The Commission of Forty and the Blueprint

Seen from above, the burnt district was a vast, geometric scar upon the coastal hills, a stark grid of rubble and ruin stretching from the waterfront to the distant peaks. Where streets had run, paths were cleared through debris; where buildings had stood, only skeletal walls, melted iron, and solitary chimneys remained. This desolate expanse, laid bare, revealed the city’s underlying skeleton: the imposed grid of surveyors, the ghostly lines of old land grants, and the filled coves and flattened dunes of nineteenth-century engineering. It was a blank slate for planners, but one already being scribbled upon by thousands of returning owners.

This was the view that greeted Daniel Burnham when he arrived in San Francisco in May 1906. The Chicago architect, fresh from his triumph at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, had been invited by a syndicate of downtown property owners to prepare a plan for the city’s reconstruction. He brought with him a portfolio of grand proposals—wide boulevards, civic centers, radiating streets—that bore no relation to the actual city beneath his feet. The contradiction did not trouble him. Burnham believed that great plans preceded great cities, that the physical form of a metropolis could be willed into existence by men of vision and capital. He set up his offices in the Palace Hotel, still standing though damaged, and began to sketch.

The invitation had not come from the mayor’s office or the Board of Supervisors. It had come from the Committee of Fifty, the self-appointed body of businessmen, railroad executives, and bankers who had begun meeting in the days after the fire to coordinate relief and, increasingly, to plan the city’s future. The Committee had formed spontaneously in the lobby of the Merchants Exchange Building on April 19, while the fire still burned in the Mission District. Its original purpose was emergency relief: to feed the refugees, to secure credit for the ruined banks, to petition Washington for federal aid. But by early May, as the flames died and the scope of the destruction became clear, the Committee had turned to questions of permanent reconstruction. It had become, in effect, a parallel government.

The Mayor’s Advisory Committee, as it was officially titled, numbered closer to forty than fifty, though the popular name stuck. Its membership read like a directory of the city’s commercial elite: presidents of the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; the heads of the six largest banks; the owners of the major downtown hotels and department stores; the publishers of the Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Call. What united them was not merely wealth but location: nearly all held property in the burnt district, and nearly all stood to gain or lose depending on how the city was rebuilt. They had no legal authority to plan anything. They claimed it anyway.

On the morning of May 23, 1906, a subcommittee of the Forty convened in a borrowed office on Montgomery Street. The room was small, lit by gas lamps that hissed and flickered, for the electric lines were still down in much of the city. The men present represented the core of the planning effort: an architect who had agreed to supervise Burnham’s work; James Phelan, the former mayor and art patron who had first proposed bringing Burnham west; and three representatives of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose terminal and freight yards occupied some of the most valuable land in the burnt district. They had before them a preliminary sketch of Burnham’s plan, showing a new civic center at the intersection of Market and Van Ness, a widened Embarcadero along the waterfront, and diagonal boulevards cutting through the old street grid.

The first vote taken that morning concerned the width of Market Street. Burnham proposed 120 feet, a Parisian standard that would require the condemnation of property on both sides for nearly two miles. The Southern Pacific representatives objected. Their tracks ran down the center of Market, and widening would require expensive relocation. They proposed 100 feet. The architect, caught between his commitment to Burnham’s vision and his need to keep the railroad men cooperative, suggested a compromise: 120 feet from the waterfront to Fifth Street, 100 feet beyond. The motion passed. The grand boulevard would shrink as it approached the working-class districts south of Market, where the railroad’s interests were concentrated and where property values were lower.

This was the pattern that would govern the Committee’s work. Every grand proposal met an immediate collision with existing property rights, existing capital investments, and the urgent pressure of small owners who were already rebuilding on their old lots. The Committee of Forty met in closed sessions, published no minutes, and announced its decisions only after they had been negotiated with the interested parties. It was not government by deliberation but government by deal, and the deals favored those who had the most to lose and the most to offer.

The contrast between the Committee’s deliberations and the actual condition of the city could not have been sharper. While Burnham sketched his boulevards and the Forty debated street widths, thousands of San Franciscans were living in tents, shacks, and the crude wooden barracks that the Army had thrown up in Golden Gate Park and the Presidio. The refugee population had stabilized at roughly 20, 000 in the official camps, with perhaps another 30, 000 scattered in private arrangements across the Bay Area. These were not the displaced masses of April, stunned and wandering. They were a settled population, increasingly organized, increasingly vocal about their conditions and their future.

