As we gained the top of the hill on Steiner street, a San Francisco man who came in with me on the train stopped dead still. “My God; look there!” he said, his voice catching with a sob.
Through the rift of the buildings we caught our first glimpse of the dying city.
“That was Market street,” said the San Francisco man, softly.
He pointed across a vast black plain, hundreds of acres in extent, to a row of haggard, gaunt specters that did seem to be in two lines like a street.
“There’s the City Hall,” he said, tremulously, pointing to a large dome surmounting a pile of ruins and surrounded like some hellish island with vast stretches of smouldering ashes and twisted iron girders.
The San Francisco man found a tottering, blackened pile of wall that he said was Mechanic’s Pavilion, and a sort of thin peak of brick that he said was the new Bell Theater. He would go over the town from the top of the hill and torture himself trying to locate San Francisco’s splendid landmarks in these acres of ash heaps.
Down in the middle of the city I found two young men in a violent argument over the location of Market street in the ashes.
At the pretty little park, Fell and Steiner streets, we came upon one of the strange little cities of refugees. I should pronounce this one of the most select residence districts of San Francisco now. It is the only home of hundreds upon hundreds of once well-to-do San Francisco people now ruined.
It was heart-rending to see the women tidying things up and trying to invent new ideas for attractive homes—trying to make their homes look better than their neighbors’, just as they did before.
Some women made odd little bowers of two blankets and a sheet tent.