Storming the Gates of Paradise (51 page)

This was the first of the great fires which devastated San Francisco; and it was speedily to be followed by still more extensive and disastrous occurrences of a similar character. Something of the kind had long been anticipated by those who considered the light, combustible materials of which the whole town was constructed. . . . Scarcely were the ashes cold when preparations were made to erect new buildings on the old sites; and in several cases within a few days, and in all, within a few weeks, the place was covered as densely as before with houses of every kind. These, like those that had just been destroyed, and like nearly all around, were chiefly composed of wood and canvas, and presented fresh fuel to the great coming conflagrations.

After this first great fire of San Francisco, five more would follow in the subsequent three and a half years, with the sixth erupting on the summer solstice, June 22, 1851. The third, the
Annals
recorded, destroyed five million dollars’ worth of property.

But in proportion to the unusual depression was the almost immediate reaction, and the ruined citizens began forthwith to lay the foundations of new fortunes instead of those so cruelly destroyed. . . . As the spider, whose web is again and again destroyed, will continue to spark new ones while an atom of material or a
spark of life remains in its body, so did the inhabitants set themselves industriously to work to rear new houses and a new town. . . . From this time forward, we therefore began to notice, that the street architecture gradually assumed a newer and grander appearance.

It also assumed a more fireproof appearance, as brick replaced wood, though brick was a far worse material in earthquakes.

By 1850, the writers could say of a fire damaging about a million dollars’ worth of property, “Elsewhere such a fire might well be called a great one; but it was not so reckoned in the ‘Annals of San Francisco.’ ” The fifth fire was the largest of all, coming after eight months of “comparative immunity from conflagration.” This arson fire began on the night of May 3, 1851, on the south side of Portsmouth Square. It created a firestorm, burning between fifteen hundred and two thousand structures, most of the central city. Then the rebuilding began. (“Sour, pseudo-religious folk on the shores of the Atlantic, might mutter of Sodom and Gomorrah, and prate the idlest nonsense,” said the
Annals
writers, asserting that the catastrophe was no punishment and that there was no reason why the city should not rise again.)

The sixth great fire came about six weeks after the fifth one. These six fires “successively destroyed nearly all the old buildings and land-marks of Yerba Buena,” the original hamlet overtaken by the Yankees. There’s a saying to the effect that “this was my grandfather’s ax, though it’s had four new handles and three heads since his time,” the idea being that the continuity of use and of tradition is more powerful than the incessant replacement of materials. Something similar could be said of cities, except when memory is swept away with the masonry rubble. Memory is what makes it my grandfather’s ax rather than some worn-out piece of detritus; memory is meaning.

The seventh destruction of San Francisco was the great and oft-forgotten earthquake of October 21, 1868, a rupture on the Hayward Fault estimated at 7.0 on the Richter scale. Five people died, spires and chimneys fell, walls tumbled down, some brick buildings collapsed entirely, cracks opened up in the ground, the Custom House was damaged, and City Hall was devastated. And the city was
rebuilt, with little regard for the
San Francisco Morning Call
’s editorial warning against shoddy construction, the use of cornices and other ornaments that could fall in a quake, building on landfill, and other seismically precarious practices: “The lives lost yesterday are not chargeable to the earthquake, but to the vanity, greed and meanness of those who erected the buildings.” When San Francisco was largely destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the sixty-year-old city had already survived a series of destructions and rebuildings. After 1906—the city’s seventh fire and eighth destruction—the destructions would be about social forces out of control rather than natural ones.

