Living It Up on the Edge

Cliff House in the 1890s

As the San Francisco Chronicle reminds us, it was 150 years ago this week that one of Northern California’s foremost landmarks--the Cliff House, a restaurant with spectacular views over the Pacific, located just north of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach--opened to the public. The present incarnation of that wind-whipped structure, though, is far from the first; and it’s certainly not the most palatial. I devoted a couple of spreads in my 2009 book San Francisco: Yesterday and Today (Publications International) to the Cliff House. Here’s what I wrote to accompany the photos:

Point Lobos, named by Spanish explorers for the sea lions (lobos marinos, or sea wolves) that languished and barked on the surrounding rocks, is the westernmost tip of San Francisco. It’s been a leisure destination ever since the mid-1850s. In 1863, a real-estate speculator named Charles Butler constructed the first, fairly modest Cliff House just south of that point. It initially attracted the chic and well-heeled set, who ventured out by carriage over a toll road (later Geary Boulevard) to dawdle and dine, to survey the marine life on adjacent Seal Rocks or thrill to the sight of daredevils treading tightropes above the crashing waves. However, as more common folk discovered this resort, and competitors for the coastal tourist trade appeared, Butler added card rooms and saloons to the Cliff House, both of which lent it an unsavory reputation.

In the early 1880s, Adolph Sutro purchased the Cliff House. A Prussian-born entrepreneur and resolute dreamer, he’d made a fortune in Nevada’s Comstock mining country, developing a chemical technique to extract residual wealth from already processed ore and then boring a tunnel deep into the heart of the mining district, to bleed off hazardous gases. After acquiring an idyllic cottage on the promontory above the Cliff House and Seal Rocks, which he enlarged and surrounded with gardens full of scandalously underdressed statuary, Sutro began restoring the respectability of Butler’s former oceanside resort. Although a chimney fire burned the Cliff House to the ground in 1894, Sutro seemed undiscouraged. With architects Emile S. Lemme and C.J. Colley, he soon erected a considerably grander, French château-style replacement, stuffed with private dining rooms, curio shops, and parlors. He also built an electric trolley line out to the beach, so more people of lesser means could enjoy his entertainments.

(Right) Sutro Baths

Beside the Cliff House on the north, the ambitious Sutro raised the largest public bathhouse in the world. Opened officially in 1896, while its creator was serving his first and only term as mayor of San Francisco, Sutro Baths boasted seven swimming pools of varying sizes and depths (the largest being an unheated, L-shaped seawater pool 300 feet long and 175 feet wide), and 500 dressing rooms. The Victorian structure, with its Greek temple-like entrance, was roofed by two acres of crystal glass and also contained sweeping staircases, gardens of palms and ferns, restaurants, a theater, a gymnasium, and an eccentric museum that showcased Egyptian mummies, stuffed animals, medieval armor, and even a carnival made of toothpicks, crafted by a penitentiary inmate.

Adolph Sutro died in 1898, only a year and a half after relinquishing the mayor’s office to banker James D. Phelan. In 1907, his luxurious Cliff House went up in flames during a remodeling project. It was replaced two years later by a conspicuously less grandiose (but more fire-resistant) version, the essence of which still stands today. The Sutro Baths persisted as a recreation center well into the 20th century, though its largest pool was turned into an ice-skating rink in 1937. Declining attendance and rising maintenance costs finally shuttered the facility in 1966, shortly after which it too burned, leaving what some call “the finest ruins in the city,” now part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area.

I’ve been out to the Cliff House on numerous occasions--the first time, in the 1970s, with my parents; the most recent time with my brother, Matt, on a very long walk west from downtown. I know that it holds a special place in the hearts of native San Franciscans. But every time I visit the Cliff House, I feel, well, just a little disappointed. I’m too familiar with photographs of the Cliff House at its baronial, turn-of-the-last-century best, and I keep hoping that the next time I visit there, it will have been somehow magically restored to that incarnation. Unfortunately, that’s a dream only to be realized in trick photos such as this one.

If you’d to learn more about this landmark, pick up or order a copy of Mary Germain Hountalas’ 2009 book, The San Francisco Cliff House (Ten Speed Press).

Vintage Views: San Francisco, 1905

I’m inaugurating a new series here at Limbo, focusing on rare and fascinating old film footage I have come across while surfing the Web. Today’s first “Vintage Views” video was apparently shot from the front end of a streetcar heading east along San Francisco’s spacious Market Street in 1905, a year before the earthquake and fire of 1906 devastated most of downtown.

