Devastation after the earthquake. Photo taken by Arnold Genthe.

The city of San Francisco was destroyed in the spring of 1906 after a violent earthquake shook the city to the ground on Wednesday, April 18. The infamous quake was certainly damaging, but a series of 2,700 degree fires lasting three days after the quake, consumed or multiplied the damage. So overwhelming was the aftermath, many people simply left the city for good. Seventy five thousand of the 400,000 San Franciscans left for nearby cities like Berkeley and Oakland. The remaining population stayed to turn devastation into opportunity.

A view of the damage on Sacramento Street. Photo taken by Arnold Genthe.

The damage was almost incomprehensible. Insurance claims calculated a total loss of $252 million, not including the destruction caused by the earthquake since many policies did not include that type of coverage. In today’s money, this number equates to $6.2 billion and back then, the amount was equal to the federal budget in 1906! Banks weren’t functional for the six weeks following the quake, causing the city business needed to counterbalance the financial damage to come to a screeching halt. Some money was saved, but the banks fire safes could not be accessed until the safes cooled a week later. San Franciscans had a choice to make, sulk or work.

Workers search through destruction for reusable bricks. Photo taken by George Williford Boyce Haley.

Rebuilding a City…Fast and Different

In order to save the city’s place in the nation, the leading officials understood it had to be rebuilt quickly. It was. Citizens were drafted to clear debris from the streets in the days following the quake, making the job more manageable for the professionals who dumped the rubble into Mission Bay. Skilled workers poured into the city – within 4 days there were already 300 plumbers ready to get to work. Building skyrocketed; 500 homes and 300 saloons/dance halls were built within the year. The quake also affected residential architecture in the city, aiding in the transition out of the Victorian architectural styles like Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Stick (1860—early 1900s) and into the Edwardian architectural styles like Arts & Crafts, Shingle, Tudor Revival and Mission Revival.

Example of the Queen Anne style homes in Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Queen Anne is one style that spanned both Victorian and Edwardian architectural Styles. Photo taken by Urban.

Success

By 1909 a staggering 20,000 buildings had been built in the recovering city! The officials and citizens of San Francisco had pulled off what seemed to be impossible. In just three years time, the city had recovered from a devastating blow. Despite much difficulty, displaced San Franciscans of 1906 rallied together, with the help of aid to pull off a modern miracle.

A view of the rebuilt city from Grant Avenue at Market Street in 1915. Photo credit: Library of Congress.

To showcase their accomplishments, San Francisco hosted the Portola Festival in 1909 and the larger Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. The Portola Festival boasted five days of parades, spectacular city lighting, a crowded auto race, warships from all over the world and gained the attention of one million attendees. The Exposition of 1915 opened in February and lasted the remainder of the year. The nineteen million people who attended the event proved that San Francisco had risen from the ashes to an international level of grandeur.

Extravagant lighting system at 1915 exposition. Photo credit: Project Gutenberg Archives.

A remastered depiction of the exhibit palaces at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Photo originally published by Pacific Novelty Co.

Earthquake shack saved and re-purposed at San Francisco Zoo. Photo by Mark Hogan.

In 1906, the earth jolted beneath the feet of the 400,000 people of San Francisco, California. An entire cityscape of buildings, homes and parks were completely disrupted by the chaotic quake on April 18. Possibly even more destruction was caused by the three day fires that followed. 250,000 residents were left as homeless refugees struggling to survive.

Refugees rush to leave San Francisco after the earthquake. Photo by George Williford Boyce Haley in 1906.

Where to Sleep?

Thousands of homeless families were sheltered quickly in 11 large campsites organized by the United States Army, the San Francisco Relief Corporation and San Francisco Parks Commission. Washington Square, Dolores Park, Golden Gate Park and the Presidio were a few of the sites where about 20,000 people sought refuge in military issued tents. The tents were given numbers, much like a home address, and camps were scattered with intersection directories. As winter approached, 5,500 wooden “cottages” were constructed by the Army and its local relief collaborators.

The early stages of housing aid at Golden Gate Park. Photo courtesy the Committee Papers of the Senate Committee on Printing of the 60th Congress.

The Far From Cozy Cottages

These cottages were smaller than most of our living rooms. Type A was 140 square feet, and Type B was square 252 feet. They were one room, and had no kitchen or bathroom. Space was tight, but the 16,000 tenants who had the opportunity to call one home, had basic shelter thanks to the walls and floors made of redwood and fir. Tenants paid $2 a month toward the final price of $50.

