First-Hand Reflections on the 1906 San Francisco Seismic Event. A panorama of confusion ensued, with the affluent and destitute, locals and foreigners abruptly sharing makeshift quarters, a mutual befuddlement setting in.
The term “instant disaster book” emerged in the publishing realm as identifying works like The San Francisco Disaster by Earthquake and Fire (1906). This genre emerged due to the prevalence of catastrophes at the century’s commencement, which included the Johnstown Flood of 1889; the Galveston Hurricane in 1900; Mount Pelée’s eruption in 1902; the Iroquois Theatre Fire in 1903; the devastating Baltimore Fire of 1904; the steamboat General Slocum’s conflagration in 1904; and the calamitous San Francisco Seismic Event of 1906, claiming over 3,000 lives and ravaging 80% of the township. Each tragedy was immortalized in literature that adhered to a distinct prototype: dispatch a scribe to the epicenter posthaste, where he would rapidly scribble down narratives, supplement the manuscript hastily with miscellaneous previously published pieces, and intersperse abundant illustrations. The objective was to saturate the market while the tragedy still captivated the public’s attention.
Charles Morris, the compiler behind The San Francisco Disaster, was a seasoned scribe prolific in creating numerous mainstream historical accounts and dime novels under pseudonyms. The exact timings of his arrival in San Francisco from Philadelphia and the completion of his compilation remain obscure, but his publishing house asserted it was a rapid endeavor. Even if Morris’s work wasn’t the inaugural recounting of the earthquake, it stood among the earliest.
The San Francisco Disaster justifies its narrative expanse with a comparative exploration of various other seismic disturbances and a chronological account of San Francisco. Nevertheless, the core of the compendium lies in a concise section commencing some fifty pages into the text. Here, Morris presents a direct discourse with aghast informants whose genuine reactions, unfiltered and startling, have yet to be numbed or intentionally omitted. Their disjointed recollections paint an ongoing tableau of nightmares, never before tidied up or downplayed. They recount an array of agonies still in motion.
Tales unfold of a billboard for beer repurposed as a communal message portal, thronging with notices of the deceased. Descriptions of bandits severing fingers and gnawing on earlobes to steal jewelry from corpses. Makeshift havens crafted from lavish drapery and table linens. Wounds oozing blood, masses stripped of attire spared their nightwear. Individuals in ceaseless screams, whilst others rendered speechless. Subjects unwilling to part with cherished possessions—a piano, a sewing device, a canary, or the remains of a beloved. Carts typically for waste repurposed to convey bodies. An atmosphere dense with the odors of gas and smoke, punctuated by sizzling electrical lines sporadically spurting azure sparks.
With a casual motion of his unhurried hand, he says, “Behold,” and proffers, “Behold, my origins trace back to one of antiquity’s earliest metropolises. The cradle of civilization. And here, they erect a mere car park and fancy it as civilization.” I am taken aback and respond with laughter. To this, he reciprocates. In a shared moment of hilarity, I concede, “Indeed, indeed.” “The cradle of civilization,” he restates. “Indeed,” I echo once more.
Dionne Brand, 2001
Visualize, if permitted, The Ark, a dilapidated ocean liner steadfast on blocks, nestled in a deserted lot in West Oakland, California, shadowed by the I-880 flyover. Below this long-forgotten vessel, amidst the untamed flora of the lot, stands a transient “tent city,” a curious blend of Tesla vehicles, tents, and trailers. (Indeed, Teslas.).A retired pleasure vessel at the Oakland Seaport, bordering the neighborhood of West Oakland. The proposal aimed to supply temporary accommodations for close to a thousand individuals without housing.
The Port of Oakland continues as one of the most active in the United States, devised with a federally mandated structure specifically for freighters, resulting in its incapability to berth cruise ships. Nonetheless, Kaplan and her associates maintained that a temporary “floating hotel” could serve as a makeshift solution to the alarming 86 percent upsurge in homelessness that the city had observed from 2015 to 2019. Kaplan pointed out that, in history, cruise ships had been utilized for temporary lodging in the event of calamities such as the one post-Hurricane Katrina. Clearly, homelessness represents an artificial catastrophe. However, Kaplan’s approach was merely the latest in a string of endeavors to mitigate the emergency; since 2015, Oakland along with other municipalities across the Bay Area have been piloting various “emergency” initiatives, such as authorizing tent communities on designated parking and vacant plots.
To comprehend San Francisco’s self-made shelter conundrum, one must start with the municipality’s first zoning statute, the so-called Cubic Air Ordinance. Established in 1870, amid a period of unchecked asset fever in a city notorious for its disorder, this statute insisted on a basic spatial allocation per tenant in lodging facilities. Authorities proclaimed this was in pursuit of enhanced living conditions and secure housing, an honorable pretext for state intervention.
