The Damnedest, Finest Ruins: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

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The Damnedest, Finest

Ruins: The Great San
Francisco Earthquake and
Fire
by JAMES DALESSANDRO
Just after 1:00 a.m., April 22, 1906, at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco’s
Presidio, a 53-year old man struggled through his last labored breaths. Spread around him on
cots and mattresses, in hallways and on porches, were more than 200 of his wounded fellow San
Franciscans. Since his transfer from the Southern Pacific Hospital on the afternoon of April 18,
he had been the center of attention: doctors, nurses, soldiers and passersby had stopped near his
bed to pray for a miracle.
Just outside the hospital’s walls, on the Presidio grounds, 20,000 San Franciscans, every
one of whom knew his name, were being housed in tents and fed by military soup kitchens.
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James Dalessandro “The Damnedest, Finest Ruins”
Spread about the city, refugee camps big and small, 100,000 more souls who had not fled by
train or boat were huddling against the cold rain. The wet weather had arrived minutes after the
great fire had burned itself out and the steady drizzle compounded the miseries of survivors
already stunned by their ordeal and fearful for their future. More than 430,000 San Franciscans
had endured the most destructive earthquake in North American history, followed by its greatest
fire: a fire greater than the London fires of 1212 and 1666, greater than Chicago’s in 1871 and
Baltimore’s in 1904; the worst urban fire in the Western world since flames consumed two-thirds
of Rome in 64 A.D.
With the conflagration’s passing, hope and attention at Letterman General shifted to its
most illustrious patient, who had already survived three and half days in a coma; longer than
many expected.
The injuries suffered by Dennis Sullivan were an index of the city’s wounds. A steeple
from the adjacent California Hotel had crashed through the roof of his firehouse as, all along a
275 mile stretch of Northern California, thousands of buildings shed their chimneys and
parapets, wreaking carnage on their sleeping neighbors.
The weight of the brick caused the three floors of Sullivan’s Chemical Company #3, on
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Bush Street near Chinatown, to pancake downward, gaining heft and momentum as each piled
atop the one below, ripping joists and beams from their moorings with a blood-curdling roar.
Hundreds of tenements and hospitals and office buildings across the city suffered similar
collapses. Sullivan’s final act – the same as countless others – was crawling through swirling
dust and debris to reach his stricken mate.
On April 22, when death finally came, Dennis Sullivan would be the highest ranking city
official to perish, the most famous victim of the most famous disaster in United States history.
His passing would seal his stature as the city’s most revered public figure. The Department’s
highest medal for valor would soon bear his name. For years, scarcely a survivor recalled those
three terrible days without invoking his name and his loss.
At 1:10 a.m., eighteen hours after the holocaust officially ended, Dennis T. Sullivan,
Chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, exhaled his last breath and succumbed. He died,
surrounded by thousands of his homeless neighbors, within view of the stunning Golden Gate,
sans bridge, in a spot where George Lucas now presides over the largest sound recording and
design facility in the world.
Where a hundred years ago sat ruin and debris and tents and men in drab green uniforms
trying to make order from chaos, now sits some of the world’s most expensive real estate, filled
with joggers and parks and bicycle trails, and a bridge that ranks as one of the world’s most
recognizable structures.
Urban renewal often produces urban amnesia: with much of the terror of 1906 relegated
to the dusty files of history, the memory of Dennis Sullivan has faded as well.
On April 18, 2006, the Centennial anniversary of the Great Horror, his death should
speak volumes. His loss was the linchpin, the shattered firewall between two extraordinary
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tragedies: the earthquake and the fire that followed, between the nightmare of the former and the
total destruction by the latter. Dennis Sullivan was the man whose authority in fire and disaster
was sovereign over all, the man who had prepared his entire life for that awful moment, the man
best qualified to lead a shattered city in a Herculean attempt to survive. He never got the chance.
San Francisco never had a chance. Not without Dennis Sullivan.
In Sullivan’s absence, the task fell to men who could not have been less qualified lead the
shattered city. Foremost in the awful pantheon was the corrupt and incompetent mayor, Eugene
Schmitz, whose every major decision compounded the death and destruction.
Given the recent reminders of our fragility in recent years; in New York and Florida and
the Gulf Coast, the events of 1906 resonate loud and teach us an extraordinary lesson. Whatever
disasters we face, natural or man made, complacency, corruption and incompetence will
compound the damage exponentially.
We have nothing to fear but folly itself.
It is not necessary to beatify Dennis Sullivan to measure his importance. He was a fire
fighter, trained in hydraulic engineering, blessed with great common sense, a great awareness of
the lessons of history, a man blessed with foresight and character, courage and conviction.
Characteristics currently in short supply.
By the hour of Sullivan’s death, City Officials were already drafting the “official story”
to mask their culpability, their disdain for Sullivan’s endless warnings and pleas for preparation,
seeking to spin a self-flattering web of lies to cover their barbaric decisions and
incomprehensible stupidity.
It is a story no writer could have invented, for the cast of characters alone.
Dennis Sullivan was a marquis figure in a drama in which he never appeared. It is the
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most dramatic tale in American history outside of war, layered with love and hate, courage and
cowardice, genius and stupidity: violent, bawdy, cheaply melodramatic, downright operatic.
It is a most cautionary tale, more relevant today than ever, for even if we continue to
ignore the lessons of history, we are still condemned to repeat them.
For earthquake, unlike terrorism, is a “when” not an “if.”
***
In the spring of 1906, the United States was in a glacial shift from rural to urban-centric
culture, nurtured by the industrial revolution, its staggering array of technological achievements
and the jobs it created. The world had changed more in just over two decades than it had in all of
human history with the invention of the automobile, the motorcycle, the phonograph machine,
the moving picture, the airplane, the wireless telegraph, the X-ray machine, and the electric light.
Los Angeles boasted the nation’s first movie theater, San Francisco the first juke box. Thomas
Edison was the most admired man in the country. An obscure scientist named Albert Einstein
had just published theories on the properties of light and something called “relativity.” The
bicycle had provided women with unprecedented freedom: pundits believed the foul-smelling,
unreliable automobile posed no threat to their beloved two-wheeled Sterlings and Schwinns.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton had predicted women would pedal their way to Suffrage. American
blacks, fed-up with the horrors of the Jim Crow South that had dampened the euphoria of
emancipation, flocked to the cities, bringing Ragtime, the Blues, and the first inklings of Jazz.
America became a musical nation, with a style all its own.
The century’s first president would be its most influential: Roosevelt was all the rage in
San Francisco, where he visited in 1903 and trekked the majestic Hetch Hetchy Valley with
Sierra Club Founder John Muir.
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In the spring of 1906, the populace of San Francisco was as buoyant and optimistic as
any in North America. The city’s ranks swelled by a thousand people per week, attracted by its
physical beauty, mild winters (often warmer than its summers) “anything goes” spirit, and
unprecedented economic opportunity. San Francisco had helped define the American Middle
Class with an endless stream of economic bonanzas: Gold Rush; Silver Boom; the agricultural
“Green Gold Rush” of the San Joaquin and Santa Clara Valleys; the annual production of 40
million gallons of wine in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys; manufacturing and ship building; a real
estate boom and a virtual monopoly on trade with every port along the Pacific Rim, from
Antarctica to Anchorage.
The city was the standard bearer in the labor movement, with more than 140 unions,
including one for piano polishers. Its cultural offerings were not far behind. San Francisco’s
rebellious daughter, Isadora Duncan, owned two dance studios by age 14 and invented Modern
Dance. William Randolf Hearst launched a publishing empire with a newspaper his father had
won in a card game.
A San Francisco newspaper reporter borrowed the name of a San Francisco fire fighter
named Tom Sawyer, then borrowed a name for himself: Mark Twain then ushered in a new
American literature. But by 1906, a true native son was challenging Twain’s stature. The
challenger had transcended literature to attain worldwide stature as the poster boy for the
Progressive Movement. Son of a “free love” advocate, former child laborer and oyster pirate, at
age 24 he ran for Mayor of Oakland on the Socialist Ticket. The handsome, self-destructive
novelist Jack London was as famous for his adventures and politics as for his fiction, straddling a