The clip isn’t perfect; it was filmed more than a century ago after all. But it’s somewhat mesmerizing to watch the people and assorted vehicles navigate the old Victorian city’s principal east-west arterial, to see automobiles and bicycles dash across the streetcar’s path, and pedestrians stroll over its tracks, confident that they have plenty of time to avoid disaster. Before long, one starts to imagine himself a passenger on that trolley, approaching the clock-towered Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.

At about the 1:25 mark, the streetcar reaches what used to be known as “Cape Horn,” at the windy intersection of Market, Geary, and Kearny streets. That’s where you may spot Lotta’s Fountain and the San Francisco Chronicle headquarters off to the left, with the white San Francisco Examiner headquarters on the right. Slightly further on, also on the right, you’ll sight the original, seven-story Palace Hotel, with its redundant banks of bay windows.

With few exceptions, most notably the Ferry Building, what you see over the course of this eight-minute clip either tumbled to the 7.8 magnitude temblor, or was consumed by the hungry flames that followed that 1906 shaking.

Happy Birthday, Golden Gate Bridge

From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

It is used by more than 100,000 commuters a day, visited by as many as a million tourists a month, and crossed by 40 million drivers a year. Its bold beauty is staggering, its mystique legendary.

But the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened to pedestrians 70 years ago today--at 6 a.m. on May 27, 1937--is more than an international icon in burnished red. To the 200 people who work on the bridge, taking tolls, painting cables, replacing steel and providing security, it is a paycheck first. An honor second.

Read more about the Golden Gate Bridge here. And go here to watch a video of the bridge’s opening day back in 1937.

Gone to Blazes and Back

[[M I L E S T O N E S]] * “If I get to heaven, I’m going to say what every San Franciscan says when they get to heaven: ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’”
--Former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen

If you do a lot of traveling, as I’ve done, you find that there are certain places in the world where you feel more at home than normal. Pull up a chair, grab a cold one, and settle in for the rest of your days. Maybe we’re so comfortable in these locales because we lived there in some previous life. I don’t know. But in any case, I’ve found a few such spots of my own over the years: Jamaica; Sydney, Australia; and San Francisco. My relationship with that latter city began in the early 1970s, during a family vacation in Northern California, when our Volvo station wagon suddenly broke down one evening at the busy intersection of Powell and Post streets, right on edge of Union Square, downtown. The horns honking, the people yelling, the streetlights flickering as my father tried to figure out what the hell was wrong--I remember it all. I also recall a time, almost a decade later, following the last tests of my junior year in college, when I crawled into the aft end of a faded blue Volkswagen mini-bus and headed south from Portland, Oregon, to San Francisco with three or four other students. Exhausted after staying awake for most of three days straight (the consequence of my previous procrastination), I promptly conked out, raising my head again only 650 miles later, as we rattled over the Golden Gate Bridge. The day was bright and balmy and smelled of salt water. As Caen suggested, it was as close to heaven as I’d ever come.

I’ve been back to San Francisco many times since, and I was there again this last week, as the city commemorated the centennial of its disastrous 1906 earthquake and fire.

This ceremony, dedicated to the men and women who lost their homes and/or lives during the catastrophic happenings of April 18, 1906, has been held annually at Lotta’s Fountain on Market Street for more than 85 years. I’d participated in the 90th anniversary, as maybe 300 other people showed up to observe the official moment when the quake clobbered the city--5:12 a.m.--so thought I should be on hand for the more significant 100th. But I didn’t really know what to expect. Since the commemoration was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, at 4:30 a.m., I rose from my hotel room bed that morning at 3:00, showered, threw on some clothes, and commenced walking east along Geary Street, through the dark, heading toward the gold-painted, 131-year-old fountain, the landmark where so many bewildered and lost folks left notes, hoping to reconnect with their loved ones in the aftermath of the ’06 quake. I was a little surprised to see small clutches of others--not the sorts who would normally be up and strolling through downtown in the wee hours--heading in the same direction. However, the real shocker came when I stepped out into the broad concrete canyon that is Market Street. Arrayed along one side of Lotta’s Fountain were platforms on which sat TV cameras and enormous lights, and in the street were gathered perhaps 2,000 other people, some of them dressed in early 1900s period attire. (Local newspapers later reported that as many as 10,000 celebrants attended this event, some of whom had stayed up all night to be there on time.) It was only through sheer determination (and the employment of sharp elbows) that I managed to wend my way to within about 25 feet of the fount and its neighboring podium, where dignitaries would be speaking.

