He slid the key into the lock and opened the box.
He drew in a breath at the sight of the neatly stacked cash.
It happened so fast we didn’t have time to blink. I saw a faint orange line, and the next thing I knew the contents were ablaze.
With a howl, Jewell reached in and tried to take out the cash but it was burning paper now, and he threw it down.
“You tricked me!” he screamed. “You set it on fire!”
“No trick,” my father said. He stared down at the still-burning contents. With his boot, he flipped over the box and quickly kicked dirt over the ledger, putting out the fire. “I’m guessing it was just too hot to open. When the oxygen hit, it ignited. We should have waited, maybe.”
“Maybe?” Jewell screamed. “Are you really standing there watching a million dollars go up in smoke, calm as you please?”
“I don’t see how shouting is going to bring it back. Though it might bring the sentries and we hardly want that,” Papa pointed out.
Jewell stamped away. He stood a few feet from us, his shoulders heaving.
“You knew,” Papa whispered.
I shrugged my shoulders.
Papa shook his head, and then he laughed.
“Now you’re laughing?” Jewell said, turning around furiously.
“I don’t see anything better to do. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t.”
“This isn’t over, Jock Bonner,” Jewell said. He brushed past us and disappeared into the gloom.
We heard his footsteps echo for a while, and then there was only silence and stars.
“Oh, it’s over,” my father said softly. “He is a man of empty threats.”
“Were you going to take the money?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t have given us the chance. Jewell had a gun in his pocket. He was planning to take everything — but he would have left the ledger.”
“You mean you wouldn’t have fought him for it? It was a fortune!”
“It was a considerable temptation,” he said. “But not worth it, I think.”
I don’t know if he was telling the truth. But I’ve decided to believe it.
Without speaking, we climbed one more block to the crown of Nob Hill. We walked past the broken stone lions of one of the mansions to the only thing that remained of the Towne mansion, the steps leading to the marble-columned portico. We climbed the steps, my father and I, and gazed out. By the light of the pale moon we could see the skeletal dome of City Hall through the empty frame of the columns.
There were scattered lights around the hills, from outdoor stoves, I guess. That was the only way I knew there were people out there, tucked into these bare hills where once there had been houses and restaurants and stores.
I had a strange sensation right then, diary. As though I were on the top of a world about to be born. I could smell the bay, the wild salt smell of it. For the first time in a week, it overpowered the smell of decay.
“Heard lots of hammering and sawing today,” Papa said. “People starting to rebuild already.”
“You’d think they’d all be leaving,” I said. “Scared to live here after what happened. But they’re staying.”
“That’s what faith is,” he said.
We stared out at the graying sky, the flares of light.
“Plus, it’s a kind of paradise here, isn’t it?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind the earth cracking open,” I said.
“Everything has a flaw, Min. Even cities. Doesn’t spoil the beauty one bit.”
That first day I arrived — I thought of it then. The blue bay and the white houses and the sky, and the air so fresh at the top of the hill. How exhilarating it all was.
“This is our chance to start over,” he said. “We could make something new.”
“But how? We have nothing.”
“We have this.” He showed me the ledger in his hand, charred and black.
“But it’s ruined.”
“Crandall won’t know that. He doesn’t need to see inside it; he just needs to see it exists.”
“And what will we ask for in return? The tavern?”
“We could. Or we could ask for the money from the sale.”
“But why would he say yes, after what I’ve done?”
“Because of what you saw in this book. And I do not think a man with so much to lose will pursue this any further. He has too much to gain.”
“And then . . .”
He made a suggestion that surprised me. “What if we wrote to your mother and asked her to come out here? Perhaps we are holding on to something we don’t want anymore. We’re just in the habit of thinking it’s our only hope. The tavern will be gone soon anyway, chérie. The city is changing and leaving us behind. But we could start something here. This strikes me as a place people may start over again.”
“Do you think she’ll say yes?”
“If she doesn’t, we’ll go back. We’ll be together. Whether she lets me in the door or not. I don’t know what will happen. I just know I have a way to make amends. Thanks to you, Min.”
I don’t know what will happen, either. But when everything is gone, what can you do but have faith?
We could see the beginnings of sunrise now, just a glow of pink in the sky. We walked back down the hill in that ravishing light. Outside the house on Green Street we saw the remains of the crate neatly stacked on the lawn, ready to be taken away.
I stopped on the stairs and looked through the window. The painting leaned against the wall. Lily’s gaze stared out at me, her mother’s heavy hand on her shoulder. She looked nothing like me at all.
At the dining room table I saw Mr. Crandall smoking a cigar, sitting and waiting for me.
You can have your life back now, Lily. I won’t be living it. Rest in peace.
Papa took my hand. “Ready?”
I’m ready.
When Minnie admitted her deception, Mr. Crandall’s fury blasted her eardrums. Mrs. Crandall threatened to telephone the police. Then she realized that she didn’t have telephone service.
