Coppas place, center of real bohemia, where artists for many years congregated and adorned the walls with pictures, still remained. But it was lonesome; all its fellows were gone; it was surrounded by ruins. Not an old place remained with a story or with a sentimental charm. San Francisco went to work with a will to rebuild, ships continued to enter its magnificent harbor, and lived down earthquake and fire to again become a great, prosperous, magnificent city.
But the sentiment of its Latin Quarter was gone, for outside of the Coppas place, there was nothing left of the old and loved San Francisco except the gable tiled roof of Mission Dolores, its plain wooden cross surmounting it, and its sweet-toned chimes long stilled. Their voices should ring out anew at intervals to remind all who may hear them that San Francisco has a storied past and a bright future, a future glorious as the brilliant sunsets that come streaming so magnificently through the Golden Gate.
It should be borne in mind that San Francisco was not destroyed by the earthquake. While old buildings in that part of the city which stood on “made” ground east of Montgomery street and some of that district lying south of Market it is true suffered from the shock, it was fire that wrought the great devastation and wiped out the entire business section and more than half of the residence section of the city.
The great modern steel structures were practically uninjured by the earthquake, except for cracked walls and displaced plaster. All those great structures, of course, subsequently were utterly ruined by the flames as far as the interior construction was concerned, but the walls were in most cases intact. The most notable cases of practical immunity from the shock were the St. Francis Hotel, the Fairmont Hotel, the Flood buildings, the Mills building, the Spreckels buildings, the Chronicle building and scores of other modern steel structures.
The branch of the United States mint on Fifth street and the new postoffice at Seventh and Mission streets were striking examples of the superiority of the workmanship put into federal buildings. The old mint building, surrounded by a wide space of pavement, was absolutely unharmed. Not even the few palm trees which stand on either side of its broad entrance were withered by the flames that devoured everything around it.
The new postoffice building also was virtually undamaged by fire. The earthquake shock did some damage to the different entrances to the building; the walls were uninjured. Every window pane, of course, was gone, as they were in almost every building in town, but the government was able to resume postal business immediately.
The Fairmont Hotel, while seriously damaged in the interior, was left intact as to the walls and the management offered space in the building to the various relief committees who desired to house the homeless or to store supplies in those parts of the building considered safe.
One question that confronted the rebuilders was whether the city’s level had sunk as a result of the earthquake.
Parties sent out by City Engineer Thomas P. Woodward for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not the city, as a whole, had sunk, reported that there was no general depression, though there were many spaces where there were bad depressions. The most notable depressions were on Valencia, from Nineteenth to Twentieth; lower Market, Howard and Seventeenth and Eighteenth; Van Ness, from Vallejo to Green, and on Folsom in the region of Seventeenth street.