Amazingly, a dozen creaky survivors of the 1906 calamity were on hand to share their memories (with 22 reportedly having been invited), including 109-year-old Chrissie Mortensen, who told the rapt crowd, “I remember the smell of the smoke. I remember the cow running down California Street with its tail in the air.” Each of them was interviewed on stage by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a charming first-term Democrat seemingly destined for higher office (Governor? President?). The 38-year-old Newsom gently, and with ready humor, escorted each of the elders through their often fading recollections of the 100-year-old events, teasing out tidbits from the men and women that contributed to that morning’s general air of respectful celebration. Then it was on to speeches by U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (whose 8th California congressional district covers most of the city) and the town’s police and fire chiefs, as well as longtime organizers of this annual occasion. (The Chronicle reported the next day that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, “who was in town to speak later Tuesday morning at an earthquake conference, declined to attend.” Probably because, as an often immoderate Republican, he’d have been booed in a metropolis so familiar for its Democratic leanings.) And before the sun could rise fully, a giant flowered wreath was hung on Lotta’s Fountain, to honor the 3,000 or more people who were killed during the earthquake and fire. The morning’s only glitch came when celebration organizers sought to lead the huge assembly in a painfully off-key rendition of the title song from the 1936 Clarke Gable/Jeanette Macdonald film San Francisco. Even many locals couldn’t remember the words (“San Francisco, open your golden gate/You let no stranger wait outside your door,” etc.) Too bad Tony Bennett didn’t accept the city’s proffered invitation to come belt out his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” for the assembled multitude.

Finally, beginning at 10 a.m., Market Street filled with the squeals and sirens of a parade. San Franciscans who’d balked at the notion of getting up for a predawn tribute seemed more than willing, hours afterward, to cheer passing bands, antique fire trucks, and marching union workers, whether they did their clapping from the sidewalk or from the open windows of skyscrapers lining the procession route. There was nothing even remotely commercial about this affair--no floats sponsored by department stores, or balloons paid for by faceless corporate interests. Instead, the folks striding happily down the middle of Market were mostly inheritors of the occupations that had been instrumental in either combating the 1906 blaze or reconstructing the charred and crumbled city: plumbers, longshore workers, firefighters, and garbage collectors, along with thong-wearing Brazilian dancers and cheerleaders holding forth chapeaux to collect contributions for AIDS research. For a San Francisco exhibition, this one was remarkably short of both protestors in all flavors and cross-dressers in plumes and leather. But then, there were other things to rejoice in on this day than diversity and tolerance.

Few other towns in America have as good a time merely existing as San Francisco does. There’s a liveliness about this place that gold built and fire endeavored to destroy, that imperious newcomers and blindered moralists don’t understand, much less appreciate. Along with New Orleans, a city that is also struggling to rise from its ruins (the result of natural upheaval as well as governmental incompetence), Caen’s renowned “Baghdad by the Bay” has overcome, well, earth-shaking events to earn a second chance at prominence. Such a city assumes a level of self-confidence that is unavailable to urban centers that have never had to fight for their futures. It also inspires a distinctively fun-loving spirit, which was much in evidence as San Francisco remembered its greatly exaggerated death a century back. I believe it was the city’s director of emergency services who, in closing out her remarks last Tuesday morn, noted that there was ample reason--and opportunity--for folks to continue celebrating. “The bars open at 6 a.m.,” she observed, winning a hardy round of applause from the masses. Let’s hope our descendents will find that same spirit still in evidence when San Francisco celebrates the 200th anniversary of its great quake.

* * *

While I’m in the mood for travel commentary, let me recommend a wonderful but rather overlooked exhibit now on display at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Visitor Center (499 Jefferson Street at the corner of Hyde Street), in the Fisherman’s Wharf area. Called “A Master’s Brush with the Sea,” it features the abundant artwork of William A. Coulter (1849-1936), an Irishman who arrived in the Bay Area in 1869 (the year the first transcontinental railroad was completed), and went on to become the waterfront artist for the San Francisco Call newspaper. Coulter produced what is perhaps the best recognized painting depicting the earthquake and fire of 1906 (see above). That dramatic image, created on a 5-foot-by-10-foot window shade the artist found in the still smoldering ruins of his city, and put together from scenes Coulter took in while riding the ferries back and forth to Oakland on April 18, 1906, is today “identified as the most accurate on-site, overall representation of California’s most famous disaster,” according to the historical park’s Web site. Standing in front of the painting, which was just being framed protectively when I saw it last week, you get a strong sense of the chaos and despair people must have felt fleeing from or merely watching the ’06 inferno. It reminds me of nothing so much as movie scenes of folks escaping the sinking Titanic in 1912, desperate to reach safety and sanity.