When the camps started closing in summer of 1907, tenants were encouraged to purchase the houses and were pretty much given the homes so long as they promised to move the structure off the original site. Many people willingly complied and hauled them off to private lots around the city, often combining two or three together to make a larger home.

The Cottages Make A Comeback
Jane F. Cryan – deemed the “shack activist” brought preservation of the shacks into the foreground of public interest in the 1980s, with the story of her “little red house” dwarfed by large modern structures. It is no longer red but can be seen here in the Sunset District. After that, the shacks made a nostalgic comeback among the hearts of San Franciscans. They are still being renovated, preserved, and increasing in property value! Today, the $50 shack of 1906 is sold for around $800,000!

Quake shack at 20 Newman Street in San Francisco. Photo byLeigh-Anne Lehrman.

Quake shack at 164 Bocana Street in San Francisco. Photo by Leigh-Anne Lehrman.

Quake shack at 43 Carver Street in San Francisco. Photo by Leigh-Anne Lehrman.

Steam, gas and ash coming from the lava dome in Mount St. Helens in 1982. Photo courtesy USGS.

The eruption of Mount St. Helens forever holds a place in the memories of many people across the nation. On May 18, 1980, Washington’s great mountain received a geological face lift by blowing up all that stood in its way. The volcanic eruption and ensuing landslide took 57 lives, more than 200 homes, and destroyed almost 200 miles of highway road on that spring day.

The Volcano that Made a Glacier

Who would have thought that with the heat of continuing vulcanism that the crater could give birth to a glacier? But it did. Since the eruption, the world’s youngest glacier has been growing in the crater of the active volcano. After the blast in 1980, a thick collection of loosely arranged rocks gathered on the floor of the crater and protected the accumulating snow from both the heat of the lava dome and the melting rays of the sun. Heavy snows, avalanches, and rock falls, allowed the glacier to grow. It gained about 50 feet a year in thickness and 135 feet per year in length, until 2004.

The crater floor in October, 1980, after the eruption but before Crater Glacier was born. Photo courtesy USGS.

Crater Glacier in October, 2000, prior to the 2004-2008 eruptive cycle. Photo courtesy USGS.

From 2004 to 2008, Mt. St. Helens groaned and steamed again with volcanic activity. A new lava dome formed and the glacier lobes were squeezed and compressed between the caldera wall and the new dome. This caused the ice to move more rapidly downhill and was almost split into two separate glaciers. The volcanic activity melted about 10% of the glacier’s mass and changed it from a smooth crevasse-free glacier to a chaotic jumble of ice falls with many crevasses. The cold rock at the edge of the glacier insulated it from flowing lava and prevented the glacier from melting completely, and possibly causing catastrophic mud flows.

Crater Glacier February 2005. It is nearly split at its south end by the new lava domes. Photo courtesy USGS.

Crater Glacier in October 2006. Photo courtesy USGS.

The Little Glacier that Could

Crater Glacier, officially named the the Tulutson Glacier in 2006 (from the local native Cowlitz language word for ice), is currently over one mile long and 650 feet thick. In the mid-2010s, it is getting about 15 feet thicker and 330 feet longer every year. This glacier, nestled in a warm volcano, is also fighting against a larger climate warming trend as it continues to grow. While there are isolated instances of glacial growth across the globe, most ice sheets and glaciers are melting. The paradoxical success story of Crater Glacier and Mt. St. Helens is particularly spectacular.

Crater Glacier in 2011. Photo by J. Brew

Northeast view of Alcatraz Island, 2013. Photo by William Warby.

When many people think of Alcatraz, visions of a high security prison come to mind. For most of us, it’s that island in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay, where high profile bank robbers and notorious Mafioso criminals were sent during the mid-20th century. Most people don’t associate Alcatraz with the arguably more important happenings once the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary closed in 1963, and the island became surplus government land.

Clarence Carnes, Sam Shockley, and Miran Thompson, all tried to escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in 1946. Photo in the Public Domain.

The Trail to Alcatraz

For Native Americans, the 22 acre rock holds very different visions. Ones of resistance and struggle for self determination and ethnic pride. Over 40 years ago, Alcatraz gave birth to the Red Power movement; one of the most effective acts of Native American resistance in the twentieth century.

The United States termination polices of the 1940s – 1960s attempted to get Native Americans off Indian reservations and assimilated into US culture. It caused many Native Americans to move to the city where the promised assistance was not given. Many ended up poor and isolated from their culture and identity.