At one o’clock in the morning on July 27, 1943, the British Air Force, with support from the U.S. Army, began bombing the city of Hamburg. “The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called,” writes W. G. Sebald, “was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes.” In this, it was eminently successful, and thousands died. On the eve of Valentine’s Day 1945, the same forces began dropping nearly four thousand tons of bombs on the city of Dresden, best known for its manufacture of china dishes, though it also produced gun sights, plane parts, and gas masks. Sixteen hundred acres of the central city, more than twenty-four thousand buildings, and somewhere between thirty and one hundred thousand people were destroyed in the firestorm, the fire so powerful that it incinerated people underground, created its own wind and weather, and moved faster than human beings could run. (Almost twice as many acres, nearly three thousand, were destroyed in San Francisco in 1906.) On August 6, 1945, in the culmination of the Manhattan Project, the first inhabited nuclear ground zero was created when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The bomb killed somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand people in various terrible ways, some instantly, some slowly, and vaporized, shattered, irradiated, and ignited the central city. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In the photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, Nagasaki doesn’t look ruined, as San Francisco did after the earthquake; it looks shattered. Buildings have been torn into splinters and shards in which bodies lie, some of them charred; the force of the bomb is furious, vicious in ways the earthquake was not.

Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are still cities, though not the
cities they were. But World War II also changed even American cities that were far out of reach of the war’s violence. The war did much to lift the Great Depression and created a huge demand for factory and shipyard workers, prompting a colossal migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial cities. San Francisco’s African American population increased ninefold between 1940 and 1950, and still more of these southerners migrated to nearby Oakland, Richmond, and Marin City to fill shipyard jobs. Pushed by discrimination and economics, many ended up in San Francisco’s Western Addition, the flatlands west of City Hall and Van Ness Avenue, which had been partly vacated by Japanese Americans forced into prison camps for the duration of the war.

Ironically, this was the most central neighborhood to have survived the 1906 earthquake. It was made up of wooden Victorian row houses with intricate ornamentation, bay windows, and, often, storefronts built into the ground floor. After the quake, businesses and city administration had relocated to Fillmore Street, the central artery of the Western Addition, while the city to the east was rebuilt. Through World War II and afterward, Fillmore was a lively street of theaters, dance halls, and music clubs, frequented in the postwar years by some of the greatest jazz musicians of the time.

By 1947, however, plans were being laid to erase this neighborhood. The word used over and over until it became a mantra and a justification was “blight,” a word that was supposed to describe the poor condition of the housing and its alleged infestation by vermin but that was in fact a code word for the human inhabitants, just as “urban renewal” was recognized as code for what was also caustically described as “negro removal.” The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency declared, “San Francisco is now developing programs to correct blighted and congested conditions and to deal with an accumulation of housing that is continuously aging and deteriorating faster than it is being rehabilitated or replaced. . . . More than 50 percent of the structures are past middle age with an estimated average age of sixty-seven years. It is this condition which results in neighborhood blight and calls for both major public improvement and private rehabilitation and reconstruction.” Hundreds of wooden Victorian buildings were reduced to splinters, though preservationists managed to relocate some. The “past
middle age” houses that survived redevelopment are now more than a century old, handsome, and worth more than a million dollars apiece.

Into the 1960s, campaigns to devastate this neighborhood were carried out. The rhetoric of urban renewal was that bad housing would be replaced with good housing—and good was defined in those squeamish modernist terms as efficient, up-to-date, and orderly. The truly urban mixing of classes, activities, and households was seen as disorderly, as almost a form of blight itself. (Interestingly enough, proponents of the “new urbanism” and other contemporary urbanists seek to restore those qualities of mixed use and vibrancy to the anesthetized cityscapes and suburbias of the modern era.) In fact, though a number of barracklike housing projects were built (most of which have been destroyed in the past several years as inimical to safety and well-being, to be replaced by townhouses more closely resembling the earlier dwellings), many square blocks of the heart of the Fillmore were left vacant for decades, lots full of weeds, surrounded by Cyclone fences.

