San Francisco is an odd place. It is always changing, but still rooted to its past. One of the great traditions is a celebration of a disaster - the 1906 earthquake and fire, marked every year just before dawn on April 18 at Lotta's Fountain on Market Street.

For years, the stars of the anniversary show were men and women who had lived through the 1906 disaster, earthquake survivors, grown old and bent with age. Now there are only two - Ruth Newman, who is 112 and William Del Monte, who is 108.

Neither is likely to make it to Lotta's Fountain this year. In a sense, though, the city itself is a survivor of the events of 1906 - the splendid Ferry Building, reborn in the 21st century, and the city's celebrated Victorian houses, in the Western Addition and the Mission, which were all spared from the fires that destroyed the rest of the city.

Hidden in plain sight

There are also humble survivors - small funky buildings called refugee shacks. There were 5,610 of them, homely little houses erected in city parks to house families made homeless by the catastrophe.

Until recently, it was thought that only a handful were left, fading away like the human survivors. Now it turns out that maybe 100 of them are left, rediscovered by modern research, much altered and remodeled, hidden in plain sight.

There are a few on public display: One at the San Francisco Zoo, a couple at the Presidio. The rest are in private hands. They are people's homes. There are two dozen of them in Bernal Heights, three in the Sunset District, four in Ocean View, several more in Daly City, a few in San Bruno and at least one in Santa Cruz.

If you keep a sharp eye out from the BART train heading south from Balboa Park to Daly City, you can see three more in a backyard on De Long Street, just on the San Francisco side of the county line.

"I got a call from a man in Modesto who said he had a refugee shack there and I have no reason to doubt him," said David Gallagher, president of the Western Neighborhoods Project and an authority on the refugee shacks.

Temporary housing

The shacks are a small story from a huge disaster. When the earth stopped shaking and the fires cooled, San Francisco was a mess. There were 250,000 homeless. A lot of people moved away, never to return. But the real San Franciscans stayed with the city.

So a relief committee built temporary housing in city parks. Washington Square, Portsmouth Square and Dolores Park all had refugee camps. The houses were designed by the U.S. Army and came in three sizes: small, smaller and smallest, which was only 10 feet wide and 14 feet deep.

They were pretty basic: One room, no kitchen, no bathroom. The walls were of redwood, the floors were fir.

When the camps closed, in the summer of 1907, the shacks were offered to the tenants on one condition: They had to take them away.

"Basically, they gave them away free," Gallagher said.

There were more than 200 shacks in Precita Park, at the foot of Bernal Heights, which was out in the country then with plenty of open space. The new owners used mules to haul the shacks away. Sometimes they cobbled two of them together to make what Gallagher calls "funky little houses."

And they are still there. One of the best is at 43 Carver St., at the top of the hill, a house made of two shacks facing a nice garden. Just outside is a stunning view of the city.

There is another two-shack house at 20 Newman St., near Holly Park, and others all over the hill.

Part of modern city

The shacks were meant to last only a couple of years, and here they are, almost 108 years later. "People who live in them love them," Gallagher said.

The little old shacks are not architectural curiosities. They are part of the modern city. One of the shacks, on Cortland Avenue complete with bay windows and a porch, has rainbow flags in the flower boxes. A particularly handsome little refugee house, at 164 Bocana St., just below the Bernal Heights park, is the headquarters of a dog-walking service.

Average market value now: close to $800,000.
