Chinatown
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…e established after the 1866 fire. He knew the city’s buildings, its water pressures, its patterns of conflagration. He had fought the 1893 Chinatown fire and the 1900 waterfront blaze, and he understood that San Francisco’s combination of dense construction, limited water, and strong win…
- The City Feeds Itself by Water…re 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 Broadwa…
- Recorded by the Seismograph…ption shared by numerous survivors who reported the visual illusion of fluid motion in solid structures. In the densely packed tenements of Chinatown, where wooden buildings stood four and five stories tall with only narrow alleys between them, the earthquake produced immediate structural…