known as the white pee bakery my mother arrived and found a job right near where my dad was working he delivered the vegetables and she probably opened the back door so that's how they met for the thousands of people who had disembarked at her warm since the days of the gold rush San Francisco was a magnet a kind of promised land at the end of the rainbow the first home for many on American soil was in the district called South of Market here were cheap wood tenements Act signed by side like a house of cards they would be the first to burn and then the little streets were for like colonies all the Irish settlers one one little neighborhood and the Dutch had settlers another neighborhood and the Jews would settle in another neighborhood and which is a neighborly party everybody knew everybody else north of market was a city within the city 20,000 Chinese dipped here Chinatown is very circumscribed in that it was only about 5 square plops at that time and we are not supposed to wander beyond Powell Street or Broadway on the north the Chinese ghetto was portrayed by the popular press as a barbaric and dangerous place whose inhabitants worship pagan gods and indulged in fantastical vices [Music] they ate strange foods and lived in a world cloaked in mystery and secrecy on the inside was rather less romantic a few were influential merchants traders of silks tea and cheap human labor Chinese laborers had started coming to California around the time of the gold rush Gold mountain men they were called back home in Canton in San Francisco they became workers in sweatshops servants in the houses of the rich there was an invisible wall around Chinatown a wall of racial prejudice like my parents the minute they landed in salvages Eko from China they just stayed in Chinatown and how they ever get all rich on the top and one time I as a little boy are you wander beyond Pacific Avenue and I was beaten by some Italian boy we knew that we were hated as people and so we generally try to stay aloof and be by ourselves [Music] just a few minutes walk and in half a world away from Chinatown was the Palace Hotel if you had the money and you came to town it was the place to stay there was cut glass and marble in every corridor and the incredible luxury of telephones and bathtubs in every room [Music] there was also the most modern system of fire alarms and sprinklers the palace was built to be indestructible but so was the Titanic Enrico Caruso the famous opera singer checked in here the night before the quake he arrived with 54 steamer trunks and fifty self-portraits that evening Caruso stepped on stage to sing Don Jose in Carmen in San Francisco's Grand Opera House if you couldn't get tickets to the Opera you could go to a gala costume carnival on skates where Miss Floria was crowned the queen of the rollers in the district called the Barbary Coast Nickelodeon showed scandalous moving pictures the coast was described by one indignant critic as that sink of moral pollution whose reefs are strewn with human wrecks here glitter eyed men drink vile occur and smoke offensive tobacco and engage in vulgar conduct here are debauchery disease insanity blasphemy death and hell yearning to receive the putrid mess [Music] the men on the vice squad were ever vigilant provided no one paid them not to be the mayor of San Francisco Eugene Schmitz was a frontman for a corrupt city boss the Board of Supervisors were content to receive their portion of the bribes it was said they were so eager to better their position they would eat the paint off a house this was City Hall but serious business was done in a little pub on the south side of market their city politicians wheeled and dealed with those who needed favors and who could afford to pay for them they're all crooks there was not a graph going out of them days but people took it for granted everybody was grafton so it didn't make any difference Smits and his cronies controlled the grandest city west of the Mississippi a few dozen big hotels offices and banks were built of bricks steel and masonry most everything else was built of wood San Francisco was a city waiting to burn in 1906 the fire alarm the response the men and the equipment worked exactly the way they are portrayed in this early silent film everything was automatic in the firehouse the lights lit on the first strike of the Bell when the bell hit the lights lit that let go the horses moved out under the collars they snapped the collars the drivers in the seat and now on the street they were very fast but in spite of everything in spite of San Francisco's 38 steam engine companies 320 horses and 584 firemen who had already distinguished themselves as the city's homegrown heroes the fire department would be hard pressed to face the coming disaster just months before the earthquake the National Board of fire underwriters stated in a report San Francisco has violated all underwriting precedents by not burning up that it has not done so already is largely due to the vigilance of the fire department which cannot be relied upon to indefinitely stave off the inevitable the