literary enclave that spawned or nurtured Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Gertrude
Stein, Robert Louis Stevenson and London’s friend Upton Sinclair, whose revolutionary novel,
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The Jungle, was published that year.
Before the awful tale of April, 1906 had ended, before Dennis Sullivan breathed his last,
Jack London would write one of the most impassioned and insightful stories of what happened
during those terrible three days. “The Story of an Eyewitness” was published by Colliers on May
5, 1906, and within it, London wrote: “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so
completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories….”
Easter Sunday, April 15, forty-first anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. Susan
B. Anthony had died the previous month, her memory fresh in the minds and spirits of her
thousands of San Francisco devotees. After Easter services, San Franciscans climbed aboard one
of the cable car lines clanking up its fabled hills, some to visit the garish mansions of the gold
and silver barons atop Nob Hill, where they marveled at the granite columned Fairmont Hotel
scheduled to open on April 18th. Some boarded trolleys for the nation’s largest urban oasis,
Golden Gate Park, to savor the House of Flowers or the giant water lilies, or to its neighbor, the
Sutro Baths, which could entertain 5,000 swimmers.
The city’s pride was The Palace Hotel, world’s largest and most lavish hostelry, built by
silver baron William Ralston to be earthquake and fire-proof. Its block-long bar required of thirty
bartenders, where the political and financial fates of the state were brokered.
Seven blocks east of The Palace, beneath the 264-foot tall Ferry Plaza clock tower,
patterned after Seville’s Giralda Cathedral, people steamed across radiant San Francisco Bay to
ride the train to the top of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais or picnic on Angel Island.
The City seemed proud without being overly pretentious. When the Eastern
establishments thought of San Franciscans – if they thought of them at all – it was usually as the
provincial and uncouth refugees clinging to the end of the food chain in shake-and-bake territory,
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an open-air lunatic asylum, the last vestiges of the Old West posing in someone else’s opera
clothes. San Franciscans were having too much fun, making too much money to really care.
That much has hardly changed.
Beneath the surface lay another San Francisco. If it was the Paris of the West, it was also
part Dodge City and part Shanghai. In the basements of Chinatown, Chinese girls, some as
young as seven, were being sold into the most heinous forms of sexual slavery. City officials did
more than cast a blind eye: they profited from it.
And beneath San Francisco’s fashionable surface lay another threat: the vast and
serpentine San Andreas Fault. In April of 1906, stress on the fault had reached its breaking point.
***
If Dennis Sullivan was the disaster’s most revered character, he was far short of its most
colorful. A stirring tale requires a good sound track. In 1906, fate sent Enrich Caruso, the Elvis
Presley of his generation, to frame the bittersweet fade out. Caruso was scarcely willing.
He was indeed more wonderful than fiction. Dozens of web sites and quasi-authorities
now claim that Caruso was the first of eighteen children borne by his mother to live to his first
birthday. It’s a lie, but a good one. In New York, il Mano Nero, the “Black Hand,” which later
became the Genovese Crime Family, tried to extort money from him. NYPD Detective Giuseppe
Petrosino, founder of the nation’s first anti-Mafia task force, allegedly broke the mobster’s legs
and shipped his swarthy ass back to Sicily. Caruso invented the modern system of royalties for
recording artists, demanding that he be paid for every disc that was sold, becoming music’s first
million-selling artist. In 1906, he was offered four times his normal salary for a Western tour that
would culminate in that city of lunatics and Shanghaiiers, San Francisco. He accepted after
buying a revolver and fifty rounds of ammunition, whereby he practiced his quick draw aboard
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the regally-appointed “Caruso train” lent to him by George Pullman.
Upon his arrival at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza on April 16, Caruso was asked by
reporters and adoring fans – many from the thriving Italian community – if he feared the city’s
infamous earthquakes. Nothing, he stated, could be as frightening as Vesuvius, which had just
erupted and was threatening his hometown of Naples. Caruso suggested that God had sent him to
San Francisco to be safe. He then asked his fans where he could find a good plate of spaghetti
and roast beef.
Dennis Sullivan and Enrico Caruso formed the heart and color of the tale: the dark half
was anchored by San Francisco’s political leaders, Mayor “Handsome” Eugene Schmitz and his
Svengali, erudite political boss Abe Ruef. They and their political cronies were about to be
indicted in the most sweeping corruption probe in U.S. history, a plot hatched the previous
December in the White House office of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Boss Ruef was far more polished and clever than his crude Eastern predecessors, like
New York’s beer-swilling brawler William Tweed. A Berkeley educated lawyer who spoke
several languages, including Latin, he extorted massive sums from competing telephone and rail
companies, utilities dealers, boxing promoters, “French Restaurants” that served as fronts for
lavish brothels, and real estate developers. As a lawyer, he recorded the bribes as legal fees, and
hence, “honest graft.” In one monstrous plan, he would receive a $1 million bribe for supporting
the Bay Cities plan to dam up the Tuolumne River and ship the water to thirsty San Franciscans.
Ruef’s hand-picked puppet mayor, Eugene Schmitz was a former orchestra conductor, a
city-wide fixture as leader of Market Street’s Columbia Theater Orchestra. He was tall,
handsome, charming, with an extraordinary ability to remember people’s names and plunder
their pockets.
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On Wednesday, April 18, at 9:00 a.m., Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan was scheduled to
testify before Federal Judge William W. Morrow to force Ruef and Schmitz to stop stealing just
enough of the city’s money to implement the Sullivan Plan. The plan would force the city to buy
fire boats, erect steam pumpers along San Francisco Bay to supply salt water to Sullivan’s men,
and build massive reservoir tanks atop the city’s hills to supply high pressure hydrants on every
corner. It was a plan that Sullivan had been proposing for years, and the enormously popular fire
chief had become a thorn in the sides of Ruef and Schmitz: any money spent on fire prevention
was money they could not steal, an allocation that would never earn a gratuity from the
scrupulously honest Sullivan.
Most San Franciscan’s were too intoxicated with the arrival of the great Caruso to worry,
at least for the night, about corruption and fire chiefs or prophecies of doom. The night of April
17th was a moment of triumph, in which San Franciscans felt they had achieved some sort of
status on par with their Eastern neighbors, a night in which their cultural and social revelry
carried them to new heights.
At 8:00 p.m., Enrico Caruso took the stage at San Francisco’s Grand Opera House, before
a crowd that had outdone itself in wretched excess. The volume of jewelry sported by the wives
of San Francisco’s aristocracy must have made the aging venue’s balconies groan beneath the
weight. Extra police officers and detectives were dispersed to prevent sneak thieves and
pickpockets from having a banner evening. Caruso delivered a performance as Carmen’s
obsessive suitor, Don José that might be justly called “transcendent.” One of San Francisco’s
most esteemed reporters, James Hopper of the Call, stated, “Surely, what I have felt to-night is
the summit of human emotion.”
Buoyed by Mount Vesuvius’ threat to his home town of Naples, the 33-year old Caruso
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dipped into the depths of his emotional and vocal powers to deliver a performance that elicited
five curtain calls and an ovation that lasted more than ten minutes.
Around the city, revelers enjoyed the balmy night. At the Mechanics Pavilion, roller
skaters in garish costumes – devils, witches, pirates, et al – partied into the wee hours. On Nob
Hill, Brigadier General Frederic Funston, temporarily in command of U.S. Army forces while his
superior attended his daughter’s wedding in Chicago, was awakened by gunshots from the
Barbary Coast. The 5-foot 3-inch Funston, dubbed “Fighting Freddy” for his Medal of Honor
leadership during the Philippine War, arose from bed and vowed to march into the Barbary Coast
and rid the city of its greatest blight.
At his fire station on Bush Street, Dennis Sullivan returned from battling a colossal
warehouse blaze near Fisherman’s Wharf, one that had required the efforts of one hundred and
twenty of his men. He retired to the front room of his apartment on the third floor to rest and
prepare for his 9:00 a.m. testimony before Judge Morrow.
After attending a party at a mansion on Nob Hill, Enrico Caruso crawled into bed in Suite
580 at the Palace Hotel.
Abe Ruef and Eugene Schmitz, who had not attended the opera, must have slept uneasily
given the shocking knowledge of their imminent indictments.
***
Just after 5:12 a.m., the pressure that had built between the confluent Pacific Plate and
North American Plate reached its breaking point. Several miles west of Golden Gate Park and six
to nine miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, the San Andreas Fault ruptured along a 270-mile
stretch, moving simultaneously north and south. At its maximum slippage, the northwestern
