From a distance, the neoclassic lines of City Hall sweep grandly to the sky, a symbol of municipal pride seemingly far removed from the 15 seconds in 1989 when its walls trembled before the Earth's fury.
But inside, rough-hewn scaffolding offers a reminder that City Hall, like the San Francisco Bay area, hasn't quite recovered from the earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989."Earthquakes very quickly lose a lot of money for a lot of people and it's difficult to come back from that," said Thomas Tobin, director of California's Seismic Safety Commission.
For Cathi Scarpa, the difficulty has been more personal. She still feels the pain of the devastating injuries she suffered when a collapsed freeway smashed the van she was riding in.
Scarpa suffered a lacerated liver and head injuries and one of her legs was crushed and the other broken. She will spend the second anniversary of the quake on Thursday undergoing surgery to remove rods and plates placed in her body to help it mend.
"It's still not exactly where it was before. That's the hardest thing," said Scarpa, 39, a nursing teacher.
The 7.1-magnitude quake struck as the San Francisco Giants were about to play the Oakland Athletics in a World Series game in San Francisco.
The quake killed 63 people and injured 3,700. Forty-two of the dead were buried under the collapsed Cypress Freeway in Oakland.
A draft report by the Seismic Safety Commission estimates $10 billion in direct and indirect losses, including damage to 24,000 homes, 3,500 businesses and 140 public buildings.
Two years later, much of the damaged property has been swept up, shored up or replaced, but many testaments to the earthquake remain.
Several highways that buckled and cracked remain closed, their on-ramps barricaded.
City Hall is structurally safe but still in need of $100 million in repairs. Across the bay, a sign atop the Oakland City Hall reads, "Building closed until further notice."
Damaged houses ranged from San Francisco's famous Victorian mansions to ramshackle refuges of the poor.
Two years later, cheap housing, always scarce, has become even harder to find.
In Oakland, 2,500 people were left homeless by the earthquake and 1,500 still don't have permanent shelter, the seismic commission said.
"This earthquake revealed the ugly reality of the low-cost housing shortage in the greater San Francisco Bay area," the commission report said.
"Cities have been left with intractable problems," said Susan Tubbesing, executive director of the Earthquake Research Institute in Oakland. "We have problems with long-term shelter and housing, we have problems with our transportation infrastructure."
Still closed is an elevated section of Interstate 280 and the double-decked Central Freeway, now being demolished. The double-decked Embarcadero Freeway is almost torn down, and plans call for it to be replaced with a sunken roadway.
In a region that reveled in its early, heroic response to the disaster, such lengthy repair projects have brought forth frustration.
"What has happened in the two years since the earthquake?" the San Francisco Chronicle asked in a recent editorial. "Very little."
Still, for many people the quake is now just a distant rumble.
"My impression as a citizen is that the city's joie de vivre has recovered," said Dr. Charles Marmar, director of the Veterans Administration post-traumatic stress disorder program.
"San Francisco's now worried about the 49ers being lousy, the Giants being lousy and the economy being lousy," said Arthur Berger, who teaches broadcast and popular culture at San Francisco State University.
Those directly touched by the quake's destructive power find it harder to forget.
"I remember a lot," said Scarpa, who was trapped under the Oakland freeway. "I remember that hour and a half for them to get me out . . . the helicopters and the smoke and the smell. It's something that I know is there. But it's something I'm trying in a lot of ways to forget."