S.F.'s rebirth after '06 quake offers hope for New Orleans
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99 years apart, disasters that devastated both cities share strange similarities
By Carl Nolte
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 4, 2005
sfgate.com
The old New Orleans is dead, drowned in the worst natural disaster in an American city since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. There is an eerie sense of parallel between the two catastrophes 99 years apart.
Both cities were destroyed. Both cities had to face an uncertain future. San Francisco recovered and became the city it is today. The story of New Orleans is yet to be written.
New Orleans in 2005 was about the same size as San Francisco in 1906 -- 484,000 people lived in modern New Orleans, about 450,000 in the San Francisco of a century ago.
Both the old San Francisco and modern New Orleans were famous for food and drink -- oysters and champagne were the rage in San Francisco of long ago. Bourbon Street in New Orleans is a somewhat tamer version of Pacific Street in San Francisco's Barbary Coast days.
Both cities loved life, both were destroyed by a force of nature, and the destruction was nearly total. After a huge earthquake and three days of uncontrolled fires in 1906, San Francisco was a wreck -- "a blackened, ruined thing, the pity of the world,'' said Sydney Tyler, a journalist. In New York, they wrote San Francisco's obituary, a newspaper series called "The City That Was.''
The same thing is happening over the ruins of New Orleans; the complicated, beautiful, troubled old city is being mourned, gone forever.
The disasters were very similar. Both cities had looting. In San Francisco, the mayor put out the word that looters would be "shot down without mercy.'' The authorities later denied anyone had been shot, but armed soldiers roamed the streets, and there were no television crews to record what really happened.
There were unsavory elements in both cities. San Francisco had the infamous and lawless Barbary Coast and New Orleans is noted for its tough districts. The result: civic chaos.
There was plenty of blame spread around. In New Orleans, they are saying that everyone knew the levees would fail; in San Francisco a century ago, the fire chief had warned that the city's defenses against fire were woefully inadequate. San Francisco was built of wood and it burned; the water mains were broken by the quake, and there was no water to fight the fire. Nor was there a plan to cope with disaster. In 1906, Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan was fatally injured in the earthquake, and the Fire Department was essentially leaderless.
Neither city had an effective evacuation plan. In San Francisco, people simply walked away from the fire to the parks or the Presidio. Later, they took ferries to Oakland or the North Bay. In New Orleans, many had no place to go, so the suffering was worse.
Both cities had large numbers of people of color. Modern New Orleans is 67 percent black. San Francisco was mostly white in 1906, but it had a large Chinese population who lived in slum conditions and was the target of strong prejudice.
There were differences: The Army had a strong presence in San Francisco in 1906, and there were troops at the Presidio. Army soldiers, armed and with orders to shoot looters, were on duty in the city within two hours of the earthquake, so law and order was not the problem it has become in New Orleans. The Navy had a warship on hand from Mare Island within four hours of the quake.
Gen. Frederick Funston was an effective leader who expected his orders to be obeyed, and they were. His troops used dynamite to stop the fire, with mixed results.
There were 250,000 homeless refugees from the San Francisco disaster. To help feed them, the U.S. Army sent 200,000 rations and all the tents it had. Later, the federal government paid for construction of 5,000 tiny refugee dwellings, called "earthquake shacks.'' A handful of them survive today.
The official death toll in San Francisco was under 500, but later studies suggest it may have been as much as six, even seven, times higher. In New Orleans, the authorities have no idea. There is talk that the death toll may run into the thousands.
One thing was immediately clear after each event -- the city that Americans had come to know was gone forever.
"The old San Francisco was dead,'' said Gladys Hansen, who wrote a book on the 1906 earthquake. The San Francisco that arose after the disaster was completely different. The same thing will happen in New Orleans, she said. "It will be a different city. It has to be different. Its needs are different, and its people will be different.''
San Francisco began to rebuild almost as soon as the ashes had cooled. It will take New Orleans longer, because the floodwater has to be pumped out. In San Francisco, crews began ripping out the obsolete cable-car tracks on Market Street and by May 1, 10 days after the fires were finally extinguished, streetcars began running on the city's main drag.
The city rebuilt pretty much the way it was, with surviving buildings, like the Old Mint on Fifth Street, the Emporium and the Flood Building on Market, and the magnificent Ferry Building, anchoring the new city.
It was all done without much planning. "There was no plan,'' said Hansen. Civic leaders, mostly from the business community, took control of the city, and ordinary San Franciscans bought into the vision of a new San Francisco.
A lot of San Franciscans left after the disaster and never returned. The population of Oakland doubled in the years right after 1906. But a lot of new people came to San Francisco as it was being rebuilt. It was an economic boom; there were plenty of jobs. "The people who came in and adopted the city made a difference," Hansen said.
When they were finished, San Francisco was rebuilt, but it was another city, a new one, with a grand City Hall, a new skyline and a new attitude. Old- timers said it was nothing like the old city.
Like New Orleans, San Francisco has always liked a party, and in 1909, only three years after the city was destroyed, San Francisco threw a three-day fair called the Portola Festival, with massive light displays and parades.
In 1915, less than nine years after the disaster, the huge, colorful and fondly remembered Panama Pacific International Exposition opened in the Marina district. "San Francisco Invites the World" was the slogan. Eighteen million people came.
No one knows what New Orleans has it mind for itself, but if the Crescent City comes back, it will do it with some kind of celebration, Hansen thinks.
"I bet they will,'' she said. "They'll have to have some kind of celebration to say the city is not dead.''
One thing she is sure of. "The people who survived the flood will not want to talk about it because they lost so much. You need time.''
Years will go by, and slowly, the bad memories will fade into myth, into legend, and the New Orleans flood will become like the San Francisco earthquake, part of the fabric of a city that died and was reborn. |
