An Impossible Interview with the Man Who Sold Earthquake Cottages Without Saying the Word

We spoke with Tobias Flack on a Tuesday afternoon in August 1908, between showings in San Francisco's Richmond District. This is impossible for several reasons, not least that this publication won't exist for another 118 years. Flack is a real estate agent, originally from Philadelphia, who arrived in San Francisco six weeks before the event he now cannot name. Everything he describes here is documented: the professional resolution, the cottages, the death figures, the ground conditions. Flack himself is not. Think of him as the composite ghost of every agent who spent 1908 selling a city back to itself while forbidden from saying what had happened to it.

You came to San Francisco in March of 1906. Why?

Flack: A cousin had a printing concern on Sansome Street. I was going to set type. I'd been in Philadelphia my whole life, and the idea was, well, you know. California. Orange trees and opportunity. Six weeks later the ground started moving at five-twelve in the morning and I was under a doorframe in my union suit watching the plaster come down like snow. The printing concern is gone. Sansome Street is gone. My cousin went back to Allentown. I stayed.

Why stay?

Flack: Because I'm not a fool. I watched twenty million dollars in building contracts go up in 1905, then thirty-nine million in 1906, then fifty million in 1907.¹ A city that rebuilds at two and a half times its prior rate is a city where a man who can talk to people and open a door has work. I had no press to set type on. I had a good suit that survived because I'd hung it on a nail in the back garden. That suit got me into real estate. The suit and the fact that I can talk a cat out of a fish.

The Real Estate Board passed a resolution in April 1906, one week after the disaster, declaring that the event should be called "the Great Fire" and not "the Great Earthquake."² When did you first encounter that policy?

Flack: My second week in the office. Hargrove, the senior man, handed me a stack of the promotional sheets and said, "Read these before you talk to anyone." I read them. Not one mention of the word. I said to Hargrove, "But it was an earth—" and he put his hand up like I'd started coughing at a funeral. "Son," he said, "we had a fire. A terrible fire. And we have rebuilt from it magnificently." He wasn't angry. He was instructing me. The way you'd teach a child not to mention a dead relative at supper.

Did you believe him?

Flack: I'd been under the doorframe. I knew what it was. But Hargrove wasn't wrong about the fire, and I've thought about this, because it nags at me. The shaking lasted maybe a minute. The fire burned for three days. Most of what you see destroyed in those photographs, the fire did that. So when Hargrove says "the real calamity was undoubtedly the fire," he's got a version of the truth that works perfectly well if you don't pull at the thread.³

What thread?

Flack: That the water mains broke because the ground moved. That the fire spread because the mains broke. That the mains broke because... well. You can follow it backward to the word we don't use, or you can start at the fire and go forward into the rebuilding. My job is to go forward.

You sell properties in the Richmond District now. Some of them are assembled from refugee cottages, the small wooden structures the Army built for displaced residents after the disaster.⁴ What's that like?

Flack: (long pause)

Look. A man named Getz, Sol Getz, he works the Sunset lots, and he's selling places where two, three of those little green cottages have been nailed together into something you could call a home.⁵ I do similar work out here in the Richmond. The camps closed in January. Camp Richmond, right here where we're standing. The shacks moved onto empty lots.⁶ People combined them. Put up a partition, cut a new door. And now I show them to buyers. "Charming cottage, western exposure, solid ground." All true. Every word true.

But the cottage exists because of... it was built because of...

(He stops, looks at his hands.)

Some days that feels fine. Some days it's like trying to sell a man his own hat back and pretending you found it on the street.

When an Eastern buyer arrives and uses the word "earthquake," which they do, because that's what their newspapers called it for two years, what happens in the room?

Flack: You'd be amazed how natural it becomes. They say the word. I say "the fire." They say it again. I say "the disaster" or "the calamity." By the third time, most of them stop. Not because I've convinced them of anything. Because they realize we're not going to say it together, and they want to buy a house more than they want to win a vocabulary argument.

The ones from Boston are the worst. They'll say it four, five times, watching your face like they're conducting a scientific experiment. But even they come around.

Does anyone push back?

Flack: One fellow from Hartford. Insurance man, naturally. Asked me point-blank: "How many died in the earthquake?" I said, "The official count from the Board of Supervisors is four hundred and seventy-eight."⁷ He looked at me like I'd told him the moon was made of cheese. He'd read the papers. He'd seen the photographs. Four hundred and seventy-eight dead in that?

