94 THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE. 
KOHL BUILDING. 
The Kohl Building was of steel-frame construction faced with the 
grayish-green sandstone which is referred to so often. It had reen- 
forced-concrete floors with furred ceilings and partitions of metal 
]ath and plaster. The window frames and sash were metal covered, 
and there was very little combustible matter in the finish. The 
doors, with their frames and jambs, were of wood covered with 
sheet metal. It is manifest that this building was not subjected to 
very intense heat, as the windows above the fourth story were 
unbroken and the stone was comparatively undamaged. The first, 
second, and third stories were burned out, and there was some damage 
in both the fourth story and the attic. 
The metal-covered doors in this building, however, prevented to 
some extent the spread of the fire within the building itself, so that 
where one room burned out, the fire coming in through a front 
window, an adjacent room was not burned because of the resistance 
offered by the door. The building could hardly have been sub- 
jected to a very fierce heat, however, for, if it had been, the light 
partitions would have failed, in which case the metal-covered doors 
would have been of no avail. Where the heat was really intense, 
the wood of doors, frames, and windows burned out under the metal 
anyway, but of course the metal covering delayed the ignition of 
the wood and later prevented it from burning freely. 
The structure known as the Merchants' Exchange was a steel- 
frame building with Eoebling cinder-concrete flat floor slabs, double 
wire-lath and plaster protection for the columns, and partitions 
made of light furring irons, wire lath, and plaster. In some places 
wire lath and plaster were applied to both sides of the furring 
strips; iu others the furring strips with the wire lath were simply 
plastered on both sides. This was one of the buildings in which 
the vault walls were made of the same materials as the partitions. 
Every vault in the building failed. All the partitions in the build- 
ing were a total loss; not only did the plaster have to come off, but 
the metal framework had to come down also. The floor construc- 
tion had a furred ceiling below it. The plaster had come down 
because of the heat on nearly all the ceilings, and probably as much 
as '20 per cent of the furring rods and wire lathing were down. 
Large areas of the face bricks were shaken from the wall of this 
building, owing to the fact that they were laid without bond. The 
rear wall was also damaged by the earthquake. The adhesion of the 
bricks and mortar seemed to be largely destroyed throughout the wall, 