In the Mission District, south of the burnt zone, property owners had begun rebuilding before the ashes were cold. By late May, hundreds of temporary structures had gone up on the old street lines: wooden shops, corrugated-iron warehouses, canvas-roofed restaurants serving the construction crews. The city had issued permits for these buildings on an emergency basis, waiving the usual codes, collecting only minimal fees. The Committee of Forty watched this activity with alarm. Every shack built on the old lot lines, every business reopened on the old street pattern, made their planned reforms more difficult. They needed to act quickly, before the rebuilt city froze into its old shape.

On June 5, the full Committee of Forty convened at the Merchants Exchange for what they called a preliminary report on reconstruction. The meeting was not open to the public, but word of its purpose had spread through the refugee camps and the temporary business district. A crowd gathered in the street outside, not quite a protest, not quite a vigil: men in work clothes, women with children, the displaced population of the South of Market waiting to learn what would be decided about their future. They were not admitted. The Committee’s deliberations were reported only through the newspapers, which were themselves members of the syndicate.

The report that emerged from this meeting was a remarkable document, less for what it proposed than for what it assumed. The Committee recommended the creation of a permanent planning commission with authority to regulate street widths, building heights, and the location of public buildings. It endorsed Burnham’s civic center and his widened Market Street. It called for a new waterfront boulevard and the straightening of the crooked shoreline between the Ferry Building and Telegraph Hill. And it proposed, in language that revealed its authors’ deepest concerns, that the city should discourage the rebuilding of congested districts and secure what it termed the proper distribution of population.

The phrase meant different things to different members of the Committee. To the railroad men, it meant clearing space for freight yards and terminals. To the hotel owners, it meant removing the cheap lodging houses that had competed with their establishments. To the bankers, it meant stabilizing property values in the downtown core by preventing the immediate return of the Chinese and the working poor who had occupied the most densely built blocks. The Committee had no power to enforce these recommendations, but it had something nearly as effective: control of credit. The major banks had agreed to coordinate their lending policies with the Committee’s plans, and without bank financing, no large construction project could proceed.

The refugees in Golden Gate Park learned of these decisions through the newspapers, when they learned of them at all. The Army, which still administered the camps under General Funston’s authority, posted bulletins about sanitation and rations, not about city planning. But the connection between the two was increasingly apparent. The longer the refugees remained in the camps, the more time the Committee had to fix the city’s future shape before they could return to claim their old neighborhoods.

The Chinese community faced a more immediate threat. The fire had destroyed Chinatown completely, fourteen blocks of wooden tenements, laundries, restaurants, and temples reduced to ash. These early immigrants had settled near Portsmouth Square and around Dupont Street, now called Grant Avenue. As the settlement grew in the early 1850s, Chinese shops opened on Sacramento Street, which the Guangdong pioneers called Tang people street. By the 1870s, the economic center had shifted to Dupont Street, where out of 423 Chinese firms in 1878, 121 were located. The area was the one geographical region deeded by the city government and private property owners which allowed Chinese persons to own land and operate businesses.

The Committee of Forty had discussed the Chinese problem in its earliest sessions, and several members had advocated relocating the entire population to the southern edge of the city, near the county line. This would open valuable land near the financial district for commercial development and remove what they considered a blight from the downtown core.

The Chinese Six Companies, the merchant organization that spoke for the community, learned of these plans and moved to counter them. In late May, they dispatched representatives to Sacramento and, through diplomatic channels, to Washington and Beijing. The response was swift and, to the Committee of Forty, surprising. The Chinese Minister to the United States conveyed to California Governor George Pardee the opposition of China’s Empress Dowager Cixi to any relocation plan. The representatives, acting unofficially, stated that the only way to remove the Chinese from the old Chinatown would be to give them a place elsewhere that would be acceptable. The threat of international complication, and the fear of losing Chinese trade, forced the Committee to retreat. Chinatown would be rebuilt on its old site, though under new building codes and new sanitary regulations that would raise costs and reduce density.

This was the first major defeat for the Committee of Forty, and it revealed the limits of their authority. They could plan, they could coordinate, they could control credit, but they could not simply command. The city still had formal governmental structures, however weakened, and the federal government still had interests that sometimes conflicted with local property owners. The Committee’s power was real but partial, a network of influence rather than a monopoly of force.

The question of Chinatown also raised deeper questions about the Committee’s stated goal of proper distribution of population. If the Chinese could not be moved, who could? The answer emerged in the treatment of the South of Market district, the working-class neighborhood that had borne the brunt of the fire and the dynamiting. The Committee’s plan for this area was explicit: wider streets, lower building heights, and a more healthful mix of uses that would reduce the concentration of cheap lodging houses and industrial workers. The property owners of the South of Market, mostly small holders with single buildings or parts of buildings, were not consulted. Their interests were represented, if at all, by the larger property owners who sat on the Committee and who stood to benefit from the clearance of blighted areas.

