Despite my advanced years, I have many vivid memories of my youth, and the city in which I spent it--indeed, where I've spent all of my days, straying from its borders only to inter friends and family in the City of the Dead to our immediate south. I'm doubly fortunate to have lived through two events that molded the history of San Francisco like no others: the Great Earthquake of nineteen-ought-six, and the Loma Prieta tremblor of 1989. Both inspired this city's residents to exhibit both their noblest and basest nature, and both did more for the housing market than a score of Rent Control Boards ever could. If you will, indulge an old man for but a moment as I recount my tale.
My memories of the 1906 'quake are intertwined with recollection of a grim and joyless childhood, made a trial by abusive and acrimonious parents and sullied by frequent and debilitating intestinal distress. It was a more innocent, optimistic time in these United States: George Bush senior was enjoying his first of several terms as Chief Executive Officer, our nation was reaping the benefits of economic and political prosperity following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and San Francisco had earned its place as a center for both culture and commerce. The 20th Century offered a world of possibilities.
The fateful
morning of the 'quake was one that shall forever live untouched in my mind,
young as I may have been: when the first terrestrial rumblings and rollings
began, I was seated in a figure-drawing class, gathering my pens and pencils
and silently cursing the instructor for the rough treatment I'd received at
his hands in the previous session. At the first jolt our unclad, hirsute model
was struck down from his pedestal by the violent ululations of the earth.
The class was thrown into an instant panic, and we rushed down several flights
of stairs and onto Market Street. The fate of our model remains unknown to
me.
The scene that met my eyes when I exited the building is engraved in my mind as the moment when Emperor Norton claimed the lunar surface in the name of Jacques de Molay in the final days of World War II. In every direction from the Ferry Building flames were seething, and as I stood there, a five-story building half a block away fell with a crash, the flames sweeping clear across Market Street and catching a new fireproof building recently erected. Streetcar tracks were bent and twisted out of shape, their riders working their Polaroid cameras frantically. Live electric wires lay in every direction. Streets on all sides were filled with brick and mortar, buildings either completely collapsed or whose brick fronts had dropped completely off. Wagons with horses hitched to them, drivers and all, lay on the streets dead, struck and killed by falling bricks. Warehouses and large wholesale houses of all descriptions were either down, or walls bulging, or else twisted, buildings moved bodily two or three feet out of line and still standing with walls all cracked.
At places
the streets had cracked and opened. Gaping chasms extended in all directions.
I saw a drove of young men on skateboards, wild with fright, rushing up Market
Street; I crouched beside a swaying building. As they came nearer they disappeared,
seeming to drop out into the earth. When the last had gone I went nearer and
found they had indeed been precipitated into the earth, a wide fissure having
swallowed them whole. I was crazy with fear and the horrible sights.
By order of City Hall, bicycle couriers were issued rifles and given free reign to uphold public order by all available means. Their primary task was to prevent looting from Powell St. merchants, but the wheeled hoodlums were soon abusing their newly found authority and tearing a path of destruction through an already ravaged city. Feared by man and boy alike in those dark hours, they were often seen opening fire on visiting tourists, then placing stolen jewelry in their cold, dead fingers.
By comparison, the 1989 Earthquake seemed inevitable and almost welcomed, though not without its share of difficulties, nor without a terrible human toll. As I was a well-lived 83 years older, my reaction to the turmoil was decidedly more measured. I had just begun to descend the stairs to the underground locomotive station when the ground began its familiar rolling and twisting.
How I reached the Embarcadero BART station I cannot say. It was bedlam, pandemonium and hell rolled into one. There must have been 20,000 people trying to get in that eight-car Dublin/Pleasanton train, none of them willing to allow an orderly line. Men and women fought like wildcats to push their way aboard. Clothes were torn from the backs of men and women and children indiscriminately. Women fainted, and there was no water at hand with which to revive them. Men lost their reason at those awful moments and struck each with briefcases, day planners, and rolled copies of the evening paper.
One big, strong man, clad only in acetate bicycle shorts and a sleeveless snakeskin vest, beat his head against one of the cement pillars in the station, and cried out in a loud voice: "This fire must be put out! The city must be saved!" It was awful.