A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  And it is said that some of those who walked home late, or rose unusually early, noticed that a number of animals in the city behaved a little oddly that night. The horses in a livery stable on Powell Street, for example, seemed skittish; and in fire stations, men could be heard behind the stable doors soothing animals that appeared unduly restless. One of the better-known first-person accounts of the earthquake was in the June 1906 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, by a young Paris-born American writer named James Marie Hopper. He wrote of passing a livery stable on Post Street, and of hearing the obviously unhappy horses inside. He asked the stable boy idling at the entrance about it. “Restless tonight,” the youngster is said to have replied. “Don’t know why.”*

  At the Chutes Amusement Park that had been built at the turn of the century in the west of the city, in that area now called Richmond, there were a large number of caged animals. It was later reported by their keepers that they exhibited no peculiar behavior before the event, and that they remained quiet, cowed, and fearful during the mainshock of the earthquake. Once it was over, however, they all roared lustily with relief and puzzled exuberance. And the park’s superintendent later related that the animal that led the roaring chorus, and that can thus be said to have exhibited the greatest sensitivity to what was happening beneath his feet, was the animal possessed of the biggest feet of all: the elephant.

  But before the earthquake began this elephant was entirely unaware of what was stealing up on him. No one person—and no animal, bird, or insect—had the faintest idea of what lay in store. No credible premonition has ever been reported.

  THE SUN WAS DUE to come up that Wednesday at 5:31 A.M., Pacific Standard Time. The sky had begun to lighten about fifteen minutes before five; and by the time the bells of Old Saint Mary’s Church in Chinatown had pealed the hour, all of the sky beyond the hills of Oakland and Livermore was lightening fast, limned with the palest, clearest eggshell blue.

  The gaslights that had illuminated the deserted streets dimmed and were snuffed out with faint popping sounds at eight minutes past five. At about the same time, an unseen hand in a faraway engine house turned a crank and threw a giant lever, and huge drums began to roll; and so began the clanking grind of steel, steel rope, and ever-turning steel wheels that was then, and is now, one of San Francisco’s most haunting and evocative sounds. The cable-car lines were running, and one by one their carriages rumbled out of their barns, ready to haul passengers up and over the city’s innumerable hills.

  And also one by one, people—men, by and large—began to appear in the still half-dark streets. These were either early starters, idling their sleepy way to their offices or shops, or night-shift workers heading wearily back home. The smell of baking bread, mingled with coffee, was in the air, as was the smoke of early cooking fires. The blue-uniformed policemen, slow and imperturbable, patrolled their allotted beats. The breeze was westerly but light. Dawn was unfolding quietly, serenely. All was perfect peace.

  TEN

  The Savage Interruption

  I have the honour to report that at 5:18 on the

  morning of Wednesday, the 18th instant, a violent

  earthquake shock occurred in San Francisco—

  From a diplomatic telegram sent on April 25, 1906,

  from SIR COURTNEY BENNETT,

  His Britannic Majesty’s Consul-General,

  San Francisco, to Sir Edward Grey, Bart., &c., &c.,

  Secretary of State for Foreign and

  Colonial Affairs, London

  THE RUSTLING OF THE LEAVES

  WASHINGTON STREET, LIKE MOST OF THE THOROUGH fares that cross San Francisco from east to west, does not quite make it all the way from the Bay to the ocean. No one street does. In the specific case of Washington Street all manner of parks, diversions, and doglegs interrupt it, and in the end the huge military reserve of the Presidio blocks it from any western access to the Pacific.

  But it is nonetheless a very long road indeed, one of the city’s longest, and, on its arrow-straight way from the billets of the soldiery in the west to the docks of the Embarcadero and the storage sheds of the produce market in the east, it scythes past warehouses and office buildings, passes right through the crowded dilapidations of Chinatown, and rises and falls with the hills—Nob, Russian, and Pacific Heights—where the city swells like to live and play—and, in so doing, happens to present an almost ideal cross section of the city. It is in this regard a rather quintessentially San Francisco street, and one that by virtue of all of its manifestations—its houses, its mercantile offices, its slums, its clubs, its hotels, and these days its skyscrapers—offers up the very essence of San Francisco.

