California in 1906 - San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley

H.A. Candrian, working with B.W. Candrian, published this map of the city and county of San Francisco in 1906, the same year the great earthquake and fire devastated much of the city, and the sheet records that disaster directly by marking the burned district in a heavy green outline across the affected blocks. The verso carries a companion map of Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, extending the sheet's usefulness across the bay at the very moment when tens of thousands of displaced San Franciscans were relocating to those East Bay cities in the disaster's immediate aftermath. Advertisements from local firms including McAvoy O'Hara & Company and the California Art Glass Works run along the map's margins, a common commercial practice for maps distributed to a rebuilding public that needed practical local information as much as geography. Published as a stand-alone separate map rather than an atlas plate, it stands as one of the most historically specific documents in San Francisco's cartographic record.

The fire district is delineated in a heavy green line across the heart of the city, marking the precise extent of the catastrophe that followed the April 1906 earthquake and reshaping how residents and planners alike understood the scale of what needed to be rebuilt. Golden Gate Park appears intact beyond the burned zone, one of the city's major green spaces that survived the disaster largely undamaged and that would serve as a refugee camp for thousands in the weeks after the fire. Streetcar lines, railways, and major public buildings are marked throughout the surviving and rebuilt districts, giving the map a documentary role in tracking which parts of the city's infrastructure had come through intact. Together the fire boundary and the surrounding transit network make this sheet a direct visual record of San Francisco at its lowest point and the start of its recovery.

This map is a meaningful choice for a San Francisco family whose history includes the 1906 disaster, someone researching where relatives relocated across the bay in its aftermath, or a collector focused specifically on earthquake-era California cartography. Among the Vault's several San Francisco sheets, this Candrian map is the only one to record the earthquake and fire directly, standing apart from the Rand McNally, Langley, Gray, and Faust plans, which all depict the city in calmer decades. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.