Landslide sets San Francisco's nerves on edge

It's never good news when the earth moves in San Francisco. Yesterday several hundred startled, bemused but apparently unharmed residents and business-owners gazed at a large gash of exposed earth where a chunk of Telegraph Hill, in the heart of the city, used to be.

A 75ft-wide slab of granite and sandstone hillside had come loose in the middle of the night, tearing away at the foundations of a multi-storey condominium complex at the top and then thundering down on to Broadway at the bottom of the hill.

The landslide managed to cover the gamut of San Francisco's social system in a single city block. The condos were luxury dwellings with views of North Beach and Nob Hill, while the building at the end of the line was a strip club, the Broadway Showgirls Cabaret, whose staff had closed up for the night less than an hour before the hill gave way.

"If I'd been there at the time, I'd have been dead," the strip club manager, Ian Cabungcal, told The San Francisco Chronicle. "There is a rock the size of a Volkswagen in the middle of my office."

Telegraph Hill rises eastwards from North Beach, the old Italian neighbourhood and famed Beatnik hangout once frequented by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Its single most startling feature is Coit Tower, best known for its socialist-inspired murals of working-class San Francisco in the 1930s.

Coit Tower ­ named after its benefactor, Lillie Hitchcock Coit ­ was unharmed in the landslide, but seven buildings were deemed uninhabitable, at least temporarily, making 120 people homeless.

City officials said the slide was probably caused by heavy rainfall ­ San Francisco saw half an inch last weekend. In a city perennially on edge in anticipation of the Big One, a major earthquake to match the disaster of 1906, when San Francisco was all but wiped out, even minor events like this are cause for city-wide anxiety and debate.

Telegraph Hill has a reputation for standing on solid rock, unlike many parts of the city which sit on reclaimed land prone to "liquefaction" ­ a process that, during an earthquake, in effect turns the ground to jelly.