A Park That Was Once a City of Tents

The green slope of Dolores Park on your right looks like it has always been a park, but for close to two years after nineteen oh six, it was closer to a refugee camp.

The earthquake and the fires that followed left a huge share of San Francisco's population without homes, somewhere between two hundred twenty seven thousand and three hundred thousand people out of a city of about four hundred ten thousand. More than sixteen hundred families moved into tents and makeshift shacks on this open ground, one of several camps the city and the Army set up across its parks. Citywide, the last of these official relief camps did not close until the summer of nineteen oh eight.

When the camp here finally broke up, not everyone simply walked away from the small wooden shacks the relief effort had built. Some families bought their shelters outright for a modest fee, hired movers, and hauled them on wheels to empty lots elsewhere in the city, where they were lifted onto permanent foundations and turned into real houses. A small number of these earthquake cottages, as they are sometimes called, reportedly still stand today, scattered through San Francisco's western neighborhoods, disguised behind added rooms and new siding, their origin as disaster housing mostly invisible from the street.

So the open lawn you are passing was once packed edge to edge with canvas and lumber, a temporary city stacked on top of a park, and pieces of it, quietly, outlived the disaster that created them by more than a century.