Home » Ashes to ashes: What L.A. can learn from San Francisco’s 1906 disaster – Jobsmaa.com

Ashes to ashes: What L.A. can learn from San Francisco’s 1906 disaster – Jobsmaa.com

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Well, crap.

There is no better way. The city of Los Angeles sagged, flattened like an old party balloon, suffocating and punching.

Breath, but not energy, not spirit. We want it to be as elastic as one of those old Joe Baluga toy punching bags with a bottom weight.

With this in mind, I began to think about our sister city on the coast and the death experience it had in 1906, a fire burning three or four days after its earthquake: more than 80% of the city was demolished, 28,000 buildings and 500 city blocks were destroyed, and at least half the population was homeless. .

The scale of the damage in Los Angeles' latest disaster is stark: nearly 40,000 acres burned and more than 12,000 structures, including many homes, damaged or destroyed.

My old friend Kevin Starr, a great California historian, is from San Francisco. He loved and often worked in LA, but he loved San Francisco, with the particular fondness of the people who call that city “The city.”

He told me one day, as we were driving through the L.A. Plains, that the collapse of California's principal city, San Francisco, in 1906 had opened a gap of opportunity in our blossoming state, and Los Angeles had filled it. void. San Francisco looked like throwing touchdowns until LA intercepted and ran the ball back for its own score — and again.

San Francisco's recovery was a heroic story, and it kept the city's hands full for years.

A section of San Francisco shows the devastation of the great earthquake that struck on Wednesday, April 18, 1906.

A section of San Francisco looking east across Grand Avenue toward the island of Yerba Buena, showing the devastation of the Great Earthquake on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The earthquake measured 8.3 on the Richter scale, which was extremely devastating.

(Associated Press)

But what Kevin told me was that during those years when San Francisco was marginalized, LA spurred investment and trade to come to California, or stay in California—and do it a few hundred miles south.

And so it happened. LA took the lead from San Francisco and never relinquished.

There is a solid book by historian Mansell Blackford, “The Lost Dream: Merchants and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920.” It was written over 30 years ago and is more impressive than you might think from its title. It's worth laying out what I learned from it at some length here.

After 1906, Los Angeles merchants “took advantage of the confusion” to “penetrate”—presumably to market its wares—north of the great Central Valley. When San Francisco's frustrated businessmen asked the state railroad commission for a moratorium on fares to help restore San Francisco's fortunes, the commission — with who knows what ramifications instead — lowered Used rates for LA and its business growth as a reason. The president of the Civic League of San Francisco complained in 1911 that the railroad system had essentially become “a great funnel in Los Angeles…its mouthpiece.”

Oakland began to attract port business from San Francisco, as did Seattle, Portland, and LA Southern California firms. Simons Brick Co.'s logo-stamped bricks — still found on old patios and staircases in L.A., including mine — were shipped to San Francisco by the hundreds of pallets.

LA took the lead from San Francisco, which then barreled into new businesses: movies, aviation and, of course, oil.

"San Francisco's Earthquake Horror Fire and Famine" By James Russell Wilson.

“San Francisco's Horror of Earthquake Fire and Famine” by James Russell Wilson.

(Pat Morrison)

Frances Dinkelspiel is an author and journalist who has written extensively about California, including the book “Towers of Gold” about her predecessor. Pioneer banker and landowner Isaiah Hellman. Hellman practically founded the banking business in L.A., bankrolling large civic projects, then he moved north in the 1890s and, as Tinkelspiel said, San Francisco had more per capita than anywhere else in the world. He had millionaires. Hellman kept his faith and his fortune in San Francisco during its desperate years.

It was a slog. “San Francisco took a long time to rebuild, and that's why San Francisco was so eager to get the fair in 1915,” Dinkelspiel told me. (He's referring to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a sort of World's Fair.)

“They fought really hard for it,” he said. “They're going to show the world that San Francisco has risen from the ashes like a phoenix.” Three buildings survive from the fair, among them the spectacular Palace of Fine Arts.

