A city of great magnitude

THE first time I visited San Francisco, I spent every minute filling my nose with the burnt-wood smell of cable-car brakes. I squeezed into Chinatown shops that sold jade Buddhas, drank Irish coffee at the wood-paneled Buena Vista. I climbed to the top of Hyde Street, gasping fog-tinged air, and gazed down at the sunlight sparkling on the water around Alcatraz. And every time I saw someone I imagined to be a San Franciscan -- a woman holding the hand of a little boy in a Giants cap, a lady in a silk jacket carrying a whole fish in a pink plastic bag -- I wanted to rush over and say, “See how lucky you are? You get to live here.”

In April 1906, 70 years before my own first visit, Enrico Caruso also thought he was lucky to be here. The famed Italian tenor was supposed to be in Naples, but Mt. Vesuvius had erupted two weeks before, and Caruso thought he would be safer in San Francisco , where, after all, there are no volcanoes. “God has sent me here,” the singer declared before he went to bed the night of April 17. When he was shaken from that bed the following dawn, Caruso changed his opinion of the Almighty’s intent. “We are all doomed to die!” he shouted at his valet.

This year, the centennial of the great earthquake and fire, it’s impossible to be here without being reminded of that disaster, which still ranks among the worst in American history. Bookstore windows are crowded with new retellings, archives of earthquake photos have been dusted off and tour guides are leading history buffs across town to the surviving landmarks. Visitors who immerse themselves in 1906 history might think San Franciscans are lucky there’s a still city here at all.

The earthquake that woke Caruso measured 8.3 on the Richter scale, although that magnitude was estimated later, because the seismographs in San Francisco couldn’t withstand more than a 7.9 quake. The San Andreas fault shifted along 296 miles, and the ground trembled for nearly a minute, the cobblestone pavement opening and closing like a mouth. Buildings tumbled, masonry fell into the road, and a herd of cattle being driven up Mission Street ran riot, goring some of those who had escaped their toppling houses.

After the shaking stopped, what followed seems like a string of incredibly bad luck compounded by bad decisions.

The day of the earthquake was windy, even by San Francisco standards. Natural gas escaping from cracked pipes and ripped-away chandeliers was ignited by embers left in cooking stoves; the wind fed the fire, spreading it between the blocks of wooden houses. Firemen raced into the streets, but the heat of the flames melted their hoses. That hardly mattered: The quake had twisted and split all the water mains.

Only one fire hydrant, on a corner of Dolores Park, continued to put out a steady stream of water. Thus, Sparky, as it’s called, saved the Victorian houses just to the south in Noe Valley. A century later, Sparky’s grateful neighbors give the hydrant a fresh coat of gold paint each April 18.

With nothing but soda water and the contents of chamber pots to put out the fire, the Army and other volunteers began dynamiting buildings, hoping to starve the fire of oxygen and create firebreaks. Rushing ahead of the wind and flames, they filled basements with explosives. Everything in Union Square was leveled to save the St. Francis hotel, then only 2 years old, although fire eventually gutted the interior anyway.

Mansions on Nob Hill were blown into rubble. A marble-and-brick portico was all that remained of the Towne mansion, which withstood the earthquake but not the dynamiting. In the days after the quake, this entrance to nowhere came to be known as the Portals of the Past; these days, it stands eerily beside a dark little lake in Golden Gate Park, looking as though the house has only just disappeared.

The dynamiting, done with highly flammable black powder, and executed by anyone with the desire to blow up something, made the fire spread. As the smoke and flames advanced on neighborhoods, whole families trapped beneath their own ceilings were beyond rescue. Patients had to be evacuated from asylums in straitjackets and at gunpoint, and doctors, after emptying their hospitals of everyone who could be moved, gave those left behind massive doses of morphine. By nightfall on April 18, so much of San Francisco was on fire that people claimed to be able to read by the light of it 100 miles away.

