by Gary Kamiya
The coup de grâce was announced in 1958, the same year the last ferry ran. That was when the first containerized freighter sailed through the Golden Gate. Container shipping requires space and facilities, and San Francisco could not compete with Oakland. Just 24 years after Bloody Thursday, one of the world’s great working ports was nearing the end.
And behind the City Front, the brawny man’s-man city that had existed since the Gold Rush was dying too. Heavy industry was leaving San Francisco. Factory workers were being replaced by secretaries and clerks. Skyscrapers for the new financial district were replacing docks and cranes. The great postindustrial transformation that was to change all American society had begun in San Francisco. Over the next two decades, it would result in a completely different city.
Women, pouring into the workforce after World War II, played a far bigger role. The middle class grew enormously, driving the new consumer culture but also making it possible for transgressive bohemian movements like the Beats and the hippies to spring up. And in San Francisco, the members of that ascendant middle class were far from the petit bourgeois Babbits imagined by doctrinaire leftists. Urbanist, worker-identified, and cosmopolitan, they were much more liberal than their counterparts in, say, Los Angeles.
So it is appropriate that it was three middle- and upper-class Bay Area women who helped launch the crusade that would save the bay. Ironically, they did so at precisely the same time that it ceased to define the city’s identity.
Familiarity, even love, does not necessarily mean knowledge—let alone wisdom. And during the century that San Franciscans engaged most intimately with the bay, they neither knew it nor had the wisdom to realize that they were destroying it.
From the human point of view, San Francisco Bay is the world’s greatest natural harbor. From nature’s point of view, it is a unique estuary, a meeting of freshwater and saltwater unlike any other. Forty-two miles long, an average of 11 miles wide, and 460 miles square, the bay is fed by 85 watersheds that drain 40 percent of California’s land. The movement of water through the estuary is so complex that scientists are still studying it. Around it are 46 cities, 7 million people, six ports, and 135 parks, refuges, and preserves. It hosts 120 species of fish, 1,000 to 3,000 sea lions, 600 harbor seals, and 500 pairs of great blue herons. Every August, 700,000 waterbirds arrive. In late April, as many as 500,000 migrating western sandpipers may be on the bayshore in a single day. Above all, it is an environment in constant flux: In 1997, torrential rains changed the salt composition of the bay from 79 percent to 22 percent. In short, it is a natural miracle.
From 1848 until around 1961, none of that meant anything to the human beings who lived in increasingly large numbers on the bay. People viewed the great estuary as an infinitely renewable or indestructible resource—if they even thought about it at all. Factories poured toxic substances into the bay. Butchers, farmers, and manufacturers all used it and the streams leading to it as a dump. As Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and Kathleen M. Wong note in Natural History of San Francisco Bay, before 1970 “raw sewage traveled directly from toilets into the bay via more than 80 points of discharge.” The bay stank. It was too dangerous to swim in. And it was being relentlessly filled up. In Gold Rush times, the bay is estimated to have had 787 square miles of open water. By 1960, that had shriveled to 548. Even more devastating was the mania to “reclaim” swamps and wetlands. By 1950, only 50,000 acres of tidal marsh remained, a quarter of the original area.
No one cared, because no one even had access to the bay. Incredibly, only four miles of its entire 276-mile circumference below the delta were open to the public.
In 1961, a planner named Mel Scott—remember that name—made a survey of the bay for a conference cosponsored by U.C. Berkeley Extension and a citizen’s group called Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks. Led by a handful of planners and activists, including Scott, Jack Kent, and Dorothy Erskine, the group argued that regional planning was necessary to protect the Bay Area’s natural resources. As he did his research, Scott realized that most of the tidelands around the bay were privately owned, and extensive plans were under way to fill in vast stretches of the bay and its wetlands.