moving Pacific Plate and the southeastern moving North American Plate slipped by each other at
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a distance of twenty-five feet and at a speed of 7,000 miles per minutes. The seismic waves were
recorded in Tokyo, London and Cape Town.
Massive underwater waves shot toward the surface of the dark blue Pacific: several ships
were blasted free of the water, where they lingered a moment before crashing back down. One
ship was blasted so hard that the rivets exploded from its steel hull.
With a magnitude that would later be estimated at just below 8.0 on the Richter scale, the
rip blasted ashore at its northernmost point along Alder Creek in bucolic Mendocino County,
near the one-hundred foot tall Point Arena lighthouse. Shock waves battered the rugged
coastline, hammering fishing, whaling and lumbering towns like Fort Ross and Fort Bragg,
toppling steeples and slamming buildings from their foundations. Only two of Fort Bragg’s
buildings survived the initial shock.
As the rip continued to hug the coastline north of San Francisco, it reconfigured the
landscape of Mendocino and Sonoma counties. It dropped cliffs into the ocean, created inlets
where none had been. Forty-five miles north of San Francisco, the temblor’s ground waves
struck the resort town of Santa Rosa, twenty-five thousand strong, instantly reducing its
postcard-perfect adobe and Victorian buildings to rubble.
Dipping back into the ocean in rural Marin County, the rip caused the west side of
banana-shaped Tomales Bay to shift eighteen feet further north than its east side. At Point Reyes
Station, an engineer prepared his train for the morning commute into San Francisco: he, his
engine and four cars were tossed into a nearby poppy field. At the nearby town of Olema, a
farmer’s house and barn suddenly jumped eighteen feet closer together while he was trying to
milk his fractious cows.
Its effect was felt as far north as Oregon, as far east as the Nevada Dessert and as far
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south as Los Angeles and Santa Monica.
Directly ahead lay San Francisco and its 430,000 inhabitants. The only warning was a
deep groaning beneath the earth’s surface.
On the granite monolith of Alcatraz Island, its stature as “the Rock” would offer a rare
benefit, dampening the shock waves so that military prisoners hardly stirred in their iron bunks.
Around San Francisco Bay, thousands of ships began to slam against their wooden docks as
several inches of sea water sloshed back out through the Golden Gate, gathered in an enormous
puddle and surged back in.
Throughout the city, cobblestone streets danced like popping corn. The city’s hills
undulated like a rollercoaster. On the Barbary Coast, gamblers were thrown from their chairs
while whores and their customers were tossed about in their grimy “cribs.” At the melodeons,
“blind pigs and dead-fall” saloons, not so fancy dancers stumbled and fell to the ground.
In Chinatown, the flimsy exteriors of Dupont Street, Pacific Avenue and Waverly Alley,
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haphazardly constructed to shield the opium smoking, gambling, and prostitution, crumbled like
sand, exposing the activities inside to passersby deft or lucky enough to avoid the lethal debris.
At the Palace Hotel, Enrico Caruso’s brass bed hopped around the room as the hotel
undulated like a drunken hula dancer: 3,000 tons of iron bands braided into its two-foot thick
foundation kept the hotel from collapsing.
Throughout the city’s residential neighborhoods, its majestic Victorian houses became
giant sets of dominoes, losing their foundations and slamming into one another, the sound like a
million packing crates were being torn open simultaneously.
At the new Emergency Hospital, adjacent to City Hall, the upper floors collapsed, gaining
momentum as each floor after floor slammed onto the one below it. Doctors, nurses and patients,
asleep in their respective quarters were crushed between the floors and carried into the first-floor
operating theater. City Hall, a Beaux Arts monument to “bad politics and bad cement,” sheds its
stone and marble exterior, littering the streets with tons of overpriced debris.
Several of San Francisco’s forty-one fire stations, home to many of the city’s 584 active
firefighters, sunk into the liquefied landfill beneath them. At Engine Four’s station house,
firefighter James O’Neil was killed instantly when a wall collapsed and buried him under tons of
bricks.
On Bush Street, near the entrance to Chinatown, where the steeple from the California
Street Hotel cleaved Dennis Sullivan’s fire station in two, Dennis Sullivan heard his wife
Margaret crying for help from the rear bedroom. Blinded by dust as he crawled toward her, he
fell four stories, into the basement where he landed atop the station’s boiler and was promptly
covered by falling bricks and masonry. He was extricated by his men, broken and burned, much
like his city. He had a fractured skull, a broken leg, and broken ribs, one of which had punctured
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a lung. Burns caused by the boiler covered 60 percent of his body.
The fault line continued its murderous path through San Mateo County, south onto the
San Francisco Peninsula. The ground displacement ruptured two of the three 44-inch waterlines
from the Spring Valley Water Company, as did hundreds of smaller lines beneath the city’s
streets.
At Stanford University, forty miles south in San Mateo County, the university’s world-
renowned botanical gardens were destroyed in an instant. The shock demolished its trademark
quadrangle and squat sandstone buildings: with faculty and students on Easter vacation, only two
were killed where scores might have died.
Slamming south at a furious pace, it battered Santa Clara County and the booming city of
San Jose, collapsing block after block of brick, stone and mortar. Several miles away, the flimsy
walls collapsed at Agnew’s State Hospital, the state’s largest mental institution, killing more than
one hundred patients and staff.
All in fifty-three seconds.
In San Francisco, whose population was greater than its surrounding counties combined,
the true horror had just begun.
***
After a few moments of near silence, punctuated by the sound of hundreds of church bells
chiming, as though tolling the city’s doom, hundreds of buildings began to shed their flimsy
facades. The sound of bricks and stone and mortar crashing onto the cobblestone streets reached
a thunderous crescendo. In the meat and produce district, horses, butchers and produce vendors
were buried beneath mountains of rubble. Several blocks from Union Square, Patrolman Max
Fenner, the police department’s strongest man, was buried beneath a wall of the Essex Hotel – he
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was the only police officer who died during the disaster.
At his home on Fillmore Street, near Union Street on the northern slope of solid Pacific
Heights, Mayor Eugene Schmitz was awakened by the rattling of dishes and chandeliers, but the
lack of any significant damage made him believe that the earthquake was a minor one. But
within minutes, a driver arrived to take the mayor to City Hall.
Atop Russian Hill, General Funston was rudely awakened for the second time that night.
Jogging to the summit of Washington and Taylor Streets, the little general gazed over the
stricken city. Clouds of dust from fallen walls and buildings billowed skyward, blocking the
morning sunrise. He noticed an even more ominous sight: several fires had already broken out.
As Schmitz motored toward Van Ness Avenue and City Hall, his heart sank by the
second. Citizens, stunned, speechless, naked and half-dressed, staggered onto the streets and
sidewalks to examine their damaged buildings.
His driver turned south on Van Ness Avenue, where Schmitz noticed water bubbling up
through the broken cobblestones, a frightening indication that the city’s water system had been
broken along a major line. A few blocks further, as Schmitz approached towering City Hall, its
skeletal remains appeared like a giant bird cage: it was difficult for his mind to register the
carnage that had wrecked his proud official quarters. He ordered his driver to take him to the new
Hall of Justice, on the border between Chinatown and North Beach and across from Portsmouth
Square as the horror of the morning’s events unfolded around him. People, wounded and
stupefied, stumbled all about, carrying treasured objects, beseeching strangers to help them
rescue trapped loved ones. Worse of all, by the time he had traveled the twenty-odd blocks to the
Hall of Justice, Schmitz counted a dozen plumes of smoke, most of them wafting from the dense
South of Market neighborhood.
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General Funston, unable to commandeer a passing automobile, sprinted more than a mile
to the army’s livery stable on Russian Hill. He sent a note by messenger to Colonel Charles
Morris, commanding officer of the Presidio, directing him to muster his troops and march them
into the city.
An outraged Morris refused. He told the messenger to inform General Funston to check
his army regulations, stating that only the president could order federal troops into the city. The
issue had been settled in 1871, during the great Chicago fire, when the famed Union Army
general, Phil Sheridan, had tried to assert military authority and was soundly rebuked by civilian
authorities.
But the messenger, probably fearing the wrath of the volatile Funston, left Morris’
quarters and promptly ordered the bugler to sound the alarm.
From that moment, San Francisco was under military control.
At the Hall of Justice, Eugene Schmitz issued commands with an air of authority that
shocked observers who had seen him as an empty vessel whose principal job was to execute the
will of his great benefactor, boss Abe Ruef. As reports of catastrophes filtered in, Schmitz
