San Francisco
Books
- Three Days of Fire Earthquake, Fire, and the Forging of Modern San Francisco · Liszt Think
At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, San Francisco shattered. The true catastrophe began moments later when Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan died in the rubble and water mains ruptured, leaving the city defenseless against…
- The Engineer’s Premonition…s were requested in March 1906. The request arrived in Berkeley on April 14. Lawson never answered it. Across the bay, the men who governed San Francisco had spent the same autumn of 1905 measuring something else entirely. The city’s assessed valuation had reached $502, 892, 459, a figure tha…
- The City Feeds Itself by Water…wer 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 morni…
- The Sleep of the Plates (Geology Before the Dawn)In the hills south of San Francisco Bay, a geologist knelt beside a fence line that no longer ran straight. The posts stood in a gentle stagger, each one offset from its neigh…