Around this time, Sylvia McLaughlin, a U.C. Berkeley regent and the wife of a mining magnate, began noticing that the bay was shrinking. She was accustomed to looking out the window of her Berkeley Hills house to admire the view. Now the water was disappearing. “We could all see it being filled in,” she told Okamoto and Wong. “Then I saw the headlines in the Daily Gazette, how the city was going to double its size in the name of ‘progress.’ And every time I went downtown, I’d see these huge trucks rumbling down to the bay, filled with dirt and refuse from university building projects.”
McLaughlin shared her concerns with two friends, Kay Kerr, the wife of U.C. president Clark Kerr, and Esther Gulick, who was married to a professor. To their horror, the three women realized that the city of Berkeley was planning to fill in 2,000 acres of the bay—with zero community input. They invited the leaders of 13 environmental organizations to meet in Gulick’s living room. Scott, Kent, and Erskine were present as well. “Kay gave a pitch about the bay being filled in and they all agreed something must be done, but said they were too busy saving birds and redwoods and wilderness,” McLaughlin recalled. “So they all wished us luck and filed out the door, and we sat down and started our own organization, Save the Bay.”
Using mailing lists from the Sierra Club and other groups, the three women sent out hundreds of letters, calling attention to the destruction of the bay and asking for a $1 contribution to join their group. The response was overwhelming. An avalanche of $1 contributions poured in. They got extensive media coverage. Powerful politicians came on board. In 1965, the McAteer-Petris Act created the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) to safeguard the bay. It was the first coastal zone management agency in the world. Today nothing goes into the bay without BCDC signing off on it. And you can swim in the water.
Three women with no experience in politics or activism had led the successful fight to save San Francisco Bay—and helped create the American environmental movement. In The Country in the City, Richard Walker says, “Nothing was more essential to the Bay Area’s green culture. It all goes through Save the Bay.”
So if the Ferry Building is a tombstone, it is also a beacon. The bay is no longer San Francisco’s front door. And the army of men who worked on the wharves and the ships is gone. But thanks to a different army, the great estuary has been preserved for future generations. If Eagle, who in Ohlone mythology helped create the world, were to fly over the Ferry Building, he would tip his wings.
Chapter 35
A Tale of Two Earthquakes
274 Shipley Street, between Fifth and Sixth Streets
We are drawn to disasters. Apocalyptic events have a weird erotic pull: At this very moment, Godzilla is destroying Tokyo again on some cable channel. But they are inaccessible. They’re too frightening, too alien, too vast. The great earthquake and fire that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 is no exception. We can list the buildings that were destroyed and the number of people that were killed, but the experience itself is impossible to imagine. Unless you were there. I wasn’t there in 1906. But I was there in 1989. It wasn’t as big of a disaster, but it was big enough. And it’s the one I know.
What follows is a tale of two earthquakes, placed side by side, like tectonic plates.
At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, about six miles below the ocean floor just north and west of Mussel Rock, Daly City, the rocks along the eastern edge of the Pacific Plate, the largest tectonic plate on earth, suddenly broke free from the rocks on the western edge of the North American Plate and lurched violently forward. Enormous shock waves raced toward San Francisco at 7,000 miles an hour, furrowing the earth like a plow. Four seconds later they arrived.
A policeman named Jesse B. Cook was on duty at Washington and Davis, near the old produce market. He heard “a deep and terri
ble rumbling.” As he looked up Washington Street toward Nob Hill, he saw the street rising up and down like an undulating snake and coming at him. “It was if the waves of the ocean were coming toward me, and billowing as they came,” he said.
A man named Clarence Judson, who lived at the then Siberia of what is now 47th Avenue near Judah Street, was preparing to take his daily early-morning dip in the Pacific. As he waded in up to his armpits, an unusually large breaker almost knocked him off his feet. The undertow began to carry him out. “Instantly there came such a shock,” Judson recalled. “I was thrown to my knees. I got up and was down again. I was dazed and stunned, and being tossed about by the breakers, my ears full of salt water and about a gallon in my stomach. I was thrown down three times, and only by desperate fighting did I get out at all. It was a close call.”
