Seismic City

An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake

Joanna L. Dyl, Paul S. Sutter

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780295742465
• eBook ISBN: 9780295742472
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco's perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk. In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city's recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

Map: Produced with Esri ArcMap™ 10.3 by Lisa Benvenuti, Center for Spatial Studies, University of Redlands. Sources: streets—Esri Data and Maps, StreetMap NA, 2013; marshes and land fill digitized from San Francisco Historical Creek Map, Oakland Museum of California Creek and Watershed Information, http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/SFTopoCreeks.html; shoreline digitized from U. Graff, “San Francisco and Environs,” Map G 04362 S22 1906 G7 Case XB, Bancroft; burned area and Presidio digitized from “Map of San Francisco, California: Showing the limits of the burned area destroyed by the fire of April 18th–21st, 1906, following the earthquake of April 18th, 1906” (US Army Corps of Engineers, 1906), Historic Maps of the Bay Area digital resource, Earth Sciences and Map Library, University of California, Berkeley.

1 State Earthquake Investigation Commission, The California Earthquake of April 18, 1906: Report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1908), 25, 148–49; Gladys Hansen and Emmet Condon, Denial of Disaster (San Francisco: Cameron and Company, 1989), 13.

2 Calculations conducted in 1958 initially estimated the 1906 earthquake at 8.3 on the Richter scale, but those numbers have been adjusted using data on more recent earthquakes in California. Estimates of the area affected by the quake differ in various analyses. I have used the numbers from the report of the State Earthquake Investigation Commission, California Earthquake of April 18, 1906, vol. 1, 2–3. McAdie is quoted in Hansen and Condon, Denial of Disaster, 14.

3 Hansen and Condon, Denial of Disaster, 13–14; State Earthquake Investigation Commission, California Earthquake of April 18, 1906, vol. 1, 410–16.

4 Cushing is quoted in Malcolm E. Barker, ed., Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Londonborn, 1998), 77.

5 Jack London, “The Story of an Eyewitness,” Collier’s, May 5, 1906.

6 For histories of urban fire, see Mark Tebeau, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), among others.

7 Barker, Three Fearful Days, 34; Frank Soulé, “The Earthquake and Fire and Their Effects on Structural Steel and Steel-Frame Buildings,” in The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of April 18, 1906 and Their Effects on Structures and Structural Materials, 131–58 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907), 136.

8 John Bernard McGloin, San Francisco: The Story of a City (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 137–41; Kerry Odell and Marc D. Weidenmier, “Real Shock, Monetary Aftershock: The San Francisco Earthquake and the Panic of 1907,” Journal of Economic History 64, no. 4 (2004): 1003 (1002–27). These losses amounted to between 1.3 percent and 1.8 percent of US gross national product in 1906. Philip L. Fradkin has suggested that numbers such as these actually understate the economic impact of the 1906 San Francisco disaster; see Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 346.

9 “San Francisco in Ruins,” Coast Seamen’s Journal, April 25, 1906, 4; Gladys Hansen, “Who Perished: A List of Persons Who Died As a Result of the Great Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco on April 18, 1906,” (San Francisco: San Francisco Archives, 1980), 3; Hansen and Condon, Denial of Disaster, 153; Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44.

10 Steinberg, Acts of God, xxi.

11 Ibid. As the historian Greg Bankoff has noted: “Disasters do not occur out of context but are embedded in the political structures, economic systems and social orders of the societies in which they take place.” He suggests that repeated disasters may well shape the evolution of such societies as “societies and destructive agents are mutually constituted and embedded in the natural and social systems as unfolding processes over time.” Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 152, 158.

12 For one expression of these ideas, see Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). For a discussion of the intersection of geological and cultural time, see Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Peru’s Five Hundred Year Earthquake: Vulnerability in Historical Context,” in Disasters, Development, and Environment, ed. Ann Varley, 31–48 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994).

13 Kenneth Hewitt, “The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age,” Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology, ed. Kenneth Hewitt, 3–32 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 22–25, emphasis in the original. Stephen J. Pyne makes a similar argument about urban fires in Pyne, “Afterword: Fire on the Fringe,” in Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, 390–96 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 391.

14 Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Meaning, ed. Cathy Caruth, 183–99 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 194–95.

15 Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 191–92. See also Review of Mark Carey’s In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, ed. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, H-Environment Roundtable Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (2011).

16 Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 11–12.

17 For example, although Ted Steinberg has written a history of natural disasters, including a chapter about San Francisco, the earthquake only rates a single clause in a discussion of Hetch Hetchy in Steinberg’s excellent US environmental history textbook, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

18 Labor histories and public health histories of San Francisco constitute a partial exception to this trend. William Issel and Robert W. Cherney, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 107–8, 153–54.

19 Adeline Masquelier, “Why Katrina’s Victims Aren’t Refugees: Musings on a ‘Dirty’ Word,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (2006): 736 (735–43). Subsequent research on Katrina often did a better job of considering historical precedents and parallels.

20 Debarati Guha-Sapir, Philippe Hoyois, and Regina Below, Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2012: The Numbers and Trends (Brussels: Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, 2013), 1; Bruce A. Bolt, Earthquakes, 5th ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2006), 319–23. US Geological Survey, “Earthquakes with 50,000 or More Deaths,” 2013, online at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/most_destructive.php, accessed January 20, 2014.

21 Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters: Nature, Power, and Culture,” in Catastrophe and Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed. Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, 23–47 (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2002), 24–25.

22 Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 89.

23 Mumford quoted in ibid., 10.

24 For the most well-known articulation of the problems with these dichotomies, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 69–90 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995). Philip J. Dreyfus argues for the prevalence of this thinking in late nineteenth-century San Francisco. Dreyfus, Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 67–100.

25 Notable works of urban environmental history that have raised similar questions include William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991); Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Making Land, Making a City
• Two Catastrophe and Its Interpretations
• Three Bread Lines and Earthquake Cottages
• Four Rebuilding and the Politics of Place
• Five Disaster Capitalism in the Streets
• Six Plague, Rats, and Undesirable Nature
• Seven Symbolic Recovery and the Legacies of Disaster
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Manuscript Collections
• Index