How S.F. came of age during the 1915 Pan Pacific Expo.
How San Francisco came of age during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
If you crossed San Francisco Bay on winter’s day a century ago, you would see a huge sign in capital letters: CALIFORNIA INVITES THE WORLD.
It was as eye-catching as the forest of construction cranes on the city’s skyline is now. The big sign and the cranes were the mark of the same thing: San Francisco was reinventing itself.
A hundred years ago, it was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a magic city of palaces and towers that glittered like a mirage in what is now the Marina district for nine months, starting on Feb. 20, 1915.
It was a coming-out party, a fantastic extravaganza of light, color and show business designed to show off California, to let the world see that the Golden State “had come of age,” in the words of historian Kevin Starr.
Why should we remember the 1915 fair? Because it was the showpiece of a new San Francisco, a city undergoing a transformation just as profound as it is now with the digital age. Instead of a Super Bowl, or the dream of an Olympics, San Francisco threw a huge celebration of itself and called it a world’s fair.
Only nine years before, most of San Francisco was a smoking ruin, shaken by a giant earthquake and wrecked by fires that burned for four days. There was a line in the little ditty that San Franciscans liked to quote after the 1906 disaster: “From the Ferry to Van Ness/ You’re a godforsaken mess.”
But in a few years, not only did San Francisco stage a world’s fair, but it also built a grand City Hall, developed a brandnew Municipal Railway and stocked it with the most modern equipment in the country, started work on the Hetch Hetchy water and power system, and built a new General Hospital — all at pretty much the same time. It was “an extraordinary explosion of civic patriotism,” Starr said.
All that is left on the original fairgrounds is the magnificent Palace of Fine Arts, restored to its 1915 splendor, like some ancient ruin. There is also the Marina Green at San Francisco’s northern doorstep, and artifacts here and there: the statue of the Pioneer Mother in Golden
The 1915 S.F. exposition featured a gleaming Tower of Jewels.
Gate Park, the two faux stone elephants, Jumbo and Peewee, who guard Viña del Mar Park in Sausalito.
The fair was great while it lasted: “a temporary Byzantium ... a vision of what San Francisco wanted to be but couldn’t be,” wrote Gray Brechin, the author of “Imperial San Francisco.” “You couldn’t decree an imperial city.”
The backers of the fair certainly tried. Over all of this presided Mayor James Rolph Jr., a millionaire from the Mission District who wore cowboy boots, striped pants and a carnation in his lapel. He was called Sunny Jim and would be sure to tell visitors that the new City Hall dome was higher than the one on the Capitol in Washington and that San Francisco was the best city in the world
The fair was a huge hit — the attendance was 18,876,438, amazing in a day when San Francisco had fewer than 420,000 people, about half the present population, and fewer than 3.5 million people lived in California.
Of course, many of the fair-goers came more than once, but exposition managers claimed that more than 500,000 people came to the fair from outside Northern California. “And this was in a time when film was in its infancy, there was no ra- dio, no Internet and it took a week to get across the country,” said Laura Ackley, who wrote “San Francisco’s Jewel City,” a chronicle of the life and times of the fair.
What visitors saw when they got to the fair was 635 acres covered with buildings in pastel colors, to represent the Mediterranean look of California. There were pavilions from 21 foreign countries and 28 of the United States.
The fair had everything — palaces, artwork, airplanes, an assembly line that produced 18 new Ford cars a day. It had racing cars, cowboys, Indians, statues, fountains, music, fireworks, carnival sideshows, 11,000 paintings and 1,500 statues.
Everybody who was anybody came to the fair.
Thomas Edison, inventor of the incandescent lightbulb, and Henry Ford, who perfected the assembly line, shared a stage. They met with Luther Burbank, the plant wizard. Edison took a spin around the city with Harvey Firestone, the tire mogul.
Buffalo Bill Cody came to the fair, and so did Teddy Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Helen Keller, the educator Maria Montessori, bandleader John Philip Sousa, and Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous composer.
Don’t forget William Jennings Bryan, the noted orator; Hiram Johnson, the governor of California; and Thomas Riley Marshall, vice president of the United States.
There was Barney Oldfield, the race car driver, and Eddie Rickenbacker, later a flying ace. Harry Houdini, the magician, was chained in a locked box weighted down with 500 pounds of iron and dropped into the bay. He escaped.
Houdini wasn’t the only wonder at the fair — there was also Captain Sigsbee, the Educated Horse, who could add, subtract, and play “Suwannee River” on the chimes. The horse got tired of performing daily, so he alternated with Madame Ellis, who could read minds.