Judson ran around looking for his clothes. “I thought of lightning, as the beach was full of phosphorus,” he said. “Every step I took left a brilliant, incandescent streak.” When the quake hit, Judson was probably the closest person in San Francisco to the San Andreas Fault.
Reporter James Hopper of the Call was awakened in his room at the Neptune Hotel on Post near Mason. “Right away it was incredible—the violence of the quake. It started with a directness, a savage determination that left no doubt of its purpose,” Hopper wrote. “It pounced on the earth as some sidereal bulldog, with a rattle of hungry eagerness. The earth was a rat, shaken in the grinding teeth, shaken, shaken, shaken, with periods of slight weariness followed by new bursts of vicious rage.”
The sound of the tortured earth was dreadful. One musician said it sounded “like a thousand violins playing off key.”
Tuesday, October 17, 1989, 5:04 P.M. I am holding a cold beer and standing in the back room of my apartment on Jackson Street, getting ready to watch the Giants play the A’s in the World Series. A jolt hits the room. What? Oh—big one. Stop. Coming south to north. Keeps on rolling. Sharp rises. Definitely big.
I’m a Bay Area native. I’ve been through a few earthquakes. But every time one hits, I wonder exactly what I should be doing and know I’m not doing it. Sometimes it vaguely occurs to me that there’s nothing I really could do anyway. But I’ve never grasped this in any part of my life, and earthquakes are no exception. They come in fast and low, under the radar of consciousness, and unsettle things in your mind that you didn’t even know were in there.
The shocks last for more than 5 seconds, maybe closer to 10. I look up and see the jerry-rigged bookcase over my computer begin to swing out of the wall and come forward. Five shelves and about 300 books. Are they going to? No?—they slowly rock forward and then crash heavily, landing on the desk and the floor. A heavy volume slides across the rug and ends up touching my toe. Okay, I’m okay.
Wait, the TV is out. Is it unplugged? Did the building blow a fuse? I stumble around indecisively for a few minutes.
Reporter Fred J. Hewitt was near San Francisco City Hall when the quake struck. “I was thrown … on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looming up more terrible because of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered.” In the Mission District, Officer Henry N. Powell wrote, “Valencia Street not only began to dance and rear and roll in waves like a rough sea in a squall; but it sank in places and then vomited up its car tracks.”
The Valencia Hotel at 18th Street and Valencia, an intersection that is now hipster central, was built on the old Laguna de los Dolores. It “telescoped down on itself like a concertina” in a few seconds. Forty people were killed immediately, and more drowned in the subterranean waters of Mission Creek—an ironic fate, considering the city was about to burn down because there was no water. The four elements seemed to be vying with each other to see which could kill the most people on this intersection: Those who survived the earthquake and the waters of the creek were burned to death the next day. A total of more than 100 people died in the Valencia Hotel, the highest recorded number to die in any one building in the city.
San Francisco fire chief Dennis Sullivan was in bed on the third floor of the Chemical Company No. 3 firehouse at 410 Bush at Kearny, just opposite Claude Lane. When the quake hit, he struggled to his feet and rushed into the next room, where his wife, Maggie, was sleeping. A cloud of dust prevented him from seeing that there was a gaping hole in the floor, created when the cupola of the California Hotel next door had fallen 60 feet and sliced through the firehouse. Maggie, tucked in bed, fell three stories to the basement and lay still swaddled in her sheets, miraculously unhurt.
Chief Sullivan was not so fortunate. He landed on the floor of the basement next to a boiler, the impact fracturing his skull, breaking his ribs, and puncturing his lungs. But his most serious injuries were caused by a jet of boiling steam from the broken boiler. Rescuers pulled their severely burned chief out and rushed him to the hospital, but he died four days later. Sullivan was the one man who possessed the knowledge, experience, and leadership abilities that might have saved the city from the fire about to consume it. A plaque on a firehouse at Bush and Mason honors his memory.