  So it is perhaps appropriate that at 5:12 A.M. on that Wednesday morning the earthquake that was born out under the ocean beyond the Golden Gate seemed to come roaring into the city, as eyewitnesses like to remember, along the four switchback miles of Washington Street.

  It made its entrance in a spectacular, horrifying, unforgettable way. It came thundering in on what looked like huge undulating waves, with the entire surface of the earth and everything that stood upon it seeming to lift up and then roll in forward from the direction of the ocean. The whole street and all its great buildings rose and fell, rose and fell, in what looked like an enormous tidal bore, an unstoppable tsunami of rock and brick and cement and stone. A policeman named Jesse B. Cook was standing at the eastern end of Washington Street, talking to a vegetable seller from the market—and he recalled suddenly stopping, horror-struck, as he saw what was happening along the street ahead of him.

  At first there was what Officer Cook called “a deep and terrible rumbling”—presumably the reason that he looked up. Everything by now was fairly well illuminated by the gathering dawn, and so as he looked uphill he could see quite clearly. The ocean itself was spilling what looked like immense waves of water down the street; it seemed as if a huge tide of buildings and pavement had been lifted up and was relentlessly bearing down on him and on all the great commercial palaces of downtown. He spoke of the entire roadway undulating, billowing, and enormous breakers speeding toward him. For the officer, and for those few others who were abroad at that hour, or who were outside or at a window and thus able to see what was happening, it was a scene that had all the makings of an unutterably dreadful nightmare.

  Policemen, trained as observers and equipped with notebooks, made excellent witnesses of the events of those first few moments. Officer Cook was one of a handful whose reports have an awful redolence about them:

  The earth seemed to rise under me, and at the same time both Davis and Washington streets opened up in several places and water came up out of these cracks. The street seemed to settle under me, and did settle in some places from about one to three feet. The buildings around and about me began to tumble and fall and kept me pretty busy for a while dodging bricks. I saw the top-story of the building at the southwest corner of Washington and Davis streets fall and kill Frank Bodwell …

  A few blocks away on Market Street was Officer Michael Grady, who was on his way back to the station after spending the night patrolling in Chinatown. He, too, heard a rumbling sound, like thunder. The ground began to shake, and he was quick-witted enough to run immediately into the middle of the street,* which, in the same way as Washington Street half a mile away, was rising and falling like the sea:

  I thought I was gone when I saw the Phelan Building suddenly lurch over Market Street. But it lurched back again, and as it set back in its place its foundations ripped and cracked and seemed to screech. The tall Call Building rocked to and fro from north to south, while the Mutual Bank Building on the opposite side of Market Street, near Geary, similarly lurched and dipped over the thoroughfare.

  The shake ended with a violent twist or rotary motion that caused the stone cornices of the building on the south side of Market Street west of the Call Building, and therefore much nearer to me, to come crashing down on the sidewalk. At the same time the front of the Oberon Building, on O�
��Farrell Street near Stockton, and parts of other buildings on the same side of that block, came tumbling to the ground. These were all in plain sight of where I was standing.

  On Grant Avenue the effects were not so startling; but nearly all the plate glass windows sprung and seemed to explode as they were bent and twisted by the force.…

  There were police aplenty on dawn duty at City Hall; their perspective was thus from rather farther to the west than that of Grady and Cook (they were at the corner of Larkin and McAllister Streets—a mile west of Grady, two miles west of Cook). Edmond Parquette, for example, was visiting what was known locally as the CEH, the Central Emergency Hospital, which was in the City Hall basement.

