A Race to Splendor (6 page)

***

In the waning hours of the fogless spring night, a sharp vibration rippled beneath the redwood planking on the ninth floor of 456 Montgomery Street.

Startled, Amelia lifted her head from her arms, which were braced against the slanted drawing board, and tried to remember, in her just-wakened stupor, where she was. To gain her bearings, she focused on the large sketch of a floor plan she’d been working on for hours, its precise, black outlines vivid against the ivory-colored vellum.

It’s my drawing of the library. I’m still at the office…

After a few more seconds of soothing quiet, she pushed her wire-rimmed drafting spectacles lower on her nose and peered through the windows across the room. The sky was a pale gray wash. It would soon be dawn.

A few blocks away, the Ferry Building stood rooted at the edge of the congested shoreline. Ships’ masts bobbed on both sides of the clock tower whose alabaster face registered a few minutes past five. The faint tremor that had just rippled through the room was like so many other small jolts she’d experienced as a native San Franciscan. Not like the earthquake in April of 1898, that had broken windows in the women’s residence hall adjacent to the Berkeley campus, frightening some of her fellow sorority sisters half to death.

“Mornin’, Miz Bradshaw.”

She peered across the room at a bewhiskered man in a dark blue cap who’d poked his head through the open office door.

“Zack! Goodness! You gave me quite a turn.” She paused and then asked, “Did you feel anything just now? The shaking?”

“What, miss?” the night watchman replied, furrowing his brow.

She glanced around the room and shrugged. “I thought I felt a little earthquake a few minutes ago, but maybe not. I think you caught me cat-napping.”

“The charwomen will be comin’ soon.”

“I know. It’s after five. You must think me daft.”

Zachary Webb cocked a disapproving eyebrow in so fatherly a fashion that Amelia laughed. “You’ve worked long enough, it seems to me,” he said. “It’s just comin’ on daybreak. You’d best enjoy a cup of coffee with me in the basement and have yourself a bit of a rest while the ladies be at their cleanin’.”

“Yes, of course. That’s a lovely offer.” The watchman had been extraordinarily kind to her from her first day entering the building just as everyone else was leaving. There was kinship in the night shift, she concluded, happy to have his company. She pointed at her drawing. “Just give me five more minutes.”

Webb shook his head in another show of friendly censure. “I’ll just be makin’ one more round of the building, miss, and be back for you in my elevator when the chars arrive.”

“You’re very kind,” she murmured, absorbed in her handiwork. After a few minutes, Amelia sighed, absently tucking her shirtwaist more securely into her skirt. “
Voilà
!” she exclaimed, pronouncing the project complete. With a flourish, she stashed her drawing implement in a tin cup atop her drafting table.

As if that triumphant flick of her wrist had set a giant machine in motion, the clutch of sharpened pencils rattled an alarming tattoo inside their metal container.

Amelia would remember that staccato sound the rest of her life.

In the next second, a vicious tremor struck beneath the soles of her sturdy shoes. She grasped the edge of her drafting table to steady herself and hung on tight as a large photograph of Julia Morgan’s controversial Mills College bell tower swung in a wide arc along the paneled wall. Then a second gigantic jolt of primordial energy shot through the room.

“Oh!” she cried as the four walls began a terrifying dance. “Oh
God, no!
”

A loud rumbling in the distance, deep and powerful as a hundred locomotives, gathered strength, and in seconds roared beneath her feet. The black-framed photograph of the campanile catapulted off the wall and crashed onto the desk normally occupied by Lacy Fiske. Lacy’s desk, her typewriting machine, and the smashed picture then toppled to the floor, overturning the drafting boards like a row of dominoes.

Amelia clutched her own desk for support. Church bells from a few blocks away sounded, joined by peals from the tower of old St. Mary’s on upper California Street by Chinatown. Then, bells all over the city began a dissonant clanging, as if heralding doomsday.

It
is
an earthquake!
she thought, stunned.
And it’s a big one!

By this time, the entire ninth floor was undulating like a deadly carpet. Rolls of blueprints flew out of their storage bins as bottles of ink exploded off the shelves in the supply room. Agonizing seconds ticked by while the noise grew even more deafening—the unforgettable roar of the earth splitting open and nearby buildings collapsing in lethal piles of debris.

Amelia’s stool pitched out from under her, hurtling her to the floor. Behind her, a waterfall of bricks and mortar erupted through a paneled wall from a stairwell leading to the roof.

Chunks of concrete and heavy ceiling moldings crumbled, filling her mouth with the chalky taste of plaster dust. The drawing she’d painstakingly completed slid to the floor, which was blanketed with gravel-sized chunks of rubble.

Amelia’s worries of material loss were soon replaced by the gut-wrenching fear that she was about to lose her life. Her world kept shaking as terror gripped her insides and left her gasping for breath.

