The City Feeds Itself by Water

The chief extinguished his lamp and lay down to sleep.

At the foot of Market Street, the produce markets stirred before dawn. The steam schooner Columbia had tied up at the Southern Pacific wharf during the night with 340 tons of lumber from Eureka, and stevedores were already swinging crates of strawberries and asparagus from the Roanoke, which had made the run from Los Angeles in four days. The manifest lay open on a clipboard in the harbormaster’s shed: 2, 400 boxes of oranges, 180 barrels of apples, 60 crates of lettuce. The clerk copied the figures into his ledger by lamplight, his pencil moving in the practiced rhythm of a city that fed itself by water.

At 4:47 a.m., according to the tide gauge he had checked an hour before, the bay stood at mean lower low water.

The morning was warm and windless. Somewhere above the wharves, the cable cars had begun their first runs up the grades, drawing power from the powerhouse at Washington and Mason streets where great wheels turned sixty-ton sheaves through endless loops of wire rope.

The San Francisco Chronicle came off the presses at its plant on Bush Street in the dark hour before five. The compositors had locked the forms for the morning edition at 2 a.m., and now the rotary presses threw out 30, 000 copies an hour onto conveyor belts where boys in canvas aprons bundled them for delivery.

The lead story concerned the Interurban Electric Railway’s fight with the Southern Pacific over terminal rights in Oakland. Page four carried an advertisement for the Orpheum Theater on O’Farrell Street, where Blanche Ring would open that evening in a musical comedy, with a company of 75 and prices from ten cents to fifty cents.

The theater’s electric sign, one of 1, 200 arc lamps licensed by the city, would burn from dusk until midnight, drawing current from the San Francisco Gas and Electric Company at 110 volts DC. The Chronicle itself occupied a building of brick and cast iron, four stories, constructed 1889, valued by the assessor at $287, 000, insured for $200, 000 against fire with the Phoenix of Hartford.

At Engine Company No. 1, the three-story brick building at 410 Bush Street that housed the fire chief’s official quarters, Dennis T. Sullivan had completed his nightly inspection.

He was fifty-three years old, a third-generation San Franciscan who had joined the volunteer department at nineteen and risen through the ranks after the paid force was established in 1866. His wife Margaret slept in the adjoining room.

The chief had spent the evening reviewing the department’s readiness: thirty-five engine companies, twelve hose companies, two hook-and-ladder companies, 585 men on the roster, 121 horses, 53, 000 feet of cotton hose, 16, 000 feet of rubber hose, 142 fire alarm boxes connected by 260 miles of wire to the central station at 117 Brenham Place. The water system, maintained by the Spring Valley Water Works, delivered 48 million gallons daily through 1, 200 miles of mains, with pressure of 75 pounds at the hydrants in the business district and 45 pounds in the residential hills. Sullivan knew these figures as he knew his own heartbeat.

He had fought the fires of 1868, 1875, 1880, 1886, and 1891. He had seen the city burn and rebuild, each time higher and more densely, each time with greater faith in brick and stone.

In 1903 he had proposed an emergency water supply system for the fire department to use water from reservoirs constructed on the city’s high peaks, but construction would not begin until 1909.

The chief’s last recorded act that night was to check the speaking tube that connected his quarters to the engine room below, where two men stood watch. Then he extinguished his lamp.

By 6 a.m., the produce markets had filled with buyers from the retail grocers of Mission, Castro, and Divisadero streets. A commission merchant named Koshland was offering Washington state apples at $2.75 per box; the Italian fishermen of North Beach had delivered 800 pounds of sole and 400 pounds of rock cod before midnight; a carload of live chickens from Petaluma waited in crates on the Sacramento Street wharf. The city’s food supply moved through these few acres of waterfront with the efficiency of long practice. San Francisco consumed 1, 200 tons of fresh produce daily, nearly all of it arriving by water because the railroads terminated across the bay in Oakland, and the ferries charged what the traffic would bear. This geography of dependence—water to wharf to wagon to market to kitchen—would become decisive when the mains broke and the wharves burned.

