Footage of San Francisco’s Marina District after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989 show a city broke open. Asphalt streets are torn up in angry spires and strips. The walls of four story buildings are crumpled as if smashed under the foot of a giant. In the midst of researching the event for a radio story, I parse through one image of destruction after another, of toppled telephone poles and houses swallowed by the ground below. What’s most haunting are the faces of the people in the photos -- their arms crossed, eyes downcast, brows furrowed with fear and sadness from what the earth beneath them had done to their lives.
Their sadness is devastating but it also begs a crucial question -- did they knew their neighborhood was always doomed to destruction? The Marina district rose out of the tidal lagoons and soggy wetlands that once edged that part of San Francisco’s northern shore. Filled in to create land for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) -- a massive event created to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s re-emergence from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake -- the land of the Marina district was made from mud and sand and dredge scraped from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. When the exposition was over and its structures razed, the Marina’s buildings and streets immediately began to rise and spread.
Building on this kind of land in earthquake prone country like San Francisco is a dangerous process. When an earthquake begins, it creates seismic waves that move through the ground. If the waves move through solid rock, the material doesn’t allow for much side-to-side shaking, so the wave can pass through quickly. With softer materials, however, particularly fill like sand and mud, each particle can be shaken every which way. More energy from the seismic wave goes into the shaking, making it both stronger and longer lasting. If the filled in area is close to a high water table, as it was in the Marina, water and fill are mixed together into a kind of apocalyptic quicksand.
Looking at the devastation of the Marina in 1989 through the lens of these origins, you can’t help but see the irony. The area was filled in for an exposition designed in large part as a symbol of San Francisco’s rebirth from its 1906 destruction. That quake reduced most of the city to rubble, set off fires that lasted for days, and left nearly ¾ of the city’s population homeless. As Jack London wrote at the time, “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed … Nothing remains but memories.”
The way the city worked to celebrate its survival and re-emergence on the international scene, set the stage for future devastation of an all too similar kind. In the decades following the PPIE event, the Marina district continued to grow in size and population atop the artificial fill. Despite the lingering memory of the hardships caused by the 1906 quake, the vulnerability of the land built out in its wake was largely ignored, until the next one struck.
If the past is prologue, as people say, understanding how our history – political, cultural, geologic, climatic – shapes our present is a key part of being human. Staring at the photos of the Loma Prieta quake that day, the question arose in my mind: if the construction of the site of the PPIE led directly to its destruction decades later, how much more could I discover by peering farther into the site’s past? How could understanding how the site had changed over time influence ways of negotiating its future?
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When it comes to reading the layers of time, change and disaster that have shaped San Francisco over the years, The Palace of Fine Arts is a key spot. One of two remaining buildings from the PPIE, it’s a moment in the city fabric that does this kind of thinking for you. Stand next to its curving arches and Grecian style pillars, and time traveling one hundred years into the past is easy. You can see white women in high necked dresses hold parasols against the cold San Franciscan summer sun, while men in curling mustaches and waistcoats stroll alongside, swinging walking canes and puffing cigars. Instead of the red tiled single-family homes, wide streets and lawns that now cover the adjacent areas, the 1915 PPIE grounds were a palatial expanse of beaux arts style buildings painted in cream colors, decked with scrolled moldings and robust Romanesque statues. Areas with names like the “Joy Zone” displayed curiosities and treasures from across the globe, and state of the art technologies. There was so much to see, stretched over so vast an area that few were able to visit all that the exhibition had to offer during the nine months it remained standing. And then it was gone. Designed to last the better part of a year, everything was torn down by December. The Palace was built to be destructed as well but had become so beloved during the course of the Exposition that it was re-constructed with more permanent materials.
The Palace is now cemented in the city’s collective memory but it landed there by accident, much like the state of California itself. For a large portion of the world’s history, California didn’t exist. The North American continent ended near the center of present day Nevada and the ocean met its edge, covering the area of the future golden state in salty seawater. Around 350 million years ago, tectonic plates began to move in such a way that islands, bits of continents and archipelagos rammed into the continental edge. Tens of thousands of earthquakes occurred as different pieces of land subducted and slid past each other, creating the California we now know.
The process continues today; every time an earthquake occurs on the West Coast, California’s patchwork of plates and fault lines warps and shifts again. It’s in a constant state of becoming, a sliding boundary that never stops. When you stand next to the Palace, one of the last easily identifiable remnants of the PPIE, you start to see it as a symbol of that ongoing process. With it’s beaux arts columns and central dome, it calls back to a time past, reminding of us of how the city has changed and how we residents keep changing with it.