5:25 P.M. I get on my mountain bike and zoom north down Jones, turn right on Pacific. It’s a hot day. The Bay Bridge is there as always. I don’t bother to look at it. I careen down Mason, then Vallejo. I ask a cop at the Central Station when we’re going to get power back. He says he doesn’t know. It’s citywide.
North Beach. I turn left onto Stockton, and as I go past two stalled buses and shoot across Columbus, the absolute and glorious improbability of it all hits me, the city stunned into a new life, during the World Series yet, and I break into a loud and exuberant laugh. I want to shout out “The damndest fine ruins!” And I don’t even know there are any ruins.
I swoop around a pedestrian. This quake is nothing, just a nudge in the ribs from the earth, a good joke from its igneous guts. I turn into that crazy six-way intersection and pull up in front of Gino and Carlo’s.
William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and one of the fathers of pragmatism, was asleep in a house in Palo Alto, where he was living for a year while teaching at Stanford. When the quake hit, all the chimneys in the house collapsed and bricks crashed into the living room. James ran into his wife’s bedroom, saying, “This is an earthquake. Are you frightened? I am not, and I am not nauseated either.” What James’s wife thought of her husband’s response is not recorded.
Later James wrote of the experience: “In my case, sensation and emotion were so strong that little thought, and no reflection or volition, were possible in the short time consumed by the phenomenon. The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration: glee at the vividness with which such an abstract idea or verbal term as ‘earthquake’ could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatsoever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.”
5:25 P.M., Gino and Carlo’s, Green and Stockton. The TV is dark. A bunch of people are leaning over the bar, listening to a radio. I hear something indistinguishable about a “Cypher-structure” collapsing. This cryptic “Cypher-structure” or “Cypress-structure” phrase, with no explanation, is repeated a number of times. A hysterical reporter comes on the air; he’s almost incoherent. “They’re not gonna play,” says a dyspeptic-looking middle-age man at the bar. A Financial District–type woman next to me is pretty shaky, pounding them down. The bartender suddenly announces it’s free drinks for everyone. “Thanks for staying!” As I drink a straight shot of Jack Daniel’s, I hear reports that people are dead on the freeway. There are helicopters flying around. It’s all very garbled. Somebody says there’s a fire in the Marina.
“The vibrations ceased and I began to dress,” James Hopper wrote. “Then I noted the long silence. Throughout the long quaking, in this great house full of people I had heard not a cry, not a sound, not a sob, not a whisper
. And now, when the roar of crumbling buildings was over and only a brick was falling here and there like the trickle of a spent rain, this silence continued, and it was an awful thing. But now in the alley some one began to groan. It was a woman’s groan, soft and low.”
Hopper’s eyewitness feature on the quake and fire was the finest piece of writing to emerge from the disaster. (The world-famous Jack London, who was enticed to write a 2,400-word essay himself when Collier’s magazine offered him the unheard-of figure of $500, admitted that Hopper had outdone him.)
Hopper made his way down Post toward Union Square. “In the morning’s garish light I saw many men and women with gray faces, but none spoke. All of them, they had a singular hurt expression, not one of physical pain, but rather one of injured sensibilities, as if some trusted friend, say, had wronged them, or as if some one had said something rude to them.”
Jack London noticed the same silent restraint. “As remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night, when the whole city crashed and roared into ruin, was a quiet night. There were no crowds. There was no shouting and yelling. There was no hysteria, no disorder. I passed Wednesday night in the path of the advancing flames, and in all those terrible hours, I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic-stricken … Never in San Francisco’s history were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror.”
Examiner reporter Hewitt must have been in a less stoic part of town. “Each and every person I saw was temporarily insane,” he wrote. “Laughing idiots commented on the fun they were having. Terror marked their faces, and yet their voices indicated a certain enjoyment that maniacs have when they kill and gloat over their prey … All humanity within eyesight was suffering from palsy.”