At the Palace Hotel, the night clerk was completing his ledger. The hotel occupied an entire block on New Montgomery Street, six stories of white granite and brick, 800 rooms, 600 baths, the largest hotel west of Chicago. Its register for April 17 showed 412 guests: traveling salesmen from Chicago and New York, a party of English tourists en route to Yosemite, three members of Congress attending a conference on irrigation, the opera singer Nellie Melba in suite 419. The Palace maintained its own artesian well, 600 feet deep, with pumps capable of delivering 50, 000 gallons daily to its tanks on the roof. This private water supply, unknown to most guests, would prove more valuable than the insurance policies in the hotel safe. The night clerk noted one late arrival at 11:47 p.m.: a metallurgist from the Comstock Lode, registered under the name J.H. MacDonald, who requested a ground-floor room facing the interior court.

The Barbary Coast, that quarter of brothels and dance halls between Broadway and the waterfront, had begun its nightly commerce at 8 p.m. And would continue until 4 a.m.

The police blotter for the Northern Station, covering the district, recorded seventeen arrests on April 17: six for drunkenness, four for vagrancy, three for visiting a disorderly house, two for assault, one for larceny, one for malicious mischief. The call houses—so named because patrons telephoned from downstairs to arrange appointments upstairs—operated under a system of protection that reached from the beat officer to the chief of police and, by reliable report, to the mayor’s office.

Eugene Schmitz, in his second term as mayor, had been elected in 1901 with the organized support of the Union Labor Party and the tacit approval of the business community, who preferred his machine to the more radical alternatives. His administration had survived one grand jury investigation and would face another in June.

On April 17, he lunched at the Commercial Club with the presidents of the Southern Pacific, the Spring Valley Water Works, and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, discussing the proposed municipal ownership of the water supply. The meeting adjourned at 2:30 p.m. Without resolution.

South of Market Street, the factories were already running. The American Can Company at Third and Townsend employed 400 workers on two shifts, stamping tinplate into containers for the canneries of San Jose and Sacramento. The plant’s boiler room, fired by California crude oil, maintained steam pressure of 120 pounds for the stamping presses. Two blocks away, the Union Iron Works shipyard was building a cruiser for the Navy, with 1, 200 men on the payroll and a completion deadline of December 1906.

The industrial district, built on filled marshland, had subsided as much as eight feet since the 1860s; some buildings stood on piles driven through mud and sand to bedrock fifty feet below, others simply on the compacted fill, their walls cracking, their doors sticking, their floors tilting toward the bay.

The workers lived in boardinghouses and tenements on Mission, Folsom, and Harrison streets, paying $8 to $12 per month for a room shared with two or three others. The San Francisco Call that morning carried an advertisement seeking fifty girls for cannery work, with steady employment, at the California Packing Corporation on Third and Berry.

On Nob Hill, the mansions of the Big Four railroad barons and their successors faced the morning with their usual composure. The James C. Flood mansion, built of Connecticut brownstone at a cost of $1.5 million, was now occupied by his son, who had added electric lighting and a private telephone exchange with lines to his brokerage office and his stable.

The Huntington residence, the Crocker, the Stanford—each stood on land that had risen in value from $50 an acre in 1850 to $500 a front foot in 1906, each represented a concentration of wealth that had shaped the city’s politics, its water supply, its fire protection, its very street grades.

The hill itself was artificial, built up by dumping sand and rubble into the ravines that had separated the original dunes. The water mains that served it ran through these unstable fills, as did the gas pipes, the electric conduits, the sewer lines.

The engineers knew this. The geologists knew this. The property owners had more immediate concerns.

At the Presidio, the United States Army post at the Golden Gate, reveille sounded at 5:30 a.m. As it did every morning.

Brigadier General Frederick Funston, commanding the Department of California, was already awake; he had risen at 5 to ride his horse along the beach before the day’s heat. Funston was forty-one years old, five feet four inches tall, a veteran of the Cuban insurrection and the Philippine War who had won the Medal of Honor for crossing a river under fire at Calumpit in 1899.

He had commanded the expedition that captured the Filipino nationalist Aguinaldo, and he carried himself with the certainty of a man who had never failed at anything physical. His command at the Presidio consisted of the 29th Infantry Battalion, 220 men; Battery A, 3rd Artillery, 84 men; and various service detachments—fewer than 500 troops in all, with two field guns and no mounted unit.