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A prophecy comes true

WHEN the rest of the country learned of the destruction, some called it divine retribution. Only a few days before the quake, a missionary from an apocalyptic sect called the Flying Rollers of the House of David warned the city’s residents to give up their wicked ways or God would send them earthquake, fire and pestilence. The Flying Rollers were not displeased to be right.

Mayor Eugene Schmitz visited his own retribution on the city’s residents. Within hours of the quake, he issued a proclamation instructing the militia to KILL -- a word he put in capital letters -- “all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.” But it was difficult to distinguish a looter from a person searching through the rubble for his possessions. A man caught stealing from a corpse was left strung from a telephone pole. A woman who would not wait her turn in a bread line was shot. It’s thought that militiamen killed more than 500 people in the days after the quake, although city officials admitted only to six.

Survivors also were pressed into service. Even famous ones. According to San Francisco City Guides -- which is offering three quake-themed walking tours all year -- actor John Barrymore, who was staying with a paramour at the St. Francis when the quake hit, had to be persuaded by fixed bayonet to help clear rubble.

The strong wind, lack of water and dynamiting kept San Francisco burning for three days. When the fire finally went out -- more because of a change in weather than anything the fire department did -- 508 city blocks, or about 5 square miles, of San Francisco had been reduced to ash and twisted metal.

It’s estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 people died in the earthquake and fire, although for many years the city put the number at 674 because too high a death toll might scare away rebuilding money. (For the same reason, nobody counted the thousands who succumbed to smallpox, typhoid or bubonic plague in the following months.) Most of the survivors were homeless, collecting in parks with whatever they had thought to save -- photo albums and caged parrots, among other things.

The period that followed was captured by dozens of photographers -- including hobbyists with new mass-market Kodak Brownies -- who recorded the leaning houses and smoke-filled skies. About 100 of these sepia-toned photographs and glass lantern slides are collected in the exhibit “1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Women in hats the size of carriage wheels primp before a skyline of burning buildings. Members of the Phelps family, smartly dressed in high collars and pressed skirts, pose outside their refugee tent with their pet parrot. A congregation that lost its church to fire kneels in the grass. The show captures both the destruction of the city and the indestructibility of its residents.

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‘Let’s go rebuild her!’

THERE’S a scene in the 1936 Clark Gable-Jeanette MacDonald movie “San Francisco,” in which a group of soot-covered residents peers over a ridge at the smoldering city and sees that the fires have gone out.

“Let’s go!” they shout to one another in cinematic bravado. “Let’s go rebuild her bigger and better than before!” And without waiting to locate as much as a hammer, they march back into the city, singing a full-throated chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The scene is painfully hokey. Still, I can never watch it without a catch in my throat, perhaps because it’s not far from the truth.

San Franciscans were eager to rebuild their city -- so eager that in the months after the quake, 15,000 horses died hauling away debris or hauling in lumber. A man named R.B. Hale watched his department store catch fire at 11 a.m. on the first day of the fire, and by 2 that afternoon had sent a telegram ordering steel for a new store.

The displaced lived first in tent cities, then in camps of two-room shacks built by the San Francisco Relief Corp. These “earthquake cottages” had redwood walls, fir floors and cedar-shingle roofs and were painted park-bench green.

Some of those who couldn’t rebuild their homes -- many insurance companies, fearing bankruptcy from the claims, fled the state -- bought their shacks for $100 in 1907. About 5,000 were deposited all over the city. Today, 27 remain, three of them tucked away in the hills of Bernal Heights, less than a mile from one another, cottages that would sell for more than $1 million today.

In a refugee camp, hundreds of these would have been packed in tight rows, with barely enough room to pass between, as is seen in one photo from “After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,” an exhibit at the Legion of Honor.

For the show and a book of the same title, Mark Klett returned to locations of 1906 photos to record what is there now. Placed side by side like a before-and-after advertisement, Victorian wreckage turns into high-rises and video stores. The refugee camp is now a baseball diamond.

In a photo of burning buildings on Market Street, Lotta’s Fountain, the site of annual earthquake commemorations, pokes into the frame. Among the most recognizable images are the panoramas taken from atop the St. Francis, one in which the sky is blackened by smoke and another of the skeletons of buildings left by the fires.