In the 1960s, Native Americans unified their grievances against a long history of broken promises by the US Government in the form of the Red Power Movement. The Movement, full of protests and demonstrations, took place alongside many changing ideologies of the Civil Rights Era. These changes, inspired by national movements surrounding race and war from the 1950s to the 1970s, provided Native Americans with inspiration, motivation and guidance to produce effective demonstrations of their own.

“We Hold The Rock!”

The Native American resistance movement gained traction around three attempts to occupy Alcatraz between 1964 and 1969. In the first two attempts, the occupants quickly proclaimed their rights to reclaim possession of the island – after it was declared surplus by the U.S. in 1964. Both times, the Coast Guard hurriedly removed the protesters from the island. Stories of the two occupations were published by the media, and provided a foundation of public interest for their cause.

On October 9, 1969, the cultural center of the United Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs, was suspiciously destroyed by fire. The possibility of hate crime sparked Richard Oakes, the group’s undeclared spokesperson, to begin collaborating and planning for a third occupation of Alcatraz. On November 20th, 1969, Oakes and 78 Native Americans boarded the island.

By the National Park Service. Wikipedia.

Not long after the start of this third occupation, Oakes wrote a letter known as the Alcatraz Proclamation to the San Francisco Department of the Interior. “We are on Alcatraz Island to make known to the world that we have a right to use our land for our own benefit,” he said. The group of Native Americans claimed the island as their own according to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 which gave Indians the right to acquire land declared surplus, abandoned, or retired by the federal government. They proposed to purchase the land for “twenty four dollars in glass beads and red cloth.” The “offer of $1.24 per acre [was] greater than the $0.47 per acre the white men [were then] paying California Indians for their lands,” said Oakes. The proclamation also presented their desire to construct a number of cultural institutions on the newly acquired land including: a Center for Native American Studies, an American Indian Spiritual Center, an Indian Center of Ecology, and a Great Indian Training School. This letter gained more media coverage which opened more opportunities for the Movement.

The occupation lasted a duration of 19 months and peacefully came to an end when the few remaining occupants were escorted off the island by the Coast Guard, FBI and other U.S officials. During its time on the island, the group proved its perseverance through two Coast Guard blockades and the government’s termination of water and electricity supply to the island.

The End of Termination

The occupation served to make the mainstream US public aware of the Native American termination policies and their terrible outcomes for Native Americans. The desire to rectify past injustices was helped by celebrities like Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory and Marlon Brando, all of whom visited the island. Creedance Clearwater Revival also donated $15,000 which was used to buy a boat (the Clearwater) to transport the protestors.
The groundswell of support in fairly short order motivated the government to make drastic changes in its policies. President Nixon renounced the governments previous termination policies and introduced the notion of “self-determination without termination.” Congress passed 52 pieces of legislation to support Native Americans self-determination from 1970 to 1971.

Dancer at the Indigenous Peoples’ Day sunrise gathering and ceremony, November 22, 2012. Photo by Angelina Sevin.

Ceremonial Remembrance

Every year on Thanksgiving Day since 1975, the legacy of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz is remembered by hundreds of people through the “Indigenous Peoples Sunrise Ceremony, also known as Un-Thanksgiving Day, which is celebrated on the island. The ceremony honors the achievements of the leaders of the Red Power Movement as well as the still continuing struggle to defend the ways of life and sacred places of Native Americans.

“She has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want in her. She is immortal.” – Roy Stryker. Photo by Dorothea Lange, Nipomo, California, 1936. Photo courtesy the US Library of Congress and Wikipedia.

It was March of 1936, in the farms of southwest California. The woman pictured above had just sold her tires as a last, desperate effort to barter another day’s worth of food for her large and hungry family. She represented the impoverished migrant workers trapped in Nipomo Mesa, California. This is what you would gather if you were to read Dorothea Lange’s field notes for this image. In fact, the woman’s name is Florence Owens Thompson, and she was to became the face of the Great Depression, and poverty in America.

The Making of The Migrant Mother

Lange, a Resettlement Administration (RA) photographer, was returning from a month shooting images of poverty in the West Coast. As she drove through the valleys of California, she passed signs calling for pea-pickers, directing passersby to the migrant workers camp not far down the road. Twenty minutes had passed since the signs, and Lange’s growing intuition of a good photo opportunity waiting for her at the camps caused her to turn around. When she arrived, she found thousands of workers with no work, and hundreds of families with no food. Out of the entire camp, she choose one family to introduce to the world.

A photo of Dorothea Lange by Robert Partridge. Photo courtesy the US Library of Congress and Wikipedia.

