Prior to COVID, I made frequent business trips to San Francisco. However quick business trips where you work during the day does not offer a lot of time to do anything touristy in the evenings. But, being a big history buff and having an interest in dark tourism aspects of the places I visit, San Francisco is a great place to seek out historic photo vistas and look for evidence of the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and resulting firestorms. All you need are photos from 120 years ago on your smartphone and a map.
I found a collection of history books on San Francisco at a bed and breakfast I was staying at in the Mission District. All of them had a large number of images of the city after the quake. Often they listed the intersections or the addresses of where the photos were taken. I shot pictures of the photos with my phone and pulled up more using Google searches. The conference I was at was at the Moscone Center in the heart of the downtown, and many of the photos from 1906 were taken with 5-10 blocks of the convention center. With a street map of the downtown or Google Maps called up, the photos guided my odd historic tour of the downtown.
Surprisingly, many of the landmarks seen in the photos from 120 years ago are still intact, intertwined with more modern buildings or heavily updated.
I posted numerous comparison images from 1906 and 2019 side by side on social media, which was quite a conversation piece among my friends who are historians or who like to travel to the city, but never quite envisioned what happened there more than a century ago.
The Destruction of San Francisco in the 1906 Quake and Fire
Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake close to 8.0 on the Richter scale struck San Francisco. The event toppled buildings, and with must of the city still lit with gas lights, fires broke out everywhere. The quake and fires killed about 3,000 people. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andreas Fault, which runs through the west side of San Fransisco, over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles.
The fires quickly burned out of control due to broken water mains preventing firefighters from stopping the flames. Massive fires spread and created firestorms with high winds throughout the city. U.S. Army troops from Fort Mason and firefighters dynamiting whole city blocks to create fire breaks in attempts to stop the spreading fires. The fires blocked the escape of many residents and on April 20, about 20,000 refugees were evacuated from the foot of Van Ness Avenue onto the USS Chicago.
The quake and fires destroyed about 30,000 buildings, including most of the city’s homes and close to half of the central business district.
The army troops also enforced a dusk-to-dawn curfew and authorized soldiers to shoot-to-kill anyone found looting. Early on during the emergency, the army became the U.S. government’s first responders to the disaster and played a key role.
Whole books are devoted to the disaster, which might be worth while for anyone interested in learning more or tracking down the precise spots where many of the historic photos were taken.
