Dr. Leonie von Zesch on the ’06 SF quake and fire

The Phelan Monument and Flood Building survived, but Dr. von Zesch’s office burned.

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Dr. Leonie von Zesch, 23, was building a successful dental career when the earthquake struck on April 18, 1906, 105 years ago today. On Sunday, The Chronicle excerpted portions of a manuscript in which she recounted waking up to the violent rocking of the home she and her mother shared in downtown San Francisco, and walking through the city as it broke apart around them. In the calm of the previous night, she thought only of the grass-green pleated dress and flower-covered hat she would wear to her Market Street office in the morning. “I looked forward with a good deal of interest to the appearance I should make the next day; it would give a lift to one which would be otherwise like too many others,” she wrote.

Von Zesch, the daughter of a German countess, graduated in 1902 at age 19 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in San Francisco. When she died in 1944, she left boxes of her belongings to her niece who stored them in a family attic. Their bounty, discovered decades later, included photographs of the fiercely independent von Zesch in the fashions of the times; dental instruments and diplomas; artifacts from her world travels; and thousands of pages of a manuscript about her remarkable life typewritten on onionskin paper.

Today we pick up Dr. von Zesch’s story as she and her mother return to their home on April 18 after a day of encountering the dusty march of refugees. Holding on to the belief that the fire would show some mercy, they sheltered others who had not been spared.

That night our house was filled with acquaintances who were already burned out, or who happened to be visiting San Francisco at the wrong time. From our roof we looked down upon the crescent of the burning city. St. Ignatius Church was first a large square outlined by flame. Then the spires ignited one after the other until it looked like a huge set piece of fireworks on a Fourth of July. Market Street, toward the waterfront, showed a blood-red horizon. Burning segments rose like fireflies and soared away. And still we believed that the fire would not reach us, or if it did, it would pass us by. Very trusting! Like living at the base of Mt. Vesuvius, or settling on the banks of the Mississippi at flood-time.

There was no sleep for anyone in our house that night, what with frightened visitors deciding to go farther out of the heart of the city, and newcomers arriving. When Mother and I decided at five in the morning to go out for our food, we found people laying on the pavement dead drunk, while the gutters ran with liquor that the corner saloons had been ordered to empty into the street.

General Frederick Funston had declared martial law. Men and women, completely demoralized, expecting the earth to open up and swallow them at any moment, lay flat on their stomachs and supped up the liquor from the street as cowboys drink water from a rangeland stream. Those not crazed or paralyzed with fear were not so excited on this second day as on the first. They were dazed or in a reverie. Mind and body can bear the extreme of excitement for a comparatively short time only; after that the most terrifying experiences become commonplace.

The fire was now moving up Market Street. The Mission District fire was burning toward it, so our own house on Hyde Street [rented out] would be caught in this circle of flame. The Phelan Building was also doomed.

Before eight that morning, I was downtown persuading the Phelan Building agent to open the door to my offices. Water, coming through a huge hose from temporarily repaired and newly laid mains, was already breaking in the great front windows, tearing down curtains and flooding rich carpets. I had only time to get my colleague’s leather bag, pick up several dozen of his most cherished forceps and elevators, and save some instruments of my own. I could not get into the safe, so books and papers were destroyed. The roaring of the fire, the drumming of the water on walls, ceilings and furniture, and the frenzied yelling of men drove all but escape from my mind. In less than an hour after it had started burning, the whole large building was gutted.

By that time Mother and I knew that the house [we lived in] on Sutter Street would burn too. We began packing things to move, but moving was out of the question. We had all our furniture and bedding carried down to the street, to save it if possible, otherwise to let anyone have it who could move it away.

In looking about for a conveyance, we saw one of the great western bankers come sadly down the street. He carried an unwrapped rump roast under one arm, and under the other several bunches of carrots, turnips and beets with a head of cabbage.

A man, clad only in a shirt that reached to his middle, came dashing down the street. A young man whom we knew from the Southern states came dragging six trunks, one behind the other, tied together with sheets. He was pulling this train by another sheet tied around his waist. With tears in his eyes he said, “Water from the Bay spouted up through the basements and out of first and second story windows of wholesale houses on Front Street.” Smiling disconsolately he moved on. For a handsome man, he was the most woebegone individual that I have ever seen.

