A Crack in the Edge of the World (45 page)

Aside from the film
San Francisco
, which Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy made in 1936, and which has many devoted admirers but few pretensions to greatness, what lasting art was born from the tragedy? The short answer appears to be: Not much.

Although there were a number of talented and nationally known men and women working in town at the time—people like Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Bret Harte, and Gertrude Atherton, some of whom stayed on and became intensely curious about the developing state of affairs—the creative energies of turn-of-the-century San Francisco truly lay with that colorful, highly vocal, and somewhat self-regarding movement known as the Bohemians, a movement that was in full cry at the time of the earthquake.

They had come at first as adventurers, as had many in early San Francisco, except that what distinguished them was that they carried, as someone put it, “slim volumes of Virgil” in their rucksacks for the long overland nights, and, once in town, they met up with other Virgil-lovers, got drunk with them, and promptly stuck together, isolating themselves from the more philistine companionship of the Forty-Niners. In those early days there was spontaneity and freshness to their writings, a kind of innocence of the newly arrived; by the turn of the century, however, it had been replaced by an air of contrivance, with even their name, the Bohemians, suggesting a certain preciousness. Robert Louis Stevenson was at first charmed by them; the
Overland Monthly
published them; Oscar Wilde visited them; and then for a while they sagged, grew bloated and uninteresting, and faded from the scene. (The Bohemian Club, which some of their journalistic fellow travelers inaugurated in 1872 for the city's cleverest and most intellectually alive, survived them, though, and remains today a gathering place of the West Coast's power elite.)

Very little that the Bohemians wrote from the turn of the century, whether the first fresh material or the later more jaded maunderings, has enjoyed much lasting popularity, nor did it really deserve to: So much of it was too relentlessly romantic and introspective and self-absorbed to enjoy wide currency or longevity. Moreover, many of this movement's finest writers and poets—if soi-disant—decamped to the coast after the earthquake. Many of them quite specifically went off to the hamlet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, which was fast becoming fashionable as an artists' colony, in order get away from the unrefined vulgarity of the city's demolition and reconstruction. One of the archpriests of the movement was the poet George Sterling—later to kill himself by drinking cyanide. His best-remembered phrase described San Francisco as “the cool gray city of love.” But he composed the words in Carmel, a hundred miles away. Indeed, once characters like Sterling had all left town, it did seem as though the creative heart of the city had been torn out, too. There were briefly held fears, never realized, that San Francisco as a cultural epicenter might have been ruined for all time.

The painters left in droves as well, some demoralized, others made homeless, a few ruined. Collections both private and public were reduced to piles of smoking canvas—the carefully gathered selection of works at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, thirty-five years in the making, was utterly destroyed. A few notables stayed: William Keith, perhaps the greatest western landscape artist of the time, held on, despite losing fully a thousand works, including forty major oils of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Maynard Dixon carried on sketching, writing poems, and painting covers for the local magazines. And the photographer Arnold Genthe stayed as well, even though he lost everything other than his Chinatown pictures—which in time would make him a fortune.

But otherwise the bulk of the community took to its heels—some went down to Carmel also, others fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, still more went to New York or across the Atlantic to Paris and London, never wishing or daring to return. And so for a while the city remained gloomily silent, no one writing, no one painting, no one composing, no one drinking absinthe into the small hours and cursing the moon and the stars. The creative juices had flowed away, and there seemed at first precious little chance of bringing them back.

Not that the poetasters and hacks and the penny-a-line merchants fell totally silent. In the archives lie reams of the most execrable poetry dedicated to the city and its troubles, and scores of unreadable short stories about the earthquake. Most of the poetry is couched in the favored Bohemian high romantic style that would have made William Topaz McGonagall, the Scot whose standard set that by which all poetic dreadfulness is measured, green with envy. The greater number of those poems dedicated specifically to the future of the city appeared either in
Sunset
or the
Overland Monthly
, both of which were determined to boost the morale of the citizens by producing editions urging and cajoling everyone to work hard to re-create the new San Francisco. This, from the Irish immigrant–Bohemian Harry Cowell,
*
is perhaps typical, and memorably forgettable:

Now, waked from painlessness of pain bespent
,

The prophet Faith foresees her doubly fair
—

By fire transfigured, fire and dew and air
—

All-beauteous with a beauty yet to be;

A city-soul in utmost wonderment

Renascent by the immemorial sea
.

But then, out from the ruin and abandonment and the making of so much temporary dross, stepped a young married couple who would make a game attempt to change everything. They were Arthur and Lucia Mathews, painters and furniture makers, whose atelier on California Street, which they opened as soon as the ruins had cooled, became a center for what the pair hoped would be rapid revitalization of the arts in the city.

The couple are perhaps best known for their handmade chairs, tables, and mirrors, all invested with a florid and flamboyant style—a sort of Art Nouveau meets Beaux Arts meets Arts and Crafts meets Celestial Empire mélange—that came to be known as California decorative, which has its devotees, and so its price, still today. Arthur Mathews produced an enormous number of majestic and forceful paintings, most in a decidedly Renaissance palette and many with a classical, allegorical symbolism about them; his twelve great murals, made in 1913 for the California state capitol in Sacramento, famously provide a vision of the postearthquake state that, with their exaggerated visions of a high-colored new Byzantium rising on the Bosporus-like Pacific coast, can be regarded as either noble or incorrigibly cheesy.
*
Mathews was not a well-liked man: He was forceful and bombastic, and not at all progressive. He would happily have chased the Bohemians out of town and kept them at arm's length down the coast in Carmel.

