The Story of the Fair

In 1915 San Francisco was nine years out from the earthquake and fire that had gutted it. It spent those years rebuilding itself and, at the same time, raising money to build a second city beside it: a walled town of palaces, courts and gardens on filled land at the edge of the Golden Gate. The fair opened on February 20, 1915, ran for 288 days, drew 18,876,438 admissions and closed on December 4. Within about fourteen months of closing, nearly all of it had been knocked down, sold for salvage or burned.

A merchant's letter, 1904

The idea started with Reuben Brooks Hale, whose family ran the Hale Bros. department store on Market Street near Sixth. On January 12, 1904, Hale wrote to his fellow directors of the Merchants' Association. The United States was about to take over the digging of a canal across Panama, and Hale thought San Francisco should be ready to celebrate its completion with a world's fair. His model was St. Louis, which had started planning its 1904 fair more than five years ahead. Hale suggested a 1915 date, a site of twelve to fifteen hundred acres between the ocean and the hills, and paying for it the way St. Louis had: $5 million from private subscription, $5 million in city bonds, and $5 million from the federal government.

"Is the time not ripe for us to consider a World's Exposition in San Francisco in 1915? This is looking far ahead, but it is better for us to build for the future than to repent the past."

R. B. Hale to the Merchants' Association, January 12, 1904, as printed in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)

Hale's timing matched the canal's. His letter was read to the Merchants' Association about a month before the United States ratified its treaty with Panama. Many people then expected the canal to open around 1913, which would have coincided with the four hundredth anniversary of Vasco Núñez de Balboa's first sight of the Pacific. Those two events, the canal and Balboa, became the fair's official reasons for being (see The Canal). On April 26, 1904, the heads of six San Francisco commercial bodies resolved that the canal should be celebrated with a "Pacific Ocean Exposition" in the city and made themselves its Board of Governors. For the next several years the board mostly kept the claim alive. Portland, Seattle and St. Louis all had fairs coming, and the canal was a long way from finished.

Earthquake and fire

On April 18, 1906, the earthquake struck, and the fires that followed burned most of the city. Todd's official history mentions a small loss among the large ones. Hale had written to bankers, wholesalers and merchants in St. Louis asking what their fair had done for bank clearings, building permits and trade, and he had kept their replies as evidence for his case. Those letters burned.

Hale kept pushing even so. That fall he formed a new five-man committee, and on December 10, 1906, the Pacific Ocean Exposition Company filed its articles of incorporation. The incorporators met in the temporary wooden St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, across from the burned-out shell of the old one. The articles stated the purpose that would eventually be carried out: a world's exposition in San Francisco "commemorative of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Balboa, and in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal."

The project picked up again after the Portolá Festival of October 1909, the rebuilt city's first big civic celebration. On October 27, 1909, four days after the festival ended, Hale gave a dinner at the Bohemian Club. Among his guests were the heads of the city's business bodies and Charles C. Moore, an engineering contractor whose company built steam and hydroelectric power plants up and down the coast. Moore argued that the fair needed what he called a "certificate of birth," meaning public approval, and he pushed for a mail poll and then a mass meeting to get it. About 2,500 businessmen were polled in November. The vote in favor was overwhelming. A mass meeting on the floor of the Merchants' Exchange on December 7, 1909, ratified everything done so far. At a follow-up meeting on December 29, F. W. Dohrmann proposed a slogan, "San Francisco Invites the World." It later went up in electric letters on the Ferry Building as "California Invites the World."

Two million an hour

Congressman Julius Kahn warned the organizers that Congress would do little for San Francisco until the city had put up its own money. The organizers therefore staged a public stock subscription. Todd says it was planned "as carefully as any impresario would have staged an opera." It took place on the floor of the Merchants' Exchange at 3 p.m. on April 28, 1910. More than 2,000 people packed the hall. An accountant with an adding machine sat by the speaker's desk, and a blackboard showed the running total. Moore chaired, and the humorist Lawrence W. "Larry" Harris served as auctioneer. Harris told the crowd that a cough was worth $500 and a sneeze $1,000.

A million dollars was pledged in the first nine minutes and $2,440,000 in forty minutes. The meeting peaked when Colonel John C. Kirkpatrick of the Palace Hotel, from whom Harris had asked $100,000 on behalf of the Hotel Men's Association, pledged $250,000 instead. The blackboard closed at $3,790,000, but people kept signing at the platform. By the end, Todd records, pledges totaled $4,089,000. Estimates at the time put the pace at $37,172 a minute, which is where the chapter title "Two Million an Hour" comes from. The pre-fair pamphlet Condensed Facts rounds the total to "$4,000,000" raised "in a space of two hours."

The corporate paperwork went through alongside the fundraising. The Pacific Ocean company was reorganized and renamed the Panama-Pacific International Exposition Company, with $10 million in capital stock at $10 a share. Todd gives its incorporation date as March 22, 1910. That same day a convention of delegates from more than fifty California cities met at Santa Barbara and endorsed San Francisco, not San Diego, as the "obvious and logical" place for the celebration. San Diego went ahead with a fair of its own, the Panama-California Exposition, also held in 1915. Todd dismisses it as "another story."

