W. W. Overton, of Los Angeles, thus describes the Chinatown dens and the revelations made by the earthquake and the flames:
“Strange is the scene where San Francisco’s Chinatown stood. No heap of smoking ruins marks the site of the wooden warrens where the Orientals dwelt in thousands. Only a cavern remains, pitted with deep holes and lined with dark passageways, from whose depths come smoke wreaths. White men never knew the depth of Chinatown’s underground city. Many had gone beneath the street level two and three stories, but now that the place had been unmasked, men may see where its inner secrets lay. In places one can see passages a hundred feet deep.
“The fire swept this Mongolian quarter clean. It left no shred of the painted wooden fabric. It ate down to the bare ground, and this lies stark, for the breezes have taken away the light ashes. Joss houses and mission schools, groceries and opium dens, gambling resorts and theatres, all of them went. These buildings blazed up like tissue paper.
“From this place I saw hundreds of crazed yellow men flee. In their arms they bore opium pipes, money bags, silks and children. Beside them ran the trousered women and some hobbled painfully. These were the men and women of the surface. Far beneath the street levels in those cellars and passageways were other lives. Women, who never saw the day from their darkened prisons, and their blinking jailors were caught and eaten by the flames.”
Devastation spread widely on all sides, ruining the homes of the rich as well as of the poor, of Americans as well as of Europeans and Asiatics, the marts of trade, the haunts of pleasure, the realms of science and art, the resorts of thousands of the gay population of the Golden State metropolis. To attempt to tell the whole story of destruction and ruin would be to describe all for which San Francisco stood. Science suffered in the loss of the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, which was destroyed with its invaluable contents. This building, erected fifteen years ago at a cost of $500,000, was a seven-story building with a rich collection of objects of science. Much of the academy’s contents can never be replaced. It represented the work of many years. There was a rare collection of Pacific Sea birds which was the most valuable of its kind in the world. In fact, the entire collection of birds ranked very high, was visited by ornithologists from every country, and was the pride of the city. The academy was founded in 1850, James Lick, the same man who endowed the Lick Observatory, giving it $1,000,000, so it was on a prosperous footing. It will take many years of active labor to replace the losses of an hour or two of the reign of fire in this institution, while much that it held is gone beyond restoration.
LOSS TO ART AND SCIENCE.
Art suffered as severely as science, the valuable collections in private and public buildings being nearly all destroyed. We have spoken of the rare paintings burned in the Bohemian Club building. The collections on Nob’s Hill suffered as severely. When the mansions here, the Fairmount Hotel and Mark Hopkins Institute were approached by the flames, many attempts were made to remove some of the priceless works of art from the buildings. A crowd of soldiers was sent to the Flood and the Huntington mansions and the Hopkins Institute to rescue the paintings. From the Huntington home and the Flood mansion canvases were cut from the framework with knives. The collections in the three buildings, valued in the hundreds of thousands, in great part were destroyed, few being saved from the ravages of the fire.
The destruction of the libraries, with their valuable collections of books, was also a very serious loss to the city and its people. Of these there were nine of some prominence, the Sutro Library containing many rare books among its 200,000 volumes, while that of the Mechanics Institute possessed property valued at $2,000,000. The Public Library occupied a part of the City Hall, the new building proposed by the city, with aid to the extent of $750,000 by Andrew Carnegie, being fortunately still in embryo.
In the burning of the banks the losses were limited to the buildings, their money and other valuables being securely locked in fireproof vaults. But these became so heated by the flames that it was necessary to leave them to a gradual cooling for days, during which their treasures were unavailable, and those with deposits, small or large, were obliged to depend on the benevolence of the nation for food, such wealth as was left to them being locked up beyond their reach. It was the same with the United States Sub-Treasury, which was entirely destroyed by fire, its vaults, which contained all the cash on hand, being alone preserved. Guards were put over these to protect their contents against possible loss by theft.
One serious effect of the conflagration was the general disorganization of the telegraph system. News items were sent over the wires, but private messages inquiring about missing friends for days failed to reach the parties concerned or to bring any return.