31st Floor Downtown SF for the Quake of 89

I was working on the 31st floor of the 101 California Bldg in downtown San Francisco when the earthquake hit. My girlfriend and I both worked for Russian stock brokers, and they had called us in to work their phones that afternoon. We had just caught a bus, and a cable [...]

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My earthquake story

I was going to school at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, back when it was located at 19th and Ortega Streets. On the late afternoon of October 17th, I had stopped at a ‘mom and pop’ corner market at 19th and Ortega to pick up a bottle of grape juice and a small package [...]

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My experience of Loma Prieta…Shak’n it up!…

A couple of months before the Big EQ I was fishing on the Delta and threw my line out and snagged a passing ski boat and skier.  I yelled to my wife to give me my fishing knife quick! I cut the line just before it ran out of string and probably [...]

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Earthquakes: More Than Just Destructive Forces

I was six years old, which is strange, because I have a hard time remembering anything else other than this event around this age. I was raised in a neighborhood called Forest Hills in San Francisco, California. Not a lot of people outside of the neighborhood, tourists especially, know the strategic importance Forest Hill has [...]

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In the Financial District

It was five o’clock, and I’d just gotten off work in the Financial District of downtown San Francisco. I called my wife, Jan, and I recall becoming angry after I’d talked with her. It seemed that she was putting words in my mouth. I had been talking along cheerfully, when suddenly she said: “I can [...]

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Rock and Walk

I had just started a new job about a month before and was on my way home. I had waited FOREVER for a bus but the World Series was in progress so I figured that was what caused the delay. Finally I reached the TransBay Terminal. As I crossed over the expansion joints of the [...]

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Loma Prieta

I’m a Bay Area native. I lived on Carl Street at Stanyan in the outer Haight that day. I was a tour guide and did a Chinatown tour in the morning. After that, I ran upstairs into the stacks at the main library for some research material, drove across the Bay Bridge to Oakland on [...]

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My roommate was in the shower during the quake. I yelled to him “It’s an earthquake!” and he yelled back “No shit!”
We stood in line at Crown Hardware on Balboa with people to get batteries (power was out and the clerk sold things out of the store doorway), while my roommate told other people in [...]

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Loma Prieta Quake

Address @ time of quake:
1490 30th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94122
Like many people that day I had hurried home to watch Game 3 of the “Battle of the Bay”. I had just finished riding a friend (Mike Gomes) on the back of my motorcycle over to the Port of Oakland to board a Sealand container ship [...]

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Reading Pinter by Candlelight

(written in October 1999)
My recollections of ’89 aren’t particularly earth-shattering compared to others, I’m sure, but they are vivid. I’d been in San Francisco for a little over a year, having moved here from Ireland in July of 1988 right after college. At 22, I was a grad student in Creative Writing at SFSU, shy [...]

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