But the real stars were in the skies — daring aviators, including some of the most famous fliers of the day. Aeroplanes were as new as tomorrow in 1915 — the fair opened less than a dozen years after the first powered flight.
The first star was Lincoln Beachey, a native San Franciscan who was billed as “the king of the skies.” He was said to be the first American to fly the loop the loop, but the stunt led to his death when the wing of an experimental plane failed and he crashed into the bay.
He was followed by Art Smith, “the boy aviator,” who flew loops by day, and stunts by night, his plane trailing fire-
works, like a comet.
Ordinary citizens could fly themselves. For $10 they could fly with the Loughead brothers, who later changed their name to Lockheed. A plane would take passengers over the fair, over the bay and back again. From the skies they could see it all.
The fair extended from Chestnut Street to the bay and from the Presidio to Fort Mason. The fair was crowned by the Tower of Jewels, as tall as a 43-story building, and decorated with 102,000 brightly colored cut glass “Novogems” that moved in the wind. “A searchlight is directed on the tower at night,” wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder, “and it is wonderful.”
The Tower of Jewels had no real function. It was a one-of-a-kind building, part Byzantine, part Italian with touch of Aztec. Besides the glass “jewels,” there were statues on the tower. As architecture, “it was a bit of a mess,” Ackley thinks. But it was bold and impressive, and no one who saw it ever forgot it.
The 1915 fair began as an idea by Reuben Hale, who started Hale Bros., a local department store chain. He wrote the Merchants Association — later called the Chamber of Commerce — suggesting an international world’s fair to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal and a new role for San Francisco as a major player in the Pacific.
The idea sat on the back burner, but after the city was nearly destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, the civic mantra of those days became simple: San Francisco would be rebuilt, bigger and better than ever.
And what better way to show it off than a world’s fair? That was the aim of the city’s mercantile elite, “an oligarchy of businesspeople,” Starr called them, “a coalition of the city’s Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leading citizens. They were Progressives with a capital P.”
The city staged a five-day-long Portola Festival, in 1909, a kind of dress rehearsal, with parades, a big flotilla of ships from foreign nations, even a Chinese dragon that was so big it took 120 men to carry it in a parade up Market Street. The festival attracted more than 400,000 visitors, and it was clear that San Francisco knew how to throw a big party.
“There was a huge sense that the city was reborn,” said Starr.
Next, the city needed to come up with a plan and convince the country that a world’s fair was just the ticket. The main competition in California was San Diego, which ran its own Panama California fair in 1915, and New Orleans, which also wanted to hold an international exposition.
San Francisco had a key ally in President William Howard Taft, who was fond of the city by the bay. “San Francisco is the city that knows how,” he said. The House of Representatives voted 180 to 159 for San Francisco over New Orleans — and the fair was on.
Ground was broken in 1911. An area on the northern edge of the city called Harbor View was selected; about 400 houses were removed, part of the bay was filled in, and work began on the Palace of Fine Arts in the summer of 1914.
“It was also a huge redevelopment project,” Starr said. In a sense, the time around the fair’s run not only rebuilt the city but also reimagined it.
The fair opened on Feb. 20; it had rained the night before, but the sun came out on opening day; a quarter of a million people went through the gates. Admission was 50 cents, half price for children.
“You know,” author Laura Ackley said, “I would like to get into a time machine and go back to the fair, because the world is so completely different now.” She would like to go for a month, but not longer.
“I would like to go to the Palace of Horticulture to see the displays, I would like to hear John Philip Sousa at his last performance at a world’s fair. It would be cool to hear him with Saint-Saëns and the 80-member exposition orchestra and a 300-voice choir.”
She said she would have some candy floss, “a new invention,” she said, “like cotton candy.”
She thought she might be able to talk to pioneers, “real 49ers,” she called them, who had crossed the plains in covered wagons and were now old men and women who came to the Panama-Pacific Exposition like venerated relics of another time. Among them were Patty Reed, one of the last survivors of the 1846 Donner Party disaster.
In fact, Starr, the historian, says, the fair was a bit of a farewell to the city’s past as well as show of the future, mixed together. “One city gone and another born,” he said. The Palace of Fine Arts, in particular, he said, represented “a mourning for a lost city.’’
On the fair’s final day, Dec. 4, 1915, more than 450,000 people came one last time. Toward midnight, it was said that a hush fell over the crowd. Exposition president Charles C. Moore offered a farewell thought. “Friends,” he said, “this is the end of a perfect day, and the beginning of an unforgettable memory.”
The lights went out, one by one, a bugler played taps, and, as Samuel Dickson, who was there, remembered: The crowd turned and left slowly, without a sound, leaving the fair and “slowly climbing the hills, back to reality.”