  I was just stepping through the entrance of the office when the whole place began to shake, and in a few seconds the shaking became so severe that I had to hold on to the door to save myself from falling.… The building was shaking and rolling like a mad thing. The furniture was rolling and hopping about, the plaster and everything else on top was falling. Then there was the roar of the earthquake itself, and the crashes and shocks and rumblings as we felt the walls and pillars of the City Hall bursting and breaking over our heads.

  One floor above him was Edward Plume, another patrolman working the end of his shift in City Hall’s small police office. He experienced much the same sensation, but noted the time, interestingly, as “5:10 A.M. by the station clock,” fully two minutes earlier than the time in those precise reports from central San Francisco and across the Bay (most notably the five mentioned earlier) by which history has since fixed itself.

  Quite probably Officer Plume’s record of 5:10 A.M. signifies very little—other than that his police station clock was slightly slow. Except—his station was in fact a little closer to the fault and its rupture than the other observers: One could therefore expect the plowshare wave from it to rip through City Hall just a few moments before it reached the waterfront, and significantly before it reached the sleeping Professor Gilbert in his cot nine miles away across the Bay in Berkeley a few moments before. Not two minutes before: With the wave traveling at two miles a second the time difference would be barely noticeable.

  The laggardly police-station clock gives us the hint that those in the west of San Francisco experienced the quake first; and it makes it more than likely that Clarence Judson, the workman who was swimming in the Pacific off Ocean Beach before dawn that day, experienced the event a few moments before everyone else did, simply because he was so very much closer to where it all began.

  Officer Plume’s notes reveal an experience similar to those of his three colleagues, except that they offer rather more of the sense of terror everyone must have felt:

  The noise from the outside became deafening. I could hear the massive pillars that upheld the cornices and cupola of the City Hall go cracking with reports like cannon, then falling with crashes like thunder. Huge stones and lumps of masonry came crashing down outside our doors; the large chandelier swung to and fro, then fell from the ceiling with a bang. In an instant the room was full of dust as well as soot and smoke from the fire-place. It seemed to be reeling like the cabin of a ship in a gale. Feeling sure that the building could never survive such shocks, and expecting every moment to be buried under a mass of ruins, I shouted to Officer Dwyer to get out. The lights were then out, and though the dawn had come outside, the station, owing to the dust and smoke inside, and the ruins and dust outside, was all in darkness.

  Officer Plume’s view of the likely collapse of City Hall was entirely accurate. Twenty-six years it may have been in the making, and millions may have been spent on rendering its external glories, but the building was like so much of the San Francisco of the day: gaudily finished but shoddily made. Most of it fell that day, and all of it had to be torn down in 1909. The building does still have its defenders, who say it was not that poorly built: They note that a number of city offices remained working in the shored-up ruins until the entire structure was finally demolished. Most, however, including federal government inspectors, condemned its construction, and in no uncertain terms.

  Not far away a policeman named Harry Walsh was having much the same experience as Plume: and had already witnessed death and destruction at a machine shop, where he had stopped off to have a cup of coffee with the night watchman. He was appalled to see huge cracks opening up on the pavement of Fremont Street, and then closing and reopening as the shock waves shook everything to pieces. He tried to crank a message to police headquarters on a corner message box, but the lines had already gone down.

  What he saw next was memorably awful: a stampede of wild long-horned cattle tearing toward him along Mission Street, from the direction of the docks. It turned out later that a group of Mexican vaqueros had unloaded these beef cattle from an inbound ship and were driving them to the city stockyards in the south of town. The moment the shocks began, the drivers took off, leaving their herd to fend for itself—and, as Officer Walsh put it, the cattle promptly “went daft with terror and started running anywhere,” continuing:

  While a lot of them were running along the sidewalks of Mission Street, between Fremont and First streets, a big warehouse toppled onto the thoroughfare and crushed most of them clean through the pavement into the basement, killing them and burying them outright. The first that I saw of the bunch were caught and crippled by falling cornices, or the like … and were in great misery. So I took out my gun and shot them. Then I had only six shots left, and I saw that more cattle were coming along, and that there was going to be big trouble.

