A Crack in the Edge of the World (38 page)

Most dreadful, though, was the plight of those who were pinned and trapped in the wreckage and thus unable to get out of the path of the inexorably advancing flames. Stories abound of such victims being put out of their misery by passersby with guns, policemen especially. The coroner's reports, however, remark on the almost total lack of corpses with gunshot wounds, casting a certain skeptical shadow over these suggestions. It is generally accepted, though, that bodies consumed by fires that often reached more than 2,000 degrees would barely be recognizable as bodies at all.

The four-year-old Ansel Adams, bruised but unburned near the Golden Gate, knew from the family cook, Kong, that Chinatown had been particularly badly hit. This dignified old man had gone off to look for his family moments after preparing breakfast for his employers, and probably after helping to nurse young Ansel's newly broken nose. Hours later, bone weary, he returned to the relative peace of the great house among the dunes. “He had found no one, and fire was everywhere,” Adams later wrote. “He never discovered what happened to his family.” Probably they died; what happened to other Chinese families in the aftermath of the fire was to have, as we shall see, considerable consequences for American society.

ONCE AGAIN
it is the pictures that offer most poignantly the portrait of a city being rapidly burned to death. There are thousands of them, made as amateurs and professionals alike—for simple cameras were inexpensive and photography a growing hobby—snapped at the blazes, turning tragedy into spectacle, and in doing so perhaps minimizing, at least for themselves, its impact at the time.

And the odd thing that many noticed was that a large number of those watching the fires rage (and perhaps taking pictures) seemed to be not so much perturbed by the unfolding events—unless they had suffered an irreversible personal loss—as they were awed by them. The esteemed Harvard psychologist William James was visiting Stanford University and very much hoping—professionally speaking—for an earthquake; he was delighted to be caught up in one.
*
He wrote later that people did indeed remark on how “awful” and “dreadful” the event was; but they were nonetheless full of some kind of wonder at being able to be part of so majestic a catastrophe. They eagerly watched it, James noted; they took pictures of it; and they thought themselves lucky to be enfolded in an event of truly historic significance.

Four years later James went on to write the famous paper “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake” and claimed, among other things, that, by taking photographs of the realities of the event, the city residents were undertaking what nowadays are called “coping strategies,” placing their agonies in an easier perspective, by way of the recorded reactions of light on silver nitrate–covered paper. There is one image in particular that captures this notion to perfection: A pair of young women, pretty, behatted, and beaming, pose to have their portrait taken while the sky behind them is a pall of rising smoke. They might as well have been standing in front of Half Dome, or under the Eiffel Tower, or on the Great Wall: Their city was being destroyed, yet the catastrophe—at least for that brief moment—was for them little more than
background
.

Some of the pictures are on an epic scale—most of them panoramas taken from rooftops, some managing to make the tragedy look both gargantuan and human, awe-inspiring and prosaic. One taken from the roof of the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, looking northeastward along Market Street, toward downtown and the docks, shows immense billows of smoke rising like a huge volcano, enveloping everything in the middle distance. But then, close up, one can see the billboards of merchants—billboards that the day before might have read as jaunty and proud proclamations, but that now, since their owners are about to be burned out, seem no more than bitterly pathetic.

THE BIGGEST FURNITURE HOUSE ON THE PACIFIC COAST
announces one huge banner on top of a store shortly to be consumed, and housing, no doubt, chairs and tables and overstuffed sofas that would provide a most agreeable fuel.
LENGFELD'S PHARMACY
proclaims another, on top of a four-story building right on the square on Stockton Street. And then, most wretched of all, there is the wall of a thus-far-untouched building on Powell Street, off to the right of the panorama, with an immense painted notice announcing that
GOLDSTEIN AND CO., THEATRICAL COSTUMERS, NOW AT 733 MARKET STREET, WILL OCCUPY THIS ENTIRE BUILDING MARCH IST
. Needless to say, they didn't, or for not that long. Neither 733 Market nor this building on Powell would survive the fire that swept in later on the day that the picture was taken.

(But it is worth noting, according to the San Francisco
Crocker-Langley Directory
of the following year, that both businesses did survive, with Goldstein moving to new premises on Van Ness Avenue, and Lengfeld's
*
to Fillmore Street, both well to the west, and away from the charring and the ruin. The California Pacific States Telephone Company announced that the exchanges for many of the new businesses would be called Temporary: One asked the operator for TEmporary 839, for example, to reach the Pinkerton's Patrol Center, TEmporary 3780 for the Union Lithograph Company.)

Perhaps the most famous of all the panoramic photographs of the event was that taken in the middle of Wednesday morning by Arnold Genthe, and titled simply
San Francisco. April 18th, 1906
.

Genthe was the German-born draftsman-artist (though he had a Ph.D. in philology) who was later to make his name with the 1908 book
Pictures of Old Chinatown
. He had taken these photographs much earlier in the century, out of frustration at being endlessly forbidden from sketching the mysterious Celestials, as they were regarded, who inhabited the nine square blocks west of Portsmouth Square. He had abandoned the all-too-visible pursuit of sketching, and instead bought himself a tiny camera with a decent Zeiss lens; like Cartier-Bresson half a century later, he took his pictures quietly, fading himself into the background.

Unlike Cartier-Bresson, however, Genthe often retouched his pictures, to remove such things as might dilute the Chinese-ness of the images: All English-language billboards and electrical wires had to go, for instance. The pictures were published after the fire's near-total destruction of the ghetto: They have an elegiac quality to them, and the portrait they offer of the vanished world of Tangrenbu—of men with pigtails and old women with bound feet and the rows of trussed ducks and strange market fare and monstrous Manchu guards on sentry duty outside the dozens of opium dens—is intensely romantic, offering a shot of Oriental
galangal
to viewers in today's vanilla America.

