1906: A Novel Book

If high school text books read like James Dalessandro's "1906," nobody would sleep through history class.

The apocalyptic earthquake that levelled San Francisco on April 18, 1906 started at 5:12 A.M. Fifty-three seconds later, the "Paris of the Pacific" was a pile of rubble. A hellish three-day firestorm followed, cremating the ruins. Final toll: 5,000 dead, 29,000 buildings collapsed or burned to the ground; 80 percent of the city erased from the map.

San Francisco on the eve of its destruction wasn't Sodom and Gomorrah, but you could see it from Telegraph Hill. Sin and corruption suited the city's rough and tumble, gold-fever, get-rich-quick citizenry. City Hall was a cesspool of bribery; its infamous, red-light Barbary Coast was Satan's crib - chockablock with whorehouses, saloons and gambling dens where you could get drunk get laid, get robbed and get shanghaied to China, all in one night.

Dalessandro's sprawling, colorful novel fully exploits the reader-grabbing potential of both themes - humanity's persistent vices, and the unfathomably destructive power of a 7.8 earthquake unleashed on a criminally unprepared city.

"1906" is big, bold, operatic historical fiction.

You viscerally root for the good guys, like the novel's narrator, plucky muckraker Annalisa Passarelli, and the virtuous Brotherhood (a secret clique of ethical cops), as they attempt to take down venal S.F. Mayor Eugene Schmitz and the avaricious political machine which owns him (Schmitz isn't fictional; in real life, President Teddy Roosevelt and federal investigators were preparing to nail him on the eve of the disaster).

The bad guys are soap-opera bad - Shakespearean villains you want to jump up and punch. Cartoon characters? Hardly. The Darwinian ethics and scandalous excesses of America's ruling class and their muscle during America's Gilded Age are shocking in hindsight. The rich owned the police, Congress and the court system. They did what they damn well pleased. The injustices inflicted by the powerful on the urban working poor at the end of the 19th century made a mockery of democracy. San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and other major U.S. cities were awash with vulnerable immigrants treated like animals, routinely cheated and scammed, living in horrific squalor. No safety net existed in 1906 - no Social Security, no food stamps, no Medicaid, no OSHA. If you lost an arm to a factory machine, you were tossed aside without compensation. Photographers Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and Lewis Hine (1874-1940) have left us a painful record of the era. Hine risked his life to document the nation's child labor scandal - ten-year-old kids slaving away in noisy, dangerous factories 12 hours a day. Company goons threatened and harassed him every step of the way. Riis famously focused his lens on the over-crowded, fetid, fire-trap tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Meanwhile, across the continent, San Francisco's "Big Four" - Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington - vied to construct the largest, most lavish palace on Nob Hill. "Stanford built a fifty room palace whose entrance boasted a 75-foot high vestibule with the twelve signs of the zodiac done in black marble, a hothouse conservatory, indoor Corinthian pillars of Aberdeen granite, mechanical singing birds, a music room where a servant changed cylinders every few minutes so that a continual stream of classical music was piped throughout the house, and a miniature railroad." (According to Wikipedia, "In the 1970s the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder"). As wealthy Anson Hunter says in Fitzgerald's famous novelette, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." Never more true than turn-of-the-century America. Dalessandro gets your juices flowing. As Passarelli and the Brotherhood close in on Schmitz and the city's crooked nabobs, you're passing the hang noose.

The novel brims with finely-observed period detail that snaps scenes into sharp focus. Ever ridden San Francisco's famous cable cars? Here's the ride Easter morning 1906: "The city's only Negro gripman eased the brake lever and ratcheted up the hook that snagged the heavy cable underground. The six-ton car lurched forward, jerking and rumbling past the Victorian row houses. Within seconds the rising sun illuminated the entire bay and filled the cable car with blinding amber light."

Pages are crammed with Michener factoids. Passarelli leans out her fourth-floor window at the Fairmont hotel and describes an Easter Day street march jammed with political and social protesters: "...pickets seeking higher wages for chambermaids, Industrial Unionism, shorter hours for carpenters, Suffrage for women, vegetarianism, enforced temperance, recruits for Socialism, and end to Imperialism. The Prevent Premature Burial consortium, the short-lived Committee for Improved Mastication ('32 Chews to a Healthier You'), appeared to have lost steam to the point of near extinction, as had the Back to Africa outfits. A roller skater headed for the frightening plunge down Mason Street, almost taking one of the Temperance women with him."

His research is impeccable. Dalessandro's cinematic description of the horrific earthquake and firestorm fits the facts. The doomed city is destroyed, minute by minute, street by street, pretty much as history records.

The author's storytelling skills are backed by a lifetime working as a screenwriter and poet. Together with his Beat Generation pals Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ken Kesey ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; "Sometimes a Great Notion") Dalessandro co-founded in 1972 the famous Santa Cruz Poetry Festival, then headed to Hollywood and UCLA film school. He wrote and sold a half dozen screenplays; penned the San Francisco noir thriller "Bohemian Heart" (1993); true crime "Citizen Jane"(1999 - subsequently a Hallmark Channel movie); and published "1906" two years before the centennial of the celebrated quake. Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks and Warner Bros. engaged in a legendary bidding war for the film rights before the novel was even finished, but the book never made it through the Hollywood meat grinder to become a movie. Instead, a decade later tinsel town regurgitated this summer's flashy, but formulaic "San Andreas," now playing in a theater near you. Dalessandro is currently turning "Bohemian Heart" into a TV series with the help of his friend Bobby Moresco (2005 Academy Award winner "Million Dollar Baby").

Meanwhile, "1906," re-issued in Kindle, made the Amazon Top 100 this Spring.

Geologists agree that San Francisco will inevitably be destroyed again. In 1989, the city shrugged off the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake, but the USGS estimates a 7 percent chance that the "Big One" (magnitude 8) will occur in California within the next 30 years.

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