A Crack in the Edge of the World (30 page)

No matter, all of this gaudy grandiloquence. Despite the variety and gaiety and hyperbole, San Francisco in 1906 was also in fact a big, dirty, brawling, vulgar, smoggy, sooty, and corrupt town of rather less charm than myth and latter-day boosterism would have us believe. It
was a factory town in the south, below Market and Mission Streets, “south of the Slot,”
*
as the locals charmlessly had it; manufacturing plants and foundries would belch smoke into the air, the boilers fueled by low-grade high-sulfur steam coal. Many of the ships in the Bay burned coal; the houses were heated by furnaces and stoves that burned coal. The railway station at Third and Townsend sent coal-fired steam trains south to Los Angeles in a shower of soot and fire. A yellow-gray miasma thus enveloped the whole city, especially on the warmer days of summer, or when the cold winds were not sweeping in from the ocean.

The streets were filthy, too, covered with the leavings of the thousands of horses that pulled freight and passengers around the city. There were essentially no sewage treatment plants in the city, and foul-smelling fluids poured continually into the Bay. China Basin, an especially unpleasant lagoon south of the city, was described by a ship's captain as “a cesspool, emitting foul odors, especially at low water.”

And though in the city center and up on Nob Hill and out at Land's End there were fine buildings, built to impress and to last, farther afield the structures were gimcrack and ugly—shacks and lean-tos and hastily cobbled together cuboids of brick and lath, smoky and insanitary and ill planned and likely to burn or fall down at the slightest excuse.

The houses on Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill and where the Italians gathered in North Beach were almost all made entirely of wood—the classier houses fashioned from California redwood, the humbler homes made wholly of rich and resinous soft pine. This simple fact set some of the less corrupt officials to worrying, not least the city's fire chief, Dennis Sullivan. He had been arguing for years that the city was a tinderbox waiting to be struck. He wanted a saltwater firefighting system—after all, the seven square miles of the city had been built on a narrow peninsula that was surrounded on three sides by water. And he wanted the freshwater cisterns, which a long time before had been built beneath the city streets but had been forgotten and neglected
and allowed to deteriorate, to be cleaned, renovated, and refilled with water. But he was ignored.

He must have felt vindicated when, in October 1905, the National Board of Fire Underwriters declared that San Francisco's water-supply system, despite being able to deliver 36 million gallons a day, was structurally in such poor shape that the hydrants would not be able to halt anything approaching a major fire. Chief Sullivan informed the city of the board's analysis, but was studiously and comprehensively ignored once again. Seven months later the contention would be tested, and in all its essentials would be proved fully right, and tragically so.

SEVEN MONTHS AFTER
the underwriters' report, and half a world away, a dozen Neapolitan villages were busy being devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius. The great old volcano had started to explode and exhale clouds of gas and lava and dust back on April 6, and was still doing so ten days later. The residents of Los Angeles seem to have been particularly affected by the news—more so, one gathers, were the Italians in the North Beach of the generally earthquake-insouciant, fire-unaware, devil-may-care San Francisco. Down in Southern California they had collected $10,000 to transmit by telegraph wire to the victims in Italy, and had sent it on its way on the morning of Tuesday, April 17.

On that same Tuesday there were two other oddly coincidental events. One was a meeting held in the offices of a U.S. circuit court judge, W. W. Morrow: It had been called quite specifically to consider establishing committees that would be formed in the event of a major disaster or emergency in San Francisco. The other was the delivery that very day of a formal report, completed six months before, by the great Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, on his plan for comprehensively rebuilding the city. The idea was to make it as elegant and planned a city as Washington, D.C., where Burnham had also had a hand.

It was an ambitious, extravagant scheme, to which I will return. It was a plan that called for grand monuments to be sited on the summits
of peaks, broad boulevards to be bulldozed through neighborhoods, and scores of parks, fountains, marble piazzas, and wrought-iron elaborations to be built. All this, the critics said, would take far too long to achieve and would present an image of San Francisco utterly at variance with what it truly was. For the city was not a Paris or a Washington or a Buenos Aires; it was a place that made its fortune from making things, importing things, shipping things, and having endless decadent fun with all the wealth that these most basic activities brought. The Burnham plan was too pretty for it, too chic, too frothily pompous; it dressed San Francisco up as though it were Savannah or Charleston, when what it really wanted to be was a West Coast version of New York.

