The frontier, c.1906

The four day event took more than 3,000 lives, burned through 28,188 buildings, flattened 522 blocks, destroyed tens of churches, 9 libraries, 37 national banks, the Pacific Stock Exchange, 3 major newspaper buildings..., 2 opera houses, and the largest, most richly appointed imperial hotel in the era of turn-of-the-last-century opulence. More than 200,000 people were burned out of their homes -- men, women, and children who found themselves wandering smoke-filled streets with no claim to a future except that they were alive and that they owned the clothes on their backs [3].

San Francisco, a city of enduring culture and taste, has been known throughout the world as the Paris of the Pacific. But its many contradictions have occasionaly led to its being known as the Baghdad by the Bay -- a city of historic wickedness and ferocity, with more than a few vestiges of the frontier in its character. In 1906, it had the highest per capita murder rate in America and was the only city in the country where a killing in a boxing ring had no legal repercussion. While it had a church for every 2,500 citizens, it also had a saloon for every 250 of them [3-4].

Smith, Dennis. San Francisco is Burning : The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires. Viking, 2005. ISBN 0670034428.