South of Market Street, where tracts sat precariously on landfill, the ground liquefied over ancient waterfront and wetlands. The four-story Valencia Hotel, a working-class lodging house, sank into its fluid foundation. With only its top story protruding above ground, lodgers on the lower floors were submerged and drowned.
Dozens of small fires burst from toppled chimneys and cracked stove flues. Fire alarms stayed strangely silent. The alarm center on Brenham Place had been destroyed. At one station, fire horses bolted in fear, so firefighters had to tow their engines by hand. When they hooked up their hoses, only droplets trickled out, so the firefighters siphoned leaky sewage to spray on the flames.
Steers being herded to the Potrero stockyards were spooked by the shaking and stampeded along Mission Street. To avoid being trampled, bystanders shot the crazed cattle between the eyes.
On Merchant Street, near the federal morgue and laboratory, fish dealer Alex Paladini was unloading the morning’s catch when the earthquake disintegrated buildings around him, burying horses, drivers, wagons, and fish under tons of bricks and mortar. The steeds’ necks protruded from the debris, their manes caked with dust, tongues lolling. The neighborhood around the morgue was now one giant street of the dead.
The ground shock savaged City Hall. Its regal dome teetered on empty ribs. All around it stretched acres of rubble. Before the day was over, flames devoured municipal records, incinerating all city history before 1906.
Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who had been reelected despite an ongoing graft probe, now played his role with cool command. He closed the saloons. He imposed a curfew from dark until dawn. When rioters raided liquor and cigar shops, he issued an executive order for federal troops and police to shoot looters on sight. From the ruins of City Hall, he moved the seat of government to the Hall of Justice on Kearny Street, then to the Fairmont Hotel, then to a hall in the Western Addition, keeping one step ahead of the flames.
Schmitz wired the mayor of Oakland, demanding hoses and dynamite. From the capital in Sacramento, Governor George Pardee boarded a train toward the stricken city, setting up his base of operations in Oakland, where phone and wire service remained intact. He telegraphed Los Angeles, imploring: “For God’s sake send food.”2
Central Emergency Hospital collapsed, killing doctors and nurses. Its patients were moved to the Mechanics’ Pavilion. The night before, the pavilion had been awhirl with roller skaters competing in a tourmanent. Now it was a war zone, littered with broken bodies and doctors racing about in desperate triage.
As the Palace Hotel writhed and shuddered, beds bucking and chandeliers crashing, the tenor Enrico Caruso, fresh from singing the role of Don José in Carmen, was wrenched from his dreams into a nightmare. After throwing on his fur coat, the portly star ran into the street and headed north toward the St. Francis Hotel, where his opera colleagues had been staying. Some say he wept. “Hell of a place!” Caruso cried. “I never come back here.” Upon his return to Italy, he kept his promise and never sang in the city again.3
In Hayes Valley, a woman tried to cook breakfast on a broken stove and succeeded in igniting the walls of her frame house. The resulting blaze, called the “ham and eggs fire,” ate quickly through the wooden Victorian neighborhood, growing into a major conflagration. Crossing Van Ness Avenue, it torched church steeples in its path, burning on to the Civic Center, where blowing cinders lit the roof of the Mechanics’ Pavilion. As smoke seeped into the makeshift hospital, doctors again evacuated patients. As afternoon turned to evening, the “ham and eggs fire” roared south and merged with a fire in the Mission district.
Two other fires coalesced into a second giant inferno. At Delmonico’s restaurant, a cooking fire burned north and merged with a big blaze in the wholesale district that joined the waterfront and Chinatown. From these two infernos blossomed the Great Fire, which would rage for three days.
Fiction writers plundered their imaginations for words to describe the sight. The novelist Mary Austin wrote that the fire gave off a “lurid glow like the unearthly flush on the face of a dying man.”4 Another eyewitness to the disaster, the novelist Jack London, trod the smoking city with his wife, Charmian.
“A sickly light was creeping over the face of things,” London wrote. “Once only the sun broke through the smoke-pall, blood red, and showing a quarter its usual size. The smoke-pall itself, viewed from beneath, was a rose color that pulsed and fluttered with lavender shades. Then it turned mauve and yellow and dun. There was no sun. And so dawned the second day on stricken San Francisco.”5
Surrounded on three sides by water, the city was dry. The major water distribution mains all over the city had ruptured. As a result, fire hoses couldn’t tap the eighty million gallons of water stored in city reservoirs.6 Hugging the waterfront from Fort Mason to Hunter’s Point, tugboats pumped seawater from the bay into hoses stretched ashore. The other weapon was dynamite, ignited to carve firebreaks between the walls of flame. Charges were exploded along Van Ness Avenue to halt the westward march of the Great Fire. But other explosions ignited by inexperienced hands served only to launch firebrands that spread the blazes.
A drunken munitions man, John Bermingham, carted explosives into Chinatown to demolish the wreckage and ended up starting sixty fires. As witnesses watched in horror, he lurched around setting charges that blew up buildings with people still trapped inside. Bodies flew fifty feet above the rubble, falling back into the flames below.7
Atrocities were rumored—of jewel thieves cutting the fingers and ears from corpses, of bloodthirsty troops bayoneting innocent citizens. As teams of rescuers clawed frantically to free the injured from rubble, some lost a race with the approaching fires. One man, hopelessly pinned down by debris, begged his rescuers to kill him before the flames burned him alive. A gunman stepped from the crowd, gravely confirmed the trapped man’s last wishes, drew a pistol, and fired. He then turned himself in to the mayor, who commended his humane act.8
Tallying losses of such magnitude was almost impossible. In a telegram to Senator George C. Perkins in Washington, Governor Pardee estimated: “Three hundred million taxable property wiped out in San Francisco….”9 Others placed the loss at three times as high.
In the toll of major city monuments, the Chronicle and Call Buildings and the giant Emporium department store were lost. Of the storied mansions of Nob Hill tycoons—Stanford, Hopkins, Flood, Huntington, and Crocker—only scorched and hollow shells remained. Likewise, the Palace, the Fairmont, and the St. Francis also burned.
Tireless bucket brigades and employees beating embers with wet sacks saved the post office, courthouse, and U.S. Mint along Mission Street. Exhausted firefighters preserved the Ferry Building and the Southern Pacific Railroad Terminal, allowing over 200,000 refugees to flee by rail and sea.
The U.S. Army and city officials estimated that about 500 people had died. Later, historians calculated that the true toll of crushed and cremated humanity more closely approximated 3,000 lives.10
By the morning of Saturday, April 21, streams of seawater, favorable winds, and dynamited firebreaks finally starved the fire of fuel. In its wake, 490 blocks were incinerated. The homes of 250,000 San Franciscans were gone, along with libraries, courts, jails, theaters, restaurants, schools, churches, and centers of government and business. Communications and transportation systems were mute and paralyzed. And 10,000 of the city’s gardens were a memory under ash and rubble.11