It would have been interesting to read what Coulter thought of the scene he reproduced so exquisitely; but I didn’t find anything at the exhibit recounting the artist’s specific recollections of that horrific day 100 years ago. There are, however, numerous ship portraits beyond this fiery panorama, including paintings of sailing craft entering or leaving San Francisco harbor, passing by prominent points in the Hawaiian Islands, and resting against the docks of London. People more knowledge about art than I am suggest that Coulter’s perspective can sometimes be a bit off, but the romantic scenes he presents make one forget about the technical aspects of his labors, and simply appreciate his canvases for the way they capture a period of nautical majesty long past.

I highly recommend that visitors to San Francisco between now and October 31, when the Coulter exhibit is set to close, stop by to see these paintings.

READ MORE: "Earthquake: Is San Francisco Ready for the Next Big One?” by James Dalessandro (San Francisco Magazine); “The Great Quake: 1906-2006” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Shake, Rattle, and Remember

[[H I S T O R Y]] * [Author’s note: This will be a very light blogging week, as I’m traveling to San Francisco to help commemorate the 100th anniversary of that California city’s great earthquake and fire--one of the worst disasters in American history. Having written much about the city’s past, most notably in my 1995 book, San Francisco, You’re History!, I wouldn’t think to miss this opportunity to relive the 1906 catastrophe that destroyed the town’s first incarnation, and birthed a second-century San Francisco that, while subordinate to Los Angeles in size, nonetheless remains one of the greatest metropolises in the world. I intend to be among those hardy souls who, at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, April 18, will be crowded around the landmark Lotta’s Fountain on Market Street for a ceremony marking the exact time when, a century before, San Francisco, a city that had sprung up from nothing in response to the California Gold Rush, was reduced to almost as little by Mother Nature. In the meantime, I’m posting this remembrance of the earthquake and subsequent conflagration, combining material from a couple of chapters in San Francisco, You’re History! Even if you can’t join me on Market Street in the cold predawn of April 18, I hope you’ll come away from reading this with a better understanding of the disaster born there 100 years ago.]

* * *

“There was a deep rumble, deep and terrible, and then I could see it actually coming up Washington Street. The whole street was undulating. It was as if the waves of the ocean were coming towards me, billowing as they came.”

The speaker, a police sergeant named Jesse Cook, who was on duty in San Francisco’s produce district during the early morning hours of Wednesday, April 18, 1906, remembered later that he didn’t even have time to react before the city’s most violent earthquake smacked him to the ground.

It began just after 5 a.m., on what San Francisco Chronicle editor Ernest Simpson later recalled was “as fair a morning as ever shown upon the world.” Suddenly, the earth ruptured along the 296-mile San Andreas Fault with a force equal to 15 million tons of TNT, the quake’s epicenter located a mile offshore from Mussel Rock, southwest of the Golden Gate and adjacent to what’s now the suburban community of Daly City. Forests of mighty redwoods were toppled like so many toothpicks. Ships 150 miles out in the Pacific were jolted, their captains convinced that they had somehow struck a reef or a wreck twisting up from the deep sea floor. Fort Bragg, a blue-collar hamlet on the Mendocino Coast, jiggled and collapsed. The 110-foot-high Point Arena lighthouse, 90 miles north of San Francisco, swayed like a hula dancer before it too disintegrated in a hazardous hail of glass shards and broken masonry. At Point Reyes Station, also north of the city, the southbound morning train was tossed into the air as its track buckled with the release of subterranean pressure. Boats docked at Bolinas were snapped clear of their moorings, and the town’s wharf slipped underwater. South of San Francisco, 14 buildings at Stanford University in Palo Alto were demolished, along with the main quadrangle. Twenty-one men, women, and children perished in San Jose. A telephone operator in San Luis Obispo heard a scream on the other end of the line, and then her scratchy connection with Salinas went dead.

At just after 5:12 a.m., 20 minutes before dawn, the shock pummeled San Francisco. There were actually two tremors, lasting less than a minute, with an eerie and falsely reassuring few seconds of calm in between. The second shock was the bigger of the pair, being felt as far north as Oregon and all the way south to Los Angeles. The Richter magnitude scale hadn’t yet been developed in 1906, but estimates since then have rated this seismic convulsion at 7.8 magnitude (down from an original estimate of 8.3), on a scale of 1 to 10. The great quake’s effects were picked up by seismographs even in far off Birmingham, England, and Tokyo, Japan.