Mr. Crandall calmed down when Jock Bonner produced the ledger and suggested that it would be to all of their benefits to let the deception be passed along to earthquake shock and upset. He offered to toss the ledger into the stove outside, let it burn, and start over. He also pointed out that without Lily, Mr. Crandall now had full power over the Sump estate.
Mr. and Mrs. Crandall calmed down quickly.
Mr. Crandall paid the Bonners for the sale of the tavern. Minnie and her father had an anxious ten days of waiting before hearing from her mother. She informed them that she would come to San Francisco, but she had not forgiven her husband.
With the money from the tavern sale the Bonners built and furnished a restaurant in downtown San Francisco that they called Lily’s. Mrs. Bonner didn’t talk to her husband for thirty-two days, which was surely a record. Lily’s became a favorite restaurant during the rebuilding of downtown, and the customers stayed loyal — politicians, journalists, businessmen, and writers.
Hugh Crandall went on to establish the Sump Trust, which he administered. The Sump Trust was an important financial partner in the rebuilding of San Francisco. Mr. Crandall became a rich and successful attorney specializing in commercial real estate. He and his wife built a showplace on Nob Hill on the site of the old Sump mansion.
Minnie never forgot the Jennardis. They reopened their grocery in six months, in a new building in North Beach, the Italian section of San Francisco. Minnie often thought about seeking out Jake to explain what had happened to her and her family, but she could not get up the nerve. Then, nine years later, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, they ran into each other. Although so much time had passed, they knew each other instantly. Within a year they were married and moved into a small house on Telegraph Hill with a view of the bay.
Jake Jennardi became a partner in the restaurant, and it became a San Francisco institution, popular with local
s and tourists, and known for its French and Italian food. Today it is run by their great-great-granddaughter, Alessandra Jennardi.
Minnie and Jake had three children. Their eldest son, Dante, took over the restaurant when they decided to take early retirement and divide their time between the city and their house on a vineyard in Napa Valley. Jake died in his sleep at the age of eighty-three, and Minnie lived until she was ninety-one. For the last ten years of her life, Minnie was an honored guest at the April 18 earthquake anniversary ceremony at Twentieth and Church Streets, when the hydrant there was repainted gold in memory of its role in saving the Mission District and Noe Valley from the fire.
Jock Bonner would still take off for weeks at a time, but he never gambled again. He was a beloved grandfather to Minnie’s children for a few short years. He died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five, while sailing with a friend on San Francisco Bay.
Hazel Bonner surprised the family by marrying again, and lived a long life with her second husband, a professor of geology.
Mr. Crandall and his wife had two daughters. When her father died, his daughter Lavinia took over the trust in partnership with her cousin and best friend, Delia Flynn. Together they expanded its interests from commercial buildings into the nonprofit world of libraries and museums. The Sump Trust funded many projects in Chinatown and working-class neighborhoods, starting libraries and school lunch programs during the Depression. Lavinia never got along with her mother.
Andrew “Slippery Andy” Jewell started a new life in Los Angeles. He worked in vaudeville doing card and magic tricks and then as an extra in the developing silent film industry. He was shot during a poker game in 1922 at the age of forty-two.
“There is no water, and still less soap.
We have no city, but lots of hope.”
— Anonymous inscription scribbled on the ruins of Market Street
At 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, a powerful earthquake ripped through San Francisco at an estimated 7,000 miles per hour, throwing many people out of their beds. Some never made it that far — 95 percent of all the chimneys in the city collapsed in that shock, some of them on people still asleep.
Those who were awake and outside reported that sidewalks rolled like rough ocean waves, and deep cracks appeared in the street only to close up again. Some buildings fell in a thundering crash, and others remained intact but were knocked off their foundations, tilting crazily over the street. The Valencia Hotel collapsed like an accordion, and those on the fourth story stepped over the debris and walked straight out into the street. Those in the lower floors were not so lucky. An estimated one hundred people lost their lives in that hotel, some in the initial collapse, some drowning as the water mains burst and flooded the layers beneath the street.
There was no system of measurement for earthquakes in 1906, but today’s geologists estimate the quake at anywhere between 7.9 and 8.2 on the Richter scale: a catastrophic event.
Those who survived the shock had no way to know that the worst was yet to come. Together, the quake and ensuing three-day firestorm were one of the worst natural disasters in United States history. More than fifty fires began in the first hours after the quake, some growing to join others until there was a solid wall of flame a mile and a half long.
Volcanoes smoke and storms build, but earthquakes give no warning. The day before the earthquake was fair and sunny, the first day of delightful weather after a damp and chilly spring. If a city can have a collective mood, San Francisco was in a cheerful frame of mind. The world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso was in town, and all of society turned out to see his performance in the opera Carmen. San Franciscans were proud of their city, the biggest and most important metropolis west of Chicago. With a population of about four hundred thousand, it was the nation’s ninth-largest city. It was a busy port, the gateway to Asia and the Pacific, and a center for business and manufacturing. It had the largest population of Chinese in any American city — estimated at 14,000 in 1905 — most of them living in the densely populated blocks of Chinatown.
