Our San Francisco

Our San Francisco

T midnight I was at the Grand Opera House, where the Conried company was giving “Carmen.” I still can see Caruso striking open the gates of the arena with his long Catalan. I see him stab, I hear Fremstadt’s scream, Caruso’s wail of remorse, glutted passion and remorse commingled; I see his magnificent crawling movement to her as the curtain comes down. I see myself walking back slowly to my paper, the Call, a few steps away, and I am saying to myself: “Surely, what I have felt to-night is the summit of human emotion.” And now when I think of that, I almost laugh.

After turning in my copy, I went up Post Street to my room in the Neptune Hotel, six blocks away. It was two o’clock in the morning, and that is San Francisco’s fairest hour. The blustering sea-breeze has ceased at that time; from the land comes a breath of air already dawn-scented. From the slope I was climbing I could see the dark loom of the big buildings below, the bay beyond with the red and green lights and the long silhouettes of ships at anchor, and still farther, the familiar hearthlike glow of the mainland towns. The night struck me as particularly peaceful.

As I passed a livery-stable on Post Street between Powell and Mason Streets, a horse screamed with a sudden, shrill cry. I asked a stableman lolling in the darkened doorway what was the matter. “Restless to-night; don’t know why,” he answered. And then, with my head poked in, I heard the thunder of a score of hoofs crashing in tattoo against the stalls.

I went up to my room. “Fine night,” said the elevator-boy. “Beautiful,” I answered. I went to bed at about three o’clock.

I slept, but with a hot, restless slumber. I dreamed. I heard a scream, then another. It was the scream of Caruso before Carmen’s prostrate form, and the strident cry of the horse in the stable. They mingled, rose interwoven in a fiendish crescendo—and then I awoke to the city’s destruction.

Right away it was incredible—the violence of the quake. It started with a directness, a savage determination that left no doubt of its purpose. It pounced upon the earth as some sidereal bulldog, with a rattle of hungry eagerness. The earth was a rat, shaken in the grinding teeth, shaken, shaken, shaken, with periods of slight weariness followed by new bursts of vicious rage. As far as I can remember, my impressions were as follows: First, for a few seconds a feeling of incredulity, capped immediately with one of finality—of incredulity at the violence of the vibrations. “It’s incredible, incredible”—I think I said it aloud. Then the feeling of finality. “It’s the end—St. Pierre, Samoa, Vesuvius, Formosa, San Francisco—this is death.” Simultaneously with that, a picture of the city swaying beneath the curl of a tidal wave foaming to the sky. Then incredulity again at the length of it, at the sullen violence of it. “It’s incredible—vertical and rotary—look at me in my bed—like a fish in a frying-pan.” This last figure pleased me. “Just like a fish in a frying-pan,” I repeated. Then an impulse to get out of the hideously grinding walls, mastered immediately, solely from a repugnance, as I remember it, to making a show of myself. “No, if I die, I die in bed, not with my legs bare to the skies.” Incredulity again at the mere length of the thing, the fearful stubbornness of it. Then curiosity—“I must see it.”

I got up and walked to the window. I start to open it, but the pane obligingly fell outward and I poked my head out, the floor like a geyser beneath my feet. Then I heard the roar of the bricks coming down in cataracts and the groaning of twisted girders all over the city, and at the same time I saw the moon, a calm, pale crescent in the green sky of dawn. Below it the skeleton frame of an unfinished sky-scraper was swaying from side to side with a swing as exaggerated and absurd as that of a palm in a stage tempest.

Just then the quake, with a sound as of a snarl, rose to its climax of rage, and the back wall of my building for three stories above me fell. I saw the mass pass across my vision swift as a shadow. It struck some little wooden houses in the alley below. I saw them crash in like emptied eggs and the bricks pass through the roof as through tissue paper.

The vibrations ceased and I began to dress. Then I noted the great silence. Throughout the long quaking, in this great house full of people I had not heard a cry, not a sound, not a sob, not a whisper. And now, when the roar of crumbling buildings was over and only a brick was falling here and there like the trickle of a spent rain, this silence continued, and it was an awful thing. But now in the alley some one began to groan. It was a woman’s groan, soft and low.

