American History Tellers - 1906 San Francisco Earthquake | Out of the Ruins | 4

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire reduced the city to rubble and ash, reporters fanned out across the burning landscape. The San Francisco Chronicle, along with several other papers,] continued to publish amidst the chaos. Today, Lindsay is joined by San Francisco Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub. His office is in the paper’s archive, which he mines for stories to share in his history column called “Our SF.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's April 1st, 1907. It's been nearly a year since the earthquake and fire destroyed most of San Francisco, including your home and business in Chinatown. For months after the disaster, you and other Chinese-American business leaders fought city officials and their attempts to move Chinatown to a new location south of the city. They finally backed down, and now you're spearheading

the movement to rebuild. Today, you're meeting with your architect, a Scotsman named T. Patterson Ross, who is helping you rebuild your business, Sing Chong Bazaar, at the corner of DuPont and California Street. You lean over the desk, where Ross has laid out the blueprints for your review. Well, I like how things are coming along here. Can we make it look even more ornate, more oriental? Where's the pagoda we talked about? Well, that's just the thing. A pagoda tower isn't really used on top of a western-looking building like this one. I don't care if it's historically accurate or subtle. I want it to feel like it's part of a Chinese city, or actually a modern American city with Chinese flourishes. I'm not sure I understand.

It's like I told the city officials last year. We're not trying to rebuild Chinatown the way it was. I want to move past that. I want tourist-friendly flourishes, dragons, and lanterns, lots of red. I see, more red. But not just that. I need you to understand what I'm trying to do here. Before the earthquake, they called us heathens, lepers, all kinds of horrible things. And after the fire, they looted our homes and businesses. Then they tried to move us out of the city altogether. Yes, it was very unfair how you were treated. And we could have just left.

Built a new Chinatown in Oakland or somewhere else. But this is my home. I want to show them that we're not who they think we are. We're business leaders. We have a community. We have families. And we're Americans. You're Americans, but you want to create a Chinese city,

even if it's not authentically Chinese. And you want it to be someplace Americans will want to visit. If I got this right? Yeah, you're getting it. It should be like a palace. I want my building to draw people in. A colorful emporium full of ivory, porcelain, silks, and exotic Asian treasures. Well, how about this?

As your architect starts drawing a few sketches, you nod enthusiastically. Your family's building could set the tone for a reborn Chinatown, a place where your children can live, work, and raise their families. You're hoping that the rest of Chinatown will rebuild just as quickly because you want to show the battered city of San Francisco that Chinese Americans belong here. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In 1908, two years after the devastating earthquake and fires leveled most of San Francisco, the rebuilding of Chinatown was complete and commemorated with a large fireworks display.

Chinatown opened for business more than a year ahead of the rest of the city's reconstruction. A driving force behind the new Chinatown was an American-born merchant and banker, Luk Tin Eli, who had been manager of the San Francisco branch of the Russo-Chinese Bank and the owner of Sing Chong Bazaar. Luk also created the new Chinese Chamber of Commerce and with a partner opened the Canton Bank of San Francisco, the first Chinese-owned bank in the United States, which provided much of the financing for the rebuilding of Chinatown. The resulting design of San Francisco's new Chinatown

became a model for other Chinatowns across the United States. Here with me now to discuss the press coverage of the earthquake and fires and the remarkable efforts to rebuild neighborhoods like Chinatown in the aftermath of the disaster is Peter Harlaub, culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and host of the Total SF podcast. Here's our conversation. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, where aspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, it gets them in front of our panel of experts. Gwyneth Paltrow.

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from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Peter Harlop, welcome to American History Tellers. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you. So you're the pop culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, but you've also gone diving into the archives and used them to resurface some fairly incredible stories about the 1906 earthquake. And where are you speaking to us today from? I am at 901 Mission Street. This has been our home since 1924.