Funston had requested additional cavalry in January; the War Department had replied that his needs would be reviewed in the fiscal year 1907.

On April 17, he inspected the post bakery and approved the requisition for 500 barrels of flour. His wife Eda was in Los Angeles visiting her mother; his two children were at school in the post chapel at 9 a.m.

The Western Union telegraph office at 215 Montgomery Street began its business day at 7 a.m.

The night shift had handled 1, 400 messages between midnight and six, mostly commercial traffic: cotton quotations from New Orleans, wheat from Chicago, mining stocks from Denver. The wires ran east through Sacramento and Reno, north through Portland to Seattle, south through Los Angeles to El Paso and the transcontinental connections.

A submarine cable connected to Honolulu; another, completed in 1902, reached Manila by way of Guam and Midway. The office maintained battery power sufficient for forty-eight hours of operation without external current, and duplicate circuits for priority traffic.

The manager, a man named H.T. Whitmore, had worked for Western Union for twenty-three years.

He knew that the San Francisco office handled more messages per capita than any other in the system except New York. He did not know that the building’s foundation, like those of most structures in the financial district, rested on fill that had been dumped into Yerba Buena Cove during the gold rush, mixed with the hulks of abandoned ships.

Central Emergency Hospital, at the corner of Fell and Baker streets, had been completed in 1902 as the city’s response to the growing burden of industrial accidents. It maintained forty beds, an operating theater, and a staff of six physicians on rotation from the University of California Medical School.

The superintendent, Dr. Charles D. Leale, had served as a young army surgeon at Ford’s Theater on the night of Lincoln’s assassination; he was now sixty-three, semiretired, supervising the hospital’s administration while younger men handled the surgery.

On April 17, the admissions log recorded eleven cases: three fractures from falls, two burns from kitchen accidents, a stab wound from a Barbary Coast altercation, a childbirth, and four cases of acute alcoholism.

The hospital’s water supply came from the same Spring Valley mains that served the rest of the city, with a reserve tank of 10, 000 gallons on the roof. Its electrical system, installed in 1903, was powered from the Folsom Street substation of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

The Stock Exchange closed at 3 p.m. With the industrial average up 1.75 points on moderate volume. The building at 301 Pine Street, opened in 1890, was one of the first steel-frame structures in the city, designed to resist fire by the Chicago method—masonry walls enclosing an iron skeleton. The members’ reading room occupied the second floor, with leather chairs and spittoons and the tickers that printed prices from New York and London. The clearinghouse settled the day’s transactions by 4:30; the vaults were locked by 5. The exchange’s private fire brigade, twenty men with hand extinguishers, stood down at 6 p.m. After inspecting the premises. They had never fought a real fire. The building’s insurance, carried through Lloyd’s of London and various American companies, totaled $800, 000 against all risks.

By evening, the city had settled into its routines. The cable cars carried 110, 000 passengers on their 52 miles of track, climbing grades of 20 percent with the grip mechanism that Andrew Hallidie had patented in 1871. The electric streetcars of the United Railroads added another 200, 000 fares on 200 miles of line, their overhead wires strung from poles that also carried the telephone and telegraph circuits. The gas lamps in the residential districts were lit by lamplighters at dusk, 3, 500 of them, each carrying a long pole with a flame at the end. The electric arc lamps in the commercial streets came on automatically when the current was switched from the daytime to the nighttime circuit at the substations. The city consumed 120, 000 cubic feet of manufactured gas daily, produced at the works on Potrero Point from Pennsylvania anthracite shipped around Cape Horn.

At 8 p.m., Blanche Ring took the stage at the Orpheum Theater in a musical comedy that had opened in New York the previous September. The house was three-quarters full, 1, 400 patrons in the orchestra and two balconies, with standing room at the rear. The stage lighting required 300 incandescent lamps and eight arcs, drawing 150 amperes at 110 volts. The asbestos curtain, required by the fire code since the Iroquois Theater disaster in Chicago, hung in its guides above the proscenium, tested monthly by the chief engineer. The audience applauded the hit song of the evening and dispersed by 10:30 to the restaurants and saloons of the surrounding blocks.