I went down the stairs and into the streets, and they were full of people, half-clad, dishevelled, but silent, absolutely silent, as if suddenly they had become speechless idiots. I went into the little alley at the back of the building, but it was deserted and the crushed houses seemed empty. I went down Post Street toward the center of town, and in the morning’s garish light I saw many men and women with gray faces, but none spoke. All of them, they had a singular hurt expression, not one of physical pain, but rather one of injured sensibilities, as if some trusted friend, say, had suddenly wronged them, or as if some one had said something rude to them. As for me I felt a strange elation. I was immensely proud of myself. I had gone through that hideous minute and a quarter with full command over myself, and now I was calm, absolutely calm. I threw my chest out and looked with amazement upon my dazed co-citizens. And yet when a few days after, I saw again a friend who had met me just at that time, he told me that I had been so excited I couldn’t talk, that my arms trembled as I gesticulated, and that my eyes were an inch out of their sockets. As I walked slowly down the street I was very busy taking notes—for the paper. “Such and such number, such and such street, cornice down; this building, roof down; that building crumbled.” And then, “Good Lord!” I exclaimed to myself after a while, with childish peevishness, “I’m not going to take a list of all the buildings in the city!” I kept on going toward the paper. I thought that I was observing very carefully, but I wasn’t. I remember now, for instance, seeing the roof of the Hotel Savoy caved into the building. And yet I did not try to find out if many had been hurt or killed. It was rather unimportant detail that struck my eyes. In Union Square I remember a man in pink pajamas, a pink bath-robe, carrying a pink comforter under his arms, walking barefooted upon the gravel. In the center of the square an old man was with great concentration of purpose deciphering the inscription of the Dewey monument through spectacles of which the glasses had fallen out. I cut across through the Square and for the first time I heard some one speak. A man said to me, “Look!” I looked the way he was pointing, at a three-story wooden building called the Geary.

It stood between an unfinished building at the corner of Stockton and Geary Streets and another tall building. The two sky-scrapers had shaken off their side walls upon the wooden one nestling between them, and only the façade of the latter stood, like cardboard scenery. At one of the windows was a man. He was trailing to the ground a long piece of cloth that looked no thicker than a ribbon, with the evident intention of sliding down by it. I shouted to him to wait a moment and ran to the door. I found the stairs still up, stuck along the front wall as with mucilage. I went up to the third floor over piles of plaster and laths, and there forgot about the man. For I came to a piece of room in which was a bed covered with débris, and out of the débris a slim white hand and wrist were sticking like an appeal. I threw off the stuff and a woman was beneath, still alive, a little, slender thing whom I had no trouble in carrying down to the sidewalk, where some one put her on an express wagon. I went back with another man and we found a second woman, whom we took down on a door. She seemed to be dying. There was another woman in another corner, but a pile of bricks was upon her and she was dead.

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By this time the ruins were fairly swarming with rescuers, and a policeman had to drive away many of them with his club. All the time, however, I could hear a mysterious and insistent wailing somewhere in back. Finally I located it on the second floor. A strip of the hallway still remained along the right wall. I followed it till I came to a place where the whole hall was intact, and there, as upon a platform amid the ruins, a woman with long, disheveled hair was pacing to and fro, repeating in a long-drawn wail, over and over again, “Oh, my husband is dead, and a young man is dead, and a woman is dead; oh, my husband is dead, and a young man is dead, and a woman is dead!” “Where is your husband?” we roared in her ear, for she seemed unable to hear us. She pointed toward the back. We went toward the back and came to the abrupt end of the hall. Below us was a mound of bricks with the end of a bed-post emerging. Mechanically we began, three of us, to take up the bricks one by one, throwing them behind us. Above us towered the walls of the homicidal building. After a while a fireman joined us. He seemed stupefied, and like us began to take up bricks one by one. Finally another fireman came and called him. “Come on, Bill,” he said, “there’s fires.” They went off and then after we had worked a time longer a red-headed youth who was digging with us said, “Wat’s de use of digging out those that’s dead?” This remark struck us all as so profoundly true that without another word we all quit.