What of Father? Did he finally go home? And Aunt Margaret… all alone in Oakland. Will I ever see Mother again?

She heard herself scream with fright as a water main burst through a baseboard like a broken bone puncturing skin. On her next breath, she inhaled a foul-smelling stench as the nine-story office building’s principal sewage pipe fractured and hemorrhaged its rank contents in all directions.

I’ll never have a child! I’ll never see the Bay View again.

Then, years of training suddenly drew her fragmented thoughts to
the inside stairwell spiraling to the lobby.

The center core of the building’s the strongest… get away from the windows… get to the center!

Blindly, she inched along a floor pitching as violently as the deck of a boat in a midwinter storm. Her hands touched the threshold opening onto the ninth floor foyer at the instant the glass transom over her head exploded into a thousand pieces. Reflexively, Amelia cast her right arm in front of her face, but not before blood spurted from her scalp and ran down her checks. She crumpled beneath the doorframe, curling into a ball.

Amelia screamed again as a twenty-five-foot expanse of wood paneling and masonry pitched outward and plunged nine stories to Montgomery Street below. She knew that no structure on landfill, no matter how well built, could withstand much more shaking without collapsing.

Then, just as suddenly, the convulsions subsided.

For several long minutes, Amelia clung to the doorjamb, her mind drifting like a seabird’s flight. She gazed beyond the missing wall on the ninth floor at several buildings now visible across the street. Their facades too had disintegrated into heaps of rubble. Desks where accountants once sat were exposed to the elements. Bathroom urinals were immodestly revealed, and entire office floors were twisted into a jumble of metal girders.

The gray sky in the east had deepened to a rosy pink interspersed with streaks of palest blue. Incredibly, though, the Ferry Building’s clock tower was still standing above the roiling salt water below, hands frozen at 5:14.

Amelia’s entire body had started to tremble uncontrollably as if she, like her father, had been trapped in an ice cave in the Sierras. Her gaze skittered from crumbled cornice to buckled ceilings to the flag still flying from the top of the Ferry Building as she tried to absorb the chaos of her surroundings. Miraculously, she was still alive, but what of the rest of the city? What of her father and Aunt Margaret? Julia and the colleagues she hardly knew? What of people across San Francisco asleep in their beds?

She struggled to her knees and then fell once more against the doorjamb. A light breeze blowing gently through the missing wall lifted a few strands of hair from her bleeding forehead. She stared vacantly at the sky beyond the line of wounded buildings ringing the shore.

April 18, 1906, had dawned eerily clear and mild in the City by the Bay.

Chapter 5

Amelia had no idea how long she remained crouched in the doorway with her back to the open gash that had been the ninth floor’s east wall. Bruised, bleeding, and coated with plaster dust, she willed herself to stop trembling as she listened to the unnatural quiet, wondering if she were the last person alive in San Francisco.

Fine plaster particles still hung suspended in the air, making it painful even to breathe. Somewhere within the shell of the building she heard bricks break loose and cascade for several long seconds until they hit bottom—wherever bottom now was.

Without a plan or promise of reaching safety in a building in its death throes, she began crawling across the littered floor toward the elevator. The brass arrow above the door indicated that the car had halted one-and-a-half floors above the basement.

Zack! Oh God… the poor night watchman…

Zachary Webb had made a final trip down to the basement and had been on his way back to get her when the quake struck. What if she hadn’t remained in the office to put the finishing touches on her drawing?

Don’t think about that… not that.

Finally, she found the strength to limp toward the center stairwell and creep down an endless series of steps—many missing or warped by the tumultuous upheaval. Her ankle-length skirt and petticoat were now as potentially lethal as the jagged spikes of wood and chunks of brick that impeded her way.

At length, she arrived at the mezzanine where a broad staircase had once descended into the building’s resplendent marble lobby—now an enormous open pit. Gone were the tall brass torchieres. Gone were the bronze and amber glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling—for now, there was no ceiling. The elevator shaft on the lobby and mezzanine levels was a tortured mass of steel and plaster. The car itself had been flattened to half its size, probably with Zack’s body inside. The enormity of the damage was so devastating that Amelia stared in disbelief at the destruction of one of the city’s grandest office buildings.

Like a diver poised on the edge of a cliff, she took a deep breath, counted to three, and then stepped backwards onto a jagged peak of the lobby’s remains. She clung to the sharp edges of the wreckage above her head and, step by step, slowly eased herself down the pile of rubble until she reached the buckled sidewalk.

By this time, she was trembling uncontrollably, her frightened state made worse when she caught sight of a woman’s hand clasping a crumpled tin wash bucket nestled among the debris.

The poor soul… it could have been me… the poor soul…
rang in her head like a hideous nursery rhyme.