It’s a process of change that’s been going on for over 15,000 years, to when humans first arrived in the Bay Area. It was a very different place then. With much of the earth locked in glacial cold, sea levels were four hundred feet lower than they are now. Over the millennia since the Bay Area formed, global climate has shifted many times, transitioning from ice ages into warming periods into ice ages, causing sea levels to rise and fall. As the eons have passed, at least four different bays have come and gone.
The bay we know today was a riverine valley then, with the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flowing in from the north and the Guadalupe meandering up from what would become San Jose. The two rivers merged around the Golden Gate before flowing out to the coast, west of the Farallon islands. Look at a map of the Bay floor and you can see the deeper channels made by those rivers, two gouges of dark blue converging where the peninsulas of Marina and San Francisco come together, like a bow shooting off into ocean beyond.
What must it have been like to walk through that land, now submerged, when it was open to the sky? Though the ice age hasn’t yet ended, the climate is Mediterranean, a wide grassland that rustles in the afternoon wind. Mega fauna – mammoths, huge cats – graze the grasslands. The mammoths tower over you, looming ten, eleven, thirteen feet above the ground. Massive short-face bears stalk the plains, bears bigger even than the grizzlies that would come later. Birds call out so loud and often it’s almost deafening.
You spend your days hunting. You stop occasionally at the site that will one day become the Palace of Fine Arts, then a bluff overlooking the deep valley of the Golden Gate. The river moves below, winking in the afternoon sun. It’s a prime vantage point for you. The Golden Gate valley is a key hunting and foraging thoroughfare in the region, with animals constantly migrating to and from the western coast to the east bay hills. You stand on the land where, tens of thousands of years later, the Palace will be because it is a good place to watch the constant movement and change.
Temperatures gradually warmed as the eons passed, transforming the riverine valley into the bay we now see. The mega fauna died off, either from climatic changes or over-hunting, we don’t know. The region was good for humans and those early arrivals stayed, becoming the array Ohlone tribes who lived on the land from the northern coast down to the area that became Monterrey.
The site of the future Palace is a wetland now, a marshy inlet on the edge of the bay, with large sand dunes separating it from deeper water to the north. A member of one of the Ohlone tribes living on the peninsula, you stop at the site for a drink in some of the nearby springs, or to launch a tule reed canoe for fishing in the small lagoon. But you don’t do much more. The bay waters are strong there, too dangerous to be much use for fishing. Settlements around present day Mission Bay and Hunters Point, more protected from wind and fog and in shallower water, make better spots for living.
The marshy, lagoon edges of the site remain until Anglo settlers arrive in the 19th century. The Spanish had already come to dominate the region since they first found the Bay a hundred years before, but had left the site more or less alone. Located between the military fort of The Presidio and the town of Yerba Buena (the name of the Spanish settlement that would become San Francisco), the site of the future Palace was still a place for watering your horse, for taking a break to watch ships move in and out through the Gate.
It’s the 1850s when things really start to change. The Gold Rush is in full swing now and the city of San Francisco is growing. The site, with its fresh water and sand dunes, becomes an ideal place for washing clothes. A flock of laundromats open around the lagoon. As an enterprising housewife, you often do the family washing yourself, making a day of it on Sundays with the rest of your family and a picnic in tow.
The lagoon takes on the name Washer Woman’s Cove but more action than laundry continues to move in. Dairy farms and vegetable production expand across the area. Soon there are canneries and tanneries open for business. By 1870, some of the sand dunes are razed to make way for more development. By the 1890s, they are gone completely. Sewage and effluent begin to seep into the lagoon, and the water becomes murky and dark. Not much laundry is done in the lagoon by hand anymore, but it retains the name.
But then the earthquake of 1906 happens. San Francisco crumbles into ruins. Fires resulting from the quake devastate what wasn’t already destroyed. But the site of the future Palace itself is not so damaged. Some business and warehouses are compromised but not destroyed. There are so many people left homeless by the earthquake – nearly 300,000 out of the city’s total population of 400,000 – that free space on the site is used for refugee housing. Small shacks spring up and new people move in. Seven years later, after the site has been chosen to become the PPIE and construction has begun, some are still living there. But the money to be made from the exposition, the cheaper cost of leasing filled land for the event, the prospect of presenting San Francisco as reborn from the ashes of ruin, is motivation enough to push the last refugees out and fill in Washer Woman’s Cove with mud and sand. The Exposition is a resounding success and when it’s over, the streets, power lines and transportation circuits built for the event help make the Marina District the city’s next exciting spot for growth and investment. The marks of destruction and change are paved over and things look bright on the surface, for a few decades anyways.