I am in the Chronicle archive, so I'm in the basement of the Chronicle, just surrounded right now by photos and negatives, including photos of the earthquake from 1906. And we have been in this building for almost 100 years. So a very appropriate place to be doing this interview. But that's not where the paper was back in 1906. Could you please take us back to that day of April 18th, 1906, the day the earthquake hit? What was happening at the newspaper? You know, fortuitously, we have a document of it.

The Chronicle was right along Market Street, where the fire's encroaching. We know that the photo team was looking for a facility to process images and couldn't find one. They couldn't find the editor. There was chaos. But what they could find is a printing press. And we brag about it to this day in the newsroom that the Chronicle is published continuously, including after the 1906 earthquake. They either got a ferry or traveled by land to Oakland and found the Oakland Tribune,

where the printing press was working. The Oakland Tribune was using that printing press, but allowed the call, the San Francisco call, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Chronicle to put out an edition. So we had this joint edition the next day, which is amazing. It was a special section and kind of a combination of the three newspapers working together with a fourth newspaper in Oakland. So the reason why the Chronicle staffers went looking for a press and photo processing equipment is because the fire and earthquake destroyed the building that their equipment was in. Yeah, absolutely destroyed it. The Chronicle building was a brand new building. It was one of the tallest buildings in the city. At the time that it went up, it was the tallest building. But it was useless. There was nothing to work with

there. And it sent Chronicle journalists literally across the bay when there's no Bay Bridge, no Golden Gate Bridge, to find a place to publish. Something I find very inspiring. So let's go back to the coverage that Chronicle journalists and others were able to keep putting out. Give us a sense of what was included in the paper. There probably wasn't a sports section, for instance. There's no sports section. There's no arts and entertainment. There's a huge headline that says, earthquake and fire, colon, San Francisco in ruins. Four pages combined, call Chronicle and Examiner, and it's a hodgepodge. Every font is different on every headline.

We've since, 50 years later, interviewed some Chronicle journalists. One of them said that everybody was writing stories, never mind for what newspaper. People had seen things. They had been out in the streets talking to people, but there are no quotes in this. It was definitely just everybody getting there and getting the bare information out in this four-page newspaper the next day. And what was the bare information? You say there were no direct quotes, but conversations with city officials, public service announcements, what was the information? dynamiting square blocks, and the police and the fire know nothing about it. So there was a special section in a newspaper that came out in 1956 interviewing anybody who was there who survived and worked for the Chronicle. There was a reporter named George Lowe who's quoted as saying, glancing about, I saw thin spirals of smoke rising from several directions,

and I had a foreboding of what was to come. He crossed into the Tenderloin, which is the district right next to the Chronicle, and he said, scantily clad women were pouring out of the cheap hotels. One in particular was saying over and over, oh God, I know it's the end of the world. And that's what they were witnessing. There was these reporters walking around. Many of them had lost their own homes. Many of them didn't know what was next for them. Their newsroom is a burnt-out husk, and they're walking around gathering what they can and then somehow making it over to Oakland to report on this and get out this four-page newspaper with, again, just the barest of information.

But it was really a triumphant moment for the Chronicle that we got a paper out at all. So how did the news reporting evolve over these several days? The first edition is slapdash and anything goes, and then what? Was there more structure in the days to follow? You know, the days that followed were very grim. All of the headlines, you read them over and over, and they just beat you down. I mean, death comes to the fire chief was one. Looters shot by police. There's reporting of bank vaults being closed, and no one knows if their money inside the bank vaults has burned because these vaults are surrounded by fire. There's tragedy in the personals. There's ads searching for lost loved ones. Some of the

first journalism that came out was just reams and reams of classified ads, parents looking for children, people in Oakland wondering if their family members in San Francisco are safe. One story I read about a woman who dragged her broken body to the fourth floor window of a hospital. She's got broken bones from the earthquake, and she drags herself to the window to throw herself out and commit suicide because she believes that she's lost family members. San Francisco police are shooting looters, and the message that the police chief's getting out, if you loot, we will shoot, That was in the paper as a quote. With the waterline still broken,

the military's threatening to jail citizens who set fires to keep warm if they don't have authorization. And one of the few moments that almost seems humorous in retrospect, the Chronicle reported that California Secretary of State Charles Curry was walking down the street to just assess what's going on.