Amelia quickly turned away from the mangled corpse and limped to the Montgomery Street side of the shattered structure. She knew from her engineering studies that the force of the shaking had turned solid mortar into grains of sand and transformed the building’s foundation into liquefied earth. That, and the simple Law of Gravity, caused huge chunks of the building’s facade to crash into the street, leaving a twisted superstructure that now resembled a rusted, empty birdcage. In the distance, Amelia heard the clanging bells of fire brigades and the occasional muffled explosion. She knew there would be gas pipes erupting, coal stoves overturned.

She sank onto a pile of debris as a tremendous well of fear and grief filled her chest. Like a water main rupturing, the pressure reached the bursting point and she covered her face with her hands. She cried for Zachary Webb and his daughter Josie, whom she’d never even met. She cried for the woman who’d died with a wash bucket in her hand, for a father who never came home at night—and for a mother who’d never come home at all. And for her elderly aunt, haunted by her own, long-ago traumas, across the water in Oakland.

Finally, she cried for San Francisco.

***

At length, Amelia rose to her feet to stagger uncertainly toward the bay. Lurching onwards, she was continually overtaken by scores of battered San Franciscans fleeing their homes. Women and small children, many swathed in bandages, struggled with all manner of household items: quilts and cook pots, family portraits and sewing machines. Men wielded wheelbarrows piled high with clothing and books, even a wicker cat-carrier or two, and carts overflowed with everything from bedsteads to teakettles.

“I left a note tacked to Lotta’s Fountain,” she heard one fellow say who was pushing a pram with an ornate mantel clock where a baby normally reclined. “Maybe someone in the family’ll see it and know we’re alive.”

“If
they’re
alive, maybe they will,” his companion replied.

At the waterfront Amelia witnessed a sickening spectacle as anxious crowds pressed toward a lone approaching vessel. Then, without warning, the earth roiled beneath her feet once again and a wail rose in unison from the crowds waiting in long lines at the wharves, people and property pitched against each other.

“Aftershock!” someone cried, a word tragically familiar to San Franciscans after the recurrent temblors of 1898.

Amelia imitated seasoned veterans crouching and covering their heads. The jolt lasted only a second or two but seemed much longer. It felt to Amelia as if the Apocalypse was at hand.

The ferry hooted a warning to alert deckhands and stevedores to prepare for docking. The instant the
Berkeley
bumped against its mooring, the desperate throng surged forward as one body, ladies elbowing children out of their path, men casting women aside—all scrambling to be first when the gangplank was lowered.

Slowly, Amelia rose to her feet and joined the swelling tide of humanity.

“I hear Oakland’s not hit too bad,” a woman confided to her companion in a low voice. “Heard it from a deckhand on the first boat over this mornin’. Think that no good brother of yours’ll take us in?”

Just then, Amelia was shoved aside by a gentleman in black evening clothes sheeted with white dust. Amelia seized his filthy sleeve and angrily pushed back. “For heaven’s sake, sir! Could you please—?”

Their eyes locked in a startled look of recognition. “Mr. Kemp! Are you all right?” Amelia exclaimed, gazing at her father’s erstwhile poker partner.

Ezra Kemp’s barrel chest and broad shoulders loomed over Amelia as he regarded her shocking dishevelment. He noted the blood and bruises. “And you, Miss Bradshaw?”

“I’m alive,” she replied, taking in his tattered sleeves and dirty face. “Where were you when it hit? I was at the top of 456 Montgomery.”

“At five a.m.?”

“I work at night and had a deadline for a design project for Julia Morgan. Most of the building collapsed.”

Kemp gestured toward a scene reminiscent of a Matthew Brady Civil War daguerreotype. Rubble was scattered everywhere, and the acrid smell of smoke from Market Street intensified by the minute.

Kemp jabbed a stubby finger at the prevailing chaos. “All the water mains burst, so there’s no means to fight the fires. A member of the brigade told me that the fire chief fell two stories and is probably dead by now. The city’s doomed, Miss Bradshaw. Get yourself across the bay and stay there,” he ordered gruffly.

“That is exactly what I am attempting to do,” she retorted. “I’m terribly worried about my aunt in Oakland and—” She hesitated and then asked a hopeless question. “By chance, have you seen my father?”

Kemp didn’t answer as he forced his considerable bulk past anyone standing between him and the gangway.

“Mr. Kemp!” she cried, attempting to follow him. He turned at the sound of her voice. “This ferry is going to Oakland. Don’t you live in Mill Valley? Won’t you step aside and let me—”

Ezra Kemp ignored her desperate plea and turned toward the docks. Furious at his indifference, she shouted, “At least have the decency to tell me if you’ve see my father?”

To her surprise, Kemp looked back, calling out over his shoulder, “He’s probably still at the Bay View.”

“At the hotel? Have you actually
seen
him?”