underwriters were about to be proven incorrect [Music] [Music] I was sleeping with my mother and we thought was the end of the world we grabbed each other and pulled the covers over our heads and said this is the end of the world and of course we were scared to death we tried to stand up or do something but we couldn't be it if you had to hang on for dear life because as I say the bed was flying around the room like like a kite we would tried to get out the back kitchen door onto our porch but the chimney was broken down and the bricks were all against the door we couldn't go out [Music] the quake hit San Francisco on Wednesday April 18 at precisely 12 minutes past 5 o'clock in the morning but San Francisco wasn't the only place to get hit for more than 200 miles along the San Andreas Fault the crust of the earth slipped as much as 21 feet in San Jose 8,000 people were homeless Santa Rosa a town of 7,000 was leveled trees were uprooted fences curved and in some places the earth flowed like water the quake had the impact of 6 million tons of TNT roughly 12,000 times the power of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima it remains the greatest natural disaster suffered by a North American city [Music] [Music] back in San Francisco in the hours just after the quake people wandered the streets in confusion they had a singular hurt expression remarked one observer as if good friend had suddenly wronged them in some districts people had no idea of the amount of damage that had been done at Valencia station commuters waited impatiently for train that would never come others including Sam Fey set out and walked to work then I got there the building stood like a drunken man there and the boss was there and he says Sam would you mind standing here and watching the building I said it's no use watching it I says watch there's nothing to steal and there were people walking along while some would wheel valves and they closed and someone that was the parrots on that shoe the Canaries and what have you anything they could carry even saw a guy rolling the barrel of whiskey along the number of people killed by the earthquake was not yet known or even guessed at but it was clear that many of the worst casualties were in the neighborhood south of market an estimated 30 to 80 people were crushed in the Valencia hotel Sam hey was there a fella come order the third floor Stark's vendor naked not a stitch on him or the door window and he stood there on the fire escape and I bent over threw up put through one of the firemen I says say you better see what you can do with that poor devil because he's liable to get hurt I didn't take five minutes since that fella got out there when the whole floor everything crashed into the basement with a roar God was but the noise had made they had the big party tonight before their and the majority was still sleep so they slept there for good and my mother kept telling the children she says I just have a feeling something happen to your father and about a half an hour later my mother sees the horse and wagon coming back and driven by a strange person so my mother knew then that was the end and that she got the news that my father had been killed in the quake all over the Mission District tenements folded in like pasteboard from the wreckage the cries of the trapped and injured could be heard those who survived could not be helped at the city's hospitals which had sustained major damage in the quake they were taken to the dance hall where only last night miss Floria had reigned as the roller Queen I wrote around with my father I sat next to the driver of the driver's seat well he went around with his wagon looking for injured people who had not been found and then then we couldn't find Lily after that Nellie was the horse and I was crying where is Lily where is nearly I never have learned what happened to Lily never have learned what no one yet realized that morning was that the greatest tragedy of San Francisco was yet to unfold the shark had snapped gas mains and toppled chimneys 50 fires had started almost simultaneously although the city's telephone and central alarm system were destroyed the individual Fire Brigades flew into action but when they arrived on the scene there was no water the quake had broken almost all water mains coming into the city hydrants gave off a trickle and then ran dry by 7:00 a.m. mayor Schmitz had received status reports from the police and fire departments half a dozen fires were raging out of control the mayor issued a proclamation stating that looters would be shot on sight he also deputized special police whose actions would later be questioned but the real power lay in the hands of Brigadier General Frederick Funston the ranking army officer in San Francisco Funston commandeered automobiles and mustered troops by 8:00 a.m. more than 1700 men had arrived downtown their orders would have fight the fire evacuate citizens and prevent crimes but in the chaos that followed the soldiers themselves were seen looting by the time troops were patrolling the streets a good part of the city was in