A Crack in the Edge of the World (31 page)

Charles Aiken of
Sunset
magazine was to write later:

All society—with a big S—was out in force. Beautiful women gorgeously gowned, with opera cloaks trimmed with ermine, and diamonds on hands and hair; men with pop hats and the conventional cast-iron sort of clothes that mean joyous discomfort; here were wondrous bunches of orchids and roses; the singing and acting that charmed and the deafening applause. Then came the hoarse shouts of the carriage numbers, the strange melody of automobiles, the clang of electric cars; then tuneful orchestras at the Palace palm garden, or at Tait's, or the Fiesta, or Techau's, and oysters
poulette
and Liebfraumilch, Welsh rarebit and steins of Munchenbrau or terrapin Maryland and Asti
tipo
Chianti. And after all came the home-going in the early hours, with down-town streets still crowded, and the dazzling electric signs swinging wide over welcoming portals, making the garish city shame the modest moonlight.

Carmen
went as well as it ever had. The audience, stolid and moneyed though they might have been, exhibited raptures of enthusiasm, and Caruso returned their adulation with polite charm. But there was no public afterparty for him: He slipped away, driven off in what passed in 1906 for a limousine, and spent the rest of the evening in a local restaurant drinking, eating pasta, and listening to the twenty-three-year-old Elsa Maxwell—a fat girl from Iowa who would later become America's best-known society hostess—play the piano.

He waited for the early editions of the papers, which, whether out of respect or sagacity, wrote rave reviews—though William Randolph Hearst had issues with the Met and was said to have tried, in vain, to have the exuberant notice in his
Examiner
watered down. After reading the papers Caruso—Erri, as he was known—then called for one of
the rising rooms to beam him up to his fifth-floor suite, where he took himself to bed. It was 3:00
A.M.
He would sleep for no more than 120 minutes.

John Barrymore was in town as well. This debonair young man—“The Great Profile,” as he was known to his fans—was on the verge of thespian greatness, even then. But only on the verge. In San Francisco he had performed few of the Shakespearean roles that later would make him so famous, and had come to town merely to appear in a small-time play called
The Dictator
by the noted war correspondent Richard Harding Davis. The company that had performed it perfectly ably on the Bay was now about to sail off across the Pacific to try it again 7,000 sea miles away, in Australia.

John Barrymore's main interest—both then and for the rest of his life—appears to have been winning the favors of the local chorines, and that Tuesday evening he had found one, a woman who, like him, had come to listen to Caruso. Impeccable in his white tie and tails, he would have been a dashing companion—but it happened that he was low on funds and had to ask a newspaperman for a loan, which he did not get. One might suppose he would have taken the young woman back to his room at the St. Francis, for reasons both of amusement and economics; but he did not, and since he then wrote what he later admitted was an entirely fictitious account of his experiences of the following day, it can never be certain what he did, to whom, and where. All that is really known is that Caruso was at the opera and John Barrymore was in the audience.

After the last arias had died away and the carriages had collected the good and the great, Marcelle Assan headed for the most fashionable restaurant of the day, Delmonico's.

In its great gilded and mirrored rooms, in its thickly carpeted stairwell, by the light of its electric candelabras, through the crack of the heavy doors left ajar, only joyous parties of men and women could be glimpsed and overheard enjoying themselves.

Champagne corks popped amid bursts of laughter and both sibilant and animated voices. The restaurant was filled on every floor, and everyone was playing all the most exciting games while
tipsy from champagne or cocktails. Husbands and wives no longer knew each other, nor did they want to: it was merriment totally free and American.

There were more modest amusements for the less well-off. The Columbia Theater on Powell Street—convenient for the cable car, which passed right by—was showing the three-year-old (but since then quite indestructible) musical
Babes in Toyland
by Victor Herbert. For a mere dime you could have yourself an evening of vaudeville at the Orpheum. The entirely beloved Australian singer and actress Nellie Stewart was having great success with a production based on the life of Nell Gwynne,
Sweet Nell of Old Drury
.
*

In the Mechanics Institute pavilion—a huge, ornate, and prettily fretworked wooden structure close to the hospital in the City Hall basement—a local sports promoter was staging a masked roller-skating contest, which continued well past midnight. The doctors in the hospital across the road did a roaring trade from the scores of skaters who managed to land unhappily on the vast redwood floor and found themselves in sudden need of splinter removers.

And for the less physically inclined, there were a dozen smaller theaters ranged along Market Street and Broadway, and hosts of restaurants and clubs and whorehouses, all doing trade that evening that could be described as healthy or not, depending on your point of view. It has been said that Tait's, Delmonico's, Sanguinetti's, the Pup, and Tortoni's were doing good business that night; and that theater patrons crowded particularly into the Alhambra, Fischer's, and the Alcazar—others attending in lesser numbers the little plays being staged at the Majestic and the Valencia.

But Wednesday was a normal working day, and so the saturnalia that invariably gripped the city on Friday and Saturday nights was not in its fullest flower on a Tuesday. Aside from the gaiety of the opera—with well-dressed swells in their phaetons and hansoms and diligences swinging home via the better supper places, thus keeping some establishments going well beyond midnight—a pleasant quiet had settled on the city by one or two in the morning, as it usually did.

There were a couple of fires, which irritated the fire chief, Dennis Sullivan, who had in consequence to attend to duties until at least 3:00
A.M.
One was at a warehouse on Market Street, and Sullivan ordered three of his horse-drawn wagons out to extinguish the blaze. The city had eighty fire stations (though none at all among the densely crowded tenements of Chinatown), and 700 men, most of whom were paid and so obliged by more than mere civic duty to fight any fires that might break out.

The insurers had long thought such kinds of preparations insufficient, however. As we have seen, the National Board of Fire Underwriters had remarked only the year before, after an extensive survey, that the city remained a tinderbox, waiting to be consumed once again as it had been six times already in the half century of its existence. Chief Sullivan concurred, often vehemently. Such was the flammability of its structures, the lack of water, the vulnerability of the supply, and the eccentric siting of some of the fire stations that insurers found the risks barely tolerable. There were only thirty-eight steam-powered fire engines in service, and tests had shown they could deliver water at only 70 percent of their rated capacity—much too low for comfort. The men who manned the engines were poorly trained. There were too few hydrants, and the old cisterns that long before had been built to store water below intersections in the city center were rusty and empty. So poorly equipped was the city, the board declared, that it had violated all underwriting traditions and precedents by
not
burning up.

And then there was the wind. In all six of those earlier devastating fires the prevailing wind had been westerly, blowing in from the sea, setting to the east. On this Tuesday night the wind backed slowly during the night from northwesterly to westerly. As Chief Sullivan took himself to his small box bed on the third floor of the Bush Street
Fire Station, he must have noticed it—noticed that if any night was the least ideal for the tackling of a major fire, it would be a night with a wind setting like this.

So the bars closed down, the streets emptied of their stragglers, the lights in the hotel rooms snapped off, one by one. The gas lamps in the city streets hissed and sputtered. The churches pealed the quarters and the hours, announcing the times in a soft clangor of amiable disagreement.

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.

          
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 S
IR
C
OURTNEY
B
ENNETT
,

His Britannic Majesty's Consul-General
,

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

Secretary of State for Foreign and

Colonial Affairs, London

W
ASHINGTON 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.