I went down to the Call to report. The sun was rising behind a smoky pall already floating above the populous district south of Market Street. The Call Building, the highest in the city, was unmarred by the earthquake, and so was the building of the Examiner, across Third Street from the Call, and that of the Chronicle, across Market Street from the Examiner. The editorial building of the Call, however, in the narrow alley back of the main building, was shaky. At the door I met Bowie, the acting city editor, the first man at his station. “Hopper,” he said, “the Brunswick Hotel at Sixth and Folsom is down with hundreds inside of her. You cover that.” This order seemed perfectly natural to me. In spite of what we had already seen, our power of realization was behind time as it was to be through the three days’ progressive disaster. Going up into the editorial rooms with water to my ankles, I seized a bunch of copy paper and started up Third Street. At Tehama Street I saw the beginning of the fire which was to sweep all the district south of Market Street. It was swirling up the narrow way with a sound that was almost a scream. Before it the humble population of the district were fleeing, and in its path, as far as I could see, frail shanties went down like card houses. And this marks the true character of the city’s agony. Especially in the populous district south of Market Street, but also throughout the city, hundreds were pinned down by the débris, some to a merciful death, others to live hideous minutes. The flames swept over them while the saved looked on impotently. Over the tragedy the fire threw its flaming mantle of hypocrisy, and the full extent of the holocaust will never be known, will remain ever a poignant mystery.

The firemen were there, beginning the tremendous and hopeless fight which, without intermission, they were to continue for three days. Without water (the mains had been burst by the quake) they were attacking the fire with axes, with hooks, with sacks, with their hands, retreating sullenly before it only when its feverish breath burned their clothing and their skins.

I went back to Market Street and stopped an automobile. It was a private machine, chauffeured by one of the city’s gilded youths, but he jumped at my offer of $50 for the day’s hire, another example of the twisted vision of us all, which refused to acknowledge the true stupendousness of what was happening. I whirred off north into the Latin quarter to see as to the safety of friends I had there. Its destruction was in keeping with the picturesque reputation of the district. The low brick buildings built in the pioneer days had nearly all thrown their fronts into the narrow streets, and their interiors were shown cross-sectioned like the doll houses you see in toy stores. The house of Henry Laffler, the writer, was so, his bookcase, writing-table, and bed showing like furniture on a stage. Beneath the pyramid of bricks that had been the front of the building a dead Chinaman lay, one long yellow hand stretching out of the loose sleeve of his blouse. But a note pinned upon the remnants of the stairs told me that Laffler was safe. I went on to the studio of Martinez, the painter. The old building still stood. The studio was full of bricks, but a neatly stacked pile of paintings in the center told me that the painter was safe. How these two men escaped is beyond my imagination.

Back to the paper we whizzed. We passed firemen fighting the fire, which had jumped Market Street and was beginning to devour the wholesale and financial district. At the paper, I picked up “Scotty” Morrison, our old policeman, and Byers, one of the “cubs.” They had walked miles to report. This time we had a nearer appreciation of what was happening and our orders were to cover the progress of the fire and get a list of the dead. As we left, the Grand Opera House, where a few hours before I had been listening to Caruso, was burning with explosive violence together with the back of the editorial rooms. The main Call Building was to be our reporting place.

We started first to cover the fire I had seen start on its westward course from Third Street. From that time, I have only a vague kaleidoscopic vision of whirring at whistling speed through a city of the damned. We tried to make the fallen Brunswick Hotel at Sixth and Folsom Streets. We could not make it. The scarlet steeplechaser beat us to it, and when we arrived the crushed structure was only the base of one great flame that rose to heaven with a single twist. By that time we knew that the earthquake had been but a prologue, and that the tragedy was to be written in fire. We went westward to get the western limit of the blaze.

