[10]:03:00 surviving San Francisco's great earthquake and fire / by Gerstle Mack ; with an introduction by Dianne Feinstein.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

the Valencia Street Hotel sinking up to its top floor in the soil of a suddenly vanishing street, four square miles of city becoming a blazing inferno. Here are refugees carrying everything from the family silver to empty birdcages, and pushing pianos up the steep hills to the tent cities and parks. Here is the Great Caruso fleeing the Palace Hotel in a garbage wagon, and an unknown pianist giving an impromptu concert while Union Square burns down around him. Here are acts of folly, acts of heroism, and acts of God combined in Gerstle Mack's fascinating account of a beautiful city's destruction and rebirth.

Here is City Hall disintegrating in a hail of masonry