As it became evident that we should not be able to take everything we had so carefully assorted for keeping, we began discarding. As the hours passed and it began to look as if we would have to walk, we continued to discard until we had cut five suitcases down to one in which we had a change of underwear for each, stockings, comb, brush and toothbrushes, towels and soap, and another pair of shoes for each. I saved one of the little after-dinner coffee cups that I especially prized.

Heading for the Presidio, Mother and I tried to keep together, but no conveyance would, or could, take two more persons. Presently a wagon loaded with baled hay stopped.

They had room only for one. None but an acrobat could ride down San Francisco’s cobbled hills on a swaying mountain of baled hay and live to tell the tale. Mother declined to chance it, but insisted that if I would ride and take with me our luggage, she could make her way on foot and would meet me at the Presidio entrance.

I suppose war-scourged evacuees could not feel more depressed and forsaken than some of these San Franciscans who were leaving all behind and moving out into the open spaces. Many were separated from their dear ones and did not know when, or whether, they would meet again. Constant tremors reminded the unfortunates of what Nature could do if she wished. Hungry, frightened and tired, the refugees trudged on, carrying what they could of their belongings.

I don’t recall where the wagon load of hay was bound for, but the driver let me off near the Presidio. I had with me my aquarium of goldfish and my alligator suitcase – our one piece of luggage. I wore the grass-green dress and the jaunty little hat with flower-covered bandeau that two days ago I had hoped might lend zest to a busy but unexciting spring day.

Editor’s note: Dr. Leonie von Zesch was reunited with her mother at the Presidio and the two began to help with relief efforts in the temporary medical tent set up on the base. Von Zesch was then appointed acting United States Army dental surgeon of the emergency hospital on the Presidio parade ground, where she served for nine months.

The earthquake and fire marked a turning point in many lives. As always with disaster, for some they proved a springboard to better things; for others they meant irreparable ruin. But in one way or another, everyone had a chance to start anew. For a long time after the calamity, Fillmore Street was the main business thoroughfare, having been untouched by the fire. Except for the rows of old houses, all alike, there was nothing about the street to remind us of the San Francisco we had known. San Francisco before the disaster, though a most cosmopolitan city, had dignity. Fillmore Street, afterward, turned itself into a carnival street, decked for several miles with flags and bunting.

Looking back over the years, there is one sound I shall never forget: the rasp of shuffling feet on sandy sidewalks. Two sights will stay with me forever: shambling figures with haunted faces; huge pieces of red-hot tin and corrugated iron rising from burning buildings and soaring away to start other fires.

Excerpted from “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time,” by Leonie von Zesch, to be published in May by Lime Orchard Publications (leoniethebook.com).

’06 quake through eyes of woman ahead of her time

Bancroft Library

Because the slim Call building had been lampooned as an angleworm waving about in the air in an earthquake when it was built, Dr. Leonie von Zesch, 23, set out to check on it first. It survived both the quake and the fire.

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Jane Troutman was 18 when she inherited boxes of her beloved Aunt Leonie’s belongings in 1944. She thought little of them, assuming they contained academic work from the various universities her aunt had attended, and stashed them in the family attic.

Decades later, Troutman, now 85 and living in Beverly Hills, opened the boxes and found the bounty of an extraordinary life. Among the discoveries were artifacts from her adventurous aunt’s solo journeys in her Model T across the Western United States; souvenirs from trips to Alaska and Europe; diplomas, business cards and dental instruments; photographs of Leonie in high fashion; and thousands of pages of an autobiography typed out on onionskin paper.

Leonie von Zesch, the daughter of a German countess, graduated in 1902 at age 19 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, San Francisco, and built a thriving dental practice in the city prior to the great quake and fires of 1906. Among the typewritten pages bequeathed to her niece was a description of the disaster as it eerily unfolded around her. She would lose almost everything, including her home and office.

But on the evening of April 17, 1906, just hours before San Francisco crumbled, Dr. Leonie von Zesch, 23, thought only of the new outfit she planned to wear to her Market Street dental office in the morning. It would be a grass-green, instep-length pleated dress and an Eton jacket with three-quarter sleeves. “A small, flat chip hat covered in flowers with a long black quill standing from the crown was to be tilted over the eyes,” she wrote. “I looked forward with a good deal of interest to the appearance I should make the next day; it would give a lift to one which would be otherwise like too many others.”

Troutman says her aunt always hoped her writing would be published. Now, 105 years to the day after Leonie von Zesch envisioned her decorative attire, she has her wish.