The military demands that he starts clearing rubble on Market Street. They're grabbing any able-bodied man to come and help. He refuses and was forced, and this is a quote, under the suggestive encouragement of the bayonets of soldiers to work like every other able-bodied man at the scene. There's little rays of hope. There were births going on during all this, and there was a spirit of optimism that came out later, but those first editions of the Chronicle are dire and bleak, and honestly, I've only wanted to read them once. Well, in addition to the reporting on misery, you wrote about how the earthquake also exposed the dark underbelly of San Francisco. What did you mean by that? The 1906 earthquake

also exposed a lot of corruption that had been brewing for decades before this quake and fire hit. The mayor, Eugene Schmitz, was found guilty of extortion and bribery for crimes that were committed before the earthquake. And the biggest exposure was City Hall. Everybody's getting a kickback to build the City Hall in San Francisco. And the quake hits. The City Hall that had taken 27 years to build crumbles to the ground. It is not ready for an earthquake and exposes the fact that the walls were not filled with cross beams and things that would have kept City Hall up. It was filled with literal garbage. They had used the garbage from the construction site for insulation. And you look back and just think, you know, decades of corruption had come to roost because of the biggest disaster in the city's history.

And that caused a lot of distrust in the city at the time when people needed the city and their politicians the most. And it changed the city fundamentally when people realized what had been going on. So you mentioned earlier that there were in the paper some bright points as well. This earthquake, like many other tragedies, also kind of brought the city together. So with so much of the city friends and family were, where their jobs were, what the next step was. They mostly stayed in San Francisco. Golden Gate Park had already been kind of under construction. It's not finished yet. That area is still mostly sand dunes, but people headed there. They headed to the Presidio, which was a military camp then and they were welcomed there. They headed to Presida Park, Dolores Park, cemeteries.

Some people went next to the U.S. Mint which is right across the street from where the Chronicle's currently located. And the U.S. Mint, even though it was severely damaged, the walls were up. People are worried another earthquake's gonna hit and they thought, well, the walls for the U.S. Mint survived. I'm going to pitch my tent around that. So we have photos of people creating tent encampments around the U.S. Mint where all the gold is stored because they felt like that was safe. Some people did leave San Francisco,

but they came back. There were early reports of people getting on trains and in some case being quoted as saying they're never coming back. But just weeks later, there was a report in the Chronicle that said, quote, a large majority of're complaining that the conditions are much worse in the east than they are out here. And I think that shows the fact that we can prove this with the census data that San Franciscans did not flee en masse. And those who did leave, many of them did come back and were here to rebuild the city. So that explains what's happening inside San Francisco. But what about the surrounding areas? Who rushed to the city's aid? Well, the Transcontinental Railroad was finished, but it would have been weeks for help to come from the East Coast.

San Francisco very much felt like it was on its own. But there was help from Los Angeles. And this is something that I talk about anytime there's a 49ers-Rams rivalry or a Giants-Dodgers rivalry. I always tell people that more than a century ago, Los Angeles did more than come to our aid. They brought up supplies, baby clothing, food.

The mayor came up of Los Angeles with $50,000 cash. There were instructions going out in Los Angeles all through the state Franciscans. Oakland, which was not hit quite as hard, people were coming on ferries the next day and doing what they could to help. So there were people in California who saw what happened to San Francisco, were very sympathetic, and threw their backs and their money and everything that they had into helping the city. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still a virgin. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on

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Yeah, it said, comeback edition. It actually had those words on the top of it. It was the first edition that was not printed out of Oakland. Finally, the Chronicle got some sort of backup press going. And it was eight pages and says a lot about what San Francisco was and what it would become. There are many examples of hope and optimism in the paper, but I think the strongest example was in the Chronicles editorial where we really called our shot. They said, there's no discouragement in this city. On the contrary, there is perfect confidence. There is not merely energy, but enthusiasm. And we're all pulling

together for a new and more glorious San Francisco. And for all the stories about the negative things that were going on, the lootings, the shootings, the horrible accidents, the deaths, suddenly there were these really positive stories going on. My favorite is the toughest earthquake survivor that I've found. This is a quote from a Chronicle story. On Saturday night, triplets were born to one of the homeless at the Presidio. This is a time when medical supplies were scarce and pain medication was likely in short supply. Eight more babies were born in Fort Mason, including two in a vacant lot next to the fort where mothers had taken refuge. Another quote from that story, the babies are all reported to be healthy youngsters.