Florence and her family were on their way from their home in Modesto, California, to find work picking crops in the farms of Pajaro Valley. As they were driving past Nipomo Mesa, the t-chain in the car snapped. Her husband, Jim, took the older children to town to get the parts needed to repair the car. In the meantime, Florence took her youngsters to a massive camp full of stranded migrant workers stuck in poverty after the promised, harvestable crop was devastated due to freezing rain.

According to Florence, Lange quietly wandered to their make-shift site with a camera in her hand, took some photos and jotted down a few notes along the way. Responding to Florence’s concern, Lange said that the photos would never be published. Lange did not keep her word.

Mama’s Been Shot

A day after her photo shoot in Nipomo, Lange took the freshly developed images straight to the San Francisco News. A day later, a story titled “What Does the New Deal Mean to this Mother and Her Child?” ran in the paper with the now iconic “Migrant Mother” photo as the lead. That photo helped solidify Lange as an established American photographer. It also prompted the shipment of 20,000 pounds of food to the 2,500 to 3,500 starving workers in the camps of Nipomo Mesa. The picture however, did nothing positive for Florence and her family. They quickly repaired their car and continued on their way to find work elsewhere. While selling newspapers outside of Watsonville, California, one of the Thompson sons saw the photo and brought it back to his family screaming “Mama’s been shot, Mama’s been shot!” Florence looked at the picture in silence.

The other five photos of the Thompson family taken by Lange in Nipomo, California, 1936. Photo courtesy of the US Library of Congress and Wikipedia.

Consequences of the Betrayal

Florence’s identity wasn’t discovered until the late 1970s and it was only then she began to tell her story to the media. She did not shy away from mentioning that she never received even a penny for the photo that sold for $244,500 in 1998 to the Getty Museum of Los Angeles. When speaking of life after the photo, Florence mentioned the work it required to sustain a family of ten children: “I worked in hospitals, I tended bars, I cooked, and I worked in the fields.” Unfortunately, the Thompson’s lives were not improved after Lange. “Our life was hard long after that photograph was taken,” said one of Thompson’s daughter’s. For the next four decades after the publication of the image, Florence worked her family out of poverty and up to the middle class without any help from Lange’s valuable photo.

Thompson’s character and perseverance were tested until the very end of her life when she battled with recovery after a stroke, heart complications, and cancer. Her children, unfamiliar with asking for and receiving charity, created the Migrant Mother Fund in order to uphold their vow of keeping their mother out of a nursing home. The family received an amazing $35,000 from the effort to pay for the weekly care costs of $1,400. Just a few weeks after the funds were raised, at the age of 80, Florence died in her home in Scotts Valley, California. She is buried at Lakewood Memorial Park in Hughson California. The inscription on her gravestone reads “Migrant Mother – A Legend of the Strength of American Motherhood.”

A distant view of Racetrack Playa. Photo by Daniel Mayer. Wikipedia.

From a far glance, the flat, dry surface of Racetrack Playa, in Death Valley, California, invites you to perceive a cloudy lake. Nearing the Playa, this mirage evolves into a reality of silt and clay where nothing seems possible. Here, the lake bed serves as a respite to the surrounding mountains as it waits eagerly for the meager annual rainfall of 3 inches. With the help of this water, the surface changes from dry silt to wet mud, offering us an incredible mystery from a muddy mess.

The sailing stones in motion at Racetrack Playa. Photo by Daniel Mayer Wikipedia.

These rocks and their trails are sprinkled throughout Racetrack Playa, proving seemingly impossible movement. Wakes of thirsty ground, frozen in time, linger behind them, showcasing their lively sailing trips across the dry lake bed underneath.

A rock with a GPS unit inside a cavity bored into its top. Photo from Norris R, Norris J, Lorenz R, Ray J, Jackson B (2014).

Explaining the Sailing Stones

Scientists have struggled to explain the movement of these stones for decades. Until recently, there were only two main theories explaining the movement: hurricane force winds, or thick ice. Both theories accounted for wind, rain and ice but required these conditions to create a Samsonite feat of natural strength to move the rocks. Thanks to new technology, scientists have finally been able to get some answers.

Slow and Steady

In 2011, a team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography set a weather station in the Playa and placed GPS tracking devices on the stones. They expected it to take years to get the right coincidence of unknown factors, but as luck would have it, just two years later they saw – and measured – the rocks moving!

