Outline Map of San Francisco, Showing the Burned District, in Black, Comprising About One-Sixth the Total Area of the City. Note the Fact That the Entire Waterfront Was Saved.
- Title:
- Outline Map of San Francisco, Showing the Burned District, in Black, Comprising About One-Sixth the Total Area of the City. Note the Fact That the Entire Waterfront Was Saved.
- Alternate Title:
- Outline Map of San Francisco, Showing the Burned District, in Black, Comprising About One-Sixth the Total Area of the City
- Collection:
- Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection
- Creator:
- Dunn, Allen
- Date:
- 1906
- Date 2:
- 2024-04-25
- ID Number:
- 2368.01
- File Name:
- PJM_2368_01.jpg
- Style/Period:
- 1900 - 1919
- Subject:
- Advertising & Promotion
Deception/Distortion
Disaster/Health/Environment
Money & Finance
Railroads - Measurement:
- 27 x 40 (centimeters, height x width)
- Notes:
- This map is part of a massive public relations effort by the business and civic leaders of San Francisco to persuade the world that the city would recover fully and promptly from the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906. See generally Steinberg 2000, 26-33. “The battle to interpret the San Francisco disaster began even before the smoke had cleared. . . . California’s business class . . . expressed deep reservations about the adverse role all the publicity might have on the city’s commercial prospects.” (For examples of the kind of “adverse publicity” map feared by San Francisco’s leaders, see ID #1154, “Destruction of One of the Greatest Modern Cities,” and ID #1157, “San Francisco Burned District.”) The city’s public relations approach turned on the fact that “capitalists were wary of investing in seismically active locales because at the time it was believed that, in contrast to earthquakes, more could be done to avoid fires.” Accordingly, the city adopted a strategy of “seismic denial”: convincing the public that virtually all of the damage had been done by the fire, rather than the earthquake. Ibid. 26, 29, 32.
Among the leaders in pursuing that strategy aggressively was the Southern Pacific Company, “the dominant economic force in California at this time.” Ibid. 30. This map is part of a publication by Southern Pacific on a single folio sheet folded three times, such that it opens as a four-page brochure entitled “San Francisco the Imperishable.” The brochure (ID ##2368.03-.06) describes the damage to the city and the intensive recovery efforts already under way (including the railroad’s work transporting people and supplies) with a relentlessly upbeat view of the city’s future. But there is no doubt as to the central message: “The one object of this present emergency message from the publicity department of the Southern Pacific Company is to tell clearly . . . that San Francisco is by no means destroyed, that the lessons taught by Chicago and Baltimore and other fire-swept cities have not been lost here, and, most emphatically, that fire, terrible and unchecked, and not those forty-three seconds of the earth’s trembling was responsible for the tremendous damage, loss and destruction.”
The brochure unfolds to quarto size, revealing an “Outline Map of San Francisco, Showing the Burned District, in Black, Comprising About One-Sixth the Total Area of the City.” ID #2368.01. In fact, the map is profoundly misleading because the five-sixths of the city not destroyed by the fire - while within the formal city limits - was largely undeveloped, and virtually all of the city’s most important business and financial structures were lost. The caption below the map makes yet another point in support of the city’s recovery: “Note the Fact That the Entire Waterfront Was Saved.”
When the broadsheet is unfolded once more, the verso contains two photographs taken from approximately the same point. ID #2368.02. The first was taken “a Short Time After the Fire Started, Showing Comparatively Insignificant Damage Done by the Earthquake.” The second was taken four days later, “Showing the Damage by Fire and How the Substantial Structures Withstood Both Earthquake and Fire.” These photos may also be misleading, because we are not told either (i) how many of the building were destroyed in the interim not by the fire, but because of earthquake damage, or (ii) how many of the structures still standing would require demolition later because of earthquake damage.
Versions of this brochure - typically the text only, without the map and photos - were widely circulated; copies were reviewed at the time from Buffalo to Tasmania.
For another contemporaneous upbeat map, see ID #1155, “Ideal Picture and Map of San Francisco” (1906).
For further information on the Collector’s Notes and a Feedback/Contact Link, see https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/content/about-collection-personal-statement and https://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/content/feedback-and-contact - Source:
- Passenger Department, Southern Pacific Company. 1906. San Francisco the Imperishable. San Francisco: Southern Pacific Company.
- Format:
- Image
- Rights:
- For important information about copyright and use, see http://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/copyright.