The earthquake shook Genthe awake, as it did almost everyone else in the city. He was something of a swell—a well-born Berliner, the son of a classicist—and had finely decorated bachelor quarters on Sacramento Street, as well as a Japanese manservant. (Genthe never married.) In the first few moments after the earthquake had tumbled him from his bed and broken most of his impeccable collection of Chinese porcelain, and after Hamada, his imperturbable and admirably foresighted Jeeves, had announced he was heading off to stock up with food, he pondered just what might be the most suitable attire for attending so astonishing an event. He settled on khaki riding clothes and, after checking on his studio (it was ruined, though a sixteenth-century Buddha had fallen and was sitting in the midst of the wreckage looking “serene and indifferent of fate”), headed downhill with a pair of friends to see if they all might get breakfast at the St. Francis Hotel. It was here he supposedly met the fur-coat-and-pajamaclad Caruso and heard him make his “'ell of a town!” remark. There was hot coffee, and a simple cold breakfast was being offered free, so long as the food held out.

Then he decided he should be taking pictures—except that he swiftly realized he had no camera. So he went to his dealer, a man named Kahn on Montgomery Street, and asked to borrow one. Kahn was only too well aware of the fires licking hungrily toward him, so told Genthe to take anything he wanted—anyway, it would all be molten scrap in a few hours at best. And so Genthe took a 3A Kodak Special, hurried off up the hills that looked down on the city-center destruction, and began to work. Later he wrote of the one picture taken from the upper end of Sacramento Street, close to where his house would soon be consumed by fire. He was peculiarly fond of it:

There is particularly the one scene that I recorded the first morning of the first day of the fire (on Sacramento Street, looking toward the Bay) which shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people. On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed onto the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it. Several people upon seeing it have exclaimed, “Oh, is that a still from a Cecil DeMille picture?” To which the answer has been: “No, the director of this scene was the Lord himself.”
*

Genthe's picture is interesting on many levels—not the least being the haunting, captivating contrast between the calm voyeurs occupying the foreground, and the terrible and spreading calamity in the back. But it also offers evidence of the peculiar behavior of the fire, which is here known to be heading west in spite of the morning's fresh westerly wind. In the picture the
smoke
from the blaze is actually shown being blown away, wafting
eastward
toward the Bay, as it should be under the wind's influence. The fire, on the other hand, is creeping inexorably
westward
, toward the watchers and toward the place where Genthe is standing—in fact by late afternoon it would reach halfway up the hill.

The picture thus illustrates the often unrealized truth: that fire in cities is not necessarily blown by wind but often spreads, because of its ferocious concentrations of heat, anywhere nearby that has combustible material. In the specific case of this photograph two things can be said: First, there is nothing further to burn in the direction that the smoke is blowing, because that is where the city ends and the Bay begins; and second, the hungry fire will find a veritable banquet of delights in the direction of the photographer—domed buildings, wood-framed houses, wall-less rooms bulging with sofas and pianos and pictures and beds, barrels of oils and bottles of liquor and overturned wooden drays, all of them unprotected and ready to lure the flames westward. So this was the way the fire chose to spread, notwithstanding the direction of the winds. In forest fires, winds counts for much in the way a fire spreads; but in cities a host of other factors comes into play, and this is assuredly what happened in San Francisco.

The fires lasted for three days. They were sometimes beaten back and checked at their perimeters, but rarely extinguished by the men trying to fight them. They eventually burned themselves out on Saturday, and only after everything flammable had been consumed. They were prevented from spreading still farther by the efforts of the soldiers who had been called in to create firebreaks with dynamite; by the efforts of firefighters who had made some saltwater hydrants work; and by others who discovered the very few freshwater hydrants whose supply pipes had not fractured. And then, at the end of the week, the weather turned damp and cold, as it so often does in spring in San Francisco, and then it began to rain, and the fires were slowly snuffed out despite the mud of black ash everywhere and the dreary appearance of thousands upon thousands of gutted and ruined buildings, and despite the dripping misery of hundreds of thousands of refugees in their tent cities and out on the grasses of the parks. At last the city could begin to think again of what it might do next.

It is known that 28,188 buildings were destroyed; almost 500 people were officially said to have been killed—a figure that has risen over the years to well over 3,000; and of the 400,000 people whom the last city census had counted as living in San Francisco, 225,000 were homeless. The great majority of these last were men, women, and children seeking refuge—men, women, and children who were, in other words, now of a class that the “promised land” had never imagined it might see created within its own domains. They were Americans seeking refuge from the calamity, and thus they were American
refugees
. Not until the migrations enforced by the midwestern miseries of the Dust Bowl would such wretchedness be seen again.

Considering the catastrophe that descended upon San Francisco without a moment's warning, conditions here are simply marvelous.… So far from being prostrated by misfortune, the citizens have banded together in a determination not only to reconstruct, but to establish a San Francisco that will be known as the most beautiful and attractive city in the wonderland of California.

From a front-page editorial in the
San Francisco Examiner,
Sunday, April 22, 1906

Seldom does an entire and very large urban community fall victim to utter disaster. Most great catastrophes tend to be relatively local—an explosion will devastate an awesome number of city blocks here, a fire will wreck a neighborhood there, a flood will inundate the lower-lying parts of a town, terrorists will wreak mayhem in a crowded urban quarter. But once in a mercifully rare while there are those events that enfold and ruin in full the complex engine work that is an established, fully developed urban society. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the most obvious. The Great Fire of London in 1666. The Black Death. The wartime destruction of Berlin and Dresden. The volcanic ruin of Santorini, of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Martinique's St. Pierre. The huge earthquakes in Lisbon and Tangshan—and then, in 1906, in San Francisco.