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,
slough and marsh, known as the Pipeville Slough, was the ground on which
the City Hall was built, and which was originally a burying ground. Sand
from the western shore had blown over and drifted into the marsh and
hardened its surface.

When the final grading scheme of the city was adopted in 1853, and
work went on, the water front of the city was where Clay Street now is,
between Montgomery and Sansome Streets. The present level area of San
Francisco of about three thousand acres is an average of nine feet
above or below the natural surface of the ground and the changes made
necessitated the transfer of 21,000,000 cubic yards from hills to
hollows. Houses to the number of thousands were raised or lowered,
street floors became subcellars or third stories and the whole natural
face of the ground was altered.

Through this infirm material all the pipes of the water and sewer system
of San Francisco in its b