Already we had to make a huge circle to get above it. The whole district south of Market Street was now a pitiful sight. By thousands the multitudes were pattering along the wide streets leading out, heads bow, eyes dead, silent and stupefied. We stopped in passing at the Southern Pacific Hospital. Carts, trucks, express wagons, vehicles of all kinds laden with wounded, were blocking the gate. Upon the porch stood two internes, and their white aprons were red-spotted as those of butchers. There were 125 wounded inside and eight dead. Among the wounded was Chief Sullivan of the Fire Department. A chimney of the California Hotel had crushed through his house at the first shock of the earthquake, and he and his wife had been taken out of the débris with incredible difficulty. He was to die two days later, spared the bitter, hopeless effort which his men were to know. As we were leaving, two men came to the gate. They were pulling along the street a sheet of corrugated iron upon which lay an old woman with both feet charred. We bore her in and she actually smiled as we laid her upon a cot. ""

At Thirteenth and Valencia Streets a policeman and a crowd of volunteers were trying to raise the débris of a house where a man and a woman were pinned. One block farther we came to a place where the ground had sunk six feet. A fissure ran along Fourteenth Street for several blocks and the car tracks had been jammed along their length till they rose in angular projections three or four feet high. As we were examining the phenomenon in a narrow way called Treat Avenue a quake occurred. It came upon the fag-end of endurance of the poor folk crowding the alley. Women sank to their knees, drew their shawls about their little ones, and broke out in piercing lamentations, while men ran up and down aimlessly, wringing their hands. An old woman led by a crippled old man came wailing down the steps of a porch, and she was blind. In the center of the street they both fell and all the poor encouragement we could give them could not raise them. They had made up their minds to die. I looked at my watch and was astounded to see that it was only half past eight. On Valencia Street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, the Valencia Hotel, a four-story wooden lodging-house was down, its four stories telescoped to the height of one, its upper rooms ripped open with the cross- section effect of a doll-house. A squad of policemen and some fifty volunteers were working with rageful energy at the tangle of walls and rafters. Eleven men were known to have escaped, eight had been taken out dead, and more than one hundred were still in the ruins. The street here was sunk six feet, and again, as I was to see it many times more, I saw that strange angular raise of the tracks as if the ground had been pinched between some gigantic fingers.

We went down toward the fire now. We met it on Eighth Street. From Third it had come along in a swath four blocks wide. From Market to Folsom, from Second to Eighth, it spread its heaving red sea, and with a roar it was rushing on, its advance billow curling like a monstrous comber above a flotsam of fleeing humanity. There were men, women, and children. Men, women, and children—really that is about all I remember of them, except that they were miserable and crushed. Here and there are still little snap-shots in my mind—a woman carrying in a cage a green and red parrot, squawking incessantly “Hurry, hurry, hurry”; a little smudge-faced girl with long-lashed brown eyes holding in her arms a blind puppy; a man with naked torso carrying upon his head a hideous chromo; another with a mattress and a cracked mirror. But by this time the cataclysm itself, its manifestation, its ferocious splendor, hypnotized the brain, and humans sank into insignificance as ants caught in the slide of a mountain. One more scene I remember. On Eighth Street, between Folsom and Howard, was an empty sand lot right in the path of the conflagration. It was full of refugees, and what struck me was their immobility. They sat there upon trunks, upon bundles of clothing. On each side, like the claws of a crab, the fire was closing in upon them. They sat there motionless, as if cast of bronze, as if indeed they were wrought upon some frieze representing the Misery of Humanity. The fire roared, burning coals showered them, the heat rose, their clothes smoked, and they still sat there, upon their poor little boxes, their bundles of rags, their goods, the pathetic little hoard which they had been able to treasure in their arid lives, a fixed determination in their staring eyes not to leave again, not to move another step, to die there and then, with the treasures for the saving of which their bodies had no further strength.

We whirled down Harrison Street, along the southern edge of the fire which up to that time was not spreading much toward that side. The streets were choked with trucks, with baby carriages, with cabs, with toy express wagons, and a procession of silent people, stupefied by the incredible and progressive calamity, was marching stolidly out of the city which had proven a trap. Passing Fifth Street, we caught, behind the flaming smother, a glimpse of the Mint, square, squat, like a rock in the flaming sea. Its iron windows were all closed; it brooded there, unmoved, inscrutable as a sphinx. Later we learned that behind those iron doors men had lived through the maelstrom of fire, had lived and fought and had saved the building. West of it, a long white sky-scraper towered, still untouched. It was never touched. I saw it a few days later, rising white, unsullied, above the surrounding desolation. I read its name and the tremendous irony of it staggered me. “The United Undertakers” was written into the granite above the door.

