San Francisco, California, March 28, 1944.

Midnight on the skid row, and the devil had a book of matches.

The New Amsterdam Hotel stood at the southeast corner of 4th and Clementina streets,

a three-story pile in the heart of San Francisco's

south of Market District, brick from the foundation to the second floor, bare-frame

construction above that, 50 feet of frontage on Fourth Street, a hundred and ten feet of depth

running along Clementina, which was less a street than an alley with pretensions. The neighborhood was what

polite San Franciscans called south of the slot, after the cable car track that divided Market

Street. Everybody else called it Skid Row. The new Amsterdam housed the kind of people

Skid Row always houses, pensioners, day laborers, drifters, wartime transients chasing

defense work at the shipyards across the bay. 70 souls packed into that building on any given

night, some rooms holding three or four bodies. The rooms were small, the doors were thin,

the hallways were narrow, and the upper two floors burned

like kindling, because that is exactly what they were. The New Amsterdam fire was not even the

first fire in the district that evening. It was the sixth. San Francisco fire officials had been

scrambling through the south of market all night, chasing blazes that

kept sparking in closets, bathrooms, and lavatories of nearby rooming houses and hotels.

Five fires before midnight, each one small enough to stamp out, each one bearing the same signature,

charred remnants of paper, the faint stink of kerosene.

Somebody was working the district with accelerant and a grudge, lighting fires the way

a man drops coins from a hole in his pocket, and the fire department was running out of

hands to catch them. The first alarm for the new Amsterdam came in at 1155 p.m. on March 27th. By the calendar,

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