Summary

The chapter entitled “Mizpah’s Café” begins with chaos. On April 18, 1906 at 5:12 in the morning, San Francisco experienced a tremendous earthquake. The damage was extensive, and rich and poor and everyone in between lost their homes and their belongings—if not in the quake itself, then in the fires that resulted from the quake caused by broken gas lines. Solnit observes that “Nearly every municipal building was destroyed, and so were many of the downtown businesses, along with mansions, slums, middle-class neighborhoods, the dense residential-commercial district of Chinatown, newspaper offices, and warehouses” (13).

Mrs. Anna Amelia Holshauser was a beautician and a masseuse in San Francisco. Her home was slightly damaged and her business almost a total loss, so she moved on to Union Square ahead of the inevitable fires. Soon she and her traveling companion...