ordered saloons to be closed and a ban on indoor cooking.
The rapidly-arriving damage reports grew grimmer by the minute. The call boxes and
communication systems of the police and fire departments had all been shattered. The city’s
telephone system was inoperable. Looting had broken out, and rumors were flying that an armed
gang was getting ready to attack the U.S. Mint at Fifth and Mission Streets. A massive blaze at
the Chinese Laundry south of Market Street was already overwhelming firefighters.
The worst news came with the report that the one man Eugene Schmitz most desperately
needed, the one who would have assumed authority and relieved Schmitz of the awful burden of
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marshalling the city’s battered forces, was lost. Dennis Sullivan had been carried by his men to
the Southern Pacific hospital with wounds so terrible that the role of fire chief would have to
pass to another man.
Schmitz handed the reins to assistant chief John Dougherty, 69 years old, a man bowed
and half deaf from years of fighting fires.
By 8:00 a.m., Funston and his troops, with rifles loaded and bayonets fixed, marched into
the city, whereby the General informed Schmitz he would take control and establish order. With
Sullivan gone, Schmitz offered no resistance.
Instead, Schmitz issued a series of orders that would immeasurably compound the
disaster and death toll. He ordered that members of the police department, army, California
National Guard and “special police” – men who would be issued badges by Schmitz and his
cronies, men who were nothing more than vigilantes – should shoot to kill anyone suspected of
looting or “other crimes.” The first shooting would start almost immediately: it would not be
until three o’clock that afternoon, almost six hours later, that Schmitz would have his minions
post signs warning citizens that any activity that raised the suspicions of anyone with a badge
and a rifle or bayonet would likely cost them their lives.
Schmitz’ next order exceeded all the others in the gravity of its effect. He authorized
Dougherty to dynamite any and all buildings, most of them wood framed, in an attempt to check
the rapidly spreading fires.
***
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s firefighters drew upon the great training and initiative that
Dennis Sullivan had instilled in them. Many chopped themselves free of their shattered
firehouses and, with their horses scattered, pulled their heavy steam engines onto the shattered
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streets, only to find their hydrants dry. They dipped their hoses into sewers and fought fires with
buckets of sand.
“Ground Zero,” the point of greatest destruction from the earthquake, was on Sixth Street
between Mission and Harrison Streets, in the South of Market neighborhood, a few blocks from
the Palace Hotel. Four residents’ hotels – the Nevada, Lormor, Ohio and Brunswick – with more
than a thousand rooms filled with immigrants, working men and poor families, had slammed into
one another and collapsed. Firefighters climbed atop the roofs – the three and four story
buildings now rested barely one story above street level – and tried to chop the victims free from
the wreckage. They saved scant few before the buildings caught fire: hundreds perished in those
four hotels alone.
Forty-five miles north, the town of Santa Rosa had also become a raging inferno.
Firefighters there were as overwhelmed.
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Forty-five miles south, San Jose, comprised of less flammable materials than San
Francisco, was spared a massive outbreak of fire. Rescue workers clawed through the wreckage
trying to reach the trapped and wounded. At nearby Agnew’s State Hospital, sheriff’s deputies
found a scene reminiscent of Dante’s The Inferno: in addition to the more than one hundred
fatalities, naked and hysterical mental patients ran about the hospital’s three hundred acres,
attacking anyone they encountered. Horrified deputies lassoed and hogtied many of the patients
to trees where they would remain for hours in the boiling sun, distraught and weeping.
By 10:00 a.m., while firefighters engaged in the most desperate battles any of them had
ever faced, block after block and neighborhood after neighborhood, Funston’s men were
deployed in the city with little oversight or chain of command. The young soldiers had orders to
prevent drinking and looting. Dozens of them looted liquor stores, and were soon drunk. They
took the second part of their orders more seriously: the mandate to shoot and kill anyone
suspected of looting or any other activity that they considered criminal.
But help was en route. Several navy tugboats, including the Active and the Leslie, under
the command of Lieutenant Frederick Freeman and his second-in-command John Pond, were
already streaming toward the stricken city. They arrived at 10:30 a.m.; five hours after fires had
begun burning. Where Funston left his men without command or supervision, and saw his
principal job as keeping order and saving property from being looted, Frederick Freeman saw a
different task. Upon arrival, he saw that city firefighters were desperate for water to combat the
seemingly endless string of fires. He ordered his men to activate the tug boats massive pumping
systems, and to run hoses to the fire fighter’s La France and Clapp and Jones steam pumpers.
Within hours, Freeman and his men saved two of the most critical structures and helped
win two of the most crucial battles of what would become a three-day nightmarish ordeal. They
20
ran a hose line that helped firefighters save the Southern Pacific Railroad station at Fourth and
Townsend Street, not far from the waterfront. That victory would save the lives of thousands of
San Franciscans. During the next desperate seventy-two hours, brave railroad engineers and
coalmen would return to the burning city time after time and evacuate more than one thousand
passenger cars full of desperate human beings.
Freeman and Pond used a desalinater to provide drinking water to parched evacuees and
fresh water to power the fire department’s boilers.
Playing leapfrog all along San Francisco’s waterfront, they saved the Ferry Building and
scores of docks and wharves that would be crucial to the naval evacuation which would soon
supplement the efforts of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Freeman and his men soon spliced their
hoses to those of city firefighters and ran a line more than one mile over Telegraph Hill and into
21
the Barbary Coast, close to the Financial District. The Navy seemed to be everywhere: policing
the waterfront, quenching the thirst of parched citizens, organizing evacuations, fighting fires,
aiding firefighters.
In other sections of the city, events were surreal. In the Mission District, a herd of cattle
being driven to slaughter stampeded when the temblor hit. Saloonkeeper John Moller and police
officer Harry Walsh stood in the middle of the street gunning down the stampeding steers until
they ran out of ammunition and Moller was trampled to death. In Chinatown, a bull charged
along Dupont, the neighborhood’s main street, trampling people in its path. A police officer
killed the bull with his revolver, sending traumatized Chinese into near hysteria: they believed
the world was held up on the backs of four bulls and that the earthquake was caused by the dead
bull leaving its post. Cantonese wails proclaimed that the world was now doomed.
There was no limit to the causes of death; collapsed buildings, stampeding cattle,
drowning. At the Valencia Street Hotel on 17th and Valencia, the five-story building had sunk
into the unstable soil that was once part of Mission Creek. The filled ground turned to mush
again when a broken water main caused the hotel to sink three stories. Many of the hotel’s 120
guests drowned while frantic rescuers chopped at the roof with fire axes.
Many of General Funston’s soldiers were engaged in different activities and had
expanded their looting beyond liquor stores. Sporting good stores, cigar stores, clothing and shoe
stores were next.
The dynamiting took an even uglier turn. Soldiers, having run out of stick dynamite,
switched to highly flammable granulated dynamite and black powder. Rather than stopping the
fire, the dynamiting hastened it. Every time a wood frame building was blasted into kindling, it
sent flaming debris raining down on surrounding houses and businesses, igniting structures
22
wherever it fell.
***
Earlier that morning, Enrico Caruso had been assured that the Palace Hotel was as fire-
proof as it had been earthquake resistant. He had walked to Union Square and devoured an
enormous breakfast as though it were his last meal. When he returned to
The Palace, he was shocked to find the hotel being evacuated. He was forced to leave
behind dozens of steamer trunks that held hand-tooled boots, silk dressing gowns, tailor-made
shirts, and custom-fitted hats. After singing from a hotel window to test his voice – which some
observers would later claim was a heroic attempt to calm the hysterical crowd now streaming
down Market Street – the great tenor grabbed a signed photograph of President Theodore
Roosevelt and made his way toward North Beach and Telegraph Hill, where he was told he
would be safe.
At 2:30 that afternoon, after city firefighters hooked to the hotel’s exterior hydrants and
its enormous water tanks, the Palace Hotel caught fire. For years San Franciscans had been told
that, “If the Palace goes, so goes San Francisco.” In minutes, the saying became more than that.
As flames roared through the world-famous structure, a pall came over the city. Thousands of
people who had been dragging their precious belongings toward the waterfront and toward the
train stations stopped in their tracks to watch the single most expensive structure fire anyone had
ever seen.
23
