The Most Horrible Calamity
San Francisco is fallin, is fallin. At 5.30 this morning a terrific earthquake shook the city from its foundations by the Golden Gate–immense buildings crumbled and fell...and fire - fire - fire.
Thus began the entry for Wednesday, April 18, 1906 in resident Anne (Fader) Haskell’s diary. I remember very clearly coming across this entry in her hand-written diary. I was looking for something that might be interesting for my research on working women in San Francisco but, coming up empty, I turned to a date I hoped might have something compelling to read. I have been captivated by and used it in just about every paper I’ve written about the city since then.
I found a second diary entry about that fateful day by George W. Farris, who worked as a carpenter in San Francisco and Oakland that also captured some of the drama and immediacy of the event:
As you can see from the image above and this one below, taken just weeks after the fires were finally extinguished, the devastation was extensive.
In the image above, the perspective is from what today is roughly above Pier 39. The "building” on the far right of the image is the old city hall, the squarish-building in the middle foreground is the Fairmont Hotel.
The earthquake and fire of 1906 plays a pivotal and ambiguous role in my dissertation. Many prominent business and political leaders viewed the almost-total destruction of the city as an opportunity to rebuild a city that had developed haphazardly in the frenzy of the Gold Rush and featured many of the worst characteristics of a male-dominated mining town: gambling halls, saloons, and brothels. Since most of the city that hosted these disreputable businesses now lay in ruin, they imagined a modern city would be built in their place to become the urban center of a new American century.
But that’s not quite the way it worked out. More on what happened next time…
You can see more pictures of the post-quake destruction and read about the new technology that made them possible here.
The quote from Haskell’s diary comes from: Anne (Fader) Haskell diary, April 18, 1906, in Haskell Family Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The page from Farris’s diary comes from: George W. Farris diaries, 1879-1910, April 18, 1906, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.