Many of these so-called California Bonanza Kings had helped build the city's prestigious buildings, luxury hotels, and palatial mansions. The downtown business district included many striking steel structures, and the demand for housing throughout the city had increased the number of houses from 50,000 in 1900 to 85,000 in 1906.
The city was substantial enough to support three major newspapers and one promising newcomer, as well as a variety of smaller papers and specialty publications; San Francisco's Chinatown district published three newspapers entirely in Chinese, for example. More newspapers were published across the bay in Oakland and in many of the surrounding towns. One of the most prominent was William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, which he had run since taking over from his father in 1887. In 1906, Hearst was across the country, in the middle of an ultimately unsuccessful run for the governorship of New York; the Examiner's work continued under an expert editorial staff back in San Francisco.
The buildings housing the three morning papers - the Examiner, the Call, and the Chronicle - were all located within 100 feet of one another along Market Street, in the city's main business district. The area known informally as "Newspaper Row" was the intersection of Market, Third, and Kearney. The Call was located in the Carl Spreckels Building; at 18 stories, it was the tallest skyscraper in the city. The Call-Spreckels Building, as it was referred to, was a distinctive structure, capped by an elaborate dome that made it easy to pick out in the city's skyline. Farther away, on Ninth Street, were the offices of the Bulletin, a 4-year-old paper just starting to come into its own, in part because of the dedicated work of its editor, Freemont Older. Other papers included the Daily News.
Most of San Francisco's journalists had some experience covering local disasters, and the city itself had experienced ea...