At that moment, most everyone became convinced that San Francisco was doomed.
Other cities fared no better.
To the north, Santa Rosa was completely engulfed in flame. More than fifty bodies had
already been found.
In San Jose to the south, nearly ten thousand people were homeless.
A dozen blocks from The Palace, at his command headquarters at the Hall of Justice,
business leaders had formed a Committee of 50 to advise Mayor Schmitz. Each had been given a
task to manage: food, housing, the restoration of services, the care of the wounded, the handling
of bodies. Schmitz had found a working postal telegraph near Market Street and managed to send
several telegraphs. He had contacted the mayor of Oakland requesting fire engines and fire
fighters. He had telegraphed the governor in Sacramento asking for the California National
Guard.
Telegraph operators had relayed the horror story nationwide. By the afternoon of April
18th, thousands of Americans were aware of the horrors occurring in San Francisco, though
24
fiction was outweighing fact.
At the Mechanics Pavilion near City Hall, doctors and nurses had turned its vast wooden
floor into a repository for wounded from the city’s damaged hospitals. The injured – many of
them serious – lay gazing into the rafters at garish papier maché caricatures from the previous
night’s roller skating party.
Young soldiers, national guardsman and special police shot and bayoneted people for the
slightest provocations. A black man was shot and killed for bending over a fallen man. Another
man was shot for carrying a chicken, although no one ever asked if he was its owner. An old
woman was killed for cutting to the front of a soup line. Still another man was bayoneted for
failing to heed an order to help on the fire lines; the Italian victim spoke no English.
The evening edition of the Oakland Tribune carried the banner headline, “PEOPLE
SHOT DOWN BY SOLDIERS IN STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO,” estimating that at least
twenty people had been slain.
Early that evening of April 18th, as the fire from the Palace Hotel spread north into the
Financial District, Eugene Schmitz moved his headquarters from the Hall of Justice to the
Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. In the Financial District, just a few blocks from where Schmitz
had just fled, soldiers dynamited a drug store on Kearney Street, employing so much black
powder that it blew flaming debris several blocks into Chinatown. Though badly damaged by the
temblor, Chinatown had until then escaped the fire. Within minutes, it too was ablaze.
Everywhere, the city’s streets had become an open-air market. All day people had used
whatever means they could to cart away their possessions: some had nailed roller skates to the
bottom of steamer trunks; others had lashed suitcases to bicycle frames. One man was seen
pushing a piano with the body of an elderly woman atop it. But the broken cobblestones and
25
twisted trolley tracks had made the effort so arduous that many had abandoned possessions in
favor of saving self.
At the Southern Pacific Train Station on Townsend Street, thousands were crowded onto
it grounds and platforms, pleading for rescue and straining the abilities of railroad detectives to
control them.
On the waterfront, Frederick Freeman and his men operated with flawless military
precision, refugees crowded the docks desperate for a method of escape. The ferry boats, which
had offered an inspiring commute across San Francisco Bay, now became a crucial lifeline as
thousands were hauled to Alameda and Oakland and San Rafael and Sausalito.
By midnight of April 18th, fire in San Francisco raged along a three-mile front. People
fifty miles north and south, in Santa Rosa and Santa Clara, reported that the sky was so bright
that one could read a newspaper by its glow. Jack London had arrived in San Francisco, by ferry
boat, with his wife Charmian. They made their way through the city, making notes and taking
photographs that would be among the most insightful and compelling of any writer or
photographer. London arrived in Union Square to see thousands sleeping in the grass in front of
the St. Francis Hotel. Charmian London, a superb author in her own right, witnessed a man with
a broken back being carried by rescuers. As the man gazed at her, he died.
At the Fairmont Hotel, the situation had reached crisis point. Brigadier General Funston
arrived to brief Mayor Schmitz and members of his Committee of 50. Pointing to a map, Funston
explained his plan to dynamite a swath from the suburbs south all the way to the city’s
waterfront, a stretch of real estate that comprised several miles and thousands of buildings and
streets. Funston was not there to seek the mayor’s approval. He had already sent telegrams
ordering that every stick and keg of dynamite in Northern California sent to him and his troops.
26
At no time did Funston or Schmitz suggest that his men aid firefighters or the United States
Navy, who had repeated success in numerous locations where they had been able to supply salt
water from the growing fleet of tugboats.
Conspicuously absent from the Committee of 50 was Boss Abe Ruef. Mindful of the
pending indictments, Schmitz seized the opportunity to paint himself as a suddenly decisive
leader, forged by disaster, and to distance himself from Ruef.
Whatever motivation one attributes to Schmitz’s newly discovered personae, the
decisions of the suddenly forceful mayor were catastrophic.
At the Presidio, another Funston, the general’s wife Ada, had joined the effort to care for
the stream of wounded and homeless that had appeared at the Army’s doorstep. With a direct
chain of command and specific tasks at hand, the Presidio’s troops launched an ambitious and
flawless effort to house, feed and care for the desperate thousands.
Relief had begun to reach the stricken city. Fourteen hours after the earthquake struck, a
train bearing doctors, nurses and medical relief supplies arrived from the city of Los Angeles.
On Thursday, April 19, a day after the disaster struck, the situation reached a chaotic and
terrifying point. Dynamite, black powder and gun cotton were arriving by the boxcar-load.
General Funston had ordered navy tugboats to transport explosives from the California Powder
Company in the East Bay and from Mare Island Naval Shipyard, orders that contributed to the
disaster in two ways; instead of aiding in the battle to stop the fire, some naval vessels now
transported the elements to spread it. In a moment of inspired insanity, Funston and one of his
captains had decided to blast a trench fifty yards deep in Van Ness Avenue, the city’s widest
boulevard as though the fire was creeping across the pavement rather than being spread through
the air.
27
The plan would mercifully never be implemented. Just before noon, five ships of the
United States Navy’s Pacific Squadron steamed through the bridgeless Golden Gate with
desperately needed commodities: fresh men and fire hoses.
Under the command of Admiral Chester Goodrich – who had been testing a revolutionary
wireless telegraph when he received word of the disaster in San Francisco – 1,000 young sailors
and marines charged ashore to join the fire fight.
By then, much of the city’s major neighborhoods had already burned. Market Street and
South of Market were gone, as was the Financial District. City Hall and the Mechanics Pavilion
– where hundreds of victims were evacuated moments before the building caught fire – were
gone. Chinatown lay in ashes.
On the waterfront, Admiral Chester Goodrich wondered what was left to save. He was
informed by Acting Chief John Dougherty that there were indeed three elements that needed
saving.
One was the city’s docks and wharves: though Frederick Freeman and his men had kept
the flames from reaching them, the fire was building and Freeman’s men were exhausted.
Thousands of refugees were now flocking to the waterfront, desperate for evacuation. Holding
back the flames on the three-mile long waterfront was crucial to their salvation.
On Van Ness Avenue, from San Francisco Bay to California Street, more than a mile
from where his men were docked, another battle loomed. The flames had consumed much of the
east side of Van Ness, but had yet to breach the 125 foot wide boulevard. If it did, and the west
side succumbed to flames, the conflagration would burn all the way to the Pacific Ocean, to the
Cliff House and Sutro Baths seven miles away. It would destroy what little was left of the city:
Pacific Heights, Golden Gate Park, the Sunset and Richmond Districts, perhaps even The
28
Presidio.
By then, the world was aware of San Francisco’s malaise, that fires were raging and the
great city was doomed, the message spread by telegraph to New York, Charleston, Atlanta,
London, Paris, and Tokyo. People had begun to gather near telegraph stations, anxiously
awaiting each new missive: the fabled city of San Francisco was in its death throes and the world
was awaiting every precious word.
Over the next thirty-six hours, the United States Navy and San Francisco firefighters,
with the help of thousands of volunteers, would rally to save what little they could of the stricken
city.
All the while, Frederic Funston and many of his troops continued to spread the horror,
shooting and bayoneting anyone whose activities they did not like, driving people out of their
homes and denying them a chance to battle the flames. National Guardsmen and the Special
29
Police joined in the carnage, killing people for property crimes against property that was about to
burn. Special Police killed one of the disaster’s heroes, Eber Tilden, who had spent days ferrying
the wounded to hospitals. When Tilden’s vehicle, bearing a large Red Cross flag, motored
through a checkpoint in the Mission District, and Tilden was unable to hear their warnings, they
shot him dead.
Meanwhile, Lt. Frederick Freeman, bolstered by fresh men and fire hoses, continued to
perform the miraculous, checking a mountainous wall of flame on the waterfront, organizing