The mechanism for this transformation was the city’s building code, which the Committee proposed to rewrite. The new code would require brick or steel construction in the downtown area, prohibit wooden buildings in the fire zone, and mandate setbacks and open spaces that would reduce the profitability of dense working-class housing. These were presented as safety measures, responses to the lessons of the fire. They were also, transparently, instruments of class zoning, ways of making the rebuilt city too expensive for its former poorest residents.

By late June, Burnham had completed his preliminary plan and returned to Chicago. He left behind a portfolio of drawings that would be published to great acclaim: the Civic Center with its domed municipal building, the grand Fountain of the Winds at the intersection of Market and Van Ness, the terraced gardens descending to a transformed waterfront. These images circulated in the national magazines, evidence that San Francisco would rise from its ashes greater than before. They bore little relation to the actual reconstruction already underway.

The gap between plan and reality was most visible along the waterfront. The Committee had proposed a continuous boulevard from the Ferry Building to Fisherman’s Wharf, thirty feet above the existing street level, with freight traffic buried in tunnels below. This would require the cooperation of the Southern Pacific, the State Belt Railroad, and the federal government, which controlled the offshore wharves. None of these parties had been consulted in any meaningful way. The railroads had their own plans for the waterfront, centered on efficiency rather than beauty, and they had the power to implement them regardless of what the Committee recommended.

The same pattern repeated across the burnt district. Small property owners, unable to wait for the Committee’s plans to become law, were rebuilding on their old lots with temporary structures that they intended to make permanent. The city government, desperate for tax revenue and fearful of driving business to Oakland, was issuing permits faster than the Committee could review them. The banks, despite their nominal commitment to coordinated lending, were financing any project that promised a quick return. The Committee of Forty had set itself the task of planning a city, but it was discovering that a city plans itself through thousands of individual decisions, each driven by immediate necessity.

The Committee’s response to this frustration was to seek legal power. In July 1906, its members drafted legislation for the state legislature that would create a permanent planning commission with authority to override local zoning and building codes. The commission would be appointed by the governor, on recommendation of the Committee’s successor organization, and would serve terms long enough to ensure continuity. It was, in effect, a proposal to transfer planning authority from elected officials to a self-perpetuating board of experts and businessmen.

The legislature, meeting in special session to address earthquake relief, rejected this proposal. The opposition came from a coalition of small property owners, labor unions, and rural legislators who saw in the Committee’s plan the consolidation of urban power by the same men who had profited from the Southern Pacific’s monopoly. The Committee of Forty had overreached. Its closed deliberations, its assumption of governmental functions, and its obvious class bias had generated a political reaction that would limit its influence for the remainder of the reconstruction period.

The defeat of the planning commission bill marked a turning point in the reconstruction. The Committee of Forty continued to meet, to publish reports, and to coordinate charitable relief, but its authority over physical planning was broken. The city would be rebuilt not according to Burnham’s grand design but through the accumulated decisions of property owners, contractors, and local officials responding to immediate pressures. The result would be a city that looked remarkably like the one that had burned: the same street grid, the same dense blocks, the same mixture of uses, the same vulnerability to future disaster.

This outcome was not inevitable. Other cities had used catastrophic fires to implement radical reforms: Chicago after 1871, London after 1666. San Francisco had the opportunity, the expertise, and the apparent will to do the same. The Committee of Forty had assembled the resources and the talent for comprehensive planning. What it lacked was democratic legitimacy and the patience to build it. By claiming authority without accountability, by planning in closed sessions for a population still living in tents, it had transformed a technical problem into a political conflict—and had lost.

The legacy of this failure would shape the rebuilt city for generations. The street grid remained unchanged, with all its inefficiencies and dangers. The waterfront retained its tangle of railroad tracks and industrial uses. The South of Market was rebuilt with slightly wider streets and slightly better construction, but with the same concentration of cheap housing and industrial workers. Chinatown rose again on its old site, denser than before, with wooden buildings replaced by brick but with the same overcrowding and the same fire risk. Only the Civic Center, begun in 1912 and completed over the following decade, testified to what might have been—and even this was a reduced version of Burnham’s vision, its grand axes truncated by property lines that the city had been unable to clear.

The Committee of Forty had set out to create a new San Francisco, modern, efficient, and beautiful. It had succeeded instead in codifying the old San Francisco, preserving its social geography and its physical vulnerabilities against the pressures of reform. The elite-captured blueprint now governed what could be built and where, embedding the inequalities of the pre-fire city into the concrete and steel of its replacement.