A Crack in the Edge of the World (36 page)

IN THOSE FIRST
few bewildering, sleep-fuddled, terrifying moments, scores upon scores of buildings, some grand and famed, most ordinary and unsung, crashed to the ground. Buildings that had long supplied familiarity and comfort and scale to the urban environment cracked, listed, and then fell in heaps of dust and shattered brick. Countless structures—churches, hotels, stores, government offices, libraries, statues, brothels, theatres, mansions, jails, Masonic temples, art galleries, restaurants—which, even if unvisited by most, had been passed by thousands and so became landmarks, simply vanished into jagged piles of crushed masonry and contorted iron. And, as they passed, this most remarkable of cities seemed instantly to shrink and to shrivel. When the morning light flooded the town, one witness was moved to remark that all of a sudden it seemed “no distance, between points formerly too far to walk. Squares thought commodious … dwindled to insignificant enclosures.”

Streets were choked with clouds of impenetrable dust from the falling brickwork, and for a few minutes after the initial shock no one could be certain of anything. As the shaking continued, people generally stayed put—those who tried to move would be shoved back and forth across their rooms, unable to withstand the enormous forces from below. But the moment that there seemed a lull, or perhaps the blessed peace at the end of the shock sequence, they poured out into the streets, stunned into what all who remember that moment insist was an eerie silence. When people did talk to one another, it is said they did so in whispers.

The miasma of brick dust tended at first to muffle the screams of the trapped and injured; and buildings, weakened and tottering, continued to fall, crushing people, horses, cattle, and any other living creatures that happened to be in the open, no matter that the quake itself, in a proper sense, was now over. Later on people expressed their relief that the quake had happened when so many people were still indoors; had it occurred at noon, when crowds thronged the streets, they would have been hit by the falling brickwork, making the casualty figures unbearable. But at the time there were no thoughts of relief—instead the whole world seemed to consist only of the stunned silence of the mob, the dust-laden darkness, the half-heard cries of pain, the crashing of masonry as cornices and chimneys and walls kept on falling, falling, falling.

Police Officer Edmond Parquette,
*
as we have seen, had experienced the first shocks at the Central Emergency Hospital in the basement of City Hall. Now it was busily collapsing all around him: And twenty years later, the image still vivid, he wrote in a publication called the
Argonaut
about the destruction that was evident in those immediate postquake moments. The hospital patients, particularly those in the locked insane wards, were not nearly so quiet as the mobs out on the streets:

Even when the quaking and twisting ceased, the lumps of masonry still kept falling; and above all these noises of crashing and breaking, and the bellowing and thundering of the quake itself and the thuds of the pillars and the cornices as they hit the ground, there were the shrieks and yells of the lunatics, and the moans and cries of the other patients. Everybody seemed to be yelling and shrieking at the top of his voice.

Very quickly after the shocks ceased, the dust began to clear away or settle down, and stopped choking me. The cries died down too, though many of the poor creatures kept on shrieking from terror or moaning from hurts and apprehensions. As soon as these cries and howls had quieted down a little, and I could see a bit through the gloom—the dawn light was able to filter the chinks in the fallen masonry, and so through some of the upper parts of the windows—I made my way as best I could to the room of the matron, Mrs. Rose, whom I found safe and unhurt.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which later sent its best sleuths into the area to take a dispassionate look at the disaster, succumbed, just as the Board of Supervisors had, to uncharacteristic hyperbole. “The whole civilized world stood aghast,” their team of scientists wrote, “at the appalling destruction.” But they quickly pulled themselves together, and in short order produced a sensible analysis of how the various buildings had fared. Such was the violence of the shock, the report's authors wrote, that

only structures of first-class design and materials and
honest workmanship
*
could survive. Flimsy and loosely built structures collapsed like houses of cards under the terrific wrenching and shaking, and many of the structures which withstood the earthquake were subjected to a second test in a fire which surpassed all the great conflagrations of recent years. Some of these structures that successfully withstood the first test failed signally under the second, by reason of inadequate fireproofing. A very few withstood both tests successfully.

In this regard concrete proved to be king. There were precious few buildings in San Francisco built of this newfangled material, in part precisely because it
was
so newfangled. (The local Bricklayers' Union took a dim view of it, imagining it part of a plot to take work away from its members.) The first high-rise concrete building had been constructed in Cincinnati only three years earlier, and, though the century would later be dominated by the demand for reinforced and prestressed concrete, in 1906 it was all very new, and even if employed in the East, little known in the West. Nonetheless, those buildings that were made of concrete tended to survive well. If there were tie bars and metallic reinforcements in a structure, then it survived also. If the building was on firm ground and its foundations were solidly anchored, then—even though the shaking inside might have been terrifying, with most of the belongings inside the house broken—the structure as a whole quite probably survived, too.

But otherwise San Francisco was a devil's playground. Its countless unreinforced brick buildings, its scores of city blocks crammed solid with gimcrack wooden buildings (which, as a local insurance company put it, had been “hastily built, to sell”), its thousands of structures that had been hurriedly hauled up on landfill (which had been carted into the dozens of streams, rills, and nullahs flowing down from the hardrock hills of the town, in order to increase the acreage on which developers might build)—all leveled on every side, within microseconds of the shock wave hitting.