every boat to aid in the evacuation, policing the waterfront and supporting fire fighters on Van
Ness Avenue to save the fire from spreading to the west side.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 20, Mayor Schmitz was driven to Van Ness Avenue
where he confronted General Funston on the steps of St. Mary’s Cathedral. He ordered Funston
to stop the dynamiting, more than forty-eight hours after it had begun.
Funston was enraged. He had long despised the corrupt and glad-handing mayor and after
two days without sleep, he was exhausted and incensed at the idea of taking orders from a man
he considered his inferior.
Along sections of Van Ness Avenue, Acting Chief Dougherty had rallied his exhausted
forces. He had screamed and berated his men repeatedly; they had fought back out of sheer fury
at the old man’s insults. Using water pumped from San Francisco Bay by the Navy, firefighters,
sailors, marines and some soldiers were holding the fire line. Citizens along Van Ness and
nearby streets poured from their houses, soaked rags, towels and curtains in the salt water and
slapped furiously at sparks on the wood shingled houses. Doctors and nurses moved up and
down the Van Ness fire line, injecting the firefighters with strychnine in a belief that it was a
stimulant, antibiotic and pain killer. It seemed to work.
30
But Funston’s men, who had supplemented the dynamiting with artillery and cannon
balls to blast away at the buildings on the east side of Van Ness, may not have received their
orders to desist. At the corner of Van Ness and Green Street, they dynamited the Viavi Building.
Inside the Viavi were enormous vats of raw alcohol. The dynamiting ignited the flammable
liquid, and the building’s wood frame, splattering and spreading the fire over neighboring
buildings. By then, the fire already burning just over Russian Hill, along the waterfront and
Barbary Coast, had created a “chimney effect,” sucking air from three-hundred and sixty degrees
around it. The wind had reached almost gale force.
The fire from the Viavi Building spread like a wild fire up Russian Hill, its buildings
blistered and baked from the heated air that had been swirling for two days. When the flames
reached the peak of Russian Hill, all that lay below it, untouched, was North Beach, Washington
Square, Telegraph Hill and the waterfront at the end of Montgomery Street. Fifty square city
blocks that had so far escaped the holocaust.
Washington Square and the streets and alleys of North Beach were filled with thousands
of refugees. As the fire loomed, they ran toward the waterfront. A tongue of flame shot down the
eastern side of Russian Hill and was caught by a crosswind. Like a flame thrower, it ignited and
incinerated people as they ran.
The fire burned through North Beach, consuming much of Telegraph Hill: some residents
near the peak of Telegraph fought off sparks and firebrands with towels and curtains soaked in
wine and vinegar, saving several houses.
But the fire burned toward the waterfront, attacking sections across from the docks that
had not yet burned. Once gain, Freeman and his men were on the move. Once again, they
attacked with everything they could muster, raising a “water curtain” to try to cool and contain
31
the fire. At points in the fire fight, they had had to hose down their ships to keep them from
catching fire: paint and varnish had already peeled and melted. Cracked and parched, sailors and
firefighters poured salt water on themselves. Men collapsed and other men pulled them to safety
and took their places. Boats of every size and shape: ferries and pleasure craft, rowboats and
scows, continued to haul off the now-nearly hysterical refugees.
At the Southern Pacific Train Station, railroad personnel continued the evacuation.
Railroad detectives fired over the heads of looters to scare them off, and then asked the Army for
help in maintaining order. Soldiers soon took the place of civilian looters, attempting to plunder
several box cars full of whiskey: other, more honorable soldiers drove them off.
In the Mission District, firefighters, soldiers and citizens used water from a single hydrant
line to combat sparks and flames. They ripped doors from their houses and used them for shields,
slapping at the flames with wet rags, retreating when the rags and doors caught fire.
And then it stopped.
***
The fire officially burned itself out at 7:15 a.m., Saturday, April 21st.
Young sailors and marines along the waterfront and Van Ness Avenue, Frederick
Freeman and his deputy John Pond and the men of the U.S. Navy, collapsed from exhaustion.
Black soot and ash fell from the skies and covered them where they lay.
The roar of the fire had been so great, many would be nearly deaf for days.
But they had triumphed. They had saved the waterfront, and the western portion of the
city, and evacuated everyone who had come their way.
32
When city and state officials finally added up the damage, nearly 29,000 buildings had
been incinerated, 86 percent of the city’s standing structures. All of its major neighborhoods had
been consumed. Market Street, South of Market, the Financial District, Chinatown – gone. The
Palace Hotel, the mansions of Nob Hill, the Fairmont Hotel, the Tenderloin and most of Union
Square had been obliterated. The notorious Barbary Coast was gone; though somehow, in its
midst, Hotaling’s Whiskey, the city’s largest liquor distiller, remained intact. Thirty-seven
national banks, two opera houses, dozens of theaters, the city’s great libraries, its hospitals and
City Hall, the financial and cultural center of the American West, cremated. A hundred little
towns along the California coast were decimated. Santa Rosa was gone. San Jose was gone.
Stanford University lay in ruins. In San Francisco alone as many as 350,000 people were
homeless. The damage would be estimated at $400 million, equal to the entire budget of the
Federal Government in 1906.
33
Eugene Schmitz emerged as a hero, a once corrupt and hollow man who suddenly found
his voice, his courage, his resolve, in the midst of chaos. General Frederic Funston denied his
soldiers killed anyone or committed any crimes, despite hundreds of eye witness reports and
reports filed by his own men to the contrary. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, who would
succeed Roosevelt as president, declared “it would take an Act of Congress to relieve him
(Funston) of the responsibility for the violence the Army did to the Constitution…” It didn’t.
Neither Funston nor any of his men was ever charged or even reprimanded. The National Guard
and Special Police, despite a few charges, were exonerated for performing their assigned duties.
The extraordinary efforts of Frederick Freeman and his men, and the U.S. Navy, the true
heroes of the disaster, received the most cursory mention by Funston. At no time did Funston
ever order his men to support the fire fighting effort.
Several years later, the city of San Francisco would rename 13th Avenue after Funston. .
The Official Story reported that only 478 people had died. That many people likely died
on Sixth Street between Mission and Howard. The true number was likely 5,000 or more.
Eugene Schmitz was eventually convicted on graft and corruption charges for crimes that
pre-dated the disaster. On January 9th, 1908, his conviction was nullified on a technicality. The
good citizens of San Francisco elected him to the Board of Supervisors several years later.
Abe Ruef was convicted of bribery on December 10th, 1908, and sentenced to fourteen
years in San Quentin. During Ruef’s trial, prosecutor Francis Heney was shot in the face in his
courtroom. The chief witness against Ruef, James Gallagher, had his house dynamited three
times. A reform-minded Police Chief, William Biggy, disappeared off the back of the police
launch after delivering documents to graft hunters: his body was found floating in San Francisco
Bay days later.
34
After serving four and a half years in prison, Abe Ruef was pardoned when he agreed to
make a full confession of his elaborate theft and extortion. The scope of his admissions was
breathtaking. He died bankrupt.
The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire left a lasting mark on the nation. Little towns in
the West dried up for lack of commerce that once coursed through San Francisco’s ports. The
stock market dipped: a year later, a financial panic swept the nation. The dreaded automobile
proved itself as a reliable means of transportation during a disaster. Dozens of insurance
companies went bankrupt: half of the liability claims were never paid. The Hetch Hetchy water
system, the world’s longest gravity fed aqueduct – already rejected twice by Congress – was
built to answer San Francisco’s water problems, over the strenuous opposition of John Muir. The
Red Cross became a major peace-time institution.
Enrico Caruso, who spent his third night in San Francisco with two conductors on their
trolley near Golden Gate Park, escaped by ferry boat after flashing his autographed photo of
President Roosevelt. He had muttered, “’Ell of a place, I never here again,” and would make
good on the promise.
In 1912, six years after his death, Dennis Sullivan’s plan for an Auxiliary Water Supply
System – for fire boats, massive reservoir tanks on the city’s hills that fed high-pressure
hydrants, restoration of the city’s subterranean cisterns, diesel pumps along San Francisco Bay –
was endorsed by the citizens of San Francisco. They passed a $5.2 million bond issue to build
the world’s most elaborate fire suppression system that had been sought by their martyred chief.
A system built after the disaster it was designed to prevent. A $5.2 million system that
might have saved countless lives, hundreds of millions in damage, and hundreds of millions
more in lost commerce and wages.
35
If history teaches us anything, it is the fact that history rarely teaches us anything.
© 2006 James Dalessandro. All Rights Reserved.

