Black Fire by Robert Graysmith Read Free Book Online Page A

Washington and Clay streets, but they would be completely rebuilt by spring. If San Francisco’s citizens were lazy when it came to forming a fire department, they set about rebuilding with awesome zeal. The Square’s planked streets were still steaming as men galloped onto the surrounding mud-pit streets and leaped from their horses. Wagons carted fresh lumber down from the hills. Sailors ripped planks from the decks of the abandoned Ghost Fleet ships to incorporate into presumably haunted houses. At each site, men cleared rubbish in a minute. Within an hour, amid a racket of axes, saws, and hammers, men had raised the frames of three houses, nailed still-smoldering lumber into place, and hammered warm nails into scorched timbers. Their smoking hammers described graceful arcs in the cool air.
    Tirelessly the men labored on. No sooner had they raised a block of new frameworks than a terrible gale from the sea sent them crashing into the mud. Indefatigably they lifted the timbers and stood themagain. Down the beams went again, only to be thrown back up. Broderick walked the ruins looking for clues. The highly vaunted new metal houses had failed miserably and lay as misshapen grotesques, iron ovens that had baked everything inside. The uncompleted brick house that had stopped the spread of the fire interested him the most. The ex-fireman examined it for some time and even went away with one of the bricks.
    No one else took heed of the indestructible building, but labored only on buildings identical to those that had burned: slight frame structures with split clapboard exteriors nailed on and interiors of simple unbleached cotton cloth, stretched smooth, with ceilings of bleached cloth that sagged in the middle. For partitions, a frame was raised, cloth and paper were applied to both sides, and a gap of air was left between. A private dwelling took two days to construct. A hotel took four days to erect and a church six days. Within the time it took to raise a church, six large houses had been roofed, weatherproofed, and completed, with four others almost done. “Beat that in the East if you can!” roared one worker, slapping his thigh as another dwelling shot up from the smoking mud—the Boomtown way.
    A month earlier Captain Cole had arrived with twenty-five kits for wooden houses, numbered in sections for easy assembly. The prefabricated houses from New England were prepainted white and trimmed green. Thousands more of these prefab wooden sectionals—hospitals, churches, even bowling alleys—were at that moment being shipped west from Baltimore, Philadelphia, London, and Hamburg. Tasmania and China exported to the Bay Area portable ready-mades with mortised joints for effortless construction. Darkness fell, but the blackened figures rising from the mud were already smiling. “I have now only a $1.50 in my pocket,” one optimist said, “but I do not care, for before many days are over, I will have a $150.” Nothing could keep the greatest go-ahead city down. Singing and whistling, the laborers worked through the night as the fog came in and made them look like ghosts.
    The morning after, Christmas Day, a few planked streets were still smoking. The cracked mud around them was still baking. When Broderick, wheezing, trudged to the blackened ruins, he saw that except for Delmonico’s, the Square had simply vanished. In the fire’s wake, land sharks cruised the ashes with papers and pens raised above their heads like fins. Tirelessly they crested the blackened hills seeking opportunities to buy gambling dens of their own. The time was ripe. A dozennew wagering concerns were already flourishing out of small tents. The more established gamblers saw money being lost and clamored for their burned gambling parlors to be rebuilt immediately. Dennison was arguing with Mr. Cornwall, the contractor. “I want my Exchange returned to action within two weeks,” he bellowed.
    “An impossibility, Mr. Dennison,” Cornwall replied,