A little after five in the morning, the house began to tremble. Only those who have experienced earthquakes know that weird, helpless feeling that follows the first unnatural shake. Simultaneously Mother and I cried, “Earthquake!” I crooked my knees to put my feet on the floor, but before my toes had touched the carpet, my head was back on the pillow. The house rocked violently and I rocked with it, unable to uncrook my knees or straighten my spine until the first series of turbulent tremors was over.

Above Mother’s bed hung a picture thirty-six inches long, popular at that time, called “A Yard of Roses.” This swung out from the wall time and again; each moment I expected to see it fall on Mother’s head. The bureau, opposite the foot of my bed, on which I kept an aquarium with goldfish, lurched across the room, bringing it up against the bed with the goldfish gasping in a half inch of water.

On the mantel above the tiled fireplace were several dozen assorted china after-dinner coffee cups and saucers. These inched to the mantel edge, dropped over, and slivered to pieces on the tiles. In the kitchen empty Mason jars fell from the pantry shelves in a series of crashes, crockery and canned goods following. And all the while, a seeming eternity of a few minutes, there was an unforgettable humming, grinding sound that not even the walls shut out, the grinding and breaking of myriad things all over the city.

When finally the tremors stopped, we got up and dressed. I put my right shoe on my left foot and vice versa for the only time in my life, and didn’t know it until later. Then we hurried up to the roof to look down over the city. The humming sound increased as we got outdoors.

The city looked quite as usual from where we were on top of the hill, except for a gas tank near the waterfront south of Market Street. This was one of those immense Pacific Gas & Electric storage tanks. A cloud of black smoke like an anchored balloon funneled from its top. It had sprung a leak, and it was from such places that the fire started.

xcept for two loose bricks on one of our chimneys, we could see no damage to the structure of our house. We went downstairs again and looked out on Sutter Street. Diagonally across from us, on the corner of Leavenworth Street, was the Granada, a showy hotel decked with prism-glass chandeliers and much brass. It now looked like one of those furniture store advertisements so popular at that time. It had broken in half. The front now lay on the sidewalk, exposing a tier of rooms. I remember particularly an ornate brass bedstead that stood on the very edge of what was left of a third story chamber floor, with a puffy satin comforter hanging negligently from it into the apartment below. Miraculously no one in this hotel was injured; how the occupants of those sleeping rooms escaped has always puzzled me.

We did not immediately think of eating, and by the time the thought came a man had been sent out by the gas company to warn citizens that they must not light gas stoves because all the mains were broken and the escaping gas would ignite. Very much in a hurry, we breakfasted on a cold snack for we had decided to walk downtown to see whether anything had happened to the tall buildings. No one, as yet, seemed to have the remotest idea of the magnitude of the disaster.

We were particularly interested in the Call Building because, while it was being erected, a good deal of fun was made by other newspapers of its tall, slim structure. They cartooned it as swaying under the stress of an earthquake like an angleworm standing on its tail and waving about in the air.

Walking through the best shopping district, we saw the plate glass show windows of the City of Paris slivered on the sidewalk so that beautiful handmade lingerie and the finest table linens lay within arm’s reach, a half block on each street. The same at the White House. Hugenin’s, a custom jewelry shop, was equally exposed. It was a paradise for shoplifters until later in the day when soldiers took severe measures to stop looting.

By the time we had made our way down to the Call, Examiner and Chronicle Buildings, the exodus from the south was in full swing because there the fire had already started. Vehicles of all descriptions carried all kinds of people and what seemed to be the most dilapidated chattels they owned. Panic-stricken humans make strange choices – parrots and canaries, dogs and cats, ducks and chickens. Tottering old men, uncombed, unwashed and ragged, led equally tottering old women. One hugged a puppy to her chest and he had a kitten hanging from a coat pocket, their belongings tied in a red handkerchief.

Some people seemed to have become totally deranged. I touched Mother’s elbow, “Look!” A man stark naked stood for an instant in a window, then leaped from the second story of a hotel behind the Call Building when he could just as well have put on some garment and walked down the stairs.

Army friends of ours, a general and his wife, staying at the Occidental Hotel, were in their night garments when plaster began to fall on them, and doors to jam.

“We took our clothes on our arms and walked to a vacant lot on Golden Gate Avenue near St. Boniface Church, and dressed there,” they told us later. “This was a promenade of several miles. No one so much as glanced our way!”

