Posted on 04/18/2006 10:58:28 AM PDT by Battle Hymn of the Republic
Hi neighbor; I am at 44 Montgomery and had a ringside seat (looking toward Ferry Bldg) to a rather sparse crowd and a great deal of Public Servant overtime pay.
SF was a key departure point for sailors in WW2. The navy kicked out the obviously gay sailors in SF. Without any place in particular to go to many stayed.
There were govt handouts, tents and such, but also those were much simpler times when the needs of people were for the basic things in life. Also people then usually came from a background where they learned to make do with what they had. They were raised to be self-sufficient. That is the exception these days.
Let's not forget that it took many years to rebuild SF. Only several months have passed where NO residents could even start to think about rebuilding. Plus the new flood maps were only released in the last couple weeks, so it has been difficult for people in NO to know what restrictions would be placed on rebuilding. We can blame govt redtape on at least some of the NO rebuilding problems.
Simple, yet effective....
A hundred years ago, the military was there. Also, people just rolled up their sleeves and went to work. Within ten days, parts of the streetcar line were running again. In three years, there were more buildings in San Francisco than there had been before the quake.
Makes you look at New Orleans and go.... WTF?
The quake map at the USGS web site is kind of quiet for the SF Bay area today. At least the area souh of San Juan Batista is creeping.
I saw the NGC special last night. I have learned from FR to spot liberal bias on a dime. The special was loaded with it.
For instance, the references to the rich people sitting and "picnicing" outside their homes on Nob Hill watching the earthquake. Also it called the mayor a villian because he emphasized the fire, not the earthquake in order to get business back into SF fast.
Interesting. I didn't realize rich people picnicked at 5:18 in the morning, but hey, I'm not rich so I don't know.
And talking to the son of one of the survivors at the Parade today, he said the residents referred to the Great Fire more than they referred to the Earthquake. I can't be sure, but I believe it was the fire that caused most of the destruction.
I lived in the Bay Area in the late 70's, early 80's and went into San Francisco quite often. When I first got there, I did not notice a lot of obviously gay people, although I'm sure there had always been plenty of gays in San Francisco. Within a few years one started to hear that there was a strongly gay neighborhood in the Castro District and it became more common to see gay couples. Once a community was established, other gay people wanted to be part of it.
Looking up some history, I see that the gay San Francisco supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated on November 27th, 1978. So there had already been a gay constituency for some time. But I don't recall this as being such a dominant feature in the atmosphere of San Francisco in the late 70's. Maybe I was just unobservant.
I think that part of the reason for the initial growth of the gay community might be real estate. Gay males tend to have disposable income that people with kids don't have. They also might be more willing to move into a run-down urban area and gentrify it. I know that this effect has occurred in Washington, D.C.
In the NGC special they said it was a decision by the mayor and associates to hide that SF had an earthquake, because they felt the business community would not come back to an earthquake risk area, but a fire was a one time event.
They showed headlines where people kept talking about the "Great Fire".
It seems the mayor was quite successful at it too. SF built up to the city it is today. But the NGC thought it was dishonest.
The man was a successful businessman, and did what he had to do. Galveston, which had a hurricane disaster at the same time, never got its business community back.
I saw hundreds of "we shoot looter" signs in the gulf region after Katrina.
I had just stepped off the elevator (coming down from the 36th floor) of 44 Montgomery in October 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. It was quite a ride, but I was just glad that I hadn't left a few minutes earlier and been walking down the street to the bus stop after I saw all the bricks that had fallen from the older buildings in the Financial District. The really weird thing was riding home to Marin on the bus past the burning Marina District.
Later I discovered that a guy from my great great grandfather's Civil War unit had survived the war and a stay in a Confederate prison only to die in a collapsed hotel in San Francisco in the 1906 quake. I can't even imaging the horrors that its victims felt.
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