flames at about 9 a.m. someone living in the Hayes Valley section kindled a fire to cook breakfast innocent of the fact that the quake had damaged their chimney this was the result by noon the ham and eggs fire as it came to be known was on its way to claiming a good part of the city my friend Ameobi took a hike oh but between Portland tipped on for some Street because there was a little wooden church was burning flames were shooting up and B stood watchin that little church burning was horrible the fire was really often running by this time so we found we got down to a building it was going and I can recall the chief who's in command yelling that the the front of the building was coming out the wall was collapsing so a police officer decided that what we were doing down there was a right proper place to be and he said where are you from we said Telegraph we'll go on home to send us back up to help it was believed many of the modern office buildings could withstand the flames most prominent the call building one of America's first skyscrapers the call caught shortly after 10:30 a.m. it burned from the top down its elevator shafts acting like flus a few firemen were trapped on the upper floors and incinerated about this time Funston decided that the only hope of stopping the destruction was to use dynamite to create a firebreak at 1:00 p.m. a demolition team raced across market to blow up the Monadnock building the dynamite didn't work all that was accomplished was to gut the interior of the building without bringing it down around the corner a telegraph operator tapped out San Francisco's last message to the outside world 2:30 p.m. the city practically ruined by fire it's within half a block of us a call building is burned out entirely The Examiner building just fell in a heap fire all around them in every direction destruction by earthquake something frightful they are blowing up standing buildings that are in the path of flames with dynamite no water it's awful I want to get out of here or be blown up [Applause] by 3:00 p.m. all telegraph lines were down the city was isolated black powder and dynamite in the hands of inexperienced men often spread the fire rather than contained it Oh all day long you hear those dynamite going bing bing bang bang you know all over we always thought that was the big boy next to the Monadnock was the palace where Caruso had spent the night it withstood the flames until 3:30 when it's special sprinkler system ran dry bartenders gave away bottles of fine wine while national guardsmen made a last-ditch effort to save the hotel by 5:00 p.m. it was gone towards the afternoon in certain parts of the city the fire began to assume the characteristics of a firestorm [Music] the fire generated its own superheated wind which caused spontaneous combustion [Music] a police officer described seeing a tongue of flame catch three people it crackled like a million firecrackers he said and it was low to the ground the flames seemed to pass through them when it had gone they were just balls of fire on the ground I remember seeing a fire and you know all around it was smoke and everything I remember looking at the Sun or moon I don't remember whether the Sun a moon it was very red and I remember having nightmares for a long time remembering that all that redness in the moon a sudden the fire by late afternoon had not only cut San Francisco off from the rest of the world all lines of communication within this city were severed untrained deputies guarded banks and stores and took the law into their own hands and soldiers patrolled the streets without the commanding officers by nightfall they had evacuated thousands of people we shouldn't we had people knocking at our door and wanting to come in because they they wanted people to get out evacuate andum they were soldiers and we had to get out and they led us to Washington Square and we we will put up there and just assign a place where we were to be in that section in the panic soldiers barred many from saving their possessions hours before the fire has reached their district one fellow says I'm gonna take a hike over Market Street and the swords authority no you're not nobody goes over Market Street he says who's gonna stop me has the soy sauce says I will because if you insist ago and I've heard a bullet through kids who were found looting were spared but publicly humiliated they were forced to wear placards proclaiming their crime later there would be persistent reports of shootings we got down the Broadway and we heard somebody screaming up there when we walked back down and the guys stopped running and they century without them since half the other ones I shoot so when he shot because he wouldn't even halt see towards evening a young newspaper reporter named Jack London surveyed the scene I knew it was all doomed hero I walked for miles and miles through empty blocks in the intense heat of the city two troopers sat on their horses and watched surrender was complete thousands of people were huddled in open squares and parks while the fire raged unchecked through surrounding