The agenda all along had not been the creation of better housing for the inhabitants but their replacement by more affluent inhabitants and increased profits for developers and landowners. This debacle and urban renewal’s subsequent destruction of the South of Market residential hotels, inhabited largely by poor single retirees, particularly union longshoremen, constitute the ninth destruction of San Francisco. Like the earlier destructions, this devastation was not complete, but it turned once densely inhabited expanses into wastelands and signified the end of an era—in this case, the era of San Francisco as a blue-collar town. (Earlier, some of San Francisco’s elite had hoped to use the 1906 earthquake as an opportunity to relocate Chinatown, which had been pretty comprehensively destroyed, from the east flank of Nob Hill to a remote edge of the city; happily, they hoped in vain.)

Poverty as neglect produces ruins in itself—lack of maintenance leads to decay and eventually to ruins. But wealth is a more powerful scourge of cities, removing both buildings and inhabitants to replace them with more profitable versions of same. The Western Addition before urban renewal was shabby, but it was not in ruins. The wrecking balls, the splintered heaps of what had once been
Victorian houses, the vacant lots, the displaced people—all were produced not by the poor but by the wealthy, who controlled urban policy. Or perhaps “wealth” and “poverty” are terms that create a false dichotomy; perhaps “resource allocation” embraces both ends of a spectrum whose pervasive injustices produced urban renewals across the country, produced the ruins that still stand in Detroit and St. Louis and the erasures that made way for the shiny new Manhattans and San Franciscos of the present. Let me again define “ruin.” There is the slow process of entropy that transforms buildings into ruins, and there are the speedy acts of violent nature and violent social forces that immediately shatter buildings—earthquakes, bombs, wrecking balls. But whether the ruins stand, as the ruined abbeys of Henry VIII’s Protestant Reformation stand all over rural England, is another question; when the land is valuable, the ruins themselves are often ruined, destroyed, erased.

One of the principal problems in making human beings face our history is that sudden events get our attention while slow ones do not—even though the cumulative force of, for example, global warming will prove far more dire for the Arctic than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. Our minds are better suited to oil spills than to climate change, and so are our media and our stories. The crash of the airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is unforgettable, but the violent destruction of the South Bronx on a far larger scale throughout the 1970s and 1980s is barely remembered and will likely never elicit a memorial. Yet tens of thousands of intentionally set fires—many of them landlord arsons—devastated this community and turned block after block into ruins. Between 1960 and 1974, the number of fires tripled, from 11,185 to 33,465. There were an average of 33 fires a night in the first half of the 1970s; and in the last year that insurance companies paid out claims for fires, the Bronx lost about thirteen hundred buildings to flames. Then, “in the first year without payoffs,” Marshall Berman reported, “it lost twelve. In the second year, it lost three.” But the fires were never blamed on economic interests. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan voiced a typical sentiment when he wrote, “People don’t want housing in the South Bronx, or they wouldn’t burn it down.”

The fires also raged on the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side, where
a concerted program of urban renewal was also creating a huge wave of displacement. “For years,” Berman recalled, “midnight fires ate up not only buildings but whole blocks, often block after block. Then we found out that, even as big parts of the city were burning down, their firehouses were being closed. . . . Through all these happenings, dozens of ordinary nice neighborhoods, like the one I grew up in, metamorphosed into gigantic, twisted, grotesque ruins. Diverse populations brought up to lead pallid but peaceful lives found themselves engulfed in pathologies, ending in unending early death.” Later in this essay of searing outrage and stubborn loyalty, Berman added, “In the 1970s and 1980s, New York’s greatest spectacles were its ruins. We couldn’t believe the enormity of these ruins. They went on and on, for block after block, mile after mile. Some blocks seemed almost intact; but look around the corner, and there was no corner.” Cardinal Terence Cooke—the Catholic Church was one of the few powers to fight the Bronx blitz—declared that “whole areas look like the burnt-out ruins of war. The ominous wail of sirens has become a terrifying part of people’s lives. There is one building in the Bronx in which families live in constant fear because just last week the building next door was set on fire seven times.”

Another writer, Luc Sante, came of age in New York in its age of ruins: