crescent-shaped expanse, we find a broad extent of low ground, sloping
gently toward the bay. On this low-lying flat was built all of San
Francisco's business houses, all its principal hotels and a large part
of its tenements and poorer dwellings. It was here that the earthquake
was felt most severely and that the fire started which laid waste the
city.

Rarely has a city been built on such doubtful foundations. The greater
part of the low ground was a bay in 1849, but it has since been filled
in by the drifting sands blown from the ocean side by the prevailing
west winds and by earth dumped into it. Much of this land was "made
ground." Forty-niners still alive say that when they first saw San
Francisco the waters of the bay came up to Montgomery Street. The Palace
Hotel was in Montgomery Street, and from there to the ferry docks--a
long walk for any man--the water had been driven back by a "filling-in"
process.

This is the district that especially suffered, that south of Market
and east of Montgomery Streets. Nearly all the large buildings in this
section are either built on piles driven into the sand and mud or were
raised upon wooden foundations. It is on such ground as this that the
costly Post Office building was erected, despite the protests of nearly
the entire community, who asserted that the ground was nothing but a
filled-in bog.

In none of the earthquakes that San Francisco has had was any serious
damage except to houses in this filled-in territory, and to houses built
along the line of some of the many streams which ran from the hills down
to the bay, and which were filled in as the town grew--for instance,
the Grand Opera House was built over the bed of St. Anne's Creek. A bog,