Shakedown Street

INSTRUCTIONS: Before you read this book, while you're reading this book, or after you've read this book --- please have a look at this awesome and rare film footage of a trip by cable car down Market Street, shot sometime not long before the city was shaken and burned to the ground in 1906. (music: SHAKEDOWN STREET, by the Grateful Dead)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwsWVIw-5c4&list=PLWl1C8k1ZuOjVpozmWReu5qlef2QsD4eB 

THE EARTH SHOOK, THE SKY BURNED 
by William Bronson (368 pages)

©1959 I’ve read about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, but I’ve never seen a book so lavishly illustrated with rare, vintage photos of the disaster, over 275 in all.

One photographer stands out above the rest for the quantity and quality of his shots of the devastation: Arnold Genthe. Genthe emigrated from Prussia to San Francisco in 1895. There he taught himself photography. He was especially fascinated by the Chinese section of the city, and often took pictures of the area’s camera-shy residents by hiding his camera under his coat. About 200 of his Chinatown pictures survive, the only known photos of the area before the 1906 earthquake/fire. A new Chinatown, with a much more Oriental look, was built on the ashes of the old.

A quarter of a million people were left homeless and 450 people died in the earthquake and the fire that obliterated 490 blocks (2,831 acres) of the city. This excellent book, published 50 years after event, tells the story of the terrible tragedy and the rebuilding of a new San Francisco.