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The process of ignoring the past that led to the Marina’s devastation after Loma Prieta stems from a willful ignorance that’s far from singular to San Francisco. Ever since industrialization gave us the tools for large-scale engineering, we’ve set about armoring shores, filling in wetlands and building up seawalls to keep environmental change at bay. Manhattan’s marshes were filled in and shored up to make way for rising levels of international trade. The Mississippi’s meandering channels were hardened into a uniform, leveed ribbon. Following devastating losses from the 1953 flood of the Rhine River, the Netherlands launched the Deltaworks project, one of the most extensive engineered systems of dikes and dams in the world. Following the flood, their attitude of “never again” translated to concrete interventions, changing their already extensive water management systems into a massive, engineered domination of their landscape.
This attitude is in many ways understandable. It’s a longstanding human desire to want to feel safe amidst the turmoil of daily life, to have the impression that what we build and the work we do will last beyond our short lifetimes. Engineering our cities and landscapes to support that desire for controllable, static conditions is an extension of the same wish that makes us continually fascinated with youth and immortality.
But this approach gets us into trouble. When we ignore or gloss over the realities of the natural processes of the places where we live – from earthquakes to hurricanes to drought – we lay the groundwork for future strife. Sandy overwhelmed Manhattan's shoreline fill, crippling the region. Hurricane Katrina almost wiped a major American city off the map. The mighty dams and levees of the Mississippi couldn’t hold back 2011's crushing spring floods, resulting in $3.4 billion in direct damages. Destruction from the 1989 quake in San Francisco was the direct the result of irresponsible steps taken decades before.
Still, when it comes to earthquakes, the San Francisco Bay isn’t a place where people stick their heads in the sand. City and regional responses to the 1989 event were far more rapid and effective than those in 1906. Where before, chaos reigned over the city for weeks after the earthquake, in 1989 daily life for the majority of Bay Area residents more or less resumed within a few days. Lessons learned after 1906 – which resulted in improved in zoning, land-use decisions, building codes and citizen outreach -- created a stronger built environment, more responsive governing bodies and a better informed populace.
It’s said that land shapes a culture and a culture shapes the land. Even as we have shaped the Bay Area in our image of America, it has shaped us in return. Just as Floridians know to fill up their bathtubs when a hurricane comes to make sure they have stores of potable water, and the Japanese know to flee to higher ground when a tsunami strikes, there’s a certain cultural understanding embedded in the Bay Area that certain steps have to be made to negotiate future quakes.
But San Francisco is also a place where we’ve paved over our past in order to build our future. The dunes that once dominated the western expanses of the peninsula have been flattened, paved over and planted with trees. Creeks have been filled in, hilltops razed and wetlands buried. That drive of looking forward, of moving west, of busting through what stands in the way of an ever-brighter future, is a longstanding American way that’s hard to escape. We brought it with us when we first arrived in the mid 19th century, blasting through Sierra mountaintops with hydraulic hoses to get the gold inside. It’s what motivated us to cut down Oakland’s once extensive oak forests for housing. Even now, although we operate with the knowledge that every day could bring The Big One, we also push the notion out of our minds. For all our research on earthquake processes and advances in building science, as a society we seek to look beyond the fact that our homes are built on land that will always be moving away from us. We live here not because of the constant shifting between tectonic plates, but in spite of it.
It’s this kind of attitude that breeds disaster. Earthquakes by themselves are not disastrous. In areas without direct human presence, they cause trees to shake, land to shift and animals to flee but very rarely inflict permanent damage on a place. Only when streets crumble, houses fall and bridges tumble down, do people die and the event becomes disastrous. People are what make an event like an earthquake deadly, not the event itself. It’s the disconnect between a culture and the dynamics of the landscape in which it grows that sets the stage for disaster. With a place like San Francisco, an area so intimately shaped by earthquakes and the rise and fall of the sea, paving over that past only helps to grow the disconnect into an ever greater chasm.
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