However, the subtle aim—to marginalize Chinese inhabitants and property owners to recapture jobs and residential areas for the city’s Caucasian populace—established an insidious model. With the Cubic Air Ordinance, civic chieftains primed the field for a century and a half of exclusionary zoning, or land use strategies formulated to conserve the existing way of life over managing expansion equitably. Frequently motivated by racism and avarice, the bleak narrative of San Francisco’s city planning portrays a tale that resonates today with its most recent episode: the current residential crisis.
For both sightseers and residents, San Francisco entices with its paradoxical charm: ancient Victorian abodes situated atop slopes near gleaming modern towers, archaic streetcars chugging up the same thoroughfares that pioneer new tech ventures. Yet, few recognize the profound influence of the city’s urban planning department on its geographical form, where well-meaning pursuits are eclipsed by concessionary acts to placate the metropolis’s affluent, well-connected homeowners.
“Land being labeled as real property is not coincidental,” Kenneth T. Jackson articulated in his seminal 1985 tome Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. “Through many eras, property ownership has constituted not just a primary, but oftentimes the sole form of dominion.” This authority was expressly visible this year during the disputes over California Senate Bill 827, which proposed “upzoning,” or elevating structure height criteria near consistent public transit points. Several civic assemblies, municipalities, and leaders condemned the dilution of “municipal power”—a term adored by city progressives despite its ambiguous, artisanal connotation—who lambasted the bill as a “uniform” solution that could harm the city’s lower-income inhabitants.
However, municipalities in the United States have incessantly wielded “municipal power” to expand disparity by implementing prohibitive zoning regulations, redeveloping impoverished communities, and forcing less wealthy residents out of their neighborhoods. In San Francisco, citizens have manipulated “municipal power” to render development increasingly arduous by diminishing building height allowances, extending zone legislation, and amplifying the sway of property owners. These fortunate neighbors have often manipulated the anxieties of eviction and gentrification voiced by low-income dwellers to obstruct any housing construction, even though research repeatedly illustrates that in high-demand locales, the integration of any new housing typically serves to lessen displacement.
In downtown Oakland on any busy weekday, countless commuters traverse around the 12th Street City Center BART hub, brushing by a prominent bronze sculpture of John B. Williams. This monument, as is typical, falls short of its objective: to keep alive the memory of who John B. Williams was and what contributions he made to the city that honored him by naming a central plaza and a segment of the urban freeway in his honor. The influential head of the Oakland Redevelopment Agency from 1964 to 1976, Williams was once heralded as the most “capable and potent African American in municipal governance.” Before the election of Lionel Wilson, Oakland’s inaugural African American mayor, in 1977, it was speculated that Williams himself might vie for the mayoral post. Currently, pinning down his legacy in both public records and collective memory proves challenging. Yet
As with the statue in the urban hub of City Center Plaza, his enduring impacts are concealed in the open. Williams’s narrative is pivotal to the chronicle of not solely this specific locale but also of enumerable neighborhoods disrupted by the metropolis rejuvenation initiatives of the mid-twentieth century.
In 1949, the national administration ratified the Housing Act, enabling provisions for metropolis regeneration ventures accessible to numerous municipal administrations in America. Oakland embarked on an assertive revamping agenda, marking marginalized labor-class sectors for the construction of novel frameworks and enterprises. The city’s African-American population, which augmented threefold in the time periods before and subsequent to World War II, encountered a disproportionate effect. Discriminatory housing policies corralled the vast majority of this burgeoning population into the dense West Oakland — situated to the west of the downtown area — where homes were gradually lapsing into neglect.
A post-combat housing crunch, instigated by the upsurge of newcomers and the vanishing of wartime vocations, led to acutely segregated habitation districts across the East Bay. Historically diverse neighborhoods (comprising Mexican, Asian, Portuguese, and Irish residents) experienced a metamorphosis as Caucasian inhabitants from Oakland embraced federally backed loan and home loan schemes — underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration — to secure abodes in the suburbs. Concurrent
ly, due to prejudiced lending practices, bigoted zoning ordinances that relegated African Americans to zones west of Oakland’s Adeline Street, and meager rates of homeowner occupation, domiciles in and neighboring downtown deteriorated. This attenuation of property value — notably in West Oakland — along with the decay of the municipal shopping district, engendered unease among city officials, who felt acutely menaced by the business magnetism of San Francisco after the completion of the Bay Bridge in 1936. In 1959, an extensive rehabilitation schema for West Oakland was adopted without opposition by the municipal council.
Prior to the onset of the pandemic, which called a halt to much of the United States’ economic activity, the near 110 million nationals occupying rental abodes frequently grappled with the challenge of settling dues with their property owners, keeping at bay the relentless prospect of eviction. Annually, close to 4 million eviction notices were issued. On any particular night, upwards of 200,000 individuals faced homelessness.
Amidst the pandemic, the hazard of forfeiting shelter became an omnipresent terror on a significantly broader magnitude, with projections suggesting it could impact over 30 million strapped-for-cash lessees. Such a disaster of grand proportions was staved off, for the interim, by an eviction embargo enacted through 2020 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, humane and fair resolutions to the enduring accommodation dilemmas in America remain a formidable target, one that will persist well beyond the containment of the coronavirus.