Most of the force was concentrated north and south of San Francisco. The quake was powerful enough, though, to send earth waves, two to three feet high, roaring through the ground, threatening the foundations of even the strongest buildings in the city and bringing lesser edifices down with ear-splitting crashes.

And the quake was only the beginning of a three-day disaster that would bring an end to San Francisco as it was.

* * *

One of the first buildings to go was City Hall, finished only six years before, after three decades of slow work. The shaking caused almost the entire façade of the building to peel away, until all that remained was the metalwork beneath. The once-elegant dome looked like nothing so much as a bird cage.

Streetcar tracks reared up from their bolts and bent around like angry snakes. Long jagged tears opened the concrete middles of streets. Water gushed from broken lines. Gas spit up from rents in the sidewalk. Streets were quickly choked with dust from falling brickwork. At the Ferry Building, anchoring the west end of Market Street, the tower clock stopped, and the tower itself weaved drunkenly and threatened to give way. Structures erected on landfill that covered Yerba Buena Cove sagged into the ground, twisted unnaturally, their wood siding springing free with loud whines. At wharves, scaffolding collapsed, chopping boats in half. Hundreds of cemetery headstones tumbled over, all falling toward the east. What remained of gaslights fighting the darkness went out immediately. Horses, spooked by the commotion, by the sparks thrown off from severed power lines, by people screaming all around them, broke their tethers and stampeded through downtown, joining platoons of rats already running for their pitiful lives. Joining the ruckus was a herd of longhorn cattle, which had recently been unloaded into the city and were being driven by Mexican vaqueros to stockyards in the south of town. The drivers abandoned their charges the moment the shocks commenced, and the steers went charging up Mission Street.

Like some complex nightmare or surreal stage drama, the quake has left us with thousands of such bizarre scenes, each one seeming to exist separately, although we know that they are tied together by a natural phenomenon.

In The Damndest Finest Ruins (1959), one of the most readable accounts of the April 18 catastrophe, author Monica Sutherland tells of a flophouse lodger who woke in his dirty bed, still partially intoxicated from the night before, to find the furniture around him bouncing up and down on the floor. Looking up at the ceiling in his bleary-eyed delirium, the man saw a crack open up and a child’s bare foot come poking through, “like some ghastly hanging lamp.” As the building swayed, that crack closed again, “and the tiny foot, snapped off at the ankle, fell down soft and bleeding onto his bed.” The terrified transient leapt up and hurled himself from the flophouse window. That act saved his life, for within minutes the building he’d left was rubble.

Above a fire station on Bush Street, Dennis T. Sullivan, the city’s fire chief (who’d argued for years that San Francisco was a tinderbox awaiting a match), was jolted from his slumber by the belligerent rocking and the crash of chimneys from nearby edifices. Getting up quickly, he rushed toward the back bedroom where his wife had been staying. But before he could reach her, a brick chimney from the adjoining California Hotel punched through the firehouse roof, taking out part of Mrs. Sullivan’s bedroom floor. Unable to manage a clear view through the resulting dust cloud, the chief stepped forward to see if his wife was all right ... and fell three stories down through the hole that had been opened by the chimney. He landed on a fire wagon, his skull, arms, and legs badly fractured. Although his spouse survived the calamity, little scathed, Sullivan himself died in a hospital three days later, without enjoying even a moment’s role in combating the blaze that might have made him famous.

* * *

Meanwhile, at the elegant Palace Hotel on Market Street--the largest hotel in the country at that time, seven stories tall and ribboned on its face with parallel banks of bay windows--renowned Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, in town for a week with the Metropolitan Opera Company to sing the role of Don José in Carmen, was bawling his head off. Caruso, not inclined to adapt easily to new surroundings, hadn’t wanted to visit the Bay Area in the first place. When the second temblor of April 18 stilled and the cacophony subsided into an equally frightening hush, Caruso was convinced that his life was over. Worse, he was sure that he’d lost his voice. When Caruso’s conductor, Alfred Hertz, rushed into the star’s bedroom, he found his charge despondent amidst piles of boots, silk shirts, and broken chandeliers. Hertz tried to calm Caruso, but with only limited success. Finally, he told the tenor to come to the open window and see for himself that the quake--or at least its initial rampage (there would be 135 aftershocks on April 18, and 22 on April 19)--was spent.