“Yes,” Kemp yelled over the heads of the surging throng. “At about five a.m. this morning, wagering his very last penny.”

Without another word, he thrust aside a young boy clinging to his mother’s hand and climbed on board the
Berkeley
seconds before a harried deckhand pulled up the gangway. Ezra Kemp might reside to the north, but the lumber magnate was obviously hell bent on fleeing the city any way he could—and saving his own hide.

***

The ferry
set off east across the bay while Amelia headed west, back into the grim remains of the city, weaving her way past chunks of masonry and twisted trolley tracks and setting out for the Bay View atop Nob Hill. Despite the devastation surrounding her, she was buoyed by the hope that her father was alive. She hurried onward, the crowds flowing in the opposite direction like a raging river toward the bay.

Soon she began the arduous climb up California Street. The higher she scaled the incline, the less quake damage she witnessed. Several open-air horseless carriages, packed with sightseers, whizzed by. She was amazed, in fact, by the carnival atmosphere prevailing in San Francisco’s upper-class district, some of whose residents were heading downhill to enjoy firsthand observations of the collapsed docks and shattered structures along the waterfront.

A boy interrupted his game of hopscotch and pointed at her bloodstained shirtwaist. “Hey, lady, what’s it like downtown? Musta been pretty bad down there, huh? Seen any dead bodies? Did ya know your hair’s all white? Those are some mighty nasty cuts on yer forehead.”

Amelia ignored him and sped toward the top of the hill. Panting by the time she finally reached the summit, she turned right onto Taylor Street and paused to catch her breath.

“Oh, thank goodness…” she murmured.

Her favorite cluster of Victorian-style mansions belonging to the Big Four railroad barons, Crocker, Huntington, Stanford, and Hopkins, along with the new Fairmont Hotel—all built on the hill’s foundation of bedrock—appeared relatively unharmed. Alarmingly, though, bells on the fire trucks were clanging a quarter-mile away in Chinatown.

Four blocks farther down the crest of Nob Hill, she caught a comforting glimpse of one of the Bay View’s turrets. Just the sight of the place was reassuring, but, as she drew nearer, her hope soon turned to horror.

In contrast to other buildings on Taylor Street, every chimney of her grandfather’s hotel had crumbled, leaving jagged holes along the massive shingled roof and shattering windows and walls on the Jackson Street side. Why had Charlie Hunter’s pride and joy suffered such terrible damage and not other buildings in this neighborhood rooted in Nob Hill’s sheet of basalt and serpentine? Why was the grand old lady listing treacherously to the east, appearing as if it might tumble down the hill toward the bay?

And then the truth hit her full force.

“Oh God!
No!
” screamed Amelia, limping faster down the incline of Jackson Street.

The recent addition of the gambling club built by Ezra Kemp and J.D. Thayer on the downhill side of the property had completely collapsed, taking with it some of the older sections of the original building and severely damaging its roof. As she’d learned from Lacy Fiske, the designer hired by Thayer and Kemp to build the annex to the hotel was a mere dandy in spats that barely knew his architectural ABC’s, let alone how to calculate the load-bearing requirements of a structure built on a hill. Surveying the extensive wreckage, Amelia felt sick to her stomach.

Bruised and battered hotel guests wandered aimlessly in the street or sat on paving stones, looking like lost children as they watched her pass by. At the bottom of the hill, the nine blocks of Chinatown had been reduced by the upheaval into piles of oversized kindling. Orange pockmarks of flame dotted the landscape below.

Amelia lifted her skirts and hobbled down a narrow slate path toward the remains of the newer building, her aching muscles protesting each step. She searched for safe entry into the annex that had suffered such terrible damage, peering through a yawning hole in a wall that had—for the few weeks of its existence—kept prying eyes from well-heeled nobs hazarding thousands of dollars on a single hand of cards.

Now the interior was merely a jumble of fallen gas lighting fixtures, piles of bricks and mortar, heaps of wood, and a long, elaborate cherry wood bar toppled onto its face. Two-thirds of the roof lay open to the sky. Amelia leaned forward and squinted into the gloom, steadying herself against an exposed four-by-four whose splintered surface pressed painfully into her lacerated palm.

“Father!” she shouted. “Henry Bradshaw, are you
in
here?”

Her cries were greeted by ghostly silence. An act of God had changed J.D. Thayer’s glittering gambling den into a pile of rubbish. Against the only interior wall of the club left standing, Amelia could barely distinguish the outline of several upholstered sofas piled high with debris. On one, beneath five-foot mounds of plaster and wood, a length of crimson silk and the slender arm of a woman lay limply amidst the rubble. Amelia had overheard scuttlebutt that female Chinese “hostesses” were employed here for the enjoyment of a select clientele at the new club. Here was the gruesome proof.