At Third Street we caught the starting-point of the fire. It had worked north as well as west, and the Call Building, the tallest sky-scraper in the city, was glowing like a phosphorescent worm. Cataracts of pulverized fire poured out of the thousand windows. The Examiner Building, across the way, was burning. The Palace Hotel, treasured perhaps above everything by San Franciscans, was smoking, but was still making a magnificent fight. To the east the fire had gone as far as Second Street. There it had leaped Market Street toward the north, and was roaring, a maelstrom of flame, through the wholesale district, before the southeastern breeze. We circled to the north, through the Latin quarter, picturesque in its ruins as it had been in life. I remember passing six dead horses under a pile of bricks on Washington Street. We went up toward the Hayes Valley district, in which heavy volutes of smoke announced another conflagration. In passing I stopped at The Neptune, where I had been at the time of the earthquake, five hours before. The fire had not yet reached it. I ran up to my room. A key was in the door. “Looters,” I said to myself. I pushed open the door. Spick and span in his loose white clothing, Ah Wing, the Chinese chamber-man, was making my bed. The room was swept, the plaster that had fallen gathered in a heap in the hall, my clothes were all hanging in the closet, and he was putting a clean slip about my pillow. Coming out of the whirl of death and devastation, the piece of domestic fidelity absolutely flabbergasted me. I closed the door upon it and left on tiptoe as in the presence of some sacred rite. I’d like to see Ah Wing again. When, the next morning, it struck me at last that it was time to take my things out, I wasn’t able to get within fifteen blocks of The Neptune. Now, all that remains is the arch of the door, and a nameless chaos of pulverized and half volatilized things in the cellar, among them the results of Ah Wing’s industry. I devoutly hope he Is alive, with a little hoard of gold in his wide sleeves, enough to buy him a ticket on the P.M. to old Canton.

We went up to Hayes Valley to examine the fire there. We passed the City Hall, the building upon which the city had spent six millions. It had crumbled at the assault of the quake and was now a ruin, noble with a beauty that it had lacked when entire. Here and there a massive column rose with its architrave, giving an effect of Babylonian splendor. Above, the dome, divorced of stone, showed its naked skeleton, twisted as from some monstrous torture. The Central Emergency Hospital was blocked with an avalanche of huge stones.



The fire, we found, already covered four square blocks and was sweeping toward the east. We went before it and stopped at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the Madison Square Garden of San Francisco. All the morning it had been used as a great hospital, but now, before the menace of the fire, the last patients were being transferred to the Military Hospital at the Presidio. We waited till the fire came. The immense wooden structure caught with almost explosive violence, and when we left the ruins of the City Hall were catching. We circled the fire south of Market Street again and found that it had reached Twelfth Street. At one o’clock we tried to report to the Chronicle Building. The Examiner, the Palace Hotel, and the Grand were burning fiercely by that time and we could not reach it. We started on another tour of the fires.

It was just about that time that the wind, which had been slight and from the east, turned to a spanking breeze from the north west. This sealed the doom of the city. By the time we had arrived at the fire south of Market Street, it had spread from Fourteenth Street down to the bay; and this immense frontage, driven by the wind, was moving south and east, the blocks literally melting before its advance. We circled far to the south. We stopped at St. Mary’s Hospital, on Rincon Hill, at the southeast corner of the city. The whole city below, from Fourteenth Street to the ferries, was one great flame, which smacked in the wind like the stupendous silken flag of some cosmic anarchy. Below the silken, whirring sound of it, there was a muttered roar as if thousands of tumbrils were rolling over an endless bridge, and the dynamite, used now in a last effort to confine the conflagration, pulsed in dull reverberations. The patients of the hospital were being removed to steamers lying in the bay below.

