Eyewitness account by James Hopper
I looked at my watch and was astounded to see that it was only half past eight On Valencia Street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, the Valencia Hotel, a four-story wooden lodging-house was down, its four stories telescoped to the height of one, its upper rooms ripped open with the cross-section effect of a doll-house. A squad of policemen and some fifty volunteers were working with rageful energy at the tangle of walls and rafters. The street here was sunk six feet, and again, as I was to see it many times more, I saw that strange angular raise of the tracks as if the ground had been pinched between some gigantic fingers.
— James Hopper, Our San Francisco. In Everybody's Magazine, June 1906.
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