LAYOUT OF CITY AND CHARACTER OF BUILDINGS. 141 
tion in this respect has led to the use of inferior materials and the evasion of 
building laws and the underwriters' recommendations. San Francisco possesses 
building laws in plenty, which require enforcement rather than alteration. A 
valuable addition to present ordinances would be one similar to that in force in 
some European countries, which penalizes owners for fires that escape from their 
buildings, affording protection to men disposed to build well. 
EFFECT OF THE LAYOUT OF THE CITY AND THE CHARACTER OF 
THE BUILDINGS. 
San Francisco, as already stated, is divided into three great dis- 
tricts. Market street, the great artery of the city, 120 feet wide, runs 
southwestward from the bay, and divides the city into two parts — 
first, a level district on the south, largely filled with wooden build- 
ings, factories, foundries, lodging houses, and the like, but around 
the bay extremity of the street covered to a considerable extent with 
buildings of brick, stone, or steel frame; second, the uneven and in 
its remoter parts hilly district on the north. This northerly portion 
is subdivided by Van Ness avenue, which separates the older resi-. 
dence district from the newer one on the west. 
In the older section of the city, between Market street and Van 
Ness avenue, the streets had been established under the old Spanish 
system of'"100-vara lots," as they are locally known, each block 
containing about 76,000 square feet. West of Van Ness avenue and 
south of Market street, in parts of the city more recently surveyed 
and built upon, the blocks are much larger, and — particularly along 
Market, Mission, and adjacent streets to the south — were built up 
with very long rows of buildings, many of them continuous for 
hundreds of feet. These blocks were so large that it was found 
necessary, or at least convenient, to subdivide many of them by nar- 
row streets or alleys that permitted the ingress and ogress of carts 
and drays. It was easy for the flames to pass across those narrow 
streets, and the heat was in many places so great that buildings on 
the opposite side of the street were ignited by the heated air without 
the passage of any flames. 
More than 00 per cent of the buildings in San Francisco were of 
wooden-frame construction, and many of the now. modern, and so- 
called "fireproof" buildings were surrounded by frame structures 
of an old type, and, of course, were injured or destroyed by their 
combustion. The fire limits permitted those wooden structures t«> 
approach rather close to the business section; and in the congested 
business district at least 30 per cent of the buildings were of frame 
construction, some of them four or five stories in height. Outside 
of the congested district many business houses and almost all dwell- 
ings were frame structures, and except in the outskirts of the < it\ 
