The Great Quake: 1906-2006

Days before the disaster

Samuel Dickson was 17 years old, almost a man, that April night in San Francisco 100 years ago. He and a friend had gotten standing-room tickets for the opera and heard the great Caruso sing.The night was clear and beautiful, so after the opera they went to the top of Telegraph Hill to look at the city -- the lights of the Barbary Coast, the steeple of Old St. Mary's Church on California Street, the rounded domes of Temple Emanu-El on Sutter, the alleys of Chinatown and the distant gilded dome of City Hall."It's the most beautiful city in the world,'' his friend said.Dickson remembered that remark all of his long life, because the next morning, April 18, 1906, would begin three surreal days of terror, flight and chaos. A killer earthquake would strike. Untold numbers of people would die. Uncontrollable fires would rage at temperatures of 2,000 degrees. At least 250,000 people would be left homeless. And everything that Dickson saw before him, the great city of San Francisco, would be destroyed."San Francisco is gone,'' Jack London wrote later. "Nothing remains of it but memories."San Francisco in 1906 was the largest city and most important port on the Pacific Coast, the financial center of the West, the ninth-largest city in the United States. The Palace was the biggest hotel in the West. City Hall was the largest public building west of Chicago. The Emporium on Market Street was the biggest department store in the West. San Francisco had the most populous Chinatown outside of Asia, the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission streets was the largest in the world, and in its vaults was $222 million in gold, one-third of the country's gold supplies.San Francisco had been a U.S. city for not quite 60 years, but by the turn of the 20th century, it was world famous.It had been born in the fantastic Gold Rush of 1849, an instant city that claimed it had never been a village. In the 1870s, San Francisco was flush with money from the fabled silver mines of Nevada, and the silver kings and railroad barons built huge, 50-room mansions on Nob Hill. They looked like Victorian wedding cakes, painted white with gilt trim and surrounded by spiked fences of brass and iron.To climb the hills, a San Franciscan created the cable car, an invention that swept the nation. Cable cars ran down Broadway in New York and State Street in Chicago, and investors in cable car systems got rich.Rich San Franciscans drank pisco punches, and poor ones drank steam beer. San Francisco was on the cutting edge of drinking, and bartenders claimed they had invented a gin and vermouth concoction they called the Martinez cocktail, a drink now known as the martini.By 1906, San Francisco was booming. It had about 410,000 residents. The city had grown by 68,000 new residents and added 35,000 new houses in five years. The 8-year-old Ferry Building was becoming one of the busiest terminals in the world. The annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War in 1898 had expanded U.S. power into the Pacific, and San Francisco, with its magnificent port, was in position to take advantage.It was an industrial city and a port city, a dirty city and a beautiful city.The handsome, 10-year-old Call Building, a 16-story skyscraper at Third and Market streets, had 272 offices and a restaurant on the top floors. The grand Palace Hotel was supplemented by the 1904 opening of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. The Fairmont, atop Nob Hill, was so new it hadn't opened yet.Jack London thought that San Francisco was "a modern imperial metropolis," and the Brooklyn Eagle said San Francisco was "the most cosmopolitan city outside New York."But San Francisco had its eye on another city: "It was Paris of America and the wickedest city on the continent,'' wrote Herbert Asbury in his book "The Barbary Coast."It was a great theater and opera town, where even Chinese opera was available at the Royal Chinese Theater. The Grand Opera House on Mission Street could seat 2,500 patrons, and the Orpheum on O'Farrell had 3,500 seats, bigger than today's Geary and Curran theaters combined.The Orpheum was the flagship of the 18-theater Orpheum circuit, and the San Francisco stage glittered with big names like Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore and dozens of others, including George Walker and Bert Williams, two African American comedians who got their start in San Francisco.Williams was the first black superstar. In his prime, he was paid more than the president of the United States but was subjected to the racism that was the mark of the time. He was "the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever met,'' W.C. Fields said.In 1906, San Francisco had five daily newspapers and half a dozen others in foreign languages, 42 banks and 120 places of worship, but also 3,117 places where liquor was sold.San Francisco had a reputation for fine dining, particularly at the famous Palace Grill. "It has no peer,'' The Chronicle said. There were many other fine restaurants, where the elite sampled the cuisine of the world. Some of them, Tadich Grill, Sam's, Schroeder's and Fior d'Italia, said to be the country's oldest Italian restaurant, survive to this day.The working stiffs, sailors and longshoremen patronized saloons on East Street -- now called the Embarcadero. Some served "cannibal sandwiches,'' raw hamburger on pumpernickel with a slice of onion.San Francisco also had the so-called French Restaurants, multiple-story affairs, with