They came at 4:30 in the morning — a few hundred people clustered around an ornate cast-iron fountain at the intersection of Market, Kearny, and Geary, some holding toddlers, others FaceTiming loved ones who couldn’t make it. A New Orleans jazz band woke everyone up. Willie Brown was there, holding court near the fountain’s base. At 5:12 a.m. exactly — 120 years to the minute after the ground began to shake — a fleet of historic fire apparatus loosed a siren salute into the dawn air, and the crowd fell silent.

This was the 120th annual commemoration of the 1906 earthquake and fire, held Saturday 18 at Lotta’s Fountain. Organizer Lee Houskeeper describes it as the longest-running public commemoration of any natural disaster in American history.

On April 18, 1906, a 7.9-magnitude rupture along the San Andreas Fault shook the city for roughly a minute. But the damage didn’t come all at once — and the impact on the city can still be felt to this day. Gas lines ruptured, water mains broke, and dozens of blazes burned for up to three days, destroying more than 80% of the city. The official death toll of more than 3,000 makes it the deadliest earthquake in American history.

Bob Sarlatte, the longtime voice of the 49ers who served as master of ceremonies, led the crowd through the disaster minute by minute — not like a history teacher but like a PA announcer, urgent and present-tense.

The ceremony followed its usual shape: remarks from city leaders — Fire Chief Dean Crispen, Police Chief Derrick Lew, Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman, and others — a wreath laid on the fountain, a moment of silence, and a communal singing of “San Francisco,” the anthem from the 1936 MGM film. Public works had made last-minute adjustments to install a water tank so the fountain could operate.

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Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, offered the morning’s sharpest line: “This earthquake is in our DNA, so we are all survivors.”

Among the crowd were Elizabeth O’Brien, 66, a dog walker who has lived in the city for 40 years and bought a special Edwardian outfit for the occasion. “It’s hard not to honor this city and how it grew back,” she said. 

“The city has been very generous to me — emotionally, professionally, educationally, financially,” added Francisco Mijango, a 55-year-old schoolteacher dressed in similarly vintage clothing.

For 39 years, the commemoration was organized almost single-handedly by Houskeeper, a San Francisco press agent who came to the city in 1980 and who says he spent his earlier career working with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. He stumbled into the role through his girlfriend at the time: her father was the last president of the South of Market Boys, a fraternal group that had been gathering at Lotta’s Fountain every April 18 since the early 20th century. When he grew too old to organize it, the responsibility passed down to Houskeeper.

In the early years, the real draw was the survivors themselves. Houskeeper’s job was to find them, interview them, and identify the best storytellers. “Every single one of them had a certain glint in their eyes,” he said. “If you’d been knocked out of your bed at 5:12 in the morning and watched your house burn down, you developed this really wicked, dry sense of humor.”

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When the last survivors died, a Chronicle reporter, Carl Nolte, gave him the line that kept the tradition going: “It’s not the survivors. San Francisco is the survivor.” This year, Houskeeper handed the reins to the Guardians of the City, a nonprofit made up largely of retired firefighters, police officers, and other first responders.

Then, as the sky turned blue and the sun crept up over the East Bay hills, the procession made its way about two miles south to the corner of 20th and Church Streets in the Mission District, for a second ceremony that felt like a small-town ritual. San Francisco natives made dedications before spraying gold paint on a small fire hydrant — a tradition dating to the 1960s.

When the 1906 fire was consuming the city and other hydrants ran dry, this one kept flowing. Volunteers used it to save the Mission District. It has been known ever since as the Little Giant. Houskeeper tells it with more color: the volunteers, he says, had been drinking the night before and more or less stumbled onto it.

Susan Levitt, a San Francisco astrologer who lives near Dolores Park, noted earlier in the week that 1906 was a Fire Horse year in the Chinese zodiac, a cycle that recurs every 60 years.

Fire Horse years come around every 60 years, and in Chinese astrology they’re considered the most intensely yang — maximum forward energy, action, no stopping to reflect. The horse is a warrior animal; fire is the most charged of the five elements. Combined, it means “go, do, don’t worry,” Levitt said. “Cover a lot of ground. Move forward quickly… You can anticipate every fire horse year for there to be a big, drastic change.”

She ticks off the pattern: 1906, the earthquake; 1966, the Cultural Revolution and the American counterculture; and now, 2026. “Look what’s happening with Trump and the politics of the world,” she said. “We’re just two months into it.”