But the couple did have a small following, a circle of neoclassical painters and decorative craftsmen, and it was through them that Arthur and Lucia Mathews tried to pump a measure of artistic adrenaline back into the city's broken system. They did this by setting up a small club and a publishing house, the Philopolis Society and the Philopolis Press, and they started a journal:
Philopolis: A Monthly Magazine for Those Who Care
.

But it didn't last. Philopolis was out of business just ten years later, and with its collapse in 1916, and with the continuing absence of so much other talent, the city's litterateurs seemed to enter into a prolonged dry spell. No one can be sure why this was: The only explanation that seems reasonable is that San Francisco's attempt at artistic resurrection, though heroic in intent, had a kind of artifice about it, a lack of spontaneity, that may have limited its real value quite severely. It was as though the art, instead of being permitted to bubble up naturally through the cracks in the wrecked pavement, was being briefly boosted by the chamber of commerce, or the Lions Club, or the Kiwanis—with the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition that was staged as an official celebration of the city's rebirth all a part of this relentless boosterism. Artists generally prefer to work at their own pace, with their own instincts, gathering themselves into groups and movements and schools at their own behest. Though there are exceptions,
^†
artists generally do not care much to create at the whim of officialdom.

One can reasonably say that it was not until the fifties, when the Beat poets began their howling, down at the City Lights bookshop and in the bars and cafés of North Beach, and when Bohemianism and the beatnik style of life came welling up from nowhere, that creative regeneration began in the city in earnest once again. The damage that was done to the intellectual and artistic spirit of the city by the events of 1906 took much longer to heal than did the physical damage. The buildings eventually came back, but not the soul entire, not for a very long while.

They had a chance. They had an empty slate. There was an opportunity for the city's elected leaders to re-create San Francisco in the way that London had done after its great destruction in 1666, a chance to emulate Chicago's bold rebuilding after the sorrows of 1871. Moreover, a written plan already existed to accomplish all this—and, even more than that, the plan had been delivered, formally, in black and white and fresh from the printers, on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 17, just a matter of hours before the earthquake struck. The plan's author was in Paris at the time of the quake; he was telegraphed with the news of the tragedy and came scurrying back to town like an eager terrier, panting to begin building. “San Francisco of the future will be the most beautiful city of the continent,” he said when he arrived, “with the possible exception of Washington.”

His name was Daniel Hudson Burnham, he came from Chicago, and so far as Washington, D.C., was concerned, he was in a position to know, since he had, in essence, designed the place. The extension of the Mall, the siting and design of Union Station, the creation of the Lincoln Memorial—all these were decisions made by Daniel Burnham. Having designed, in postfire Chicago, any number of noble, classically based, and massive office buildings and houses, he had become a nationally known and revered planner of cities. He was a man of bold ambition. “Make no little plans,” he once famously remarked. “They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.”

Those San Franciscans who, at the turn of the century, had a grand vision for the future of their city—a vision of a cosmopolitan, sophisticated western capital, no longer the brawling frontier city of Gold Rush days—turned inevitably to Burnham. They first approached him informally; and then in 1902 the semiofficial Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco asked him formally for a plan in 1904, not least because they liked his designs for three of the city's best-known buildings.
*
He promptly came to town, set up a studio near the top of Twin Peaks, worked (without a fee) for the following year, and came up with a vision of a newborn imperial city that he felt could rival any then existing in the New World. His design, he thought, should and would be a metaphor for the urban future of the American West. It would be a thing of beauty, magnificence, and style, and it would endure—though no one uttered such a heresy in the earshot of the planners—for just as long as fickle nature allowed.

The design, when unveiled for the Board of Supervisors in September 1905, was ambitious, to say the least. The underpinning notion was triumphalism, the style baroque, the model Paris, the scale prodigious. Nine immense and die-straight boulevards radiated from the great new palace of City Hall, intersecting, as they speared across the map with
périphériques
, with huge parks, colonnades, marble subways, and castellated mansions that looked down from the city's famous hills. One park, to the south of the city, was three times the size of Golden Gate Park, which was already monstrous. And between all these grand marble confections ran water—streams, cascades, reflecting pools, and lakes set throughout the city at staggered heights, thereby providing headwaters for a score of huge fountains that could keep the city bathed in even more mist and moisture than nature provided on its own.

The public was due to see the Burnham plan in April of the following year, and with impeccable timing the printer delivered fat bundles of the final edition to City Hall just hours before the earthquake. They were all burned in the fires, and new copies were printed and distributed to citizens a while later—but not before the newspapers had seen what had been planned and had, at first, given it their most enthusiastic blessing. The city, after all, was now a tabula rasa: Why not let Daniel Burnham loose on its wreckage, to re-create the city with a magnificence beyond all imaginings?
SAN FRANCISCO WILL ARISE FROM THE ASHES / A GREAT AND MORE BEAUTIFUL CITY THAN EVER
read one newspaper headline.

But it was not to be. As it turned out, the city and its commercial oligarchs had neither the time nor the patience nor the vision to see the Burnham plan through. “The crying need of San Francisco,” wrote Michael De Young, the surviving founder
*
of the
Chronicle
newspaper, “is not more parks and boulevards; it is business.” The plan would take a generation to bring to fruition, and, in the view of the newspapers and the Downtown Business Men's Association, that was too long to wait. Besides, the principal oiler-of-wheels and greaser-of-gears within the city administration, Abraham Ruef, was on trial for corruption (and indeed went to prison), and the boards that he had overseen and the city management engines he had supervised were now riven by faction and dissent, with decisions going unmade for months at a time.