The Great 1906

San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

TERESA PONTINI
JORIS KATKEVICIUS
presentation on 19-11-2013
The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
5:12 AM - April 18, 1906

Facts
The dawn of the twentieth century was a time of great hope and prosperity in North-
ern California. Everyone was looking forward to the new century that would surely
be the greatest in the American West’s very short history. Few looked backward to When What happened
the Native American tales of movements of the earth, the fires that had destroyed Where
San Francisco numerous times in mid-nineteenth century, and the destructive earth-
quakes of 1865 and 1868 in the Bay Area. That was the time of the Grand Opera,
with the renowned tenor Enrico Caruso, and the industrial power of the big barons
Mark Hopkins and Leland Stanford who gave to the city a general state of Wellness.
It was a sort of paradise, destination of great migration flows from China and
Italy till the day in wich the earth trembled.
On April 18, 1906 at 5:12 am PDT, an Mw 7.9 earthquake shook the city of
San Francisco and the surrounding region for approximately 45 to 60 seconds.
The quake ruptured the San Andreas fault to the north and south of the city.
It wasn’t the first time that an earthquake hit California (the bigger one till that mo-
ment has been the 1868 one) precisely because of its location close to the fault; but
never before had occurred a catastrophe of this magnitude in all the United States.
The rupture extended for 430 kilometers. Parts of the fault were off- “The San Andreas Fault is a continental
set by as much as 6 meters. By day’s end and dozens of after- transform fault that extends roughly 1,300
km through California in the United States.
shocks later, much of San Francisco was a shambles and large fires
It forms the tectonic boundary between the
had broken out dalle tubature del gas scoppiate, threatening the rest. Pacific Plate and the North American Plate”.
The fires burned for three more days as water supplies, damaged by ground
movement, were reduced to a trickle.
At the end approximatey the 80% of the city was destroyed and left at least
200,000 homeless and more than 3,000 people dead. In fact, these data re-
sulted for a long time uncertain and still difficult to reconstruct due to the
lost of all official documents during the disaster. For example while the of-
ficial death count was close to 500, more realistic estimates concluded that
close to 3,000 people dead and more than 400, 000 homeless. The press and
the political authorities played a key role in trying to downplay the incident.
The real estate board met a week after the earthquake and passed
a resolution that the phrase ‘the great earthquake’ should no long-
er be used; the event would be known instead as ‘the great fire.’
Fire was the principal hazard in American cities during the late 19th cen-
tury, and this placed San Francisco squarely on a list alongside other great cit-
ies (Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore) to have experienced conflagrations.
Even now, true San Franciscans call the debacle of 1906 “the Great Earthquake
and Fire”, but in fact fires are part and parcel of any large earthquake. Separating
the calamity into two lesser calamities is one way for people to take it in stride.
That was because at the time, San Francisco, was the largest city west of
the Mississippi, with the fastest growing economy in the United States.
It was feared therefore, as partially happened, to lose the economic suprema-
cy of the area being lost all the investors who would have classified the city of
San Francisco like a vulnerable and too much not sure city for the transactions.
San Francisco had grown in a haphazard manner since the Gold Rush of 1849 as a clas-
sical Western boomtown. This very fast grow up caused the development of a very
simple and regular Urban with a lot of problems on narrow streets remain still today.
Reaction
Rebuilt causes
There were several earthquakes since the founding of the city in 1769, but the consequences
problem does not seem to be considered. San Francisco was destined to see its
buildings fall not only because it was built near a fault line, but also because the
city was poorly constructed. Certain buildings, though, suffered more damage
than others did because of surface instability rather than because of structural
weaknesses. Wood frame homes, when well constructed, absorbed the earth-
quake shocks well. Many wood homes, however, had poorly constructed chim-
neys that toppled, maiming and destroying homes. Many of the city’s brick build-
ings were of inferior quality because bricklayers did not wet the bricks before
applying the mortar, making the brick walls weak and prone to crumbling. Ac-
cording to the opinion of the architectural historian Tobriner who has studied
the reconstruction of buildings following early modern earthquakes in Europe,
and he has been a member of teams that investigate damage to buildings from
modern-day earthquakes, City’s architects and builders, joined at the end of the
nineteenth century by engineers, tried to deal with the problem even though
they had limited knowledge of the causes and nature of earthquakes. He con-
tests assertions that San Franciscans minimized or ignored earthquake danger”.
Now, with the city totally destroyed and new architectonic competences more ad-
vanced could have rethought to the city, to its town-planning reorganization and
moreover coud have established laws for the construction of more resistant build-
ings.In fact safety in future disasters was sacrificed to the expediency of the moment.
Categorizing the disaster as a fire rather than as a result of the earthquake
meant that the reconstruction could proceed on the basis of making the city fire-
proof rather than earthquake-proof. A focus on the earthquake could have sig-
nificantly delayed rebuilding: there was widespread agreement on how to build
fire-proof construction, while methods to construct earthquake-proof buildings
were uncertain and untested. The first temporary structures were being built
within weeks of the earthquake. Eventually, new permanent buildings were con-
structed taller and grander than those that had been lost. Within 12 months,
60 mi (95 km) of streets made impassable by debris from the earthquake and
fires were cleared. More than 200 mi (322 km) of street railways were restored.
Overall, $75 million was spent in the first year on the reconstruction ef-
forts, and by April 1907, around 435,000 people were living in the city.
The aim was to present to America and the whole world the efficiency and eco-
nomic power of the city on the occasion of The Panama-Pacific International
Exposition (PPIE) that SF had earned the honor of hosting winning against New
Orleans.Its ostensible purpose was to celebrate the completion of the Panama
Canal,but it was widely seen in the city as an opportunity to showcase its re-
covery from the 1906 earthquake. The fair was constructed on a 635 acre (2.6
km²) site in San Francisco, along the northern shore now known as the Marina.
The Burnham plan
For what concern the urban renewal, already in the early 1900s it was drawn
up a plan for a renewal of San Francisco that would correct the haphazard-
ness of the city’s layout, as well as the rabble who contributed human disorder.
They wanted to rennovate San Francisco as a “beautiful” place, in the man-
ner of Paris or Washington, DC. In 1904, Phelan had contracted Daniel Burn-
ham of Chicago, the country’s most famous urban planner, to come up with
an entirely new vision of San Francisco. Burnham had a great deal of experi-
ence when it came to large projects. He was the foremost practitioner of the city grid
“City Beautiful” aesthetic, which dictated that architectural beauty and or-
der inspired civic pride within urban residents. Burnham’s plan for San Fran-
cisco proposed to change the city completely. Now, If realized, the new city
would be a radical departure from what it was before the earthquake and fire.
The Burnham Plan required a great deal of patience, money, and wholesale co-
firefighters plan after the earthquake.