The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 had brought fortunes not only to the men who built the railroads — the owners of those mansions on top of Nob Hill known as the Big Four: Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker — but others who profited from the continuing expansion of the rails and the explosion in population.
Travel on the railroads became easier and more comfortable with the innovations of George Pullman, inventor of the Pullman sleeper car. More and more people began to consider a trip to California something they could do, and once they arrived they could stay in hotels such as the Palace, which promised luxury and refinement. A trip out West was no longer considered dangerous and uncomfortable, but a relatively easy week-long journey that even the most apprehensive Easterner could contemplate.
In 1906, business was booming, the rich were getting richer, and new inventions promised to make life more pleasant even for the poor. Most of the major advances in technology of the twentieth century had already been invented: the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, moving pictures, the electric light, the phonograph. These marvels would, over the years, be streamlined, improved, made easier to operate or more pleasing to look at — but they already existed in 1906, and there was a general feeling that they would soon be a part of everyday life, and the world was changing for the better.
With change and growth came opportunity, especially for the rich men who ran things. The government of San Francisco operated on a system of bribes and payoffs, thanks to a corrupt city council and a mayor, Eugene Schmitz, who was controlled by the political boss Abe Ruef. There were systems to be built and expanded — the pipes, rails, wires, and cables that would bring water, electricity, telephones, and public transportation to the people of San Francisco. All required permits and contracts, and politicians were happy to do favors for the right amount of cash. The situation in San Francisco had grown so corrupt that the reform effort reached all the way to the White House and President Theodore Roosevelt. After the quake, a federal investigation into graft and corruption continued, and political boss Abe Ruef was convicted and jailed. Mayor Schmitz was also convicted, but his sentence was overturned. The mayor had been hailed as a decisive leader during the crisis, and did rise to the occasion, so many San Franciscans did not want to see him imprisoned.
A city of wooden houses, narrow streets, steep hills, and gusty winds, San Francisco was especially vulnerable to fire. The reservoirs that fed water to the city used wooden trestles for their pipelines, often crisscrossing over the San Andreas Fault, which was known as the Tomales-Portolá Fault at the time of the quake. In 1905 the National Board of Fire Underwriters concluded that the water distribution system was inadequate and faulty and would most likely fail in the event of an emergency.
San Francisco was lucky enough to have a dedicated and visionary fire chief engineer, Dennis Sullivan. Even before the report, he was concerned about the fire department’s ability to fight a major citywide fire, catastrophes that had already occurred in Chicago in 1871 and Baltimore in 1904. For years he had warned the city council of the vulnerability of San Francisco to fire. He had proposed that the city badly needed a high-pressure water system, as well as a salt water auxiliary backup. He also proposed identifying and mapping the old cisterns that dotted the city. He had trained and organized an excellent firefighting department, but even the bravest and most skilled can’t fight fires without water.
The city council rejected Sullivan’s proposals without giving a reason, setting the city up for a spectacular failure.
On the morning of the quake, one of the victims of a building collapse was Chief Sullivan. The chimneys from the hotel next door crashed through the bedrooms in the firehouse. He struggled to get to his wife and fell to the first floor below, where he was scalded by a boiler. Seriously injured, he was carried out by his men.
Instead of Dennis Sullivan, many of the decisions about fi
ghting the massive firestorm were made jointly by General Frederick Funston and Mayor Schmitz. General Funston took charge of the city almost immediately after the quake. He left his house on Sacramento Street and walked to the crown of the hill. He saw the fires beginning and then quickly walked downtown to find the mayor. It was Funston who suggested that the only course open to them was dynamiting buildings in order to create firebreaks — areas of open space wide enough so that the fire could not spread. He took over the strategic dynamiting of much of downtown San Francisco, as well as areas of Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Chinatown, and the east side of Van Ness Avenue.
The process of creating a firebreak by dynamiting buildings has its origin in logic. If the fire has nothing to feed on, it will die. Unfortunately, this process was carried out in many cases by workers who had no experience with explosives. Also, it is necessary to hose down nearby buildings so that they won’t catch fire if sparks or chunks of the dynamited building fall on them. In many cases, the fire spread because of the careless use of explosives. People were ordered to leave their homes or businesses even though they were ready to fight to save them.
Some homeowners — such as a valiant and stubborn group on Russian Hill — refused to leave their homes and managed to defeat the fires. Many beautiful homes on the top of the hill were saved — you can still see them today. But most homeowners in the eastern part of the city could not save their homes from the fire, or the dynamite. They had to gather whatever they could carry and then join the stream of refugees heading westward toward the squares and parks out of range of the fire. In survivors’ accounts, many mention the eerie quiet, the way the walkers communicated in whispers, and the mournful sound of trunks being dragged through the streets.
The terror of the earthquake was quick — it was over in a little over a minute. The terror of the fire began slowly. Photographs taken that day show people standing about in downtown San Francisco, watching the buildings burn. Oddly, there seems to be no alarm or distress on their faces. There is no blur of panicked movement.
A City Tossed and Broken Page 11