The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal.
Photos by J.B. Monaco—from “The Damnedest, Finest Ruins”
This Amazon Short has been permanently saved in your Digital Locker.
36
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JAMES DALESSANDRO
Since its publication in April 2004, James
Dalessandro’s 1906, an epic novel of the great San
Francisco earthquake and fire, has fulfilled the prediction
of the Chronicle’s Heidi Benson and become “a
publishing sensation,” appearing regularly on Northern
California Best Seller Lists for nine months. Warner
Brother’s Films is scheduled to begin production in 2005 on a $150 million film version of 1906,
from a script also written by James Dalessandro.
His one-hour documentary, with partners CAVMEDIA and Executive Producers Paul
and Debbie Johnson of Napa, “The Damnedest Finest Ruins,” is scheduled for release April 1,
2006.
On January 25, 2005, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to set
aside the city’s official death count of 478 from the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, based on a
resolution that Mr. Dalessandro wrote and presented. It gives him, Chairman of the Board of the
City Museum of San Francisco, and Gladys Hansen, founder of the museum and Historian
Emeritus of the City, until the Centennial on April 18, 2006 to produce a more accurate death
count.
37
James Dalessandro “Author Spotlight”
His previous novel, Bohemian Heart, a hard-boiled thriller about corruption and political
assassination also set in San Francisco, introduced the descendants of the main characters in
1906, the Fallon/Fagen clan, a group of opera-loving, motorcycle riding young cops bent on
ending the rampant graft in their beloved city.
Mr. Dalessandro has had a long and distinguished commitment to his adopted home of
San Francisco. In 1973, he founded the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival with Ken Kesey, Allen
Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, drawing praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti for “giving a new
birth to American poetry.” He published his first work, Canary In A Coal Mine, that same year.
In 1999, he published Citizen Jane, the story of a Marin County woman who founded a
national victim’s rights group and has helped solve 14 cold case murders. James is the
screenwriter and co-executive producer of a Court TV Movie of The Week also called “Citizen
Jane.”
38
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Also by JAMES DALESSANDRO