A strategy brimming with potential is delved into in this film from Retro Report, dedicated to revisiting momentous historical occurrences for their ongoing influence and lessons. The foundation of the theory is not novel: empowering individuals with a real interest in their dwellings by transitioning lessees into proprietors. The documentary concentrates on two instances spaced by fifty years: in San Francisco, where the plan could not gain traction, and in Minneapolis, where it has set sail, albeit with an unknown destination.
The chronicle from San Francisco hearkens back to the late 1960s on Kearny Street, in an area dubbed Manilatown due to a dense population of Filipino migrants. Here, the International Hotel sheltered 150 individuals, mostly Filipino laborers who rented spaces for around $50 monthly, equivalent to roughly $380 today. In 1968, the proprietors of the hotel served eviction papers to its residents. City developers embarked on remolding the metropolis under the guise of urban reconstruction. The I-Hotel, as affectionately known, was marked for demolition to make a parking space available.
The lodgers staged resistance, backed by regional dwellers, ecclesiastical figures, and activists like Emil A. De Guzman Jr., who, at that time, was an academic and had spent time residing in the hotel. “The struggle essentially boiled down to one thing,” he recounted to Retro Report recently. “It evolved into a battle of individual rights versus the rights to property.”
In a piece for Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker examines a tale that’s grown all too familiar: the alarming conversion of a coastal metropolis into a sanctum devised by and catering only to the affluent. What’s at stake goes beyond the staggering leap in property rates, disruptive though that is. It’s the rampant obliteration of the civic metropolis as well. The civic metropolis, as he portrays it, ought to comprise much more than luxury residential complexes and towering corporate structures. It should incorporate ventures in public spaces and libraries, transit lines and places for public enjoyment, amenities accessible to members of all economic statuses. Baker crafts his analysis with New York in mind. Yet, his discourse could just as readily relate to the San Francisco Bay Zone — certainly San Francisco itself and, more lately, Oakland, the municipality where I reside and whose city planning and expansion I have followed for numerous years.
It’s not merely personal experience that renders Oakland suitable as a specimen of the civic metropolis at risk. In these times characterized by what Baker terms “the metropolitan dilemma of affluence,” it’s imperative to recognize…The signification of intermediate urban centers within the influence range of greater metropolises, advancing beyond the unceasing preoccupation with cosmopolitan giants and paying heed to the more modestly-sized localities inhabited by the majority of the workforce. Oakland has traditionally been overshadowed by San Francisco, situated directly across the bay, rendering it especially susceptible to the influx of individuals displaced by San Francisco’s intensifying gentrification — a scenario reminiscent of its earlier disregard during the postwar suburban exodus. Additionally, Oakland is an engrossing locale by virtue of its own merits, birthplace to luminaries such as Jack London, Julia Morgan, Gertrude Stein, and Earl Warren, alongside the inception of the Black Panthers and the works of Ishmael Reed; its roster of mayors has included Jerry Brown (1997-2007) — a four-term governor of California. Fortunately escaping the havoc of the 1906 earthquake, Oakland prides itself on housing the Bay Area’s most diverse collection of architectural forms — ranging from storage facilities to skyscrapers, cinemas to private dwellings — and eras — featuring examples of Victorian, Beaux Arts, Art Deco, and modernist styles. Shortly, its compactly constructed, multipurpose city center may rank as one of the most vibrant and alluring in the western United States.
In historical periods of prosperity here, market-driven evolution proceeded hand in hand with governmental contributions. During the 1910s, Oakland witnessed the edification of civic structures such as the City Hall (1914) and the Municipal Auditorium (1915), propelled by Mayor Frank Mott. Amidst the Depression, local bonds supplemented by assistance from the Public Works Administration financed the reconstruction of the Alameda County Superior Courthouse (1936), adorned with murals and sculptures by artists from the Works Progress Administration. The 1950s and ’60s saw the synchronization of counties on both sides of the bay under the Bay Area Rapid Transit District to strategize and construct the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, famously known as BART.
Perched on the steps of her ancestral abode — a slender yet majestic Victorian beneath the shade of an evergreen pear tree — Lynette Mackey surfaced a photograph from a familial assemblage dating back nearly half a century. The men adorned in tailored suits, the women in tailored skirts. Ms. Mackey, a youth in crimson flared trousers, extended her arms expansively with a radiant beam.
Subsequent to that era, in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Mackey observed the incremental dissolution of the African American essence from the Fillmore District, once hailed as “the Harlem of the West.” The jazz establishments that hosted icons such as Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington vanished, as did the culinary hubs of soul food.
By the mid-1970s, the departure of many peers had occurred as well, coerced by municipal leaders who confiscated properties in the pursuit of what they termed “urban renewal.” Then, ultimately, her kin forfeited the house they had obtained in the 1940s following their relocation from Texas. While numerous old Victorians were razed and supplanted with social housing, the city preserved the Mackey family home, which has been refurbished into government-sponsored apartments.
Image Source: MOLPIX / Shutterstock
