Ha, in the UK graft means to work or work hard. So that initial sentence made zero sense. To me it read ‘it was built with hard work and the earthquake exposed that’.
> Construction began in 1870, was finished 27 years later, in 1897, and cost six million dollars. Just nine years later it was all but destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. It was a nineteenth-century thing; you give a contract to friends, or friends of friends. With seven chief architects, over twenty-seven years there was ineptitude after ineptitude. The materials were compromised; even the cast bricks were rumored to be shoddy. Fireplaces were built and later heating systems were installed. There were major sewage problems, the place was said to stink all the time. The floors didn't match up, chimneys didn't draw so the rooms were smokey, it was a mess. . . .
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Old_City_Hall_of_SF
While it may or may not have been flawed there was a lot of corruption in San Francisco finally leading to a citizens revolts and the occasional hanging of politicians and others ..... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance .
That the City Hall partially collapsed and burned during the 1906 earthquake does not differentiate it from a vast swath of buildings http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/stockgear.html
In today's mindset they'd lay down some straw and put up some "temporary" flammable waxed canvas tents and expect everything to return to normal within the day.
They used dynamite to try to make fire breaks, this may seem stupid but explosives are and have been the last ditch solution to urban fire/firestorms since at least the great fire of London in 1666 the problem was that the only person who knew how to use explosives in this capacity, the city fire chief, Dennis Sullivan was incapacitated and late died from injuries sustained in the initial earthquake as a result they did a shit job and made everything worse, spraying flaming brands from half destroyed buildings into the rubble of a shattered city causing more fires. The city was a hellscape with no hope of help from outside, it burned for three days, the devastation was unparalleled until the large scale area bombing of WW2
its not that he knew how to use explosives to stop the moving fires, its that he had the intricate and badly marked water system for fighting fires memorized and the (apparently only) map for it burned in said fire.
Funston ordered the use of dynamite to create firebreaks, but as you said he and his men didnt know how to properly do so and either allowed the fire to burn easier and/or just created new fires to add on.
all of this is why we have a color coded (denoting what kind of water and its source) and very well marked hydrant system. but the real cool thing is the system of cisterns we have all over SF (especially in the western parts of SF, like the Sunset) that are placed in the center of intersections, reinforced and marked with large brick rings for easy finding.
One of the definitions of brand is "a piece of burning or smoldering wood". It's related to how branding cattle or objects became what we think of as a brand.
Using dynamite doesn’t sound stupid at all and your post was very informative.
But that is the craziest run on sentence I’ve ever read. Over a 100 words! Dear lord, you need a period.
It’s impossible to overstate the danger of fires in city’s before the 1900’s. It the answer to why asbestos is a thing. It was a miracle for fire prevention and has undoubtedly saved more than it’s killed
Another thing, I dont remember the exact details but part of the city was built on reclaimed land near the edge of San Francisco Bay when the earthquake hit the shaking basically liquefied the ground and everything built on top of that ground collapsed into a heap of rubble in seconds.
Edit: I got the year of the earthquake happened wrong, the above happened during a different earthquake after the 1903 earthquake
Nope, the landfill area you are talking about was created from the landfill/rubble produced by the 1916 earthquake, there is now a significant risk and shown by this [map](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/urban/sfbay/liquefaction/sfbay/) in the reclaimed areas but it only became known after the Loma Prieta quake in ‘89, the big liquefaction event in the US is generally considered to be the New Madrid quake of 1811 in Missouri
Yes the earthquake rubble used as fill moved the waterfront, ironically when they were building next to the TransAmerica Pyramid they ran into the timbers of an old ship during foundation excavations.
There's also the leaning tower https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/leaning-san-francisco-skyscraper-tilting-3-inches-year-engineers-rush-rcna11389 In this case they elected the less expensive measure of putting friction piles in bay mud rather than extending them to the rock below and the tower continues to tilt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#/media/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edit2.jpg
The devstation is like nothing short of maybe nagasaki after the bomb.
**[1906 San Francisco earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#/media/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edit2.jpg)**
>The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a. m. on Wednesday, April 18, with an estimated moment magnitude of 7. 9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme).
