San Francisco Stirs After Its Silent Night

SAN FRANCISCO —  On the morning after, the city woke to the sound of helicopters. They had come in the night and now hovered everywhere, like carrion insects, looking for the ruins. In my hotel room there was no light, no electricity, no clocks, but I knew the dawn had come when I heard the thumping of their blades against the window. The long, strange night had ended.

In the lobbies of all the hotels, sleeping bodies were everywhere. Some were there because the dead elevators had made their rooms unreachable, some simply preferred to huddle together. In the St. Francis Hotel they had sat up most of the night, hundreds of them, wrapped in blankets, watching the news from a small, black-and-white television. In all the great lobby, the only light came from candles and the blue glow of the screen.

And all over Union Square, during that night, there had been a silence. People sat on the curbs in twos and threes or walked through the streets in a kind of wonder. There were no city sounds, no city lights, no city life. Only the blacker hulk of the tall buildings silhouetted against the mere black of the night. It was a night when you sat, or walked, and made no noise.

And now, with the dawn, it was time to face it. The fact was, in most neighborhoods of the city, the news was not all bad. The electricity was gone, gas was gone, restaurants were closed, but serious damage was relatively rare. You had to watch the helicopters to see where the real ruins lay.

That place, of course, was the Marina. Here you didn’t have to study buildings for damage. Built 50 years ago on bay fill, the Marina paid the price. Whole apartment buildings had lurched to one side and in a few places had collapsed altogether. Some had burned, and everywhere the quake had pulled apart seams.

By mid-morning, the Marina had become the biggest sightseeing attraction in the city. The effect was unsettling. On the major streets leading to the Marina, a gridlock developed. Tour buses and stretch limos got in line with thousands of cars. When the police cordoned off the neighborhood to vehicle traffic, they simply converted it to a pedestrian mall. Hundreds strolled down the streets in an almost holiday air, taking photos of each other next to the rubble.

Perhaps it was a way of diminishing the awful news of the earthquake. Perhaps a way of safely separating the victims into a category of their own. In the Marina the neighborhood residents, shoveling debris into buckets, were studied at a distance by those from outside. I remember one sightseer watching a Marina resident packing his car with all his worldly possessions and then shaking his head. The Marina was built on mush, he said. His own house was up the hill and built on rock. Solid rock, he said, and seemed to find reassurance in that.

But somewhere out there, beyond the Marina and the city itself, was the worst news of all. A huge chunk of the Bay Bridge was dangling onto the lower level, and beyond that the Nimitz Freeway had pancaked on top of itself. If the Marina catastrophe was made more tolerable because it was predictable, the Bay Bridge and Nimitz were another category of disaster. This was not so predictable. These were industrial structures seemingly built to take the stress, built for earthquake country.

Yet, in San Francisco, those horrors remained at something of a distance. I went to a particular spot on Russian Hill that would give me a clear view of the bridge. I wanted to see how serious and how frightening the wounds looked. When I arrived there was a small knot of others staring across the bay with the same idea.

But we couldn’t see it. If fact, the failed section could not be seen from anywhere in San Francisco. The collapse had occurred on the second reach of the bridge, the reach on the other side of Treasure Island. It was hidden. The section in our view seemed as strong and as beautiful as ever.

So in mid-afternoon I drove back to downtown. In small ways the city was returning to itself. The silence had been replaced with the usual wailing and clatter. Street signals were turning on, one by one. And when I reached the hotel there wasn’t a parking space in sight. For once, I took that to be good news.