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 | | 100 Years Later |  | | FuFu Lighting |
But my office-mate Samuel and I drove downtown later in the evening to see the pretty lights adorning the Ferry Building downtown at the shore. These were taken with a Palm Treo 650 (I know, not a real camera), but you can get the idea.
Remember that we are not exactly celebrating the quake, but rather, we're mourning how it destroyed virtually the entire city along with nearly one thousand lives. It stung the national economy as well, a phenomena that few people realize. Any disaster, manmade or otherwise, tends to have a cascading effect. And the Great Earthquake certainly did.
This isn't the first time that I've seen a city honor their losses from a past disaster. Years ago I watched Chicago pay tribute to the 125th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It's a legend we Chicagoans love to tell... about a cow in a barn that knocked over a lamp, started a fire that spread and burned for days, and nearly flattened the entire city. There was also the Great Peshtigo Fire, also in 1871, that burned most of Wisconsin and Michigan. America definitely had plenty of growing pains in those days, and hopefully that era is one that has long passed!
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