Tea, Memories: 80 Years After the Big S.F. Quake

Alfred Mirande remembers the day as if it were yesterday--and at 100 years old, he has enjoyed a lot of yesterdays.

“Hoo-boy, the earthquake,” he said Friday, his sluggish voice belying a sharp memory. “That sure woke us up, all right. It shook us up pretty bad.”

Jack Downey, who was only four months old at the time, has murkier memories of that day 80 years ago Friday when a devastating earthquake knocked this city on it backside and sparked 52 separate fires to burn over what remained. Still, he claims with a bit of blarney, he does have one memory.

“All I remember,” Downey grinned as he tipped his derby to an angle, “is being carried around a lot in the street.”

Survivors of the great 1906 earthquake filled the streets again Friday--this time to celebrate one of the more colorful eras in San Francisco’s history--and to remember the 2,010 people now estimated to have died in the quake and the searing flames that followed.

“What we’re really celebrating is the spirit of San Francisco,” said city archivist Gladys Hansen, who was appointed by Mayor Dianne Feinstein to coordinate the anniversary celebration. “The world thought San Francisco was doomed, but the people were determined to rebuild their city even better than before. That spirit--and our city--live on.”

A Familiar Pattern

For the most part, the commemoration followed a pattern familiar to local old-timers. It included treks to such historic landmarks as Lotta’s Fountain, which stood defiantly over the rubble of downtown after the fire, and the repainting of the “golden hydrant,” the only fire plug still working after the quake had severed most major water mains.

But the 80th anniversary party also included a full complement of teas, luncheons and receptions for 300 or so quake survivors.

The celebration began, as such festivities always do, at 5:12 a.m.--the minute the quake hit on April 18, 1906--with the laying of a black-crepe and red-carnation wreath at the base of Lotta’s Fountain, a cast-iron tower which historians describe variously as “homely” and “charmingly ugly.”

The fountain was given to the city in 1875 by the famous frontier dance hall singer Lotta Crabtree. By surviving the destruction around it and serving as a meeting place for separated families, it became a symbol of the earthquake.

The temblor struck before the Richter scale was invented, but subsequent calculations estimate the force of the shock at between 7.8 and 8.3. It was centered along the San Andreas Fault in Marin County, just north of the city, and was said to have rattled windows as far away as Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south.

Hospital Crushed

Its force flattened most of the then-small town of Santa Rosa, 60 miles to the north, and crushed a mental hospital near San Jose, killing about 100 patients and staff members.

San Franciscans, however, are quick to point out that it was fire--not the quake--that damaged their city the most. The distinction has long been a point of pride, apparently because civic leaders at the time of the temblor worried that fear of subsequent quakes would discourage investment and thus inhibit rebuilding the city.

The city nonetheless was hit hard. At the time, 90% of its buildings were made of wood, providing ample fuel for the fires sparked by broken gas mains, crossed electrical wires, overturned stoves and toppled chimneys.

Making the situation worse were broken water mains, which made fighting the fires nearly impossible; the death of Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, who was crushed in a collapsed firehouse, and the failure of the city’s new electrical fire-alarm system.

The flames burned unchecked for three days, consuming 28,188 buildings in a 4.11-square-mile area and leaving nearly half of the city’s 450,000 residents without homes. Fancy homes and shanties alike were dynamited for fire breaks in advance of the flames, their residents joining other refugees in leaving the city or setting up camp in Golden Gate Park.

Death Toll Unclear

The cost in human life has never been accurately determined, partly because the intense heat of the fire cremated many victims where they fell and partly because an urgent desire to prevent the spread of disease forced quick burials--sometimes in mass graves, other times in unmarked plots.

Contemporary accounts put the death toll at between 478 and 503, but later estimates placed it above 700. More recently, Hansen, the city archivist, undertook a systematic records check, which resulted in a list of 2,010 people who are either confirmed dead or vanished on the day of the earthquake and are presumed to have died.

A quake of similar intensity at the same place today would claim 11,000 lives, experts say.

Despite the devastation, the city rebounded swiftly. Donations poured forth from a variety of sources--the federal government, the nation’s schoolchildren, the city of Chicago, which had suffered its own devastating fire, even wealthy capitalist David Rockefeller, who reportedly sent a check for $1 million.

The aid sparked one of the most spectacular booms in the city’s legendary boom-town history. Three months after the quake hit, more than 25,000 workers were busy clearing and rebuilding the burned area. By 1909, more than 20,500 new buildings had been put up, most of them safer and stronger than the ones they replaced.

In 1915, less than 10 years after San Francisco was declared dead by some doubters, the city boastfully hosted one of the grandest World’s Fairs in history, the Panama Pacific Exposition celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal.

“You’d think that the earthquake would be a negative thing,” said amateur historian Ron Ross. “It’s not, and it really never was. The day the fire was out, they were back to rebuild; it’s been a joyous part of the city’s history ever since.”