On that Tuesday this grubby, corrupt, decadent young city of 400,000 people was, in other words, considering how to manage itself should it ever suffer the calamity of being grievously damaged; and it was about to consider how it might rebuild itself, the proposed style thought by some to possess an elegance appropriate to its status, and by some to be merely overwrought. And 350 miles to the south a handsome sum of money was on its way to a group of people in Italy who were suffering their way through the aftermath of a mighty volcanic eruption.

But just before dawn of the following day the events in San Francisco brought a sudden and urgent need for all three of the commodities that had been on offer: an emergency needed to be dealt with, a city needed suddenly to be rebuilt, and money was needed, in abundance—but for thousands of victims at home rather than for uncounted numbers thousands of miles away.

As it happens, the cleverest of banking telegraphers managed to see that this money was actually stopped in its tracks, and instead made its way up from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Although, as it turned out, the inhabitants of the city on the Bay were going to need a very great deal more than $10,000 worth of Los Angeles largesse.

T
HE EVENING OF TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1906, WAS A TIME
almost devoid of portents, except for a change in the weather that hinted at the long-awaited end of winter. At four o'clock or so a stiff sea breeze sprang up, driving away the clouds that had dulled a hitherto dreary day. A westering sun could at last be seen, inching its way down behind the Golden Gate, dimming the rocks at Land's End and Point Bonita, and making the Farallon Islands a misty silhouette on the Pacific horizon. This dusk had turned out to be a pretty one, a fitting finale to yet one more Californian day rolling to its contented close.

San Francisco was by now indisputably the greatest city in the American West. And even if there were a fretful few who did think about earthquakes from time to time, only a small scattering of these could ever have had their fears compounded by real experience. The last time an earthquake had hit San Francisco hard was four decades
before, and so youthful had the city's population now become that only a very small number who had lived through that earthquake of October 1868 could possibly have been around for the second.

That earlier earthquake was a bad one, right enough. It had struck early in the morning, a few minutes before eight on October 21, and killed thirty-five people. Only five of these victims were in San Francisco itself, however—the remainder died in the collapse of buildings on the far side of the Bay, in what were then small settlements like Hayward and San Leandro. And the reason for this—though it was not readily ascertained at the time—is that the rupture in the earth that caused it occurred not on the San Andreas Fault but on one of its neighbors known as the Hayward Fault, which runs exclusively up the eastern side of the Bay.

It was a warm, humid mid-October morning, the sun just up, when the minute-long shaking began. People rushed out into the streets, many of them “in a state of semi-nudity.” They remained there, terrified, while buildings crumbled, streets rose and fell in waves, horses panicked; there was a general air of turmoil and confusion. Their only experience of anything similar had been a relatively small event three years before, also in October, which ruined a handful of buildings; and though several engineers had forecast that more earthquakes might well occur and so had begun to think, at last, about making buildings strong enough to withstand them, the ordinary person—the man out in the street, as it were—found the happenings of 1868 unexpected and terrifying.

The origin of this earthquake was supposed, according to most of the newspapers of the day, to be somewhere on the far side of the Bay, at the base of a range of hills—though the only reports from this unsettled corner of California came from “cow-boys riding the range.” Over on the San Francisco side there were enough residents for plenty of eyewitness accounts. The spire of a synagogue on Vallejo Street was toppled, pills and potions were thrown into “a perfect jumble” in W. Pickering's pharmacy on Stockton Street, and the premises of Messrs. Stone and Hayden, saddlers and harness makers, had all their chimneys shattered. The windows of the Empire Restaurant on Sansome
Street were smashed while the patrons were taking their breakfast. A Chinese man named King Young was fatally crushed when the
Scientific American
magazine offices near Leidesdorff Street collapsed on top of him. Brokaw's Mills, the Donohue Foundry, and the City Gas Works were so badly damaged that they had to be demolished. And the front of City Hall looked like “a dilapidated ruin,” with the rooms of the Twelfth District Court and the Probate Court wrecked.