While we stood at Market and Kearny Streets at seven in the morning, word came that Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan had been killed, that all the water mains were broken, and that there was no way of quenching the fire. The Palace Hotel was already burning and with it all the luggage of the grand opera stars who had come into town the night before. The smoke from the burning Palace was beautifully colored, comparable to nothing except the aurora borealis that I was to see in Alaska years later.

At Portsmouth Square, where Mother and I went to see how the old Hall of Justice had weathered the disaster, the crowd was so dense, what with sightseers and people escaping from their dwellings, that one could hardly walk. Sometimes I was lifted from my feet and carried forward by the tight-pressed shoulders of the hordes.

In spite of the horror, the air was electric with a sort of holiday spirit, either because the disaster was a novel experience which released people from the humdrum of everyday life, or because they were in a mood of thanksgiving and glad to be alive.

There was something of hysteria in it too. To Mother and me, everything was fearfully exciting. We did not anticipate personal loss. Our own home on Hyde, now rented, was out of the supposed fire zone; the Sutter place where we lived, of course, would not burn! Why we and thousands of others were so optimistic, I’d like to know. The water mains were broken. People all over town were daring to light gas stoves. The wind was blowing. How could the city fail to burn?

I can still see pieces of red-hot, corrugated iron rattling and flapping on the roof and walls of the Hall of Justice, then breaking and soaring away on heat waves. I can see the swallows darting frantically about, only to fall exhausted.

It soon became evident to those who were fighting the fire that only by dynamiting the buildings in the vanguard of the racing flames could any part of the city be saved. Mother and I were on Kearny Street when there came into view an army wagon drawn by eight sleek but lathering mules and driven by a soldier in uniform. It bore a heaping load of dynamite on top of which sat a great man, General Frederick Funston. To him, and to his assistants, but to the General first of all, is due the credit for saving as much of San Francisco as remained. But for his outstanding ability in combining time, place and methods, the city would have been completely destroyed.

Evidently recognizing him as a great and brave leader, the people yelled, threw up their hats, and applauded. Many followed the wagon down the street. The air was scorching hot and the way dim with smoke and flying cinders. Men with blistered hands and faces ran in and out of buildings carrying all sorts of burdens. Firemen, regular and volunteer, dragged, pushed, and pulled fire-fighting equipment. Great, strong-hearted horses, dripping sweat and lather, hauled hook and ladder wagons. Flames from the street below Kearny could already be seen against the sky.

Then the dynamiting began. It may be thought that rapid and continuous explosions are something new, to be heard only in war zones. We learned that day all about noise and concussions, heat, smells, and general destruction. Men were carried away on stretchers. Others fell exhausted in the street and lay there. Owners of buildings, tears streaming down their faces, consented to the dynamiting for the good of the cause. Others refused; their buildings went anyway.

Hammersmith and Field, Kearny Street jewelers, removed their most valuable merchandise and then, when they saw that they could save nothing more, invited the soldiers on guard outside the store to help themselves to all they could carry. One young man, to whom we talked later, had forty-two Swiss watches encrusted with pearls and diamonds and numbers of jeweled rings and bracelets.

At last, Mother and I turned toward home. Everywhere we passed people carrying away their belongings. Some hurried as if they meant to go back for more; others trudged along as if they had come to the end of their endurance. Whole families had moved from their houses to the street, starting housekeeping on the sidewalks. People were afraid to remain in dwellings that had suffered considerable damage because constant tremors were reducing them to powdered mortar and broken bricks, or to splintered lumber.

No early settlers could have been more ingenious in adapting to their purposes whatever means were at hand. Some had set up wood and coal stoves just off the sidewalk. Many had fixed a pipe to one end of a five-gallon kerosene can, and these cans laying lengthwise on the ground served as stoves. Everyone talked to everyone else. All barriers of race and creed, color and social station were let down. In a way it was like a picnic of some vast fraternal organization.

Inside: Excerpt from von Zesch’s manuscript, recounting Wednesday, April 18, 1906, on pages A12-A13.

Excerpted from “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time,” by Leonie von Zesch, to be published in May by Lime Orchard Publications (leoniethebook.com).

The quake series

Coming Monday: Dr. Leonie von Zesch spends a final night at home before walking through the city in her grass-green dress as the flames sweep Market Street.