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What was San Francisco like on April 17, 1906?
Well, it was a booming city of about 400,000 — the ninth biggest in the country, and by far the largest city in the American West.
San Francisco had exploded in size and wealth due to the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century and the construction of the transcontinental railroads in the subsequent decades. Like most American cities in the early twentieth century, it was a deeply unequal and unfair place. It was both the “Paris of the West,” boasting a stunning natural setting, beautiful parks, and a class of prominent plutocrats whose money gave the city an aura of culture and beauty, and a place of desperate poverty and cruel racism.
And what were people thinking and talking about on April 17, 1906?
Well, the whole front page of the San Francisco Call was about the opera. Though the previous night’s performance had apparently been very good, the paper’s real focus was on the rich socialites who were there to see and be seen (the crowd was a little small, though we are assured that “MEN ENJOY[ED] THE BALLET”). Enrico Caruso, one of the world’s most famous singers, was set to perform that evening.
From these pages, you get the impression that San Francisco is a city of culture and refinement — or at least its most prominent citizens wanted to think of it that way.
While the smart set attended the opera and associated parties, other parts of town were concerned with controversies that had been roiling the city.
Chinatown was still recovering from an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which had spread between 1900 and 1904; the city’s Chinese residents had been blamed for the outbreak, and the neighborhood had been literally roped off, preventing Chinese-American residents from leaving. This had been the latest in a series of ugly racist incidents against immigrants in the city. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association — a group of Chinese-American civic leaders — had orchestrated a Chinese boycott of American goods in response to the quarantine.
Meanwhile, the city’s politics were in turmoil. In 1901, after a series of contentious strikes by workers in several key industries, employers had violently attacked union members with the tacit approval of Mayor James Phelan. Unions responded by forming a new political party and electing a member of the musicians’ union, Eugene Schmitz, as mayor. But everyone knew that the real power in San Francisco politics was the lawyer Abraham Ruef, who pulled the strings behind most of what happened in politics and business.
Ruef was flagrantly corrupt, collecting protection money from many of the city’s criminal elements and orchestrating important government contracts toward his friends and business partners. In March 1906, the city awarded a sweetheart deal to a telephone company linked to Ruef; the deal was widely decried as evidence of his corruption. The biggest prize was the building and operation of the city’s mass transit system — San Francisco’s famous trolleys. Ruef had agreed to award one company the contract in exchange for a $200,000 bribe, but the final decision was still up for grabs. Ruef’s political enemies, including the strike-breaking former mayor Phelan, filed paperwork for their version of the trolley system on April 17, 1906.
All told, on that spring Tuesday in 1906, San Francisco was the site of the sorts of things you might see in lots of American cities at the time: machine politics, nativism, and late-gilded-age extravagance. It was, in many ways, an unremarkable day.
But on Wednesday, San Francisco would be changed forever.
At 5:12 AM Wednesday morning, the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, which had been quietly straining against each other underneath the city, gave way. The Pacific plate jumped northward relative to the rest of the continent; the horizontal movement caused an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. The ground shook for 42 seconds.
Those 42 seconds destroyed San Francisco. Or, to be more precise, the earthquake and the fires that came afterward destroyed it. Buildings that weren’t damaged or destroyed by the shaking were soon reduced to ash by dozens of fires, which were caused by anything from out-of-control cooking fires to the misguided use of dynamite to demolish damaged buildings. The fires burned for three days. As many as three-quarters of San Franciscans were made homeless by the disaster.
These photos can help us to at least begin to understand the scale of the devastation:
People cooked out on the street in front of the ruins of their homes:
The rich and powerful had slightly better conditions. Here’s famed actress Sarah Bernhardt, in town for a performance, riding through the ruins in a carriage:
Not much was left of City Hall:
This view, from an airship, shows how widespread the devastation was — block after block of rubble and ashes:
As does this one, taken from a kite:
For those lucky enough to escape with their lives, all they could do was watch their city burn:
There was chaos for a while — worried about looters, Mayor Schmitz issued this announcement on the day of the earthquake:
But San Franciscans didn’t stay idle in the face of disaster. Relief efforts commenced almost immediately, even though money was tight — almost all of the banks had been destroyed, and their fire-proof safes were too hot to open for weeks.
More than two dozen refugee camps were set up by the army:
But the camps weren’t for everybody. The government segregated Chinese Americans from the rest of the population. Here’s a camp that was designated as being for Chinese people only:
Here, people wait in line for food outside of a church:
Urban planner Daniel Burnham had, in 1905, proposed a grand redesign of San Francisco, featuring wide boulevards, traffic circles, and diagonal streets like in Washington, D.C.:
Though the destruction of the city was a perfect opportunity to implement big changes, city leaders decided that speed was more important than design. They quickly got to work restoring the city as it had been.
City leaders contemplated another, more sinister redesign of the city — they wanted to relocate Chinatown to a less central location, to prevent "its relapse into the occupation of the swarming, clannish, unclean and troublesome coolie." Chinatown residents — and the Chinese government — threatened trade sanctions if San Francisco followed through on the plan, and Chinatown remained in its pre-earthquake location.
Within a few years, much of the city had been rebuilt, and San Francisco’s population was back above 400,000 by the 1910 census. This 1909 photo shows some of the 20,000 new or rebuilt buildings that had been completed in three years:
Unfortunately, the rapid rebuilding had a price — many structures were shoddily thrown together and would not be able to stand up to future earthquakes, and haste provided opportunities for corruption. Shady city leaders and their cronies made a mint off of the construction.
In 1904, prominent San Francisco businessman Reuben Hale had asked Congress to approve a world’s fair in San Francisco to celebrate the Panama Canal, which wouldn’t be finished for another decade. Hale had jumped the gun considerably, and Congress delayed its approval. But the earthquake only made the dream of a world’s fair in San Francisco more important — it would be a way to demonstrate the city’s resilience.
So in December 1906, with rebuilding just underway, the city’s elites formed the Panama Pacific Exposition Company to plan a fair. The fair took place nine years later, and served as the city’s announcement that it was back:
Eighteen million visitors visited the city over the course of the exposition, viewing the latest technology, sampling foods from around the country, and viewing the Liberty Bell, which had been transported from Philadelphia.
The exhibition formed a city-within-a-city, covering over 600 acres:
The fair’s buildings were thrown together quickly and were intended to be temporary. The only structure remaining from 1915 is the Palace of Fine Arts:
This building fell into disrepair over the course of the next few decades, housing tennis courts and serving as Jeep storage during World War II before being gutted and reconstructed in the 1970s. Today, it’s an icon of San Francisco once again, a popular picture-taking spot available for “corporate events, private galas, trade shows, [and] weddings.”
The San Francisco earthquake and recovery embodied so much about America in the early 1900s — its resilience, its can-do spirit, its inequalities, and the shortcomings of its politics. The city showed remarkable grit in the face of disaster, but its response was rushed, sloppy, marred by corruption, and a little too concerned with the city’s appearance to the outside world.
In short, it was an American disaster — and a very American recovery.
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