But for me, these images of the new landscape don’t fully capture the spirit of the San Franciscans who reconstructed it. Less than nine years later, the rebuilt city was splendid enough to host the Pacific Panama International Exposition, which drew nearly 20 million visitors.

Today, it’s still a splendid city and attracts more than 15 million people a year. This splendid city Caruso never saw again; once the Italian tenor shook off the plaster dust, he tested his voice, wrapped his throat in a scarf, and vowed never to visit San Francisco again. His loss, I expect.

There are places that can fix a hold on the people who settle in them, make them feel privileged to be able to complain about the weather or housing prices. There’s nothing logical about it, nothing logical about a place in which you are willing to live between two seismic faults, willing also -- like characters in an old-fashioned movie -- to rebuild that city when the fault lines shift. But I imagine the people of New Orleans understand that pull. And I’m certain the San Franciscans of 1906 did as well.

For me, all the focus on the 1906 earthquake recalls my first time here. It’s been 30 years since that visit, and for the last 25, I’ve been a San Franciscan myself, walking the city’s streets with a little boy in a Giants cap, carrying home a whole fish in a pink plastic bag. In that time, I’ve learned that I don’t need to tell anybody how lucky they are to live here.

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On the earthquake and fire trail

GETTING THERE:

From Los Angeles, it’s 380 miles to San Francisco. From LAX, Burbank, Ontario and Orange County airports, United, Southwest and American offer nonstop flights to San Francisco or Oakland. From Long Beach, only JetBlue flies nonstop and only to Oakland. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $158.

WHERE TO STAY:

Palace Hotel, 2 New Montgomery St.; (415) 512-1111, www.sfpalace.com. Stay where Caruso stayed. The Palace, which looks today much as it did then, survived the quake. The fire, however, gutted the interior. It’s since been fully restored. You can go to bed pretending it’s 1906 -- if you ignore the high-speed Internet connection. Rates begin at $339.

EXHIBITS:

1906 Earthquake: A Disaster in Pictures, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St.; (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org. Ends May 30.

After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street; (415) 863-3330, www.legionofhonor.org. Ends May 28.

LANDMARKS:

Lotta’s Fountain, Market and Kearny streets. The site of the annual 5:13 a.m. earthquake commemoration is not the original lighthouse-shaped fountain but a newer version. For the centennial, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tony Bennett are expected. 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Sparky, 20th and Church streets. The only fire hydrant that worked after the quake, sparing Noe Valley from the fires. It gets a fresh coat of gold paint every April 18.

Portals of the Past, at Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park. The remnants of the Towne mansion, which was dynamited to stop the fires on Nob Hill.

Earthquake cottages. Three of the 27 remaining shacks are in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, at 20 Newman St., 164 Bocana St. and 43 Carver St. A restored shack is on display in Yerba Buena Gardens, south of Mission Street between 3rd and 4th streets, until April 29; www.outsidelands.org.

WALKS:

San Francisco City Guides, San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St.; (415) 557-4266, www.sfcityguides.org. Three 1906-themed walks will continue through the year. No reservations needed. Free, but donations are encouraged.

The San Francisco Historical Society, (415) 775-1111, www.sfhistory.org. Quake-themed walking tours, 10 a.m. each Saturday in April. Old U.S. Mint, 5th and Mission streets. Free.

TO LEARN MORE:

Several excellent books are available about the events of 1906. I particularly liked “The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906” by Philip L. Fradkin. “Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906” by Dan Kurzman puts a personal face on events. Simon Winchester gives them a geological spin in “A Crack in the Edge of the World.”

San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, Visitor Information Services, 900 Market St.; (415) 391-2000. The agency has its centennial event and travel deal information at www.onlysf.sfvisitor.org/earthquake.

Other events are listed with the 1906 Earthquake Centennial Alliance, www.1906centennial.org. The city also has its own site, www.sfrising.org.

-- Janis Cooke Newman