1906…Just Like Yesterday, and Maybe Tomorrow

Author James Dalessandro Scores a Hit with Historical Novel

J ames Dalessandro is the author/screenwriter of 1906. In 1998, with an outline and several chapters of the novel under his belt, James went to Hollywood, and within 24 hours was in the middle of a bidding war between Warner Bros. and director Barry Levinson, and DreamWorks. For a writer, there are only four words that mean anything: “The End,” as in the end of the script, and “bidding war.”

BC: How did this book come to be?
JA: I read Denial of Disaster, by Gladys Hansen, the San Francisco archivist. It said that virtually everything known about the 1906 Earthquake is wrong. First of all, almost no one knows the scope of the disaster. A city of 450,000 people was almost wiped out by an earthquake and fire. Twenty-nine thousand of the city’s standing structures incinerated. The wealth of San Francisco was unprecedented, due to the Gold Rush and the Silver Boom, the bounty from manufacturing and agriculture, plus the shipping to Asia and South America. No city had ever grown wealthier faster or was more powerful than San Francisco.

Since 1907, the official death county has been 478. Gladys Hansen recorded approximately 3,400 names of people who died. It also did not include anyone shot as a suspected looter. In testimony before the War Department, General Adolphus Greeley claimed that his men, while under acting General Frederick Funston’s command, never shot anybody. In fact, their own records and dozens of eye-witness accounts indicate that soldier’s and national guardsmen may actually have shot several hundred people.

On April 17th, the biggest graft in American history was underway. Graft Hunters, lead by Fremont Older, crusading editor of the city’s Evening Bulletin, were about to arrest the mayor, the chief of police, and all 18 members of the Board of Supervisors. The earthquake interrupted it. After the earthquake and fire, they reconvened the tribunal and sent the political boss, Abe Ruef, to San Quentin for four and a half years. Eugene Schmitz, the mayor of San Francisco, barely escaped going to prison. He was saved by portraying himself as a great hero of the city during the earthquake. What he did was abdicate authority to General Funston. With two of the city’s three main water lines broken, the military used dynamite to try to blast fire breaks. Every time they’d blow up a building, the flaming debris rained started a dozen other fires.

BC: They were blowing up buildings to create fire blocks?
JA: Fire breaks. You can’t use dynamite and black powder and gun cotton on wood buildings unless you have water. You create fire breaks by soaking the building first, then blow it up, and then douse all the flames when it rains down on the neighborhood. They just kept spreading the fire.

There were other amazing stories. Enrico Caruso, the most famous entertainer in the world, came to San Francisco to sing with the New York Metropolitan Opera. He was so paranoid about the Wild West’s reputation that he bought a revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition. He even practiced his quick draw off the back of the train all the way across country. He performed in Carmen five hours before the earthquake, with the revolver tucked in the cummerbund of his costume.

Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan was one of the first recorded casualties. For years, he predicted the city was going to burn to the ground if they didn’t stop stealing money at City Hall and started spending it on a supplemental saltwater system and more fireboats, because fireboats are the most valuable tool this city could have. Being on a peninsula is San Francisco’s greatest asset. There were 57 massive cisterns beneath the city streets that held millions of gallons of water that could have been used by the fire department to try to stop the fire before it spread.

Instead, the corrupt regime took bribes from contractors to use the cisterns as garbage dumps for construction sites. Everything that could have been done wrong was done.

BC: So you took this as a point of departure and made a story.
JA: I created a fictional story, a la Titanic or Gone with the Wind or Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, with characters typical of the city. San Francisco was the runaway capital of the American West, so I created a runaway farm girl from Lawrence, Kansas, named Kaitlin Staley. Her father, the town Sheriff, chases her to San Francisco and en route meets Enrico Caruso. Five million people a year went through the Ferry Building in 1906. It was the gateway to the Paris of the Pacific. The Ferry Building was one of the great landmarks of the American West.

But much of the story is true. The earthquake hit at 5:13 a.m. on April 18th. By the 20th, the United States Navy arrived to participate in one of the greatest battles in human history–fought right here at the Embarcadero, from the Ferry Building all the way to Van Ness Avenue and up Van Ness to California Street.

By the time the Navy arrived, the whole city was on fire. Five ships from the Pacific Squadron had been off the coast of San Diego, testing the ship-to-shore radio. One of the first messages they got was, “Earthquake in San Francisco, entire city on fire.” When they reached Santa Cruz, they could see the tips of the flames.

When they arrived, the Embarcadero was still standing. If the Embarcadero was lost, it would be almost impossible to rebuild the city.

The Navy and Marines had two tasks: to save the waterfront and hold back the flames because there were thousands of people trapped by this massive wall of fire. They used ferry boats, garbage scows, yachts, rowboats to evacuate people.

These young Marines and sailors were fearless. There were 15 boats in all. They fought the fire for 24 hours. It might have been the Navy’s finest hour outside of war.

BC: The ferry boats played a heroic role, didn’t they?
JA: They did and they will again. The ferry boats shuttled thousands of people away. And our fireboats at Firehouse #35 along the Embarcadero will be crucial. The Phoenix is berthed there: that’s the fireboat that saved San Francisco in 1989 during the Loma Prieta quake, when the Marina was on fire and the water mains were broken. If it wasn’t for The Phoenix and its seven-person crew, the city might have burned down again. So what does the city do? The Phoenix went out of commission for several months because the port and the city would not allocate the money to fix it. That’s an invitation to disaster. We have no back up today: no navy, no Marines, no army nearby. There are two pumper boats on the San Francisco waterfront, The Phoenix and The Guardian. If a huge earthquake hits again – when it hits again – their pumpers can refill the high pressure system, run 5 inch hoses above ground if the underground systems break, and provide tremendous mobility and back up to the land-based fire fighters. The Guardian pumps 24,000 gallons of salt water a minute, enough to fill a swimming pool in 45 seconds. Attention, City Officials: we need our fire boats.

BC: Were the ferry boats more important to the evacuation than the railroads?

JA: Up to the final day, the railroad was number one because there are so many more trains than ferry boats. But when the fire cut off escape and trapped thousands – it could have been as many as 50,000 people, there’s no way to ever count them — you cannot underestimate the service that the ferry boats provided in saving people’s lives.

BC: Tell us a little bit about the characters.
JA: I love macho-heroic stories told by women. The main character is Annalisa Passarelli, age 23. She is the opera/theater critic for the crusading newspaper, the Evening Bulletin. After graduating from Berkeley, she wanted to be a muckraking journalist like her heroes, Nellie Bly and the famed Lincoln Steffens, author of Shame of The Cities.