Photographing Disaster: Depicting the Aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake

This blog post originally appeared in California History Journal, Vol. 96 No. 1, Spring 2019

An earthquake is a visual event. Photographs taken in San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake reveal an almost unrecognizable image of the young city, showing piles of rubble and coils of melted iron swirling serpent-like from the hollow frames of collapsed buildings. One such image shows the charred remains of the Dana Building—the first Art Nouveau building in San Francisco—juxtaposed against the steel skeleton of the unfinished Union League Building. The façade of the Dana Building stands like a ghostly shell, its shattered windows and collapsed walls producing the effect of a building turned inside-out. The building’s sleek white surface is dappled not with light but with ash, a vestigial trace of the flames that had licked its walls and left the building in ruins. The building looks like it was destroyed in a flash.

Stockton Street between Geary and Post Streets. San Francisco Subjects, Photography Collection, PC-SF-EQ (1906), California Historical Society 

What would it be like to wake up and find your city unrecognizable? To find unstable ground not only beneath your feet, but in front of your eyes? The philosopher William James described how in the aftermath of the earthquake, his students at Stanford University slept outdoors in order to “get the full unusualness out of the experience.”1 The photographer Arnold Genthe remarked that the streets “presented a weird appearance . . . many ludicrous sights met the eye: an old lady carrying a large bird cage with four kittens inside . . . a man tenderly holding a pot of calla lilies, muttering to himself; a scrub woman, in one hand a new broom and in the other a large black hat with ostrich plumes; a man in an old-fashioned nightshirt and swallow tails, being startled when a friendly policeman spoke to him, ‘Say, Mister, I guess you better put on some pants.’ ”2

But these “unusual” and “ludicrous” sights were not the visuals that San Francisco’s civic leaders sought to promote. Intent on rebuilding the city as quickly as possible, pol- iticians, boosters, and industrial magnates propagated an image of San Francisco as re- silient and organized—a phoenix worthy of modern development and international investment. Compare the photograph of the Dana Building to an image better aligned with this booster rhetoric, taken by the photographer George Lawrence. Entitled “San Francisco in Ruins,” it is an aerial view of the aftermath, taken from a kite suspended 2,000 feet above the city. Lawrence’s panorama is perhaps most impressive in its ability to show the fire’s devastation not as ruinous, but as a contained event. Buildings may be smoldering, but the city’s roads and ports—symbols of industrial potential—remain. In the upper righthand corner, the clouds part to reveal the sun shining brightly on the city below, symbolizing its ordained rebirth.

By contrast, the photograph of the Dana Building depicts the aftermath as a period of precariousness and uncertainty. If the intact frame of the Union League Building conveys the city’s industrial ambition, the crumbling remains of the Dana—with its Art Nouveau walls standing jagged like loose teeth, ready to fall at any moment—read as a humbling reminder of the city’s fragility. The piles of rubble, brush, and planks lining the street symbolically dis- mantle the city before our eyes. Even the man riding through on his cart evokes a sense of contingency, his blurred face reminding the viewer that this photograph, and the landscape that it depicts, could look completely different if it had been taken in any other moment. The photograph compels the viewer to conceptualize the earthquake not as a propelling and productive force of modernization, but as a harbinger of uncertainty and radical possibility.

San Francisco in Ruins from Lawrence Captive Airship, 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay. PC-PANO_001
California Historical Society

Reflecting on the 1906 earthquake on its centennial, the writer Rebecca Solnit suggests that images of ruins and decay help us to remember that history is not teleological, but rather an ebb and flow of progress and decline. She writes: “[Decay] is the negative image of history and a necessary aspect of it. To erase decay or consciousness of decay, decline, entropy, and ruin is to erase the understanding of the unfolding relation between all things, of darkness to light, of age to youth, of fall to rise.”³ Read alongside this photograph of the ruins of the Dana Building, Solnit’s description allows us to see the structure as its own “negative image of his- tory,” its exterior melding visually with the interior to form a negative image of a building designed to symbolize modern progress and aesthetics.

In this way, the photograph also evokes a different sort of negative: a 35-millimeter film neg- ative, a technology that would be patented in America just two years later. Notice how the empty window frames are stacked neatly in rows resembling a film strip, as if to suggest the myriad ways in which the disaster could have been pictured and remembered. This photo- graph was likely taken by an amateur photographer, newly able to photograph their city after the first affordable snapshot camera was introduced by the Eastman Kodak Company just six years prior. It is through such amateur photographs that we are able to see a different view of the earthquake’s aftermath, one taken not from the point of view of a booster but from that of a citizen processing the realities of the disaster. Looking through the window frames—depicted within the frame of this forgotten photograph—we can crane our necks to imagine what it would have been like to experience the disaster as a citizen, the visual landscape of the city changing before our eyes.

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Written by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator at California Historical Society

10 California shipwreck sites that can still be seen today!

Of the photos in our newly opened exhibition, Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco, one of the images I find most striking is a mammoth plate panorama by Carlton Watkins documenting the San Francisco Bay from Nob Hill. Beyond the growing neighborhood of clapboard homes stretching out from the photographer’s foreground, we are able to view the low lying intertidal area that is now San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Several wooden schooners are anchored just offshore, likely moored after voyages across the Pacific, up from Cape Horn, or south from Alaska.

