A Letter From the Epicenter: Celebrating the End That Never Came

During the height of the Cold War, the San Francisco artist Bruce Conner became so unnerved by the possibility of nuclear Armageddon that he moved to Mexico to escape it. Many years later he told me, “Mexico is a wonderful place to go if you’re running away from death, because they celebrate it.” It seems San Francisco itself is currently celebrating death, with all the ruckus around the centennial of the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city. If it’s death we’re celebrating.

The centennial falls two days after Easter, and maybe it’s not death but resurrection that the hundreds of museum shows, expositions, books, events, newspaper articles, walking tours and, no doubt, TV specials and maybe even rebroadcasts of Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald’s musical melodrama “San Francisco” will commemorate. Cities have proven very resilient, and despite the dire straits New Orleans finds itself in, most have been profoundly altered but few have been eliminated by disaster--not London after the Great Fire of 1666 or the Blitz of World War II, not Lisbon, Portugal (site of a huge earthquake in 1755), not Atlanta after Sherman, not Dresden or Hiroshima, not Mexico City after its devastating 1985 quake. San Francisco, whose emblem since the Gold Rush has been a phoenix, the immortal bird that rises from the ashes of its own pyre, is good at resurrection. In 1906, 3,000 or more people died, more than 28,000 buildings were destroyed and the central city was a smoldering ruin. (So were much of San Jose and Santa Rosa, but San Francisco then and now gets most of the attention.)

The late artist David Wojnarowicz once subtitled an essay “Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins,” a phrase full of the brooding pleasure we took 20 years ago in the expectation that everything was going to fall apart glamorously, romantically, fatally. Back then, in the era of movies of survival after the collapse--”The Road Warrior,” “The Terminator,” “Blade Runner”--ruins seemed to be something awaiting us in the future, a permanent state we would descend into (and a state all around us in the ruins of the old industrial cities not yet replaced by the shiny information cities that New York, L.A. and San Francisco, among others, would become). Maybe the 1906 earthquake is reassuring because it tells us that we already fell apart, spectacularly, and then put everything back together, that we already survived the apocalypse.

Maybe if it were a movie, it would combine all the charms of “The Age of Innocence” and the future landscape of “The Terminator”: the opera star Enrico Caruso, who had performed the night before, fleeing the damaged Palace Hotel wearing pajamas and a fur coat and muttering to himself, “‘ell of a place,” the other evacuees that morning including a man carrying a pot of calla lilies, a scrub woman with an ostrich-plumed hat and a broom, corseted ladies carrying their bird cages away amid the flames and devastation, men in bowler hats searching the rubble, then, later, families cooking on stoves dragged into the streets, refugee camps in the parks posted with jaunty slogans such as “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may have to go to Oakland.” In Jack London’s words, “. . . in all those terrible hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic stricken.” That’s the harmonious, humorous side, but there were also corpses, mangled and burned, lost children, out-of-control vigilantes, self-serving officials, the sun shining blood-red through the thick smoke. The refugee camps closed for good more than two years later, and the rebuilt city showed off its resurrection with the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

The current fuss over the earthquake may be a way of overlooking all the other ways the city has been wrecked. It survived six major fires in its first few years, a pretty big earthquake in 1868, another in 1989, and a whole lot of changes in between. It’s the changes in between that seem most destructive, from the expansion that destroyed the habitat for ultra-local species of plants and butterflies, to the greed that destroyed much of the African American Fillmore District and the blue-collar South of Market in the name of urban renewal in the 1960s, to the dot-com boom that drove a lot of lower-income people and longtime institutions out of the city at the end of the millennium. From this point of view, the Great Quake is the easy version: that we got destroyed once and mostly survived, rather than that cities are being born and are dying all the time, dying of the economic forces that trample and erase the poor, the past, the unexploited spaces, the old ways and memory itself. Today the events of a century before are being filtered through a very selective memory.