legitimate family restaurants on the ground floor, and shady doings on the upper floors. No respectable woman, it was said, ever went above the first floor.The city was wide open with prostitution, drugs (opium was the drug of choice in 1906) and dance halls that never closed. Some things were too much, even for San Francisco. Crusaders, led by the Rev. Terrance Caraher -- "Terrible Terry" they called him -- had closed down the Hotel Nymphia on Pacific Street, an establishment with 300 prostitutes that had billed itself as the largest bordello in the world.Morton Street, near Union Square, was another street of open prostitution where ladies of the evening, with names like "Idoform Kate" and "Rotary Rosie," held forth. The top performers charged $1, but sex was on sale for as little as 25 cents. Morton Street is now called Maiden Lane.Vice was a big business, and so was civic corruption. Eugene Schmitz, a handsome man with a salt-and-pepper beard, was mayor, but the real power was in the hands of Abe Ruef, a dapper lawyer who controlled the mayor and the 18-member Board of Supervisors. It was a group so crooked that Ruef joked they would eat the paint off a house.Ruef, head of the Union Labor Party, collected "lawyer's fees" from public utility companies, the shady French Restaurants and houses of prostitution. One bordello was so well connected with the city politicians that it was known as the Municipal Brothel.Just north of downtown was Chinatown, a crowded ghetto where the Chinese were forced to live. Prejudice against them was not only widespread, it was also city policy. One of the planks of the Union Labor Party, which controlled San Francisco's government, was the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese from immigration to the United States.The city had gone through a violent teamsters strike in 1901, and the divisions among San Francisco's white population -- the city was 95 percent white in 1906 -- were clear. The rich lived on Nob Hill and the better neighborhoods north of Market Street.Cable car lines ran down the middle of Market Street, which was the civic dividing line. South of Market -- or "South of the Slot," meaning the slots between the cable car rails -- was a working-class district, overcrowded and dirty, where residents spoke with a distinct accent, a cross between Boston and Brooklyn, and uniquely San Franciscan.The South of Market district had hundreds of small factories and foundries, and the air was thick from belching smokestacks. At the Union Iron Works, out on Third Street, the shipyard turned out freighters, ferryboats, submarines and even battleships.It was said that 1 in 3 San Franciscans earned a living from the maritime industry.Yet the city had its dark side. The age of sail is presented now as a romantic period, but a century ago, a sailor's work was hard, his wages were low, and men were still shanghaied in San Francisco.Steve Canright, a historian at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, thought it was like slavery. "They were wage slaves,'' he said.There was a certain uneasiness in the air early in the century. Outside of downtown, San Francisco was a wooden city, with houses crowded close together. The National Board of Fire Underwriters had warned of major fires as recently as 1905. "In fact,'' the report said, "San Francisco has violated all underwriting traditions by not burning up.''Dennis Sullivan, the fire chief, repeatedly asked the Board of Supervisors for money to build a high-pressure water system to fight fire with water from the bay. "This town is in an earthquake belt,'' he said in a speech. "One of these fine mornings, we will get a shake that will put this little water system out, and then we'll have a fire. What will we do then? Why, we'll have to fight her with dynamite.''The Bay Area had earthquakes all the time, and big ones in 1836, 1868 and 1892. In 1905, the Weather Bureau recorded 16 small earthquakes. The science of seismology was in its infancy, and portions of what was then known as the San Andreas rift had been identified as recently as 1893.In December 1905, the Rev. F.P. Driscoll was preaching a sermon on the second coming of Christ at St. Dominic's Church and had just come to his peroration: "He will not come unannounced. ... There will be signs great and fearful!'' At that moment, an earthquake rocked the church. Strong men fell to their knees, children ran out of church, and women swooned. The next day's Call newspaper thought it pretty funny.It was a long and rainy spring, 100 years ago. In April 1906, right after Easter, the weather turned warm and pleasant. Tuesday, April 17, was warm and very still, not a breath of wind, a fine evening for a night at the opera. The Metropolitan Opera from New York was in town, and the star was Enrico Caruso, one of the most famous tenors of all time. He sang Don Jose in Bizet's "Carmen" at the Grand Opera House opposite Olive Fremstad. All of society was there, the women glistering with diamonds and rubies, the men in white tie and tails. It was grand opera at its finest, a fitting end to a perfect night.Wednesday morning, just before dawn, just as it was getting light, just as the last streetlights were going dim, the San Andreas Fault slipped. The epicenter was just off the coast from Golden Gate Park. It was the beginning of the worst natural disaster in American history up to that time, and the end of the old San Francisco.Monday: the Great Quake.Page A - 1URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/09/BAGQ09QUAKE.DTL