But it's the government number. What am I going to do, give him a different one?

Do you have a different one?

Flack: No.

You show properties on solid ground in the Richmond, but you also know that the worst damage occurred on filled land near the waterfront, areas built on refuse and landfill where the ground essentially liquefied.⁸ Can you tell a buyer about soil conditions?

Flack: I can tell them the Richmond has excellent ground. Sandy, firm, never burned. I can tell them the western neighborhoods are the future of the city. All of that is honest and I believe it.

What I cannot do is explain why the ground matters, because explaining why the ground matters requires me to describe a force that moves through ground differently depending on what the ground is made of, and that force is...

(gestures vaguely)

...the force we had a resolution about. So I say "excellent ground" and I let the buyer decide what that means. Most of them are happy to hear it. They don't ask, "Excellent ground for what purpose?" They hear "excellent" and they move on to the kitchen.

The city published a promotional book this year, Modern San Francisco 1907-1908, with a fold-out map showing the city before "the fire" and photographs of rebuilding.⁹ Do you use it?

Flack: Every showing. Beautiful publication. A hundred and twenty-six pages. The map is a work of art, genuinely. And it does exactly what it's supposed to do. A buyer holds that book and sees a city that burned and rose. A phoenix story. Everyone loves a phoenix story.

Nobody wants to hear that the phoenix is nesting on the same fault line.

That sounds like it bothers you.

Flack: It bothers me the way a pebble in your shoe bothers you. Not enough to stop walking. I have a living to make. And the city is genuinely rebuilding. The new high-pressure water system is real, the new construction is real, the investment is real.¹⁰ I'm not selling a fantasy. I'm selling a city that is actually, physically, measurably coming back.

I'm just editing the reason it went away.

Last question. If you could use the word, would anything change?

Flack: (very long pause)

Probably not. And that's what really keeps me up at night.

So I say "fire." And the ground does whatever the ground is going to do regardless of what I call it.

Tobias Flack finished his coffee, checked his watch, a Waltham, "the one thing I saved," and walked west toward his next showing. A double-cottage on 22nd Avenue, solid ground, western exposure, built from the wreckage of something no one in the room would name.

Footnotes

1. Private building contract figures documented in Rutgers SASN, "Disaster and Recovery: The Public and Private Sectors," https://sasn.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2024-02/2010-004.pdf ↩

2. San Francisco Real Estate Board resolution of April 24, 1906, documented in National Law Review, "Lessons from the Great Fire of 1906 Insurance Coverage Dispute," https://natlawreview.com/article/lessons-great-fire-1906-insurance-coverage-dispute ↩

3. James Horsburgh Jr., agent for the Southern Pacific Railroad, wrote to chambers of commerce: "We do not believe in advertising the earthquake. The real calamity in San Francisco was undoubtedly the fire." Documented in multiple sources including the Gilder Lehrman Institute, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/san-francisco-and-great-earthquake-1906 ↩

4. San Francisco Heritage, "1906 Earthquake Shacks: City Landmark #171," http://www.sfheritage.org/news/1906-earthquake-shacks-city-landmark-171/ ↩

5. Sol Getz and the property at 1227 24th Avenue documented in SF Heritage / Hoodline, https://hoodline.com/2015/03/san-francisco-s-earthquake-shacks-real-estate-deal-of-the-century/ ↩

6. Camp Richmond closure and westward population movement documented in Western Neighborhoods Project, "Streetwise: The Richmond Recovery," https://www.outsidelands.org/sw26.php ↩

7. Board of Supervisors death toll of 478 (1907), State Board of Health figure of 503, and U.S. Army count of 498 documented in NBC News, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12301877. Modern scholarly revision to 3,000+ based on Gladys Hansen's archival research, confirmed by Board of Supervisors resolution in 2005. ↩

8. Liquefaction on filled land and differential ground performance documented in Joanna L. Dyl, Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake (University of Washington Press, 2017), https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295746098/seismic-city/ ↩

9. Modern San Francisco, 1907-1908, Western Press Association, held at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/1modernsanfrancis00west ↩

10. The auxiliary high-pressure water system, including earthquake-resistant mains, documented in FoundSF, https://www.foundsf.org/April_18,_1906:_EARTHQUAKE!_FIRE! ↩