neighborhoods others watched from rooftops on Telegraph Hill Russian Hill and Knob Hill by this time it seemed too many there was nothing one could do but watch that night we went up on top of the hill my mother and I and the whole city was burning all south amok and all along the waterfront was going and she said to me well will and he'll now be a pioneer of new San Francisco my 10:00 p.m. two hundred and fifty city blocks had gone up in flame South of Market was gone the financial district was gone Chinatown and the Barbary Coast would burn in the night reports began to reach the outside world but it would take days before anyone including the people who lived through it could fully grasp what was happening the headlines were part fact and part fiction at dawn on April 19 24 hours after the earthquake people who had lost their homes gathered in the streets they seemed shell-shocked unwilling or unable to go any further [Music] fortunes factories homes had all been swept away [Music] word got around that boats were taking people across the bay and thousands began the long trek down Market Street to the Ferry Building [Music] my parents were able to hire a wagon and we told her who want to go to the waterfront to take a boat over to Richmond and the people demanded $20 for the ride and that was quite a sum of money in those days because the average Chinese earned about $15 a month [Music] others drag trucks for miles or carried what they could on their backs messages to lost friends and relatives were chalked on the sides of buildings [Music] another reporter joined a stream of refugees he wrote the stream seemed dead not recently dead but as if buried by some Cataclysm of long ago and then dug out of the lava everywhere there were smoke a contortion of stone and the great silence [Music] [Music] at the end of the long march when people finally got to the Ferry Building they were told they could only take what they could carry in their arms by midday on April 19th 250,000 were homeless over 3,000 were dead but that was only the beginning the city would burn for another two days [Music] when the fire had burned itself out William Randolph Hearst the newspaper magnate arrived in what was left of San Francisco he wrote the hills rolled to the seas as bears when the Pioneers landed in 49 but now they are a blackened waste north to the bay west to the mission nothing but ruins the wholesale district is destroyed the manufacturing district the financial district and the waterfront section of destroyed [Music] I will not attempt any description of his scene I do not believe that any words of mine could convey the slightest comprehension of the wreck and ruin took us out took the whole Hill out we had nothing up there all I could remember when my mother took me up after the fire we saw we lived all was left was the foundation the concrete foundation we found one thing and that was a little sewing machine that you turned around my hand for a little girl my sister had it and I was in the ruins we got that's about all we saved out of that I must free the mind of the idea that there has been a fire in San Francisco and must realize that there has been a fire of San Francisco the whole city has gone up in one mighty blaze the calamity seems overwhelming and yet the people are not overwhelmed everything has been destroyed except that indomitable American plug in a month there will be the beginning of a new and splendid City in three years it will be built and busy finding loved ones would take days hundreds prayed they would not find them on the lists of the coroner who now supervise the exhuming of hastily buried corpses in Portsmouth Square food was short at first men scavenged for canned goods in the debris drinking water was a precious commodity but even before the fire had burned out supplies began to flood into the city military Garrison's from Portland and Seattle sent 900,000 rationals a relief train arrived from Los Angeles first mobilized the resources of his newspapers and dispatched 12 trains from New York Congress appropriated $1,000,000 pledges of money came from cities towns and organizations all over the country soup kitchens cropped up amid the ruins and everyone waited in line my father and I anytime got to the last stood in line early morning until maybe four or five o'clock in the afternoon when you get to the to the counter where they were handing it out well sorry it's all gone then you had it wait until the next day he get in line that's the way it went standing in bread lines meat lines soup lines any kind of a line became the central activity of life everyone had to do it soldiers made sure nobody cheated some people joked about it others didn't think it was so funny a few were inspired to write poetry it ain't such a terrible long time ago that mrs. Van Bergen and me though living nearby to each other you know was strangers for all you could see for she had a grand house and horses to drive and a we rented cottage was mine but now we need rations to keep us alive and we're standing together in line if you weren't standing in line you were