Following a cold December night, the team traveled to the site. A thin, frozen pond had trapped the stones overnight due to an unusually high amount of snow. A light breeze was noticed in the mid-morning but didn’t affect the stones until the bright sun quickly began to melt the ice in the early afternoon. The melting ice began to crack and pop, forming wide and light sheets of ice. The ice, due to the force of the wind, applied buoyancy to the trapped rocks and bulldozed the rocks across the surface. This “ice sailing” process slowly moved the rocks and created the mysterious trails.

These stones, surrounded by ice continue their journeys. Photo courtesy Ralph Lorenz. RacetrackPlaya.org.

Recordings from the December site visit. Images courtesy Ralph Lorenz. RacetrackPlaya.org.

As for racing on the playa, these stones are not breaking any speed barriers. Recordings showed winds at maximum speeds of only 10 mph, and ice less than ¼ of an inch thick. These conditions, combined with ice melt from a bright sun, were able to move rocks ranging from 18 to 37 pounds about 6 to 20 feet per minute (0.07 – 0.23 mph). To put this in perspective, the average turtle, who travels at a speed of 264 feet per minute (3 mph), is almost 13 times faster than the sliding stones! Even more so, the rare factors and slow speed of the process have only moved the rocks for a total of a few minutes in the past decade!

Daguerrotype of Louis Daguerre himself in 1843 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Capturing and viewing still images has changed the way humans look at and understand the world around them for centuries. Paintings and drawings took hours to create but could be transported to bring whole new worlds and perspectives to people who couldn’t easily travel. The still life paintings of Northern Europe from the 17th and 18th centuries introduced an appreciation of beauty in the mundanity of everyday life. This was a new way of thinking for many people. In the same way, the ability to capture a fleeting moment in time with a camera has allowed us to expand our understanding of, and impact on, reality.

Humble Beginnings

The science of photography was created in 1839 when Louis Daguerre announced the invention of the daguerreotype process at the French Academy of Science in Paris in 1839. At its earliest conception, the daguerreotype could capture an image in about 15 minutes. The images were produced by introducing light to a sensitized, silver-coated copper plate using a camera and a skilled photographer. Because of the process’s long exposure and sensitivity to movement, the subject was required to hold as still as possible throughout the duration of the exposure.

Overcoming Fear

Like any new, life-changing technology, with great excitement came great hesitation. The daguerreotype’s almost alchemic ability to capture an image was a frighteningly foreign concept to a generation who relied on their own senses to understand the realities around them. Although the initial news of this process and its ability to capture an image was approached with reluctance by some, the technology immediately sparked a period of portrait photography among social elites in America and Europe throughout the 1850s. Engraved and lithographed copies of these daguerreotyped portraits began to make their way into popular newspapers and photography journals, diminishing much of the initial fear of photography. In a current age surrounded by photojournalism and abstract visual art, this may seem trivial or even archaic, but imagine how novel and even magical it was to people of the mid-19th century.

Our Brains on Photographs

We have come a long way from the days of the ten-minute exposure. Standard digital cameras capture images in less than one second, and our phones can now take bursts of 10 pictures in one second flat. With each picture we view, neuroscience has proven that our memory and understanding of what, where and when is expanded. Furthermore, the visual arts physiologically cause us to experience conflicting emotions at the same time, allowing us to explore the world and attempt to understand it the only way humans know how, by imperfectly attempting to interpret the often conflicting emotions our experiences solicit.

People living in miserable poverty, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936. Photo by Dorothea Lange and part of Roosevelt’s New Deal photographs. Thanks to Yale University for making the collection easy to sort through and download! Photogrammer.com.

Capturing the Human Condition

Initially, daguerreotypes were a great opportunity to circulate portraits to the media for posterity, and to family for nostalgia. As time went on however, exposures became shorter, cameras more transportable, and skilled photographers could often be in the right place at the right time to capture a story. President Roosevelt sent photographers out into the world as part of his “New Deal” program (1935-1945). The New Deal photographs brought the American Depression and poverty to life, both while it was happening and for generations to come. Photo journalists of the last several decades have taken “iconic photographs” that embody movements and have helped us connect viscerally to any person living their story — anywhere in the world.

High Speed and Everywhere

The days of the minutes-long exposure are gone. Today anyone can take a picture on their smart phones, choose a filter, and post it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat instantly. Speed, ease, and ubiquity allows us all to potentially impact the world in a way unimaginable to Louis Daguerre and the New Deal photographers of the 1930s. With high-speed images, pictures of beauty, disaster, injustice, and poverty can be transformed into action and intervention through social media campaigns in just minutes and hours.