1906: A Novel
Citizen Jane: A True Story of Money, Murder, and One Woman’s Mission to Put a Killer Behind Bars
Bohemian Heart
39

The Damnedest, Finest Ruins: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

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The Damnedest, Finest

bed to pray for a miracle.

parapets, wreaking carnage on their sleeping neighbors.

dust and debris to reach his stricken mate.

design facility in the world.

San Francisco never had a chance. Not without Dennis Sullivan.

compound the damage exponentially.

We have nothing to fear but folly itself.

Characteristics currently in short supply.

ignore the lessons of history, we are still condemned to repeat them.

For earthquake, unlike terrorism, is a “when” not an “if.”

America became a musical nation, with a style all its own.

Sierra Club Founder John Muir.

won in a card game.

The Jungle, was published that year.

completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories….”

Sutro Baths, which could entertain 5,000 swimmers.

That much has hardly changed.

more than cast a blind eye: they profited from it.

the regally-appointed “Caruso train” lent to him by George Pullman.

and roast beef.

December in the White House office of President Theodore Roosevelt.

scrupulously honest Sullivan.

carried them to new heights.

pickpockets from having a banner evening. Caruso delivered a performance as Carmen’s

the summit of human emotion.”

and rid the city of its greatest blight.

prepare for his 9:00 a.m. testimony before Judge Morrow.

580 at the Palace Hotel.

given the shocking knowledge of their imminent indictments.

recorded in Tokyo, London and Cape Town.

buildings survived the initial shock.

postcard-perfect adobe and Victorian buildings to rubble.

milk his fractious cows.

south as Los Angeles and Santa Monica.

deep groaning beneath the earth’s surface.

puddle and surged back in.

foundation kept the hotel from collapsing.

million packing crates were being torn open simultaneously.

a lung. Burns caused by the boiler covered 60 percent of his body.

were killed where scores might have died.

one hundred patients and staff.

All in fifty-three seconds.

the true horror had just begun.

within minutes, a driver arrived to take the mayor to City Hall.

sidewalks to examine their damaged buildings.

South of Market neighborhood.

into the city.

quarters and promptly ordered the bugler to sound the alarm.

From that moment, San Francisco was under military control.

ordered saloons to be closed and a ban on indoor cooking.

pass to another man.

and half deaf from years of fighting fires.

Sullivan gone, Schmitz offered no resistance.

and a rifle or bayonet would likely cost them their lives.

the rapidly spreading fires.

four hotels alone.

Firefighters there were as overwhelmed.

suspected of looting or any other activity that they considered criminal.

passenger cars full of desperate human beings.

fresh water to power the fire department’s boilers.