probably digging out whether you liked it or not my father was standing on the curb right in front of our over the tents and an army man came along my father was very courtesy and he said good morning captain he says he wasn't my father says no sir and he says come with me anybody they caught walking the streets was handed a shovel and follow the truck for five or six blocks until they picked up another guy then they let the last guy loose of him and that's the way it went on until they were killed six o'clock maybe within a week of the end of the fire over 200,000 people found shelter in camps that had sprung up in the parks and squares of the city newspapers in San Francisco portrayed the life of the camps as something downright heroic here again was frontier man and woman reduced to the bare necessities of life toughing it out like the stalwart pioneers of 49 we were cooking out in front of the tents you know and that sand would blow into the beans and it was an awful mess the grist of that sand and the beans I could not could never look up Spain in the face from any hits after that [Music] while people started life over again in the camps the city its government utilities and business struggled to get back on its feet City Hall was devastated the quake had exposed fake marble columns evidence of underhanded deals with the contractors who had built it at the inflated cost of seven million dollars mayor Schmitz and his paint eating cronies would eventually be deposed but for the time being he still enjoyed an immense popularity and it seemed that the quake had shocked him into his best behavior with a grim memory of the ham and eggs fire the mayor ordered everyone who still had a home to cook on a curb until inspectors could check their chimneys another big problem with Sanitation with sewers blocked epidemics were feared rats flushed from the sewers could carry the bubonic plague and there's one thing my mother didn't like it was rats we had five ash cans for all our refugees when we come back at noon time for lunch I'd inspect the ash cans rule out the covers to see if a rice had gotten that one and the coarser he got in one he couldn't get out my dog sandy a fox terrier be standing there with his tail wagging and if there was a rat in any other cans I'd tip it over and the rather jump out and stand he would kill him so I would take that right over this teenager and he'd take it I just downed the emergency hospital and the city was paying a bounty on all the dead rats and what he do was he give us a couple pieces of candy and he collects the bounty the main post office survived mail service resumed almost immediately letters were accepted without stamps or envelopes messages were scrawled on any available scrap of paper saying all safe although lost all and everything ruined but don't worry government is looking out insurance companies having lost their records in the fire set up a central bureau to sort out 170 million dollars in claims businessmen waited four weeks for their safes to cool before discovering what remained it was said that in many places the debris was not even allowed to cool and bricks were pitched from Lots when still as warm as muffins volunteers on the cleanup crews took up the refrain in the damnedest finest ruins I'd rather be a brick then live anywhere else but San Francisco the great cleanup had begun thousands of standing walls were torn down an estimated six and a half billion bricks were carted away or cleaned of mortar to be reused in new buildings the demolition of the gutted Palace Hotel cost $90,000 for the whole city just hauling away the mess and dumping it in the bay would cost twenty million dollars railroad tracks were laid down streets all over town for debris trains you were lucky if tracks ran near your property if not you'd swap your kingdom for a horse in the first 18 months of reconstruction 15,000 horses died in harness contractors figured into their costs the value of the animals they knew they would have to work to death work on the streetcar system began at once the United railroad replaced cable systems with overhead wires for new electric trolleys only ten days after the quake mayor Schmitz inaugurated service on the first line people cheered at the car fast some forgot to move until almost too late thousands of laborers worked on restoring the lines within a few weeks 225 miles of track throughout the morning newspapers proclaimed the rebirth of the city a newspaper reporter asserted that the business of San Francisco has not been destroyed nearly the business equipment if there is a businessman in this city who is not perfecting his plan for resuming at the old stand or as near as possible there to the Chronicle has not heard of him it's a free state everyone beginning over again rich and poor alike the Chief of Police sits in the window of a corner grocery and the relief committee is working 24 hours a day from the showroom of a vegetable grocer cooking their dinners in the streets maybe seeing girls who were educated at Stanford Berkeley passer and Bryn Mawr the loss of life is small