San Francisco in 1904.

This photo was taken in 1904 from Market Street east of Third Street in San Francisco.

(Associated Press)

In 1936, 30 years after the earthquake and fire, MGM released its acclaimed film “San Francisco,” starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald. At the end of the film, as homeless San Franciscans camp out in a park and mourn the dead, a child shouts “Fire out!” It runs screaming. People cheer. They get out of their tents and run towards a mountain In total, Sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and watch the smoking ruins of the city. One of them said, “We will build a new San Francisco!”

“New” is an interesting word choice. Does a “great” San Francisco mean something is wrong with the first one? San Francisco burned often before – five times in two years, right after the gold rush began.

In 1905, a few months before the earthquake, San Francisco was awarded The Burnham ProjectA Park-Centered Model for Better Urban Redevelopment. The plan was welcomed before the earthquake, but then ignored – an opportunity lost.

Even LA has a paradise that was once stolen from our past. Bartholomew-Olmsted ProjectCommissioned by the LA Chamber of Commerce in 1927, it was called “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region.” It is mind boggling to see what would have been an “emerald necklace” of mountains, rivers, parks and beaches. Today's LA would be a dramatically different, more livable, human-scale place if it were accepted. After it was delivered to the room in 1929, it sank, almost impossible to find – too big, perhaps, too expensive, too ambitious, too contrary to the plans of real estate agents.

And so LA became … this LA and what will our next LA be after these conflicts? Will it, like San Francisco, lose our global advantage as the powerhouse of the moment and the leader who thinks best about big things?

Those answers are even bigger for this moment and this place. Before last week, I was already taking Los Angeles to the woodshed and writing a column. The moment will come.

A Christmas wreath hangs on the door of a home in Pacific Palisades that burned in the Palisades fire.

Jan. A Christmas wreath hangs on the gate of a home in Pacific Palisades that was destroyed in a fire on Nov. 11, 2025.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Adam Ross, a research professor of public policy and engineering at USC, is an expert on disaster economics, and he pointed out to me some of the differences he predicts in LA's rebound: San Francisco's mostly commercial fire damage, LA's residential damage; LA's manufacturing base and its large export business remained largely untouched by the fire. Ross says the X-factors for the revival will be quite different: infrastructure, drought, climate change and our politics.

Not even hours had passed since last week's text message exchange between Governor Gavin Newsom and President Biden set the whole apparatus in motion for federal disaster relief.

Within hours, on social media, incoming President Donald Trump posted a message to the governor of California that was “newsworthy” and “almost apocalyptic.” His words were neither sympathetic nor supportive. He created grievances and lies and accusations against Newsom and the firefighting situation. Newsom, Trump posted, is to blame.

In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt, America's earnest, ambitious president, visited California for two weeks. He spent three nights camping in Yosemite with naturalist John Muir. He was given a rousing reception on the streets of San Francisco. He toured Los Angeles with his Harvard classmate, ethnographer and author Charles Loomis, and admired the city's natural beauty.

Three years later, two weeks after the San Francisco earthquake, the Republican Roosevelt White House announced that “aid has already arrived from the Canadian government, with prompt generosity, a testament to close and friendly relations. Bind us to our neighbors to the north … with a generosity equally marked and equal.” Appreciated Republic of Mexico, our nearest neighbor to the south,” from Guatemala, the Empress of China, Japan, From New Zealand, Martinique and the rest of the world.

On the afternoon of April 18, 1906 in Washington, DC, Roosevelt sent a telegram Already a million dollars is coming our way, with the Governor of California unconditionally supporting—and a further promise: “If the National Government can do anything you will let me know,” and the Secretary of War. The existing message was “We have authority to do whatever you direct.”

Explaining LA with Pat Morrison

Los Angeles is a complicated place. In this weekly feature, Pat Morrison explains how it works, its history and its culture.

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