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View Full Version : Color stereo photographs of San Francisco after '06 quake found



Shailendra
9-Mar-2011, 22:48
Apologies if this has already been posted...

http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/09/6231373-color-stereo-photographs-of-san-francisco-after-06-quake-found

Vaughn
9-Mar-2011, 23:06
I was just looking at a panoramic of SF, right after the quake while the city was burning. It was 8 to 10 inches wide and about 60 inches long. The fire was, at the time of the photograph, in two portions of the city. There was a good space between the two, so it appears to have been at least two sources of the fires.

What was interesting was the lack of damage visible -- definitely some damage, but not what one would expect -- the main damage was done by fire and by the dynamite used to try to great firebreaks.

The panoramic was different than the scenes in the OP link! The OP link images are different from the images coming out of Christchurch. The images in the link show very little rubble -- the wood structures are just gone.

Good find -- color stereos!

Vaughn

Dave Jeffery
10-Mar-2011, 08:28
OT to large format photography

I worked at the St Francis Hotel during the big earhtquake in 1989 and once the buildings were inspected for damage and we went back to work the manager pulled out a photo album of the 1906 earthquake. The old large format pictures of the damage to the city were amazing and one could tell that the photo album was seldom opened.

Almost all of the buildings in that area of the city were flattened and with only a few buildings left standing and the images looked like scenes from Nagasaki. There were very long tables set up in front of the hotel as the hotel's kitchens were used to feed the workers that were rebuilding the city.

The original hotel structure that was built in 1903 is still solid to this day and the new tower that was built around 1970 was proudly presented as one of the first to be designed like and inverted T shape on rollers so that when an earthquake stuck it would just flex and shift somewhat freely. The old building is stone and concrete and the new building is the more flexible steel and glass tower design which allows the building to be taller and shift. Both buildings survived the quake and were inspected and opened within a few days.

The gentlemen that I worked with on the 32nd floor of the new tower told me that when the earthquake hit they had to run and grab onto walls and shelving as the whole building was shifting like jello below thier feet and swaying about three feet side to side.

A lot of the big glass windows fell out of the I Magnun building and it looked like crushed ice on the street from the 32nd floor. The real scare in SF is that if an earthquake hits that is powerful enough the glass will be six feet deep in the streets between the tallest buidlings.

"Victors" was a showpiece five diamond, five star restaurant at the top of the tower and no expense was spared to make it one of the finest dining rooms in America. The window sizes and spacing were designed specifically for the size of the adjacent tables. The master sommelier was one of less than 20 in the country at that time and there were many dusty old bottles of the finest wines in the world on the list that were stored and rotated for decades in the cellar. One woman's job was just to press fresh ground coffee and serve cognacs. The coins that were given to the guests were washed by hand by a gentleman in the hotel. The Queen of England used to stay there and Gerald Ford was shot outside the hotel, and it was a famous landmark at the time. The end of the age of granduer restaurants at the top of the city's towers would soon came to a close, ending a chapter in the city's culinary history.

It would be great for someone to scan the images from that photo album and post them online, and to preserve them off site.

Sorry for the OT post but it's a tidbit of history from an wonderful city.

Jack Dahlgren
10-Mar-2011, 09:40
The panoramic was different than the scenes in the OP link! The OP link images are different from the images coming out of Christchurch. The images in the link show very little rubble -- the wood structures are just gone.

Good find -- color stereos!

Vaughn

The images in the link are from October 6, 1906. The earthquake was April 18th. So it is not surprising that the rubble has been cleared as half a year has passed. You can see cranes on top of some of the buildings in the background indicating that reconstruction is well underway.