the loss of social position is colossal down to the elements now nothing counts but human love humanity is on the flat and everyone is on the level within six months the ranks of the building trades in the city doubled from 20,000 to 40,000 working men and their families arrived from all over the nation popular postcards of the day featured the brick cleaner the carpenter and the steel girder man has the new heroes of San Francisco a carpenter could make a fat wage of $4 a day in New York City lawyers were only making a dollar fifty the Chinese returned from segregated camps to survey what was once their home in the next three years Chinatown would be rebuilt mostly by the Chinese themselves my father was so grateful that the family was in tagging that we had suffered no great loss and so he decided to follow American custom of having a Thanksgiving dinner and so he bought a turkey a 20-pound turkey and portable oven and roasted the turkey and that caused quite a commotion among the people living in a tenement house because it has never heard of such a thing and but my father said weld American custom custom is to Happy Thanksgiving celebration and that's what we're doing 28,000 buildings had been destroyed three years later they would be replaced by 20,000 500 new ones a completely new city rose up on the edge of the bay [Music] the people of San Francisco shared a sense of triumph they also shared a desire to erase the memory of the disaster and reassure themselves and the rest of the world that the new city was somehow invincible they fought for and won the right to host the World's Fair of 1950 [Applause] February 20th was opening there come down into the streets instructed the organizers we want everybody we will walk everyone without distinction after years of waiting the hour has come for San Francisco to come into her own we are going out there to open our exposition when the crowd entered the gates found strangely silent there was a benediction to the city of st. Francis by the western sea give a hope and a faith that no not failure [Music] even the city's Chinese were invited they staged a grand parade to the streets to the fair the Italian stage their own event celebrating Columbus the discoverer of America and the great Italian Patriot Garibaldi [Music] Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand king and queen at the silent comedy were welcomed by a new mayor on the steps of the half-finished city hall a symbol of reformed city government the fair itself was designed to represent the complete development of human civilization up to present time [Music] the wonders of modern technology were particularly reassuring they seem to demonstrate a triumph of man over the forces of nature the world's Fair's own fire department was supplied with the most modern equipment the last of the old horse-drawn steamers had just been replaced the year before thanks to the new motorized fire trucks and the installation of high-pressure water mains in the city people were confident that destruction by fire could never happen again tens of thousands came to San Francisco in spite of the lingering worry that the city remained on shaky ground in the end there were no guarantees that the city was invincible there was only the will and the example of the people themselves [Music] here was manifest and indomitable and impetuous spirit that in the wake of disaster had built an entire city and a World's Fair from the ground up and it was fairyland it was just like feral and to me those were the glorious years when I was 15 and it was just beautiful that was one of the most wonderful fairs they'll ever have anywhere oh that place that's a nice place and the only words that I could use it was magnificent here Judy Woodruff from the macneil/lehrer Newshour speak on democracy and the media Friday November 3rd at UC Davis call Bass Ticketmaster or the UC Davis box office for ticket information major funding for this series is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the financial support of viewers like you corporate funding for the American experience is provided by Aetna for more than 130 years a part of the American experience [Music] educational organizations may inquire about video cassettes of the American experience by calling 1-800 for 24/7 963 this is PBS next time on the American experience the Great War 1918 next time on the American experience known as the white cream bakery my mother arrived and found a job right near where my dad was working he delivered the vegetables and the chief probably open the back door so that's how they met for the thousands of people who had disembarked at her warm since the days of the gold rush San Francisco was a magnet a kind of promised land at the end of the rainbow the first home for many on American soil was in the district called South of Market here were cheap wood tenements fact side-by-side like a house of cards they would be the first to burn and then little streets were for like colonies all the Irish settlers one one little neighborhood and the Dutch had settlers another neighborhood and