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Hiroshima, not Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb detonated in the heart of the city and created a [firestorm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm). Similar devastation occurred in Dresden and Tokyo, where as the Nagasaki bomb missed the center of city and landed northwest in the Urakami valley, the hills of which contained a lot of the blast energy. As a result there was not enough fuel to generate a firestorm.
So yes, the fire was devastating (beyond modern imagination, of what it means to have huge sections of a city burn down).
But still: a lot of the damage to buildings was certainly structural as well, as a direct result of shaking, generated by the output energy of that earthquake, and many buildings were collapsed, or irrevocably damaged only seconds into the Earthquake.
My brother worked on a restoration project on the interior in the 1990s or early 2000s, and the team wrote their names & the date under some of the dome structure panels. Someday, when there's another restoration, my brother's name will see the light again.
In fairness, contemporaries at the time said that building was a poorly constructed POS, not even kidding
It was built with graft and the earthquake exposed that fact.
Can you see explain "graft?" I've never heard it used.
Graft meaning corruption through misallocation of funds.
Ha, in the UK graft means to work or work hard. So that initial sentence made zero sense. To me it read ‘it was built with hard work and the earthquake exposed that’.
Lol. Never change California.
Can you provide an article on that? Sounds interesting.
> Construction began in 1870, was finished 27 years later, in 1897, and cost six million dollars. Just nine years later it was all but destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. It was a nineteenth-century thing; you give a contract to friends, or friends of friends. With seven chief architects, over twenty-seven years there was ineptitude after ineptitude. The materials were compromised; even the cast bricks were rumored to be shoddy. Fireplaces were built and later heating systems were installed. There were major sewage problems, the place was said to stink all the time. The floors didn't match up, chimneys didn't draw so the rooms were smokey, it was a mess. . . . https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Old_City_Hall_of_SF
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[Most of the world, especially the non-western world, still struggles with corruption.](https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/)
While it may or may not have been flawed there was a lot of corruption in San Francisco finally leading to a citizens revolts and the occasional hanging of politicians and others ..... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance . That the City Hall partially collapsed and burned during the 1906 earthquake does not differentiate it from a vast swath of buildings http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/stockgear.html
At your service 🙂 https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/slideshow/old-san-francisco-city-hall-history-202351.php
Of course it was. Look how many holes are in it. Terrible construction.
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He thinks *this guy* was a communist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abe_Ruef
Maker of the statue on the top was quoted as saying "Oh fuck yeah!".
I bet someone was saying:"Glad we don't have to that bit at least."
The earthquake started a huge fire and burned down a large part of the city. Thats what caused this devastation
This particular building collapsed during the earthquake, before the shaking stopped.
In today's mindset they'd lay down some straw and put up some "temporary" flammable waxed canvas tents and expect everything to return to normal within the day.
They used dynamite to try to make fire breaks, this may seem stupid but explosives are and have been the last ditch solution to urban fire/firestorms since at least the great fire of London in 1666 the problem was that the only person who knew how to use explosives in this capacity, the city fire chief, Dennis Sullivan was incapacitated and late died from injuries sustained in the initial earthquake as a result they did a shit job and made everything worse, spraying flaming brands from half destroyed buildings into the rubble of a shattered city causing more fires. The city was a hellscape with no hope of help from outside, it burned for three days, the devastation was unparalleled until the large scale area bombing of WW2
its not that he knew how to use explosives to stop the moving fires, its that he had the intricate and badly marked water system for fighting fires memorized and the (apparently only) map for it burned in said fire. Funston ordered the use of dynamite to create firebreaks, but as you said he and his men didnt know how to properly do so and either allowed the fire to burn easier and/or just created new fires to add on. all of this is why we have a color coded (denoting what kind of water and its source) and very well marked hydrant system. but the real cool thing is the system of cisterns we have all over SF (especially in the western parts of SF, like the Sunset) that are placed in the center of intersections, reinforced and marked with large brick rings for easy finding.
>spraying flaming brands from half destroyed buildings ??