So much like what happens with disasters today, the first couple of days are talking about the disasters and the destruction. But the next few days showed a lot of the human spirit, the triumphs going on, where San Francisco was already dedicated to rebuilding. So this spirit of renewal, rejuvenation, which begins to spring very quickly after the earthquake itself, is enjoyed and spread by almost everyone in the city. But you've written about someone in particular, Raphael Weil. Who was he and what did he do to help? So Raphael Weil wasn't a major figure before the earthquake. He owned the White House department store, probably the third biggest department store in the city. He's in kind of the society pages and someone who's mentioned,

but he's not at the time a city leader. But all of the city leaders, the government, are distrusted right now. They're disorganized. Tales of corruption are starting to come out. And Raphael Weil, who is 70 years old, he finds a Chronicle reporter and gives this statement. Quote, I have enough left to buy an annuity and live like a fighting cock for the rest of my days, but none of that for me. I'm going to work of rebuilding with all my soul. I'm 70 years old, but I love San Francisco with a love that is filial, and I'm going to work on the restoration of the city as if I was only 30. And those weren't just words. Raphael Weil created essentially his own philanthropy, his own charity. He gets coats together, he gets food,

not just for his workers, but for anyone in San Francisco who he could help. He builds his store back, but all the profits for that first year are going back to helping people in the city. He lives to his 90s, knowing low-level workers who he works with by first name, and ended up just dedicating his life to charity for his workers, for the city, and making good on that promise. It's one of the most inspiring things I've read in all the pages of the Chronicle all the years we've been publishing. In our series, we talked about the miracle on Russian Hill, where a group of residents fought to save their homes. The Chronicle reported on these events too.

Paint the scene for us. What was reported? Yeah, the report came on April 24th, 1906, several days after the earthquake, that a number of fine residences are still standing with green trees and lawns like an oasis in the arid waste. In the days that followed, we got the full story that in the middle of this inferno,

where when you look at a map, it's almost like a donut. There's like a little square block area that was not affected by fire. And it was a doctor who lived in an octagonal house who rallied together his neighbors on the square block on Green Street. And they had no water pressure. There's no fire department nearby, but they use water in their tubs and water in their boilers to wet down blankets and go around their houses just putting out spot fires. There's men and women on the roof putting out spot fires.

There's other people working to cut down trees and outbuildings. Someone gets a hold of dynamite, and they manage to save their homes through the first 12 to 14 hours of the fire. But then the military comes up and says, hey, this is an area that we've got to blow up with dynamite. So they're telling this group, you've saved your homes, but now we're going to strap dynamite to them and blow them up because there's still a fire hazard. So this group gets together. They somehow had saved a little bit of wine from their houses and started plying the military

leaders with wine and escape having their houses dynamited, live through the next couple of days, and these houses at the end are still standing. And we have panoramic photos in the Chronicle of the Destruction along this area, and you can see this little oasis there. You can even see the trees where several houses were still standing because of the work of these people who were surely working in an inferno of fire and wind, and it's amazing that they're still standing. You yourself have probably traveled to this area in modern-day San Francisco a few times. What's it like being there, knowing its history?

You know, I took my bike up there, and it's a steep, steep climb, and it felt like a pilgrimage because I had read about it and reported on it and was about to finish up a story I'd written on it and biked up to that neighborhood. And it was truly, truly moving to see that this area was surrounded now by these very tall apartments. It's incredible views there. It's a very expensive part of a city that's already very expensive. And there's still a little cluster. There are just three of the five houses left that are standing there. I looked for a plaque.