the Jews would settle in another neighborhood and which is a neighborly party everybody knew everybody else north of market was a city within the city 20,000 Chinese dipped here Chinatown is very circumscribed in that it was only about 5 square plops at that time and we are not supposed to wander beyond Powell Street or Broadway on the north the Chinese ghetto was portrayed by the popular press as a barbaric and dangerous place whose inhabitants worship pagan gods and indulged in fantastical vices [Music] they ate strange foods and lived in a world cloaked in mystery earthquake the National Board of Fire underwriters stated in a report San Francisco has violated all underwriting precedents by not burning up that it has not done so already is largely due to the vigilance of the fire department which cannot be relied upon to indefinitely stave off the inevitable the underwriters were about to be proven correct [Music] [Music] I was sleeping with my mother and we thought was the end of the world we grabbed each other and pulled the covers over our heads and said this is the end of the world and of course we were scared to death we tried to stand up or do something but the we couldn't be it if you had to hang on for dear life because as I say the bed was flying around the room like like a kite we would tried to get out the back kitchen door onto our porch but the chimney was broken down and the bricks were all against the door we couldn't go out [Music] [Music] the quake hit San Francisco on Wednesday April 18 at precisely 12 minutes past 5 o'clock in the morning secrecy on the inside it was rather less romantic a few were influential merchants traders of silks tea and cheap human labor Chinese laborers had started coming to California around the time of the gold rush Gold mountain men they were called back home in Canton in San Francisco they became workers in sweatshops servants in the houses of the rich there was an invisible wall around Chinatown a wall of racial prejudice like my parents the minute they landed in San Rico from China they just stayed in Chinatown and hardly ever get out rich on the top and one time I as a little boy are you wander beyond Pacific Avenue and I was beaten by some Italian boy we knew that we were hated as people and so we generally try to stay aloof and be by ourselves [Music] just a few minutes walk in half a world away from Chinatown was the Palace Hotel if you had the money and you came to town it was the place to stay there was cut glass and marble in every corridor and the incredible luxury of telephones and bathtubs in every room [Music] there was also the most modern system of fire alarms and sprinklers the palace was built to be indestructible but so was the Titanic their portion of the bribes it was said they were so eager to better their position they would eat the paint off a house this was City Hall but serious business was done in a little pub on the south side of market their city politicians wheeled and dealed with those who needed favors and who could afford to pay for them there are all crooks there was not a graph going out of them days but people took it for granted everybody was grafton so it didn't make any difference Schmitz and his cronies controlled the grandest city west of the Mississippi a few dozen big hotels offices and banks were built of bricks steel and masonry most everything else was built of wood San Francisco was a city waiting to burn in 1906 the fire alarm the response the men and the equipment worked exactly the way they are portrayed in this early silent film everything was automatic in the firehouse the lights lit on the first strike of the bill when the bell hit the lights lit that let go the horses moved out under the collars they snapped the collars the drivers of the seat and now on the screen they were very fast but in spite of everything in spite of San Francisco's 38 steam engine companies 320 horses and 584 firemen who had already distinguished themselves as the city's homegrown heroes the fire department would be hard pressed to face the coming disaster just months before the Enrico Caruso the famous opera singer checked in here the night before the quake he arrived with 54 steamer trunks and fifty self-portraits that evening Caruso stepped onstage to sing Don Jose in Carmen in San Francisco's grand opera house if you couldn't get tickets to the Opera you could go to a gala costume carnival on skates where miss Floria was crowned the queen of the rollers in the district called the Barbary Coast Nickelodeon showed scandalous moving pictures the coast was described by one indignant critic as that sink of moral pollution whose reefs are strewn with human wrecks here glitter eyed men drink vile liquor and smoke offensive tobacco and engage in vulgar conduct here are debauchery disease insanity blasphemy death and hell yearning to receive the putrid mess [Music] the men on the vice squad were ever vigilant provided no one paid them not to be the mayor of San Francisco Eugene Schmitz was a frontman for a corrupt city boss the Board of Supervisors were content to receive
