Questions and Answers

One hundred and six years ago yesterday, San Francisco burned following the jolt of the 1906 Fire and Earthquake.

Gertrude Stein had been living in Paris for three years at the time of the quake, but Alice B. Toklas was in San Francisco living with her father on Clay Street.

She recalled the morning of April 18^th in her memoir WHAT IS REMEMBERED published in 1963:

“Life went on calmly until one morning we and our home were violently rocked by an earthquake.  Gas was escaping.  I hurried to my father’s bedroom, pulled up the shades, pulled back the curtains and opened the windows.  My  father was apparently asleep.  Do get up I said to him.  The city is on fire.  That, said he with his usual calm, will give us a black eye in the East.

 Our servant was heating water in the kitchen on an alcohol stove to make coffee.  The chimneys had fallen, the pipes were disrupted, there would be no baths.  I walked up the hill to the entrance of the Presidio, where in the early morning light General  Funston was marching his troops into the city where fires were commencing to burn.

 My father, who had at last risen, walked down to the business quarter to see if the vaults of his bank were holding.   Convinced that they were, he returned with four hundred cigarettes, all he could find.  For * Nellie, for **Clare and for you, he explained.

 I sent the servant to buy such provisions as she could find and I went to see how Nellie had fared.  Her two Chinese servants were cooking on an improvised stove on the street.  Nellie, with some novels, was distracting her mind as usual in her darkened library.”

[* Eleanor Joseph a friend of **Clare Moore, a lifelong friend of Alice’s.]

The house on Clay Street is still standing. Though it was apparently damaged during the quake according to Alice, it is several miles from Van Ness Avenue, which was where the fires from the quake stopped. Today many of San Francisco’s best preserved Victorian and Edwardian style houses, including several built and owned by Michael Stein, are east of Van Ness since they were unscathed by the events of the 1906 quake. The house Alice was born in and lived in for many years on O’Farrell Street was probably destroyed by the quake or the severe fires that followed.

Alice left San Francisco for Paris the following year and returned only once in 1935.

Tagged 1906 Fire and Earthquake, Alice B. Toklas, Clare Moore, Gertrude Stein, What is Remembered