I looked for some recognition. I found someone who lived in one of the houses and asked if they knew about it, and they didn't. I was telling them new information that their house was saved by residents like themselves 100 plus years earlier. And the houses are beautiful houses. I've checked the Zillow on them, and I can't afford them. The Octagonal House is a classic house. It's considered one of the oldest houses and also one of the most beautiful examples of architecture in the city.

And it's still standing because of the bravery of these people more than a century ago. So this is a little oasis of salvation in the middle of just enormous devastation across the city. But most of the residents, as you hinted at, are still in the city or very nearby, and they need food and water and shelter. How fast did services start to get restored in San Francisco? Lights, streetcars. Amazingly fast. I don't know that even with our technology now that we would be any faster today.

The lights were back on in a matter of days. Streetcars returned not too long after that. Some of the streetcar tracks were warped, so there was limited service. But even in the areas that were heavily burnt, the streetcars were back and running through some areas that were absolutely barren. There was no businesses to deliver people to, no homes for people to go back to, but the streetcars are still operating. Owners of hotels and department stores built structures that were even more grand than before in the long term. But in the short term, and we have many photos of this, there's tents up, and the biggest businesses to the smallest businesses started doing business again, sometimes within 24 hours. There was still an immediate problem of housing the homeless.

What did people do to address this immediate problem of shelter? Yeah, they did what they could. They created tents out of bedsheets. With the crumbled buildings, they built new shelters just to get them through. This is April in San Francisco where it's still very cold. There's still a lot of wind. People are walking along and there's messages. Don't worry, get ready and get busy was advice that was inked on the lid

of a pasteboard box. And it was hanging on the only standing column of what had been a beautiful business on Geary Street above Mason. There were also the earthquake shacks, and these are refugee shacks, they were called at the time, built with redwood and fir lumber that was sent from Washington State and Oregon. Los Angeles had helped out the city greatly in the first days after the earthquake, and then the northern states, Washington and Oregon, are sending down all the lumber they can, enough to make what ended up being 5,600 earthquake shacks. These are 14 by 14 buildings. The original tiny houses, these are shacks with a little sink in them. They're prefab, built very quickly by teams in the park. And they start erecting these cities with one little shack next to the next. And this is where people lived. Families lived there. Amazingly, when all the months passed and people started

talking about rebuilding, a lot of people had come to like these shacks. They were inexpensive. Tenants paid $2 a month rent toward a kind of a $50 lease program to own the shack. So people started putting the shacks on trailers and mostly horse-drawn, bringing these shacks to different parts of the city, areas that were unincorporated. Bernal Heights, a very popular place to live right now, was absolutely the outer edges of the city back then. Most people had never been there. And a lot of people started putting their shacks on the back of these wagons, dragging them

out to Bernal Heights and creating homes there. Sometimes they put two shacks next to each other if they had a big family. Sometimes they put a shack there and added some more housing to it and made it a bigger edifice. But the shack was the start of it. This home that they lived in just weeks after the earthquake hit became their new home in another part of the city, new neighborhoods that were developing. And to this day in Bernal Heights, I've put together an earthquake shack tour.

There are more than 50 of them. Some of them are hard to find, but a lot of them, and I've talked to the people who lived in them, are still standing very sturdy with old growth redwood and are part of our housing in San Francisco right now. And frankly, a reminder of the craftsmanship that was going into rebuilding the city and a reminder that San Francisco doesn't give up, that we rebuild, that we come back. These earthquake shacks are still here. They're a symbol.