“The street presented an amazing series of grotesque sights,” Hertz later recorded. “Most people had fled from their rooms without stopping to dress, many of them a little less than naked. But excitement was running so high that nobody noticed or cared.” Above this mêlée, Hertz instructed Caruso to sing. To reassure himself that he could. And Caruso did just that. At the top of his lungs. At the top of his form. One can only imagine the confusion engendered by this tableau. The Queen City of the Pacific Coast was a shambles, women were running down wide Market Street with babies squeezed against their breasts, men were hobbling along with prized belongings, smoke was rising from the Chinese quarters of town ... and the world’s greatest living tenor was bellowing lines from Carmen out a fifth-floor window at the Palace. People below stood transfixed by the absurdity of it all.

They didn’t remain still for long, for no sooner had the quake ended than the fires began. With all the crossed power lines, upended coal and wood stoves, broken vials of ignitable chemicals, and flammable-gas leaks, combined with the dry debris so recently exposed, the city’s combustibility was at an all-time high. Yet not a single fire bell could be heard clanging. Wrecked along with so much else that morning was the fire department’s central alarm system, housed in Chinatown.

While the tremors caused havoc in the city, it was fire that really sealed San Francisco’s fate. Despite several city-destroying blazes during the 19th century, California’s most prominent town was still built primarily of wood. Chief Sullivan’s forces did their best, rushing into the heart of the disaster, braving incinerations so hot that the firemen’s hair was singed as they moved in with hoses. But it was all for naught. In most cases, hoses attached to hydrants brought forth little more than a trickle. The 30-inch mains leading to San Francisco’s two primary reservoirs in San Mateo County were broken.

Water pipes within the city were also split and non-functioning. Water leaked everywhere, and little was left to throw onto the raging flames. Huge cisterns that had been located decades before under major intersections, for use in just such emergencies, ran dry in no time flat. Sewer water was pulled up by the gallon and heaved against the incendiary demons, but it made little difference. Firemen, even the bravest of the lot, were forced into hasty retreat. Half an hour after the earth stopped shimmying, the city was engulfed in great, mephitic clouds of smoke five miles high that convinced onlookers in adjacent Oakland and Berkeley (where the earthquake had barely been felt) that San Francisco would soon be utterly destroyed.

Thousands of refugees fled before the scalding onslaught, carrying their possessions. Mobs rushed to the ferry docks, begging for passage to the East Bay. Some had barely escaped the fires, and their scorched bowlers and flame-fingered dresses showed just how close they’d come to being painful statistics. Through the middle of this panic drove automobiles retrieving the earthquake dead, their bloody, featureless faces staring out at people still hoping to weather the calamity.

Caruso had no intention of waiting out the city’s consuming disaster. So, after fleeing the Palace Hotel, he and two members of his company embarked for the Ferry Building, hoping to secure passage across San Francisco Bay and then a train heading east. But when they arrived at the terminal, according to Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, in The San Francisco Earthquake (1971), the group was told to wait in line along with everyone else. This was too much for the spoiled Italian. “I am Enrico Caruso,” he announced. “The singer.” When the railroad man appeared unimpressed, Caruso drew out a signed portrait of Theodore Roosevelt that he had carried with him from the Palace and shouted, “I am a friend of President Roosevelt. See. He gave me this!” And as the bewildered official studied the photo of the toothsome chief executive, Caruso added, “He is expecting me in Washington!” Another railroad man was called over, and the pair consulted for a few minutes. Then the new official said to the beefy tenor, “You Enrico Caruso? Then sing.” “Sing! I want to leave here!” retorted the tenor. “Sure,” the railroader remarked skeptically. “But you sing first.” And so the vocalist who had never wanted to come to San Francisco in the first place was forced to belt out a few more lines from Carmen, just to earn his exit from town. Amazingly, it worked. Within a few minutes, Caruso and his party were on a ferry bound for Oakland.

Not everybody was so unnerved by the disaster building in San Francisco. On the Barbary Coast, the city’s infamous center of salaciousness, men and women whooped it up, taking whatever liberties they were allowed in the belief that all was lost and they might as well enjoy their last hours of life. Elsewhere in the city, looting of saloons and liquor stores was commonplace. The threat from mob violence was so acute in North Beach, the city’s Italian province, that even the firemen working there took to packing guns. Musician-turned-mayor Eugene Schmitz finally proclaimed that law-enforcement personnel “have been authorized to KILL any and all persons found engaged in looting or in the commission of other crimes.”