Chimneys were the most frequent villain. Most buildings had one—open fires and furnaces and boilers were invariably fueled by wood, or soft and sooty coal—and they were a menace. Tall, unsupported, weathered, ugly, and fragile, these great hollow columns of brick shook, wobbled, and fell in the thousands. The enormous chimney, for example, that loomed above the cable-car powerhouse at the corner of Washington and Mason Streets, where just a few moments before an unseen man had turned a crank and set the cables running, broke and crashed through the building's roof, wrecking it. Time and again this happened—so often that fully 95 percent of all San Francisco's chimneys collapsed, the War Department later said in its own review of the event. The experience of the newly appointed diocesan of Grace Church,
*
Bishop William Nichols, at 2515 Webster Street, was typical:

I arose and made a hasty inspection … the house had stood solidly, though as developed later one chimney had tossed out so that the top went through our roof, and the center through the Beaver's roof next door; the two other chimney tops were moved from the base, and several courses of bricks were thrown out of the front gable, caroming on the stone parapet outside Clare's room and going through the open window into her room, fortunately all choosing that open entrance rather than the two closed windows beside it.…

A look out of the windows brought evidence of the disasters abroad, in streets littered with fallen bricks, tall chimney stacks toppled over, the streets ominously astir with refugees from houses, and a general sort of anxiety in the air. And when I went to take my bath and no water ran, another phase of what had happened dawned on me.

His Eminence got off fairly lightly. Falling chimneys killed innumerable sleeping men and women that morning, most infamously (and, in a practical sense, most inconveniently) the city's fire chief, Dennis Sullivan. It will be remembered that he had presided over the fighting of two smallish fires in the wee hours of the morning, and at about 3:00
A.M.
had gone back to his wife, Margaret, and his bed in his small third-floor apartment on Bush Street between Grant and Kearny Streets, which housed on the first two floors the city's Chemical Company No. 3.

When the shock wave hit, the fifty-four-year-old Sullivan was out of bed in a flash, and he ran to his wife's room, presumably to help her to safety. But then the enormous mass of towering chimneys that dominated the turreted roof of the California Hotel next door toppled and hurtled down sixty feet on top of the little fire station—covering the Sullivans with bricks and smashing them and everything else down through to the ground floor. Margaret Sullivan survived, little injured; but the fire chief, his skull fractured, his lungs punctured by broken ribs, and, worst of all, his entire body scalded by steam from a broken radiator on which he landed, was fatally hurt, and died four days later in the Southern Pacific Railroad Hospital. A memorial plaque still stands on Bush Street; and, at a ceremony held at dawn every April 18, the Fire Department dips its ladders respectfully to the memory of this thoroughly agreeable man. “Dead on the Field of Honor” says the plaque, subscribed by grateful Californians. “Her Hero and Her Son.”

In the rough-and-ready residential quarters south of the Market Street Slot, the flimsy clapboard row houses slumped and lurched drunkenly as if they were toys tossed carelessly around by a child in a tantrum. Outwardly, many seemed little harmed—just dramatically moved, or tilted to one side, hopelessly out of plumb, or shifted wholesale from one side of a street to the other. But in fact inside they were wrecked, their floors torn and broken, their backs fractured, their residents trapped under beams and spars. And besides, it would not be long before the fire would get them, and turn recognizable ruin into charred and blackened wreckage.

North of Market Street, where the city's commercial buildings were concentrated, brickwork by the thousands of tons was hurled into the street, as building after unreinforced building was broken and brought crashing down.
*
City Hall, the grandest structure in the city, dominated the ruin, the sides of its tower torn away, its cupola precariously balanced on top of a spiderweb of bent iron, its elaborate arrays of columns, lintels, cornices and caryatids cracked and smashed and flung into the street. The Geological Survey report on its state was almost contemptuous, noting a basis of construction somewhat less noble than that of the Sistine Chapel. The grandest-looking of San Francisco's monuments was revealed in fact to be no more than “a brick building … consisting of steel floor beams and corrugated-iron arches with cinder-concrete filling” that was (
deservedly
, one can hear the report's authors implying) first wrecked, then gutted:

A prominent feature was a central tower, surmounted by a dome built over a structural steel skeleton. Grouped around the dome were a number of cast-iron columns of half-inch metal filled with brick concrete supported on brackets. Some of these columns in falling broke into small pieces. The brickwork was completely shaken from the central tower. The cement-plastered brick walls were laid in lime mortar of generally poor quality and without adequate tie to the steel work. In some places there was an absence of any mortar, but in others it was very good, the brick walls falling in large masses and the broken bricks showing the mortar to have been the stronger. The massive architectural ornaments were top-heavy and lacked adequate bracing. The ceiling was formed of corrugated metal against which the mortar plaster was pressed, with intermediate brick partitions where the span of the beams was too great. The expansion … caused … the arches to fail. The building was a monument of bad design and poor materials and workmanship.

The rest of the report offers a grim catalog of structural failures across the city. The Academy of Sciences building was “completely destroyed.” The Aetna Building, occupied by a hardware wholesaling firm, stored tons of tin on an upper floor, and it all came crashing down to the basement. Parts of the Bullock and Jones Building were “haunched” and “badly spalled”; the ironwork had “buckled.” The frames of the Jackson Brewing Company's plant, which was being built at the time, were held together by “an insufficient number of bolts,” fell apart and left the plant completely wrecked. The Hall of Justice was entirely ruined, the skeleton of its iron dome dangling horizontally over the wreckage.

In several buildings huge iron safes—the most popular being those of the locally based Hermann Safe Company, which operated until the 1980s—fell through floors, gathered momentum, and went rocketing downward, smashing huge holes in the structures as they did so.
*
The Majestic Theater, “particularly bad in design,” was practically demolished; the Post Office, “badly racked”; the Rialto Building, “badly racked … cracked … brick facings thrown off.” The Wells Fargo Building, despite being grotesquely twisted out of true, its terra-cotta spalled, its marble wainscoting thrown down and its cast-iron stairways considerably damaged, somehow stood, six storys tall and defiant.