  At that moment I ran into John Moller, who owned the saloon.… I asked him if he had any ammunition in his place and if so, to let me have some quick. He was very scared and excited over the earthquake and everything; and when he saw the cattle coming along, charging and bellowing, he seemed to lose more nerve.

  Anyway, there was no time to think. Two of the steers were charging right at us while I was asking him to help, and he started to run for his saloon. I had to be quick about my part of the job because, with only a revolver as a weapon, I had to wait until the animal was quite close before I dared fire. Otherwise I would not have killed or even stopped him.

  As I shot down one of them I saw the other charging after John Moller, who was then at the door of his saloon and apparently quite safe. But as I was looking at him and the steer, Moller turned, and seemed to become paralyzed with fear. He held out both hands as if beseeching the beast to go back. But it charged on and ripped him before I could get near enough to fire.

  When I killed the animal it was too late to save the man.…*

  Then a young fellow came running up carrying a rifle and a lot of cartridges. It was an old Springfield and he knew how to use it. He was a cool shot, and he understood cattle, too. He told me he came from Texas … we probably killed fifty or sixty … we used the rifle alternately, the Texan and myself.

  The celebrity-filled Palace Hotel—where Caruso was staying and had gone to his room at 3:00 A.M.—was to be a victim, too, though, like so many of the city’s buildings, it fell not to the earthquake itself but to the subsequent fire. It stood secure at the first shock, though a passerby named Frank Ames, in the hotel’s grand courtyard, later reported that the palm trees swayed, the ground dropped beneath his feet, and the horses under the hotel’s porte cochere took off in panic. As they did so, he wrote, “I could not help noticing that the beasts’ eyes were big with terror and foam was coming from their nostrils.” The earthquake, Ames noted, seemed to be running there from east to west—the opposite way from that noted by most of the other witnesses—and “the cobblestones of Market Street seemed alive. Every one of them was moving, and the streetcar rails were twisted from their places.”

  Other guests spilled out into the hallways, most of them half dressed. One guest said the sound was that of a monstrous train roaring by, and that the hotel seemed to twist on its axis, moaning audibly as it moved. Ernest Goerlitz, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera touring company, said
the hotel “seemed to dance a jig.” One Nevadan staying at the hotel’s annex across the road stood up once he thought the worst was over, only to find the floor jerked from beneath his feet, pitching him through the bathroom door and upending him in the bathtub. Another guest reported looking out of the window at the throngs gathering in the streets below; he noted that they included a woman in a nightgown who was carrying a naked baby by its legs, as though it were a trussed turkey.

  Caruso was unutterably terrified. His conductor, Alfred Hertz—who of course had to endure the shaking in his own bed, holding on grimly to the mattress supports while the crashing and banging went on and on and on—rushed to the maestro’s room. Caruso was sitting bolt upright in bed in his nightshirt, weeping loudly. He wrote later in a London newspaper that he first thought it was all a dream, “that I was on a ship on the ocean, and for a moment I think I am dreaming that I am crossing the water on my way to my beautiful country.” But, according to others, he was found in a near-hysterical state, claiming that the quake was a punishment sent to him directly, and announcing that his voice had been irreparably damaged. Hertz insisted that he try to test it: He did, croaked a little nervously, and then all worked perfectly well.

  After which Caruso’s story branches in so many diverting ways that there is precious little reliability from this point. Did he put a fur coat over his pajamas? Or over his nightshirt? Did he change into formal dress so ornate that, as one writer had it, he looked as though he were about to make a courtesy call at some embassy? He was to write later that he did indeed summon his valet, who dressed him, repacked his innumerable trunks of clothing, and had them manhandled down the stairs (because the rising rooms would now no longer rise or fall). And he sketched, hastily, small pencil pictures of himself watching the fires: They may look a little crude, but they have a ineffable charm about them, capturing as they do this most unusual moment in the singer’s life.