The police patrols changed shift at 11 p.m. Sergeant Thomas Brophy, walking the beat from Market to Mission between Third and Fourth streets, noted the usual activity: the all-night restaurants filling with theatergoers, the saloons doing their last business before closing at midnight, the cribs of Jessie Street with their red lamps and their three-minute trade. He arrested no one. His report, filed at 6 a.m. On April 18, would record all quiet for the sector. At the Hall of Justice on Kearny Street, the central station processed the night’s arrests: thirty-seven by midnight, mostly drunks and vagrants, three women for prostitution, one man for assault with a deadly weapon. The city jail held 189 prisoners in cells designed for 150.

At the Presidio, the guard mount was completed by 10 p.m. The sentries walked their posts along the perimeter, challenged by the corporal of the guard at irregular intervals. General Funston had retired to his quarters at 9:30, after writing a letter to his wife describing the health of the post garden and the progress of his children’s lessons. He slept in a wooden cottage built in the 1880s, one story, with a brick chimney and a stove for heat. The quarters stood on the natural sand dunes of the headland, above the fill that troubled the lower parts of the city.

The water system continued its invisible work. The Spring Valley Water Works maintained three principal sources: the Pilarcitos reservoir on the peninsula, 1, 500 million gallons capacity; the Crystal Springs reservoir, 22, 000 million gallons; and the Lake Merced wells, 15 million gallons daily. These fed by gravity through aqueducts and tunnels to the distributing reservoirs on College Hill and Russian Hill, thence through the network of mains and service pipes to the hydrants and taps. The pressure was maintained by the elevation of the sources, not by pumping; the system had no backup power. The chief engineer, William H. Schussler, had completed a report in January noting the vulnerability of the mains crossing the fault zone on the San Francisco peninsula, but recommending no immediate action. The report lay in the files of the Board of Supervisors, unread by most of its members.

At 11:47 p.m., the seismograph at the University of California campus in Berkeley recorded a small disturbance, magnitude approximately 3.5, origin somewhere beneath the Hayward fault. The instrument was operated by a graduate student who noted the trace the following morning without particular concern. Similar events had been recorded six times in the previous year. The San Andreas fault, forty miles to the west, had shown no detectable activity since the installation of the seismograph in 1897.

The night grew warmer. At midnight, the temperature at the Weather Bureau station on Telegraph Hill was 62 degrees, with humidity at 70 percent and wind calm. The barometer stood at 30.12 inches and falling slowly. The forecast for April 18 called for fair and warmer, with possible afternoon fog. The night watchman at the Chronicle building, making his rounds at 12:30 a.m., found all secure. The presses were cold, the gas turned off at the main, the fire doors closed and dogged. He recorded his inspection in the log: 12:30 a.m.—all well.

In Chinatown, the gambling houses and opium dens were at their busiest hour. The district, confined by ordinance to the twelve blocks bounded by Broadway, Kearny, California, and Stockton streets, housed 25, 000 residents in wooden tenements built after the fire of 1886. The Chinese Six Companies, the merchant guild that governed the community’s internal affairs, maintained its own fire company with hand pumps and leather buckets, unrecognized by the city. The tong wars had been quiet for two years; the police, in their nightly sweep at 2 a.m., arrested only four men for gambling and confiscated $200 in silver. The sergeant noted in his report that the Chinese quarter was orderly.

At 3 a.m., the produce markets began their second phase, receiving the dairy products from Petaluma and the eggs from the Santa Clara valley. The Roanoke, having discharged its cargo, was taking on ballast for the return voyage; the Columbia would sail at 6 a.m. With lumber for San Diego. The harbormaster’s clerk, completing his night’s work, totaled the tonnage for April 17: 8, 400 tons received, 3, 200 shipped, 47 vessels in port. He locked the ledger in the safe and walked home to his room on Rincon Hill, climbing the wooden stairs of a house built in 1872 on fill that had settled three feet in thirty years.

The city sleeps for the last time in its old shape, its routines complete, its institutions at rest.