Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Four days later, the fires burned themselves out. Some 200,000 (out of
410,000 residents) found themselves homeless, some 522 city blocks were
obliterated. About 3,000 people died, but we'll never know the true num-
ber. It took weeks for even the safes to cool down enough to open, but
too often, even the fortunes within those was reduced to ash.
The great urban planner Daniel Burnham just happened to have recently
drawn up a grand map of San Francisco that drew inspiration from the grand
avenues and plazas of Paris and the waterfront parks of his Chicago plan.
With everything swept away, the city had a virtually blank slate and they
could dream their own future. But the recent past proved too traumatic for
dreams, and the capitalists of San Francisco were impatient. They wanted
a rebuilt city and they wanted it now. Twisted streetcar lines had been
repaired within days in the effort to return life to a semblance of normalcy,
and reconstruction on homes and offices began within weeks. Burnham's
plan was discarded and a golden opportunity was lost.
So what evidence will you find of the Quake? Not much, except that
nearly every old building in town was constructed or heavily rebuilt in the
years immediately after. A precious few structures, like the outer walls of
the Old U.S. Mint (5th and Mission sts.) and Old St. Mary's Church (Grant
Ave. and California St.) have outer shells that made it through the apoc-
alypse. North Beach's wooden Saloon (p. 205) survived because, it's said,
its proprietors gave free booze to exhausted firemen during the blaze.
There are countless other aftereffects. Pervasive corruption among city
leaders (including that sleepy mayor) was exposed by the disaster, and to
this day, San Francisco's citizens pay close attention to the doings of their
elected officials and are civically active at a much higher rate than in most
other American cities. There is also a strong local tradition of organizations
designed to help other people, an outgrowth the post-Quake charity. Some
sociologists believe Los Angeles's modern dominance among West Coast
cities came because investors grew skittish about investing in the Bay
Area. Countless Americans who are descended from Chinese homesteaders
owe their lives here to the Quake because, in 1906, the migration records
were lost, permitting even illegal residents to pass off their families back
home as legal Americans. The borders of the town were changed after the
Marina district was fashioned out of rubble to provide land for a World's Fair
held in 1915. And, of course, all modern buildings are now constructed with
sophisticated features designed to foil earthquakes, from hidden springs to
layers of shock-absorbing oil. But that doesn't mean that we should ever
be truly comfortable with man's arrogance when it comes to technology.
Even in 1906, 6 years before the sinking of the
Titanic,
buildings that
advertised themselves as “fireproof” were soon consigned to memory along
with the grand, powerful, sophisticated city that they belonged to.