Those anchored ships are what strike me most about the image; they serve as the most tangible indicator of how far technology and transportation have evolved since the photo was taken. However, through all of that evolution, seafaring has remained beholden to the whims of the ocean and its conditions. Throughout history, fog, large swells, storms, and navigational errors regularly contributed to vessels wrecking themselves on California’s beaches, cliffs, and unanticipated offshore rocks. While some of these wrecked ships were salvaged or stripped, many still remain in place. Below is a list of ships, many en route between California’s largest ports in San Francisco and Los Angeles, that can still be viewed along California’s coast. These sites are best visited at very low tides when the wreckage is most exposed, and, as always, please use caution when exploring unfamiliar marine environments.

1. SS Monte Carlo, Coronado Island, San Diego County:
The 1920s oil tanker was converted into a floating casino. In its heyday, the Monte Carlo floated off of Coronado Island, taking advantage of a legal loophole that allowed for gambling and prostitution so long as the ship was moored at least 3 miles off shore in international waters. A storm on New Year’s Day in 1937 ripped the ship from its mooring, depositing it on Coronado Island. Given the illicit nature of the ship, no one laid claim to it, and the Monte Carlo hasn’t moved since!

2. SS Dominator, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Los Angeles County:
The freighter was traveling to Los Angeles from Vancouver with a cargo of wheat and beef. Never making it to the port, Dominator ran aground on the Palos Verdes Peninsula on March 13, 1961. Due to large surf and challenging weather, the Coast Guard was unable to pull the ship off the rocks and the crew were forced to abandon the stranded vessel. Dominator can be viewed at the base of the Palos Verdes Estate’s cliffs at low tide.

3. La Jenelle, Silver Strand Beach, Ventura County:
Built in 1931, the 400-foot cruise liner was on the market to be sold when a storm buffeted the ship ashore at Silver Strand Beach in Oxnard in 1970. After leaving her to sit for several weeks, the US Navy decided to remove the top of the ship and fill La Jenelle with rocks to provide an extension to the end of the Port Hueneme breakwater.

4. SS Winfield Scott, Anacapa Island, Ventura County:
The steamship was owned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, one of the two primary steamship companies connecting the East and West Coasts during the California Gold Rush. Winfield Scott left San Francisco bound for Panama on December 1, 1853 loaded with over 300 passengers and $1 million in gold. The captain, Simon Blunt, decided to travel through the Santa Barbara channel to save time. However, dense morning fog disoriented Blunt and lead him to prematurely steer the ship south east. Windfield Scott crashed into a rock lying off Anacapa Island at full speed and sustained 2 holes to the bow. Passengers and crew were forced to abandon ship and camp on Anacapa for a week before being rescued. The Winfield Scott now lies in shallow water off the island in the Channel Island National Marine Sanctuary, and over the years several sets of treasure seekers have searched the ship for gold and other valuable metals.

5. Barge, Salinas River National Wildlife Refuge, Monterey County:
A barge was blown ashore in a 1983 storm. After the owners were unable to remove the ship, it was left to rust on the beach. The barge is fully exposed on the beach, and it can be accessed by walking 1.5 miles north from the Salinas River National Wildlife Refuge.

6. The Sir John Franklin, Ano Nuevo State Reserve, San Mateo County:
The clipper ship was headed to San Francisco when it became emerged in heavy fog and crashed into rocks on January 17, 1965. The collision destroyed the ship and killed the captain and 11 crew members. The crew members were buried at the adjacent beach, which is now known as Franklin’s Point. In 1980, dune erosion led to the exposure of the buried sailors and archaeologists from San Jose State and Sonoma State Universities subsequently excavated the burials. The researchers discovered the remains of other burials, indicating the fatal history of ships grounding themselves at Franklin’s Point. Today, you can visit a platform located at the end of the point and take in the perilous rocks.

7. King Philip, Ocean Beach, San Francisco County:
The clipper ship was dragged into the surf line at Ocean Beach in January of 1878. The ship has remained in place since then, being battered by constant heavy surf. Surprisingly, it is still possible to view the wreck at a low tide and when storms have shifted sands off of the wreck. In order to view the wreck, plan to visit Ocean Beach at a minus tide and plot these coordinates into your phone or other GPS device: 37.751517, -122.509846. 

8. The Lyman A. Stewart, Ohian, and Frank H. Buck, Land’s End, San Francisco County:
The Lyman A. Stewart ran aground at Land’s End while rounding the bay entrance into the Golden Gate in 1922. The Ohian crashed nearby, north of Point Lobos and the Sutro Baths in 1936, and the Frank H. Buck befell the same fate, crashing into Land’s End in 1938. The Lyman A. Stewart and Frank H. Buck were subsequently blasted apart with dynamite, but pieces of all three ships can still be viewed from the Coastal Trail at Mile Rock Beach at Land’s End in San Francisco.

9. SS Tennessee, Mill Valley, Marin County:
The passenger ship was one of the earliest ships to run aground while trying to enter the Golden Gate, crashing into the Marin coastline in 1853. All of the ship’s passengers, and its cargo of 14 chests of gold were all saved, but the Tennessee could not be salvaged. The beach where the vessel landed subsequently became Tennessee Cove, and it is still possible to see parts of the rusting engine lying on the beach.

10. USS Milwaukee, Samoa, Humboldt County:
In January of 1917, the Navy cruiser USS Milwaukee was sent to Samoa beach, near Eureka, to rescue a Naval submarine that had run aground. Unfortunately, the Milwaukee couldn’t withstand an onslaught of wind and waves and became beached itself. The crew was all saved and the ship scrapped for parts, though some rusting parts of the ship still protrude from the water. The remnants can be found near the Milwaukee Memorial, at the intersection of New Navy Base Road and Samoa Pulp Lane.