you’re scurrying past. There are exceptions, like Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, whose mind-blowing verticality makes it impossible, at least for a visitor, to ignore. But most people never look up.
It isn’t just distractions that make San Francisco’s downtown—by which I mean the retail shopping area around Union Square—easy to miss. Downtown suffers for the sins of the Financial District and lower Market Street, which were blighted by the mindless construction of soulless high-rise buildings that started in the late 1950s and peaked in the late 1970s. This “Manhattanization” transformed San Francisco’s low skyline, which had allowed the myriad gentle curves and dramatic slopes of its hills to be seen, into one indistinguishable from Houston’s. For a mess of pottage, they killed something unique. The Union Square area was not invaded by these overgrown Legos, but urban ecology is delicate, and the towering mediocrities to the east and south of downtown cast a long shadow, literal and figurative.
Very few people who walk down Grant Avenue realize that they are walking down a street that a leading California architectural journal once called the greatest architectural street in the world. That claim is exaggerated, but it’s not completely baseless. Once I started paying attention, I realized that this street and those around it are indeed distinguished, a harmonious ensemble of elegant buildings. That harmony was responsible for my subliminal impression of elegance.
Urban architecture turns out to be the last cheap thrill. All you need is a little curiosity, and a few books, and you get a free lifetime pass to an entirely new city.
There is nothing spectacular about most of the buildings around here. In fact, only architectural historians even recognize them as possessing an identifiable style. Mention San Francisco architecture, and most people simply think of wooden Victorian houses with ornate facades and bay windows. But downtown San Francisco is a treasure—a largely intact time capsule from the greatest era of city building in American history, the early 20th century.
San Francisco’s downtown is so cohesive because it was built at basically the same time. Almost the entire downtown came into existence between 1906 and 1931, with the majority of it going up between 1906 and 1912. Paradoxically, what was responsible for this development was the greatest calamity ever to befall an American city, the earthquake and fire of 1906. It is almost axiomatic that the Great Quake destroyed a beautiful, romantic city and gave birth to an inferior modern one. But as architectural historian Michael Corbett argues in his fascinating 1979 book Splendid Survivors: San Francisco’s Downtown Architectural Heritage (which meticulously ranks every architecturally significant building in downtown San Francisco as part of a campaign to halt Manhattanization), the disaster could be seen as a “fortunate catastrophe.” By sweeping away a cluttered and ungainly Victorian downtown, the fire literally cleared the ground for a human-scaled new district whose dignified buildings possess a rare unity of design.
The architects who rebuilt San Francisco were inspired not just by a design aesthetic but also by an entire vision of what a city could be. The City Beautiful movement made its triumphal debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Architect Daniel Burnham and a distinguished team designed an entire city-within-a-city for the fair, whose chest-beating rationale was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Burnham’s White City, as it was called with unintentional irony, was a monument to grand, rational planning, featuring wide, symmetrical boulevards and imposing white Beaux-Arts buildings of uniform cornice height. The Beaux-Arts style took its name from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which many of America’s (and San Francisco’s) leading architects attended. Inspired by the buildings of imperial Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and the French and Italian baroque, Beaux-Arts architecture aspired to capture the classical virtues of order and harmony in a grand but flexible style.
The City Beautiful movement, as reflected in Burnham’s White City and its Beaux-Arts buildings, had an enormous impact on American city planning and architecture. Spurred by the increasing squalor and poverty of America’s inner cities depicted in works like Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1889), City Beautiful proponents embraced reformist goals, some of which now appear laughable. They believed a city rebuilt according to their plans would not only achieve the obvious good of removing slums and tenements, it would also inspire and uplift the urban poor with its vision of a shared civic life.
The City Beautiful movement was a creature of its time—idealistic, in hindsig
ht naïve in its belief in the ameliorative power of beauty, but well-meaning. And its effects on American cities, from Detroit to Washington to Chicago to San Francisco, were overwhelmingly positive.
At the turn of the century, many prominent San Franciscans were profoundly dissatisfied with their city. Allan Pollock, manager of the St. Francis Hotel, warned his fellow citizens that upstart Los Angeles was making itself more enticing to visitors than San Francisco, which had “little really attractive” to offer tourists or residents. Pollock was particularly harsh on his city’s architecture, denouncing its wooden buildings as “hideous in design and flimsy in finish—architectural shams of lumber and paint.” At Pollock’s urging, a group of notables formed the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, electing former mayor James Phelan president. Phelan was equally concerned about the city’s future. He said it was time for San Francisco to become “a great and wonderful city, or wander aimlessly to an uncertain end.”
Phelan was so impressed with Burnham’s White City that he invited the architect and planner to draw up a plan to remake the entire city. Burnham accepted and arrived in San Francisco in fall 1904. His custom, when working on city plans, was to find a high point from which to look down upon his urban canvas, and he asked Phelan to provide him with a house on 910-foot-high Twin Peaks, whose view of downtown is jaw-dropping. Phelan agreed, and Burnham’s former student, Willis Polk, built Burnham a cabin on a spur of the hill in Diamond Heights.
