The banks that fell were numerous, including the Nevada National Bank, the California, the Canadian Bank of Commerce, the First National, the London and San Francisco, the London, Paris and American, the Bank of British North America, the German-American Savings Bank and the Crocker-Woolworth Bank building. A large number of splendid apartment houses were also destroyed, and the tide of destruction swept away a host of noble buildings far too numerous to mention.
At Post Street and Grant Avenue stood the Bohemian Club, one of the widest known social organizations in the world. Its membership included many men famous in art, literature and commerce. Its rooms were decorated with the works of members, many of whose names are known wherever paintings are discussed and many of them priceless in their associations. Most of these were saved. There were on special exhibition in the “Jinks” room of the Bohemian Club a dozen paintings by old masters, including a Rembrandt, a Diaz, a Murillo and others, probably worth $100,000. These paintings were lost with the building, which went down in the flames.
One of the great losses was that of St. Ignatius’ Church and College, at Van Ness Avenue and Hayes Street, the greatest Jesuitical institution in the west, which cost a couple of millions of dollars. The Merchants’ Exchange building, a twelve-story structure, eleven of whose floors were occupied as offices by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, was added to the sum of losses.
THE FIRE UNDER CONTROL.
For three long days the terrible fire fiend kept up his work, and the fight went on until late on Friday, when the sweep of the flames was at length checked and the fire brought under control. The principal agent in this victory was dynamite, which was freely used. To its work a separate chapter will be devoted. When at length the area of the conflagration was limited the wealthiest part of the city lay in embers and ashes, one of the principal localities to escape being Pacific Heights, a mile west from Nob’s Hill, on which stood many costly homes of recent construction.
On Friday night the fire that had worked its way from Nob’s Hill to North Beach Street, sweeping that quarter clean of buildings, veered before a fierce wind and made its way southerly to the great sea wall, with its docks and grain warehouses. The flames reached the tanks of the San Francisco Gas Company, which had previously been pumped out, and on Saturday morning the grain sheds on the water front, about half a mile north of the ferry station, were fiercely burning. But the fire here was confined to a small area, and, with the work of fireboats in the bay and of the firemen on shore, who used salt water pumped into their engines, it was prevented from reaching the ferry building and the docks in that vicinity.
The buildings on a high slope between Van Ness and Polk Streets, Union and Filbert Streets, were blazing fiercely, fanned by a high wind, but the blocks here were so thinly settled that the fire had little chance of spreading widely from this point. In fact, it was at length practically under control, and the entire western addition of the city west of Van Ness Avenue was safe from the flames. The great struggle was fairly at an end, and the brave force of workers were at length given some respite from their strenuous labors.
During the height of the struggle and the days of exhaustion and depression that followed, exaggerated accounts of the losses and of the area swept by the flames were current, some estimate making the extent of the fire fifteen square miles out of the total of twenty-five square miles of the city’s area. It was not until Friday, the 27th, that an official survey of the burned district, made by City Surveyor Woodward, was completed, and the total area burned over found to be 2,500 acres, a trifle less than four square miles. This, however, embraced the heart of the business section and many of the principal residence streets, much of the saved area being occupied by the dwellings of the poorer people, so that the money loss was immensely greater than the percentage of ground burned over would indicate.