* * *

Watching the city burn from high up on Washington Street, Brigadier General Frederick Funston decided it was time for him to do something. Short and slight, Funston was nonetheless known to charge through point-blank gunfire in pursuit of a strategic goal. After proving his mettle during the Spanish-American War and in the Philippines, the red-headed Funston had arrived in 1901 at San Francisco’s Presidio, the city’s armed forces preserve, as second-in-command of California’s military department. It was not an easy posting for him. He didn’t trust Mayor Schmitz’s corrupt administration, for which he was acting as a liaison to the army, and he missed the thrill of battle. But now, with San Francisco staggering on the edge of ruin, Funston saw a chance to exercise his command skills.

Not so surprisingly, the brigadier general didn’t consult with Schmitz--a breach of protocol that would be criticized in the weeks to come. Nor did he have the approval of his superiors in Washington, D.C., before he took action. Yet he ordered his troops to march right away upon the city and do whatever they could to restore order, end the looting, organize first-aid services, and help extinguish the flames. Then “Fearless Freddie,” as he’d later be dubbed, telegraphed appeals to the army installations at Alcatraz Island, in Marin County, and as far away as Portland, Oregon, asking for additional troops to save San Francisco. By mid-morning, he had placed the City by the Bay under martial control.

While all of this was going on, the town’s much-scattered, separate fires coalesced into three major ones--south of Market Street, north of Market near the waterfront, and in Hayes Valley, to the west of City Hall. This last blaze, the so-called Ham and Eggs Fire, was apparently started by a woman blithely cooking breakfast in an earthquake-damaged chimney. Her house presently caught ablaze, and the fire spread.

Small successes were being logged against the conflagration. The waterfront survived because fireboats rushed in to spray down flammable warehouses and sheds, and the Jackson Square area was saved because a naval force led by Lieutenant Frederick Newton stretched a mile-long hose from Meiggs’ Wharf (which began near Francisco and Mason streets, well inland from today’s Fisherman’s Wharf) up and over the top of Telegraph Hill, and used salt water to douse the flames. On the disaster’s second day, Italians struggling to save houses around Telegraph Hill broke open casks of red wine--some 500 gallons of it--and sloshed it over roofs, floors, walls. Tongues of fire licked at the wine-drenched edifices and backed away in pursuit of drier feed.

But the efforts of firemen and Funston’s forces to create firebreaks by dynamiting buildings in the holocaust’s path--a practice that had been popular in the 19th century--were a failure more often than not. First, imprecise loading of explosives meant that some shanties, rather than imploding, were blown to smithereens, sending more tinder into the maw of approaching flames or peppering already burning debris onto previously untouched structures. Then, the firebreaks were neither wide enough nor far enough ahead of the calamity to be truly effective. Mayor Schmitz, chary of political fallout from a wholesale demolition of private property, had insisted that buildings be dynamited only if they were in immediate danger of ignition. This caution proved tactically reprehensible.

For most of the day, it seemed that the Palace Hotel--the grandest of accommodations in a city that even back then was rife with lodging houses, covering 2.5 acres and containing 800 rooms--would be all right. Raised by local banker William C. Ralston and opened in 1875, the hotel had been constructed to withstand almost anything. To protect against earthquake damage, the outer walls were two feet thick, and double strips of iron reinforced them at four-foot intervals. And tucked into the sub-basement was a reservoir able to hold 630,000 gallons of water. Fed by a series of artesian wells, the Palace’s reservoir guaranteed that its distinguished, high-paying guests would have water even if the city’s ample supplies went dry. It was also meant to ensure a water supply in the event of a fire at the hotel. A trio of pumps in the basement kept water pressure high, and there were 35 outlets around the building where hoses could be attached. Seven tanks on the roof contained an additional 130,000 gallons of water. Ralston even installed rudimentary electric fire detectors in every room and scheduled hallway patrols at 30-minute intervals day and night. The supposition was that, should the rest of San Francisco burn to a crisp, the Palace would remain standing.

