San Francisco

On the morning of 18 April 1906 the San Andreas fault moved, and for three days afterward San Francisco burned. The fire did more damage than the shaking. It is the most thoroughly photographed disaster of its era, partly because it lasted long enough for people to fetch cameras.

What survives is a strange body of work. Some of it is journalism. Some is what we would now call citizen documentation — amateurs with new roll-film cameras standing on hills watching their own city burn. And some is panoramic, made with the rotating cameras then in fashion, which produced images of the ruins that are physically wide enough to convey the scale.

The photographs from the weeks after are the ones worth sitting with. Refugee camps in Golden Gate Park. Cooking stoves moved into the street because chimneys were unsafe. Bread lines. Handwritten signs on rubble announcing that a business would reopen and where. There is a famous one reading that a saloon was open again, with an arrow.

The city rebuilt fast, and photography tracked it. Within a decade San Francisco was confident enough to host the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, ostensibly to mark the opening of the Panama Canal and unmistakably to announce that the city was back. The Palace of Fine Arts survives from it — the only building meant to be temporary that anyone insisted on keeping.

Earlier material exists too. The 1855 bird's-eye view shows a settlement barely six years past the Gold Rush, already laid out on the grid that would later be criticized for ignoring the hills entirely. The cable cars date from 1873, invented in response to a horse-drawn accident on a wet slope.

Chinatown appears throughout, though the photographs need reading with some care. Much of what was made there in the 1890s was staged for a white audience with an appetite for the exotic. The material from after 1906, when the district was rebuilt on its own terms, is more honest.

The archive holds around twenty-six hundred images naming San Francisco, which puts it third after Washington and New York.

The City That Rebuilt Itself Twice in Thirty Years