“The fire swept this Mongolian quarter clean.
It left no shred of the painted wooden fabric.
It ate down to the bare ground, and this lies stark,
for the breezes have taken away the light ashes.
Joss houses and mission schools, groceries and opium
dens, gambling resorts and theatres, all of them went.
These buildings blazed up like tissue paper.
“From this place I saw hundreds of crazed yellow
men flee. In their arms they bore opium pipes,
money bags, silks and children. Beside them ran
the trousered women and some hobbled painfully.
These were the men and women of the surface.
Far beneath the street levels in those cellars and
passageways were other lives. Women, who never
saw the day from their darkened prisons, and their
blinking jailors were caught and eaten by the flames.”
Devastation spread widely on all sides, ruining the
homes of the rich as well as of the poor, of Americans
as well as of Europeans and Asiatics, the marts of
trade, the haunts of pleasure, the realms of science
and art, the resorts of thousands of the gay population
of the Golden State metropolis. To attempt to
tell the whole story of destruction and ruin would
be to describe all for which San Francisco stood.
Science suffered in the loss of the San Francisco
Academy of Sciences, which was destroyed with its
invaluable contents. This building, erected fifteen
years ago at a cost of $500,000, was a seven-story
building with a rich collection of objects of science.
Much of the academy’s contents can never be
replaced. It represented the work of many years.
There was a rare collection of Pacific Sea birds which
was the most valuable of its kind in the world.
In fact, the entire collection of birds ranked very
high, was visited by ornithologists from every country,
and was the pride of the city. The academy was
founded in 1850, James Lick, the same man who endowed
the Lick Observatory, giving it $1,000,000, so it was
on a prosperous footing. It will take many years
of active labor to replace the losses of an hour or
two of the reign of fire in this institution, while
much that it held is gone beyond restoration.
Art suffered as severely as science, the valuable
collections in private and public buildings being
nearly all destroyed. We have spoken of the rare
paintings burned in the Bohemian Club building.
The collections on Nob’s Hill suffered as severely.
When the mansions here, the Fairmount Hotel and Mark
Hopkins Institute were approached by the flames, many
attempts were made to remove some of the priceless
works of art from the buildings. A crowd of soldiers
was sent to the Flood and the Huntington mansions
and the Hopkins Institute to rescue the paintings.
From the Huntington home and the Flood mansion canvases
were cut from the framework with knives. The
collections in the three buildings, valued in the
hundreds of thousands, in great part were destroyed,
few being saved from the ravages of the fire.