As flames licked their way up from the neighborhoods south of Market on April 18, 1906, spectators outside the Palace were heartened to see jets of water showering its two-acre roof. While firemen in other parts of the city found hydrants inoperable, hose-wielding Palace employees fended off the hot ashes that rained down from a black sky. But while Ralston and his engineers had planned well against sudden conflagrations, they hadn’t figured on such a prolonged battle. By early afternoon of that terrible day, the reservoir beneath the hotel and its rooftop tanks had been bled dry, while flames rose on all sides of the Palace, consuming the three-story, multi-domed Grand Hotel on the east and the new Monadnock Building to the west. By half past three o’clock, the now abandoned Palace “presented the appearance of being afire in every part ...,” recalled San Francisco Chronicle managing editor John P. Young. “The spectacle was one calculated to inspire awe despite the fact that all around it were structures which had already succumbed to the destroyer.” As fire ravished this previously impervious “symbol of San Francisco’s coming of age” (to quote Oscar Lewis and Carroll D. Hall in Bonanza Inn [1939]), crowds cheered to see a single American flag still fluttering atop a pole on the Palace’s Market Street side. Not until that banner disappeared in the smoke and angry candescence of the fire was the San Francisco That Had Been finally deemed dead.

By the end of that first day, the city was in the process of being consumed by one humongous blaze that kept the night sky lighted. Although many people remained upbeat about their chances of survival, others interpreted this as a signal fire marking the end of the world. Rumors spread of other disasters: Manhattan Island had sunk already, it was said; Chicago was now at the bottom of Lake Michigan; the entire West Coast was aflame. Just before the San Francisco earthquake, news had come that Italy’s Mount Vesuvius was, in fact, erupting. All of this convinced the city’s more fanatical residents that divine retribution, rather than natural forces, was to blame for their hardships. “This is the lord’s work!” they whispered.

* * *

The fire continued for 74 hours, until Saturday morning, April 21, when it finally burned itself out. Rain began to fall not long after that--a little late, but nonetheless welcome. Late, as well, was official authorization from the nation’s capital permitting Brigadier General Funston to take command of the situation as he had already done: It arrived by telegram on April 27.

All in all, the fire razed more than 28,000 buildings--between $500 million and $1 billion in property--over an area of 4.7 square miles, between Larkin Street on the west and 20th Street on the south. Temperatures in the thick of the disaster had climbed as high as 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. “An enumeration of the buildings destroyed would be a directory of San Francisco,” novelist Jack London lamented in Collier’s magazine soon after the terror had passed. “An enumeration of the buildings undestroyed would be a line and several addresses.” A few landmarks, such as Telegraph Hill, Jackson Square, and the old U.S. Mint, at Fifth and Mission streets, survived with minimum damage. But many of the places that had defined the character of San Francisco were horribly defaced or destroyed altogether. The elegant Call Building was gutted, as was the Examiner Building, both headquarters for newspapers on Market Street. At the height of the catastrophe, Nob Hill--with all its extravagant alcazars, the retreats of moguls who’d made their millions on gold and railroading and the sweat of their less fortunate fellows--looked like a lit match head. Even a team of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, sent into the city after Mother Nature had turned it into a devil’s playground, couldn’t contain their astonishment. “The whole civilized world stood aghast,” the team recorded, “at the appalling destruction.”

About 225,000 San Franciscans--more than half of the city’s entire population--were left homeless by this Edwardian disaster. Many of them fled to Oakland or retreated to Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, where they set up temporary tent cities reminiscent of those that had dotted the town during its Gold Rush frenzy half a century before. Estimates of the numbers killed in the earthquake and fire have varied from 478 (a deliberately low-ball count in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe) to 6,000, though something just upwards of 3,000 is more likely. (Even that is more than 10 times as many people as perished in the country’s second-worst fire, at Chicago in 1871.) Mass funerals were held all over town. Dead animals were left to decompose, adding the stink of rotting flesh to the pervasive odor of wet, burned wood.

Everywhere, there was a sense that the city would never be the same again. Yet expectation was rife in the air. “The great calamity ... left no one with the impression that it amounted to an irrevocable loss ...,” English writer H.G. Wells explained some years later in The Future in America: A Search After Realities. “Nowhere is there any doubt but that San Francisco will rise again, bigger, better and after the very briefest of intervals.”

And so it did.

READ MORE: Photographs: San Francisco, the Day Before the Great Quake; “The Great Quake: 1906-2006” (San Francisco Chronicle); “100 Years After the San Francisco Quake” (National Public Radio); The Great 1906 Earthquake and Fire (The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco); Timeline of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco); 1906 Earthquake Image Gallery (California Historical Society); The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley); Videos of the Earthquake Aftermath (Internet Archive); “Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916” (Library of Congress); “San Francisco in Ruins: The 1906 Aerial Photographs”; “A Letter from the Quake Zone” (The Seattle Times); 1906 Earthquake Centennial Alliance.