Feature

by Emily Landes

The massive destruction of the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires displaced tens of thousands. Faced with the monumental task of housing these now-homeless San Franciscans, leaders in the San Francisco Relief Corporation, San Francisco Park Services and the Army Corps of Engineers decided to create 5,610 well-built, affordable “earthquake cottages” that could be turned into permanent housing for the poorest refugees of the quake.

But even these far-thinking planners could never have expected that their cottages would still be used as housing today, nearly a century after they were built. Yet there are still at least 23 of these one-room shacks in areas ranging from the Sunset District to Bernal Heights, according to Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of western San Francisco.

LaBounty says his group became the “de facto champions of earthquake shacks” when he was notified that four cottages on Kirkham Street in the Sunset were about to be demolished by their owners. LaBounty told the owners about the historical significance of the shacks, and the surprised couple decided to donate their demolition budget to save the structures. A construction company stepped up and offered to move the cottages to their new home, the San Francisco Zoo.

After removing shingles, LaBounty and his team were amazed to discover the original “park bench” green color still on the shack walls. A team of archeologists found a number of other historical treasures under the houses, including newspapers from shortly after the quake, 1920s car parts, vintage board games, old coins and even a long-dead dog.

One year after saving the four shacks, LaBounty reports he will have at least one—a rare 10-foot-by-14-foot Type-A shack—ready for public display in time for the centennial. That cottage will be about half original and half reconstructed, and the other three shacks will likely have more or less the same amount of original wood as the nearly completed Type-A shack when they are renovated. With that much of the structures in need of replacement, is there any point in saving them? LaBounty comments that his group’s work on the shacks has less to do with maintaining authentic artifacts of the disaster, and more to do with showing San Franciscans that the fate of the refugees could soon be their own. “The story of the earthquake refugees is not over,” LaBounty reminds us. “It’s easy to look at the old pictures of the guys in their derby hats and the women in their long skirts and think it’s not relevant to us. But there’s going to be another Big One, and Katrina brings it home to San Francisco that your city can get destroyed again.”

LaBounty has a big supporter in the city’s Chief Building Inspector, Laurence Kornfield, who hopes to display a prototype for a modern earthquake cottage next to an original in a public earthquake centennial display. The display would be an attempt to get today’s city leaders as focused on the future as their 1906 counterparts. Kornfield observes: “Hurricane Katrina made it clear to me, and I hope to others, that we need to address longer-term temporary housing while we’re putting the city back together after a disaster.”