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We spoke earlier about how the 1906 earthquake exposed some of the darker elements at play in San Francisco. And one thing that that city is known for is its Chinatown. How did the earthquake expose racism and what happened to the city's Chinatown and how was it saved? Chinatown was already a place where people were grossly mistreated. There were mobs going in to beat people up in Chinatown. Chinatown had a lot of workers who were needed in the city, but they were very, very, very, very, very poorly treated. And anytime there was an illness in San Francisco, it was blamed on Chinatown. They would call it the Chinatown Plague. And when the earthquake hit, Chinatown was burned to the ground. And the assumption was by city leaders, by people who

lived there, and the Chinese residents, that they wouldn't be allowed back. There were people in San Francisco who had been trying to drive them out for decades already because the area that they wouldn't be allowed back. There were people in San Francisco who had been trying to drive them out for decades already because the area that they were living was a downtown area that was becoming more and more desirable. So there were rumors early on, there's talk in the Chronicle about moving Chinatown to the south, to Colma or Brisbane. Colma is now where it's known to San Franciscans as the city where all the bodies are buried. That's where all the cemeteries are. Leaders from Chinatown got the wealthiest white citizens who were using a lot of Chinese labor back then

telling them, a lot of us are serving you. You use us in your daily lives. We're your butlers. We're people who are doing your laundry. And if you move us down to Colma, you're going to lose that. Essentially, they almost unionized and said, we won't be able to help you if you don't help us. It was very tactical. It was brilliant. They also talked about rebuilding in a way that would make the people around them feel more comfortable about them.

And the old Chinatown was shacks. It was like any other depressed part of town. But the new Chinatown, when they started pitching how it would look, they were talking about putting up pagodas and making almost like a Disneyland version of Chinatown to make it more appealing to the white people who were living around them. And they did that. They ended up

brokering a deal to get these desirable city blocks back. They created essentially a tourist destination. Within years, they're doing, you know, the dragon dances and lanterns and things that would bring the other parts of the community in to watch them as a tourist destination, and also making sure that they were brokering the right deals with City Hall so that they'd get to stay there, that it'd get to be a permanent place that couldn't be encroached upon. You go into Chinatown now in 2023, and you still see that. You walk in there and you see those pagoda-style buildings, many of them that were built in the 1910s after the earthquake. And it still has that vibe to it from decisions that were made by people who were just trying to save

part of San Francisco for themselves. And the fact that we have a Chinatown in the middle of the fire zone, I think it's another heroic triumph that came out of this earthquake, maybe the biggest one. There was another heroic story of the 1906 earthquake that was perhaps minimized or overlooked. And that's the story of Alice Eastwood. Why do you think everyone should know her name? So much of this part of history is coming from newspapers. And newspapers were written by men covering male politicians and framed the heroism through men.

Alice Eastwood is someone whose heroism was so great that she managed to push her way through that and make people know who she was. Alice Eastwood was a botanist for the California Academy of Sciences. She was one of the first women to work for the Academy of Sciences. She was one of the first women to work for the Academy of Sciences, one of the few women scientists in San Francisco who spent her life from Colorado to San Francisco collecting plants, writing about plants, dedicating her whole life to plants. She's 47 years old, has no husband, and she is living in kind of a little cottage up the hill from the Academy of Sciences, which is on Market Street. The fire starts. Alice Eastwood has thought about this fire ahead of time. She has gathered, with no instruction from any of her superiors,

gathered all of the most important specimens from the Cal Academy of Sciences into what is as close to a fireproof locker as you could find at that time. And she has this plan. If there's a disaster in San Francisco, I can go rescue the greatest specimens. The fire hits. Her house is in flames. She goes away from her house to Market Street, where the flames are encroaching, finds someone who has a wagon, and gets into the Cal Academy of Sciences building. This fire locker that she's created to save all these specimens is on the sixth floor. The building is intact, but it is crumbled. The marble staircase is crumbled to the ground, but it's kind of a spiral staircase with a railing.