AS EVENING FELL
on that April Tuesday in 1906, a few may have been abroad who had memories of that last quake. But most people, as usual, were more concerned with the mundane. Everyone seemed to be grumbling that the weather had been poor for so long: It was the tail end of an unusually damp chilly winter, and for most of this April day clouds hung over the hills, replaced later by a cold Pacific fog. But at teatime the wind had sprung up, the mists were blown away, and the skies cleared. The sun briefly warmed things up, then duly set, as a waning moon rose to take its place. People spoke happily of this pleasing conjunction—the clear skies, growing warmth, the setting sun, the pretty moon—as signs of the approaching change of season. Spring was coming; and for this and for a multitude of other reasons, it looked likely to be a pleasing night for many in the city.

There was no doubt about which was the most celebrated event in store for the city's glittering classes: the opera. The Metropolitan Opera of New York was in town for a second visit, and the tenor who had opened every season in New York since 1903, and who would do so until 1917, was in San Francisco to sing the role of Don José in
Carmen
. He was Enrico Caruso, at thirty-three the most admired tenor of his time, and a man amply endowed with all the manners of the
primo
.

He was put up at the seven-story Palace Hotel on Market Street, a short walk from the Grand Opera House on Mission Street—both enormous buildings built in the 1870s. The 800-room hotel, the largest in the country at the time, advertised four “rising rooms,” or hydraulic elevators, which at the time were distinctly newfangled. It was also widely regarded as fireproof, with 700,000-gallon iron water
tanks built under the roof. All the visiting grandees stayed there
*
: Caruso was apparently delighted upon being shown to a room once used by President Grant, and it was reported with great deference that he found the marble fireplace, the gold brocade upholstery, the furniture carved from local laurel, and the floors made of pine and redwood entirely to his florid Neapolitan taste.

Yet he was not in the best of moods. He had come out from New York by train, and had found the weeklong journey irksome. Naples, his hometown, was being hammered by the eruption of Vesuvius, and he was fretful about his family's safety. And even though it was said he vowed never to sing in Naples again after the poor review he was once given for
L'Elisir d'Amore
, he displayed a very public sympathy for the city's plight, and had briefly toyed with the notion of scrubbing his West Coast tour and going to see if he could help.

He had been in town a few days now, and was said to be none too impressed with the San Franciscans. The audiences seemed to him largely composed of oafs, crowds very different from the sophisticates back on the East Coast—and the poor reviews of the company's previous night's performance of
The Queen of Sheba
confirmed his suspicion that he was in the midst of a largely artless rabble, no more than provincial arrivistes, well able to pay $10 for a ticket but hardly worldly enough to appreciate what they had come to hear.

And, if all that were not enough to irritate this chubby, generous, driven little man—the third of five children, and not the eighteenth of twenty-one, as legend has it—he had a terrible time at rehearsals with the 200-pound Swedish-American mezzo-soprano Olive Fremstad, who was Carmen to his Don José. She had not sung well—a stagehand had dropped a vase, and the breakage made her lose a note—and Caruso worried that the night would go badly as a consequence.

But there was no need for anxiety. In terms of sheer spectacle, the night was a tour de force. Journalist Marcelle Assan published an account of it in Paris two years later:

The spectacle of the room was wonderful. One would have to recall a similar evening at the Paris opera during the Empire to equal such beauty and majesty: everywhere were diamonds, white shoulders, magnificent eyes, sylph-waisted women wrapped in lace worthy of a Queen, with lustrous Oriental pearls wrapped around lovely
throats. It was all breathtakingly beautiful. In front of the audience Caruso, the Italian tenor, inspired by the glinting eyes of his rich American admirers, sang as he never had before, his acting imbued with Italian ardor, and elevated the enthusiasm of his public to the point of delirium. People applauded wildly, threw flowers …