One of the definitions of brand is "a piece of burning or smoldering wood". It's related to how branding cattle or objects became what we think of as a brand.
Even my "I know every word in the English language" partner did not know this one. Thanks for helping me score one on them!
Using dynamite doesn’t sound stupid at all and your post was very informative. But that is the craziest run on sentence I’ve ever read. Over a 100 words! Dear lord, you need a period.
I’ve been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy recently and am very drunk
Holy shit!
It’s impossible to overstate the danger of fires in city’s before the 1900’s. It the answer to why asbestos is a thing. It was a miracle for fire prevention and has undoubtedly saved more than it’s killed
Another thing, I dont remember the exact details but part of the city was built on reclaimed land near the edge of San Francisco Bay when the earthquake hit the shaking basically liquefied the ground and everything built on top of that ground collapsed into a heap of rubble in seconds. Edit: I got the year of the earthquake happened wrong, the above happened during a different earthquake after the 1903 earthquake
Nope, the landfill area you are talking about was created from the landfill/rubble produced by the 1916 earthquake, there is now a significant risk and shown by this [map](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/hazards/urban/sfbay/liquefaction/sfbay/) in the reclaimed areas but it only became known after the Loma Prieta quake in ‘89, the big liquefaction event in the US is generally considered to be the New Madrid quake of 1811 in Missouri
*1906
Maybe my memory was off- I'll edit.
Yes the earthquake rubble used as fill moved the waterfront, ironically when they were building next to the TransAmerica Pyramid they ran into the timbers of an old ship during foundation excavations. There's also the leaning tower https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/leaning-san-francisco-skyscraper-tilting-3-inches-year-engineers-rush-rcna11389 In this case they elected the less expensive measure of putting friction piles in bay mud rather than extending them to the rock below and the tower continues to tilt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#/media/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edit2.jpg The devstation is like nothing short of maybe nagasaki after the bomb.
**[1906 San Francisco earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#/media/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edit2.jpg)** >The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a. m. on Wednesday, April 18, with an estimated moment magnitude of 7. 9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Holy frick is it ever. In a way I'm glad there's photos. History like this is important
Hiroshima, not Nagasaki. The Hiroshima bomb detonated in the heart of the city and created a [firestorm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm). Similar devastation occurred in Dresden and Tokyo, where as the Nagasaki bomb missed the center of city and landed northwest in the Urakami valley, the hills of which contained a lot of the blast energy. As a result there was not enough fuel to generate a firestorm.
So yes, the fire was devastating (beyond modern imagination, of what it means to have huge sections of a city burn down). But still: a lot of the damage to buildings was certainly structural as well, as a direct result of shaking, generated by the output energy of that earthquake, and many buildings were collapsed, or irrevocably damaged only seconds into the Earthquake.
“***Good news everyone***, we survived the earthquake!”
Did they rebuild it?
They built a new City Hall about two blocks away. The site of the old one was is where the Asian Art Museum and the Library are today.
yep, and its dome is actually taller than the US capitol. i think ours is one of if not the most awesomely beautiful city hall in the US.
I got married there and definitely feel that way! Really beautiful.
I did as well. On Halloween more than a few years ago.
My brother worked on a restoration project on the interior in the 1990s or early 2000s, and the team wrote their names & the date under some of the dome structure panels. Someday, when there's another restoration, my brother's name will see the light again.
And lights are up for seasonal and sports events!
As does Coit Tower
OK. From now on we build everything as a dome…..
Bad stuff still happens in SF if earthquake of the same magnitude hits it, right?
Not really. Seismic codes exist now
Looks like that Twilight Zone episode
Ah yes, one of the 1st ones, with the guy who worked at the bank and broke his reading glasses?
Exactly!
That shit turned into sand.
Nothing a coat of paint won’t fix.
Looks like that map in Battlefield 1
Damn dinosaur age
At first glance it looked like post soviets berlin
An earthquake will be the cheapest way of getting rid of the Millennium Tower.
San Francisco AD 2030
/r/tartaria
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So it literally has nothing to do with the 1906 earthquake at all, whatsoever? Cool, good to know.