So she and another assistant crawl up that railing foot by foot between the little railing rails and gets up to the sixth floor and lowers more than a thousand specimens, lowers them down to a wagon waiting below. The director of the Cal Academy of Sciences panicked. He put two, and this is documented in the Chronicle, he put two sparrows, African sparrows,

in his pockets and ran away. He collected two specimens. She collected over a thousand. And when the Cal Academy came back 15 years later in Golden Gate Park, those specimens are what founded their new collection. And I've been in the Cal Academy archive, and every botanist who works there considers Alice Eastwood a hero. So Alice Eastwood is someone, you know, we talk about in San Francisco how there's hundreds of statues, and only three of them are of women. There should be a statue of Alice

Eastwood somewhere because she's one of the heroes and most inspiring figures in San Francisco history, and not enough people know about her. So throughout this conversation, it's become clear that immediately after the initial devastation, for San Franciscans, this is a moment of reckoning and rebirth. How did the earthquake end up really changing the face of San Francisco as it was rebuilt? San Francisco, even before the 1906 earthquake, was a city with a chip on its shoulder. The world-class cities were Paris and New York, and every move that San Francisco seemed to make was to try to make itself a world-class city. Golden Gate Park, the footprint of Golden Gate Park is 10% bigger than Central Park. And that's not an accident. We wanted a bigger park than Central Park so people would consider San Francisco to be a place

to visit, a tourist destination. The earthquake, though, was an opportunity. And San Francisco came into the rebirth and the rebuild with the mindset that nothing is impossible and everything's going to be bigger and better than ever. The 1910s brought back a new and better City Hall. 1915 brought the Pan-Pacific International Exposition. And it's a wonder. I mean, there are people coming from all around the world to see that San Francisco, the footprint is rebuilt, but that they're thinking about the future and what we're going to do next. And what was next was all kinds of innovations. A new skyline. We never had a skyline that was like New York that would impress people. It was a hodgepodge. Everybody was trying to build a building bigger than the next, but it wasn't anything that was done with

planning. Suddenly in the 1920s, these Art Deco buildings go up that are absolutely beautiful and give San Francisco kind of a unified theme and give the downtown a strength that would get only stronger. It used to be that downtown was department stores, but it was also brothels and freak shows and crime. The new downtown became a little more upscale. It became a place where people went to gather. A theater district developed all along Market Street that to this day, it's still a theater district where we go to see concerts and live theater. Bridges, the Golden Gate. And nobody thought it was impossible after the earthquake because the mindset was we can do anything. So the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge go up. And frankly, I think that mindset is something that's baked into us. It's something that we live with today. There's a phoenix on the flag of San Francisco, and that phoenix is about

rebirth. That was a deliberate choice that San Francisco had lived through disease. It had lived through a fire and earthquake. It had lived through another earthquake. And it's a reminder that we're a city that can come back. And finally, it's probably inescapable to think that San Francisco might face another tragedy like this again. Earthquakes are bound to happen. How do you think San Francisco would do today if that were to happen? So my initial reaction, what would happen if an earthquake happened today of that magnitude? My initial reaction is cynical, but I think history shows us that people would come through,

that San Franciscans and that innovative spirit would come back again, kick in, and we'd build back stronger than ever, and we'd come together in a way that would be inspiring. Well, Peter Harlop, thank you so much for joining us today on American History Tellers. It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me today. That was my conversation with Peter Harlop, culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and host of the podcast Total SF,

available wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, this is our fourth and final episode of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake for American history tellers. On our next season, from Edgar Allan Poe's macabre poems and stories to the origins of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Louisa May

Alcott's Little Women, we'll explore the lives and works of six of America's greatest authors and how their personal triumphs and tragedies influenced their writing and transformed modern literature. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing and sound design by Molly Bach.

Music by Lindsey Graham. Additional writing by Neil Thompson. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alita Rozanski. Our interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Managing producer, Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Ryan Lohr. Senior producer, Andy Herman.

Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Gant. Senior Managing Producer Ryan Lohr. Senior Producer Andy Herman. Executive Producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Richard Bandler revolutionized the world of self-help all thanks to an approach he developed called neurolinguistic programming. Even though NLP worked for some, its methods have been criticized for being dangerous in the wrong hands. Throw in Richard's dark past as a cocaine addict and murder suspect, and you can't help but wonder what his true intentions were. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time,

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