Burnham Plan
operation from property owners – a fact that doomed it from the start of recon-
struction. His plan for San Francisco was, by Burnham’s own admission, primarily
a plan for streets and parks. “A city must ever deal mainly with the direction and
width of its streets,” he said, and his plan for San Francisco revealed an infatua-
tion with redrawing streets and creating new diagonals and circular intersections.
Parks held almost equal importance; he envisioned a San Francisco in which fully
one-third of the entire land area would be parks, included a massive urban park
connecting Twin Peaks to Lake Merced that would have been the biggest Urban
park of America. At the center of Burnham’s vision was a monumental Civic Cent-
er, to include the existing City Hall and Post Office, and a new Union Station and
opera house. Tuttavia presented no real planning for the city’s economic future.
All in all, his master plan was not economically feasible, not practical, not even
very original.Monumental in its assumptions and objectives, however, it may be
best understood as a lesson in both beauty and order. That was totally in contraste
with the goal of the city of growing up fastly and without a too large investment.
So, the plan was scrapped and only some of his ideas put into practice,
while it was decided to rebuild the city following the original structure.
A new plan for China Town
Pursuing his idea of ​​order and aesthetic perfection Burnham planned to solve
some social issues that encountered complaints from the mayor and citizens.
The Chinatown in San Francisco was one of the most important across America,
and at the same time a problem for the image of the alleys sanfrancisco loud
right in the center of the metropolis. Before the quake, Chinatown had a repu-
tation as a crowded slum rife with disease, brothels and opium. But Starr says
Chinatown also had something that city leaders envied: it occupied one of the
most desirable locations in the city. In fact Chinese immigrants had come to
work in the railroads and mines in the past century and were widely viewed as
a competitive threat to the working class. The Burnham plan was totally shared. Burnham draws
In fact, even before the 1906 quake, the local newspapers editorialized in fa-
vor of moving the Chinese. After the quake, city leaders presented their plans
to relocate Chinatown to the mud flats on the southern outskirts of the city.
The Chinese also had another economic argument in their favor. They knew
that their taxes contributed greatly to the city’s coffers and that other West-
ern port cities would welcome them. San Francisco leaders relented and
the reconstruction of Chinatown began about a year after the disaster.
But the buildings constructed were different from the ones destroyed. He
convinced other merchants to follow his plan and hire American archi-
tects to redesign his building to look like China, in order to attract tour-
ists. In many instances, the architects designed American-style buildings,
but placed colorful pagodas with curled eaves and dragon motifs on top.
The earthquake of 1906 had a second, more far-reaching impact.
Virtually all of the birth records in the city were destroyed. That al-
lowed Chinese-born men to claim that they were American citi-
zens, and therefore had the right to bring their families to America.
“To a certain extent the loss of the paperwork for immigration in San Fran-
cisco in April 1906 represented a kind of wholesale amnesty for the Chi-
nese”. The children who were brought to America came to be known as “pa-
per sons,” because many arrived with false or questionable documents.
The situation was even more caotic than before the quake.

This too rapid grow cost too much to the city of sanfrancisco. A plan does not ab-
solutely not adequate made ​​the city even more vulnerable than before to earth-
quakes thet are known to be a real danger in the area although numerous stand-
ards have been adopted currently. Other two earthquakes hit the city: one in 1989
provocating 63 dead and 3,757 injured and another one in 2011 with less damages.
 Panama exibition

Bibliography:

Stephen Tobriner,Bracing for Disaster: Earthquake-Resistant Architecture

and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838-1933, Heyday, 2006.

Dan Kurzman, Disaster!, HarperCollins, Apr 1, 2002.

Eric Saul, Don DeNevi, The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, 1906,
Celestial Arts, 1981.

Web pages:

http://www.archives.gov (national archive)

http://www.history.com
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu (the bancroft library, online exibit)

video:

San Francisco Earthquake Aftermath, producer unknown.

San Francisco Pre Earthquake-Fire: “A Trip Down Market Street”