The earthquake that hit before dawn on April 18, 1906, was the good news. It affected everyone, rich and poor, white and nonwhite, more or less equally. The fires that came after were the beginning of the bad news--the three-day blaze fanned by inept attempts to blast fire lines in the densely built city. Grim too was the reign of terror by vigilantes and soldiers who, as obsessed with looters as the authorities and the media were during the early days of Hurricane Katrina, shot and terrorized survivors and didn’t give a damn about civil rights. Aid was distributed unevenly, as was shelter, and the poor had it hard. The earthquake is remembered as a sudden shaking or as three days of devastation, but like all such disasters it was also months of aftermath, years of rebuilding. The heroism came instantly, the greed and sleaze later, in phases that no one will celebrate and few may remember--as when, for example, the city’s business leaders tried (unsuccessfully) to drive the Chinese community out of its longtime home on the eastern slope of Nob Hill. The three-day version of the quake we’ll commemorate resembles and prefigures Burning Man, the annual festival of out-of-place people that climaxes in, well, burning a bunch of stuff in the desert, which is of course fun and exhilarating and cathartic and simple and then you go home. After all, Burning Man was started in San Francisco by San Franciscans.

I was drawn into the centennial early, when historian Philip Fradkin drafted my collaborator Mark Klett to rephotograph the sites of the 1906 quake in 2002. Philip had written a book on the quake, the magnificent “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906,” and become involved with the Bancroft Library’s extraordinary pictorial archives. He encouraged Mark to start a project, and Mark began studying the images of San Francisco in ruins in detail, online, from his home in Arizona. Through those thousands of photographs and his own spatial intelligence, he came to know the lost city intimately, as though he had turned himself into a ghost from that past. He could recognize the surviving buildings, the locations of the major views, but knew little of the modern city, of my city, so I traveled the streets with Philip, Mark and Mark’s assistant, Mike Lundgren, exploring the two cities that occupy the same place.

It was a gloriously haunted way to rediscover a place I’ve known nearly all my life, to see its ghosts come back, its frailties appear, to see that where, say, the Virgin Megastore now stands on Market Street was once little but smoke and shards, that Union Street cracked and twisted astonishingly, that the whole downtown area was once as shattered as any war zone, but all had been smoothed over--though it’s not hard to wish that all this had survived to become something less banal than, say, a Gap store. For cities are semi-immortal, are truly phoenixes, and to see the bustle of everyday life on the sites of smoldering ruins is to see a version of invincibility--of the whole, not the parts that include lost lives and lost buildings and lost eras. In “After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006,” an exhibit of Mark’s rephotography at the Legion of Honor, the paired images of then and now tell that devastation is seldom final, that cities rise up out of their ruins. That’s worth celebrating.

On April 18, we will get a lot of commemorative events staged by firefighters, historians, city officials from San Jose to Berkeley, a commissioned symphony by Cincinnati Pops composer Steve Reineke, at least one ballet, a show of earthquake shacks, more walking tours, and preparedness-related activities led by local organizations and the Red Cross. And perhaps those preparedness exercises are the best way to commemorate the resourcefulness of the survivors of 1906, because there will be more big quakes in California, in the Bay Area, in San Francisco. Remembering the past is preparation for the future.

On the morning of April 18, at 5:12 a.m., the survivors of the Great Quake will gather at Lotta’s Fountain, the bronze extravaganza on the traffic island at Market and Kearny downtown, as they have for about 85 years, and this year there will be very few of them--mostly centenarians who were babes in arms when the earthquake hit. Soon there will be none; time itself is the catastrophe that takes all of us. When that happens, Lotta’s Fountain may be nothing more than what it was before 1906, the little monument donated in 1875 by the entertainer Lotta Crabtree to the city that made her a Gold Rush icon and a wealthy woman. No memorials were erected afterward to the city that was nearly lost in the devastation, to the heroism of ordinary people and failure of officials, to the thousands who died and tens of thousands who were suddenly homeless. We haven’t truly decided yet how to remember the quake.

Perhaps the Golden Hydrant counts as the one true monument to the devastation of 1906, the fire hydrant at 20th and Church streets near one corner of Dolores Park, between the Latino Mission District and the famously queer Castro. The water mains had all cracked or run dry, and so the firemen were nearly helpless--but the hydrant at 20th and Church was miraculously working, and with its water the Mission fires were checked by exhausted firemen and thousands of volunteers from the blue-collar neighborhood. There you can still see that houses on one side of the street are older than on the other, extant evidence of the fire line. The hydrant is regilded annually, sometimes decorated with a wreath, and is identified by a small plaque placed in 1966. And maybe this ordinary fixture with its extraordinary skin of gold is the best monument to what we want from disasters, the heroism to return to the everyday and to face the extraordinary when it comes again.

Images reprinted from “After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,” by Mark Klett with Michael Lundgren, published by the University of California Press and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of California.