We circled along the water-front, everything to the west of us a flaming chaos. Up Market Street the great buildings writhed like so many live beings in the agony of fire. The entire wholesale district from the bay to Sansome and north to Washington was burning. As they burned, the buildings crashed down upon what the earthquake had thrown, and the streets were as those of a barricaded city in the throes of its last assault. The United States Twenty-second Infantry was garrisoned at the Appraiser’s Building, and all along Washington Street the troopers, aided by volunteers, were noosing ropes about the wooden shacks, relics of the sixties, and pulling them down in gigantic tugs-of-war, one hundred men to a rope. At the Hall of Justice, in the midst of the Latin quarter, the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and their staffs together with the Citizens’ Committee appointed immediately after the earthquake, were gathered in the basement. In the half-darkness, beneath the low-vaulted ceiling, they sat at long tables, their faces yellow in the light of the sputtering candles, and conferred in whispers. Near them was stretched a long line of stiff forms beneath white sheets. Out in Portsmouth Square, in front, the prisoners of the jail sat huddled in handcuffed groups. While we were there they began to move the dead from the hall, for the fire was very near now, and soon a line of sheeted figures lay in the green grass before the Stephenson monument. By five o’clock the Hall of Justice was burning, the headquarters had been removed to the big Fairmont Hotel on the tip-top of Nob Hill, the prisoners to Alcatraz, and the dead lay underground, the Stephenson bark, its bronze sails swollen with the eagerness of departure, their monument.

Almost at the same time the fire which had swept the wholesale district below Sansome, jumped Kearney Street and with a rattle of eagerness fastened upon Chinatown, with its carved balconies, its multicolored signs, its painted and gilded flimsiness. At the same time, doubling back, it came down Montgomery, San Francisco’s Wall Street, and Kearney, fairly whistling down the deep, narrow corridors. By eight o’clock the Kohl and Mills Building and the Merchants’ Exchange flamed like torches and the destruction of the business blocks of the city was complete.

At seven o’clock the staffs of the Call and the Chronicle met for a conference in the editorial rooms of the Evening Bulletin. The pink glow of the fire, near-by on three sides now, was the only light. The orders given to the Chronicle men was: “The men of the Chronicle will meet at the Chronicle Building to-morrow at one o’clock, if there is any Chronicle.” That given to the Call was: “The men of the Call will meet at the Fairmont to-morrow at one o’clock, if there is any to-morrow.” There was a to-morrow, but long before one o’clock the Chronicle was a gutted ruin and the magnificent Fairmont, like a great Greek temple upon its hill, was blazing like a funeral pyre.

At eight o’clock I was standing on the corner of Market and Montgomery. The whole south side of Market Street was on fire from end to end. There was a lull in the wind, and before me the Palace and Grand Hotels were burning with a sort of quiet mournfulness. Suddenly the great Crocker Building, on the north side of the street, began to burn, slowly, one window-shade here, one window-shade there, with a sort of flippant deliberation. Half an hour after it began to purr softly, then, with a roar, the flames poured out of all the openings. This was the beginning of what might be called the fourth main fire. It went north, caught the Chronicle, and then steeple-chased up Geary, Post, and Sutter Streets, melting before it the rich retail section and then the private hotel district. At ten o’clock the huge new St. Francis Hotel on Union Square was burning. The fire spread as it went west. It united with that of Chinatown, then with that of Hayes Valley, and the three, hand in hand in formidable alliance, marched, keeping step, toward the west with a frontage of nearly two miles.

All night the city burned with a copper glow, and all night the dynamite of the fire fighters boomed at slow intervals, the pulse of the great city in its agony. When the sun rose, a red wafer behind clouds of smoke that were as crape, the tidal wave of flame had swept three-quarters of it. Nob Hill, the Fairmont, the homes of the pioneer millionaires, Mark Hopkins’s, with its art treasures were aglow, a ruby tiara upon the city. Before the irresistible advance, the people were fleeing toward the sea. For the third time the headquarters of the Government had been changed, this time to the North End Police Station. By eleven o’clock that was in danger, and another exodus was made to Franklin Hall, on Fillmore Street, once suburb, now center.

I walked down Market Street late in the afternoon of the second day. It was as if I walked through a dead city, not a city recently dead, but one overcome by some cataclysm ages past, and dug out of its lava. Fragments of wall rose on all sides, columns twisted but solid in their warp, as if petrified in the midst of their writhing from the fiery ordeal. Across them a yellow smoke passed slowly. Above all, a heavy, brooding silence lay. And really there was nothing else. Contortion of stone, smoke of destruction, and a great silence—that was all.