Is San Francisco all it’s cracked up to be?

SAN FRANCISCO – Historians of the 1906 earthquake generally agree on this point: San Francisco will fall again in a future quake. But they disagree over whether people should love the city or leave it.

As San Francisco prepared to mark today’s centennial of the Great Quake, two leading historians staked out differing positions on the region’s long-term prospects. One envisioned an abandoned, quake-battered San Francisco Bay area in ruins; the other said he has planted roots here and isn’t budging.

Simon Winchester, author of “A Crack In The Edge Of The World,” a book about the disaster that struck on April 18, 1906, can imagine a time hundreds of years hence when San Francisco is deserted.

“There will come a time when the city is knocked down again and again and again,” he said.

Philip L. Fradkin, author of “The Great Earthquake And Firestorms Of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself,” didn’t disagree, but like millions of others, he has chosen to make the Bay Area his home in spite of the threat.

“San Francisco fell and it will fall again,” Fradkin said. “And if we can’t deal with the realities of history, we’re lost.”

Fradkin and Winchester spoke at a Commonwealth Club forum on the Great Quake, one of dozens of Bay Area events this week commemorating the event.

Fradkin lives in Point Reyes Station, north of San Francisco. The San Andreas Fault, source of the magnitude 7.8 temblor, runs close by. He said he has decided to live with the threat, but “intelligently,” by keeping history at the forefront of his mind.

Winchester, a British native who lives in New York, mused about whether the wave of dedications, plaques and speeches taking place this week will be replicated for other earthquakes.

At that point, said Winchester, who trained as a geologist, “the citizenry will begin to say, ‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,’ and will perhaps move somewhere else.

“Knowing what we know now – that this is one of the most dangerous, unstable tectonic boundaries on the face of the planet … would you put a city on top of it? Of course not,” he said.

But Fradkin pointed out that the same forces that give Northern California earthquakes also give it dramatic, mountainous landscape. “You can move to Iowa where it’s flat and there is no danger,” Fradkin said. “I’m going to keep living here.”