S.F. had money but no location
One supposed charm of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition is that it represents a lost age of civic unity, when San Franciscans and their leaders made things happen with efficient grace as they summoned a fantastical vision to life
This was, after all, the event in local history that stirred William Howard Taft to crown San Francisco with the title the City That Knows How — praise bestowed during his visit here for the groundbreaking on Oct. 14, 1911.
But there’s a problem with this yearning for an era before factions and specialinterest strife: The 27th president drove his shovel’s silver blade into the soil of Golden Gate Park. The city’s power brokers couldn’t rally behind a single site as the time to show physical progress drew near. Instead, exposition leaders put their bets on an extravaganza stretched across the northern half of the city from the Embarcadero to the ocean, a plan quietly abandoned after the presidential hoopla faded away.
“It was a grand exhibition of popular ignorance, cocksureness, and impatience,” Frank Morton Todd wrote with bemused hindsight in his official history of the exposition. “Thousands might concede that they did not know how to build an exposition but no one would concede that he did not know where to build it.”
Common sense would suggest that something as basic as location would be locked down before the city was selected by the federal government to hold an international exposition, but no. The competition between San Francisco and rival New Orleans during 1910 turned on issues of boosterism and regional pride.
The deciding factor may have been that then, as now, the Bay Area was well stocked with wealthy residents eager to make their chosen home shine. When New Orleans’ exposition committee announced in early 1910 that it had pledges of $200,000 to make a fair happen, San Francisco’s boosters responded with a gala at the Merchants Exchange where $4 million was pledged.
By the time the House of Representatives prepared to choose between the two cities in January 1911, San Francisco guaranteed a world’s fair with $17.5 million in civic and state funds to get things started. New Orleans couldn’t come close to matching this amount. With Taft’s blessing, San Francisco was awarded the right to hold the 1915 exposition.
The day after the vote in Washington, a headline in the San Francisco Call pro- claimed, “City Ready to Begin Building of Great Fair.” Readers also were informed up high that “first of all, the site must be decided upon.” Which was no easy task. In retrospect the choice for what then was dubbed Harbor View was obvious, given the visual splendor surrounding the 635 acres bounded roughly by Van Ness Avenue, Lombard Street, Crissy Field and the bay. But this was a time when much of the city’s land was undeveloped, which meant an abundance of blank slates waiting to be filled.
Land south of Islais Creek near Hunters Point, for example, was the top vote getter in a Call “election” where readers cast more than 25,000 ballots. Among the attributes was that the land was “practically fogless.”
This case couldn’t be made for another much-hyped locale: Lake Merced and its surroundings, then framed by a weave of forested hills. But supporters (including nationally famous planner Daniel
Burnham) shrugged off weather conditions, instead arguing that the topography offered “a splendid opportunity for unusual water features.”
Downtown power brokers had their own favored destination, the working waterfront along the Embarcadero. The idea was a range of attractions in a band from Telegraph Hill to Rincon Hill, with two-story wharf buildings where each upper floor would hold exhibition space connected by an elevated boulevard.
There were other geographic hats tossed into the ring. The Call ballot included Visitacion Valley, Yerba Buena Island and the Tanforan area of San Bruno. Arthur Mathews, “among the best known of San Francisco artists,” received publicity for a proposed exposition ground atop Nob Hill.
“Had the San Franciscans been able to unite in meek agreement on a site for the Exposition they would not have been the hardy breed they are,” Todd wrote later.
And then as well as now, some cynical residents preferred that nothing happen at all — especially if it meant, in the words of one letter writer, “misappropriating the public funds to fill in mudholes and a part of the bay to make land valuable for a few Millionaires who spend their money in New York City.”
As the committee organizing the exposition was eager not to offend the city’s top names — several of which in fact were on the committee — two sites emerged as front-runners.
Harbor View was one, its selling points including the relatively low costs to fill and grade the mudflats, and the fact that the military was happy to include Fort Mason and the northwest corner of the Presidio in the mix. The other was the western half of Golden Gate Park; not only was it city property, but its potential was trumpeted on a near-daily basis by The Chronicle, whose publishers had instigated the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition.
The committee appointed a subcommittee, then three more, then a fifth. The latter came back on July 25 with its solution: a super-size celebration that would take in both the Harbor View and Golden Gate Park sites, as well as vestiges of the downtown waterfront scheme.
Committee members rallied behind a solution that one newspaper promptly labeled “more beautiful, more novel, more appropriate in spirit and more appealing to the imagination than any other exposition the world has had.”
That scenario explains President Taft’s presence in Golden Gate Park, where, among other attractions, there was talk of connecting the Chain of Lakes via a Panamalike canal. He also could have chosen Telegraph Hill, where, said the groundbreaking program, “it is proposed to install the largest wireless telegraph station in the world.” Or Lincoln Park above the Pacific Ocean, where “a giant commemorative statue ... will command the entrance to the harbor.”
The groundbreaking, in short, was accompanied by rhetoric as starry-eyed and insupportably grand as every much-touted makeover un- veiled hereabouts ever since, up to and including the 2013 America’s Cup and the recent failed Olympic bid.
And as often has been the case in the decades since, what came to pass in 1915 bore only a partial resemblance to what boosters first proclaimed.
During the same month that Taft was feted by civic leaders, the fair’s architectural committee buckled down to work. “It became at once apparent that a composite plan was impossible from a technical and financial standpoint,” the exposition’s Division of Works noted in a lengthy 1915 report. The costs of stringing together a constellation of attractions would make it difficult to build anywhere close to the number of exhibit halls that were needed. Not only did Harbor View pencil out the best, the architects “believed that it had tremendous scenic possibilities.”
On Dec. 15, 1911, all the alternate schemes and dreams went into the dustbin of history. Fortunately for us, the architects knew their stuff.