The first thing San Francisco did after its 1906 earthquake was stop calling it an earthquake.
Four months later, the Southern Pacific Railroad put out a pamphlet titled San Francisco Imperishable, selling the city's recovery to investors and travelers. The word it preferred was "fire." The National Archives still holds the phoenix imagery and the rebirth language, the whole promotional package of a city turning a catastrophe into a sales pitch.
It wasn't a lie, exactly. The fires that followed the shaking did destroy most of what burned. But preferring "fire" to "earthquake" paid, and it paid in two directions at once. Standard fire policies covered fire and excluded earthquake, so whether a wrecked building had been shaken apart or burned down was a coverage question worth millions to the people filing claims. And a city trying to pull capital back onto a fault line had every reason to keep the fault line quiet. When money rides on which version of events gets told, the version that protects the money wins, and nobody has to hold a meeting about it.
A city telling itself and its investors that the disaster had been a fire was in no hurry to write earthquake standards into its building code. San Francisco rebuilt much of its private stock before California had a statewide seismic code for ordinary buildings. Brick went back up. Unreinforced masonry went back up — brick walls with no steel tying them to the floors and roof, which is what keeps a wall standing when the ground moves under it — in a city that had just finished demonstrating what happens to unreinforced masonry when the ground moves. And when the codes finally came, they kept exempting whatever was already standing.
The Exemption Chain
The 1933 Long Beach earthquake killed 120 people and damaged nearly 200 schools. It hit after school hours. Investigators looked at the wreckage and did the arithmetic on what a school day would have cost. Thirteen days later, Assemblyman Don Field introduced what became the Field Act, putting state control over public school construction: qualified designers, state plan review, independent inspection.
The operative word was construction. New schools. The Riley Act, passed the same year, required permits and a minimum resistance to sideways force for buildings put up or altered under the act. Neither law made anyone retrofit a private brick building that was already there.
That became the pattern for the next fifty-six years. Each law reached new construction, or one narrow piece of the old stock, and left the rest alone. San Francisco adopted a parapet-bracing ordinance in 1969, aimed at the decorative brickwork along rooflines that peels off onto the sidewalk during shaking. By 1989 most parapets had been braced, and they generally held. But a parapet is one piece of a building. The walls themselves, the connections between walls and floors, the roof — none of that got touched unless an owner volunteered.
In 1977 the California Seismic Safety Commission put on the record what everyone already understood: making existing buildings meet new-construction standards was economically prohibitive and politically infeasible. A 1979 law let local jurisdictions apply reduced standards when fixing up pre-1933 buildings. Few cities took it up.
In 1984, Senator Alfred Alquist got SB 1797 through the Legislature. It would have required local governments to inventory their hazardous unreinforced masonry buildings and set up programs to do something about them. Governor George Deukmejian vetoed it. His reasoning was that local governments already had the authority, so a state mandate was unwarranted.
He was right on the law. Local governments did have the authority. They weren't using it, and the veto message had nothing to say about why. What the veto accomplished was to hand the problem back to the jurisdictions that had already spent decades demonstrating they wouldn't take it up on their own. The authority stayed where it had always been. So did the masonry.
Alquist came back with SB 547, enacted in 1986, requiring cities in the highest seismic zone to identify potentially hazardous unreinforced masonry buildings and establish loss-reduction programs by January 1, 1990. The enacted version left local governments wide discretion over what counted as a program. In some jurisdictions a program meant an inventory and a letter — official notice to an owner that his building might kill somebody, with no requirement attached.
The People Caught in the Middle
By 1985 San Francisco's engineers had identified roughly 2,100 unreinforced masonry buildings in the city, holding an estimated 25,000 housing units and more than 40,000 residents, concentrated in Chinatown and the Tenderloin.
The city had the list. What it didn't have was any requirement that the owners fix the buildings on it.
The delay wasn't the work of villains, and the record doesn't offer any. What it offers is harder to wave off: a real conflict between safety and affordability, argued by people with defensible positions on both sides, in which the tenants with the least room to maneuver stood to lose either way.
Property owners said retrofit costs couldn't be absorbed by low-rent buildings, and the arithmetic backed them. Tenant advocates feared rent increases, displacement during construction, demolition, and the disappearance of cheap housing. Los Angeles had a retrofit program already running, and it showed what that looked like: average rent increases around $70 a month, roughly 1,000 demolitions, thousands of residents displaced each year to destinations nobody tracked.
The Seismic Safety Commission laid out the bind without decoration. Retrofit imposed costs on owners without producing revenue, threatened marginal businesses, and pushed rents past what low-income tenants could pay. Protection from falling brick on one side, losing the apartment on the other. City leaders were also working through homelessness and the AIDS crisis while looking at $60 million in bonds just for the public buildings on the list. The private stock was bigger and considerably more dangerous to touch.
Anyone who has spent time around construction sites and union halls recognizes this shape. The people deciding weren't ignorant of anything. They were pinned between the cost of fixing the buildings and the cost of not fixing them, and they waited, which is what the pinned generally do.
By August 1989 the city had spent about $500,000 on the environmental review for a proposed retrofit program. The Loma Prieta earthquake arrived two months after that.
What the Earthquake Found
The pictures everybody remembers came out of the Marina District: collapsed apartments, buckled pavement, fire. But the Marina failed mostly as wood-frame soft-story buildings on artificial fill, where liquefaction turned the ground to soup and amplified the shaking. Different problem, different buildings.
The masonry story was quieter and spread across the city. A federal survey of 1,947 San Francisco unreinforced masonry buildings put 36 of them — about 1.8 percent — in the heavily or severely damaged category. Chinatown, South of Market, the Tenderloin, the Richmond and the Sunset all lost brickwork.
The worst single building failure was at 665 Sixth Street at Bluxome, a four-story brick structure whose entire fourth-story exterior wall came off sideways onto passing cars and killed five people. Engineers had flagged the building as seismically deficient as early as 1982. Bricks had come off it and damaged a car in March 1986. Somebody had gone partway toward strengthening it, running bolts between the front and rear walls — but not in the perpendicular direction, which is the direction the wall went.
Reporting at the time described the building as having been put up several years after 1906. The evidence never arranged itself into the parable you'd want. No single building survived one earthquake and then dropped in the next while photographers watched. That absence is part of why nothing moved; a story that clean might have forced somebody's hand. What San Francisco had instead was easier to set aside — a building whose danger had been identified in writing, addressed halfway, and left standing until it killed five people on a Tuesday evening.
Over in Jackson Square, the Belli Building at 722–728 Montgomery Street, unreinforced brick from the early 1850s and a documented survivor of 1906, took damage again in 1989. It didn't come down. It was left vacant, and attorney Melvin Belli moved his office out. The one building that spans both earthquakes gives you survival and damage, not collapse.
The honest count from Loma Prieta is 63 dead across the region. Forty-two of them died in the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland, which is a freeway. Five died at 665 Sixth Street. The regional death toll belonged mainly to transportation infrastructure. The masonry problem was real and documented and it killed people, but it never produced the mass-casualty collapse that a list of 2,100 vulnerable buildings had made easy to imagine.
San Francisco adopted a mandatory retrofit ordinance in 1992, covering roughly 2,000 buildings, with final compliance due in 2006. It took an earthquake to get what a list, a governor's veto, a watered-down state law and four years of environmental review had not.
The buildings had been on the list the whole time. Nobody in this story lacked information. What they lacked was any arrangement under which somebody could afford to act on it.