Washington soon raised the price. A House committee changed the enabling resolution to require $7,500,000 in hand. At another mass meeting on June 16, 1910, Gavin McNab pointed out that the richest body in town, the city itself, had not yet given anything, and he proposed a $5 million municipal bond issue. The "Shoe Leather Campaign" followed on June 23: 203 volunteers from local firms canvassed the business district block by block. By June 24, private subscriptions stood at $6,156,840. On November 8, 1910, California voters approved a $5 million state tax for the fair, 174,513 to 50,857, and San Francisco approved the authority for its bonds. On November 15 the city passed the charter amendment for the $5 million bond issue, 42,040 to 2,122. That put about $16 million within reach before a single building had been drawn.

The fight with New Orleans

New Orleans had its own claim to the canal celebration. It was the nearest big American port to Panama, it was closer to the country's population center, and it had the backing of the solid South. San Francisco's organizers polled Congress and found sixty-five members for New Orleans, thirty-five for San Francisco, and the rest undecided. They answered with a campaign from offices in Washington's New Willard Hotel. It mailed 3,530,500 pieces of literature and kept a ledger on every member of the House and Senate. San Francisco's key argument was that it wanted no federal money. New Orleans's bill asked for $1 million for a government exhibit and created paid federal commissionerships. San Francisco's resolution asked only for official recognition and a presidential invitation to foreign nations. Because of that invitation, the Speaker referred the San Francisco measure to the Foreign Affairs Committee. That kept it away from the Committee on Industrial Arts and Expositions, whose chairman, William A. Rodenberg of Illinois, favored New Orleans.

New Orleans sent its "Logical Point Special" train to Washington in January 1911 with about 150 boosters aboard. Todd says they opened headquarters across the street from the Californians and served Sazerac cocktails. The San Franciscans placed newspaper advertisements across the West asking readers to wire their congressmen and the President. The telegraph office needed thirty-four extra operators. Todd says the figure of forty thousand telegrams was repeated at the time but never counted, and that President Taft complained, "They have been bringing them to me in barrels."

The deciding vote came in the House on January 31, 1911. Rodenberg closed with a plea to hold a great Blue-and-Gray reunion in New Orleans on the fiftieth anniversary of Appomattox. San Francisco's side answered with fifteen two-minute speeches from members representing New York to Colorado. The House chose to take up the San Francisco resolution by 188 to 159. New Orleans conceded, and the resolution itself then passed 259 to 43. The Senate passed it without dissent on February 11. On February 15, 1911, President William Howard Taft signed it. In its final form the resolution required that $15 million be available, since San Francisco had shown it could raise that much.

Where to put it

With Washington won, the city started arguing about the site. Candidates included Golden Gate Park, where the 1894 Midwinter Fair had been held; the rolling Lake Merced and Sutro lands in the southwest; a strip of waterfront; and a mudflat cove called Harbor View, between the Fort Mason and Presidio military reservations. Some wanted a "composite" fair spread across all of them and joined by boulevards. On June 22, 1911, the Board voted 11 for the waterfront, 8 for the parks and 4 for Lake Merced, which settled nothing. On July 25 it adopted the composite plan to buy time. One piece of that plan did get built: an exposition hall at the new Civic Center, which became the Exposition Auditorium. Moore had been elected president of the Exposition in the spring, and he accepted on May 10, 1911.

This is why the ceremonial ground-breaking took place somewhere the fair never stood. On October 14, 1911, Taft turned the first spadeful of earth with a silver spade at the Stadium in Golden Gate Park, where parts of the fair were still expected to go. Some observers estimated the crowd at 100,000. Lillian Nordica sang, and a hundred doves were released. The next day, at a luncheon at the Cliff House, Taft gave the city a motto: "San Francisco Knows How."

Planning continued. On October 11, 1911, three days before the ground-breaking, Moore had appointed the planner Edward H. Bennett to draw a block plan. About 150 plans and variations followed, and working them out killed the composite scheme. The Director of Works, H. D. H. Connick, calculated that, even after paying for the dredging, the money would buy almost nine more acres of exhibit buildings at Harbor View than in Golden Gate Park. Leaving out the fill, the waterfront came out $1,214,142 cheaper. On December 15, 1911, the Board voted to put everything at Harbor View and the adjoining Presidio. Todd found it notable that the most beautiful site any exposition ever had was picked almost entirely on cost. "Not a word was said in debate about the beauties of that location," he wrote.

Making the land

The site covered 635 acres: 287 in the Presidio, 18 in Fort Mason, 319 of private and city property, and 11 outside the fence. Only 12.26 acres were bought outright. The rest was leased from more than 175 owners of about 200 parcels, some of them heirs living in Europe. The Exposition had to buy and clear more than 400 buildings, from a fifty-room apartment house and a gas works to the Fulton Iron Works shipyard. The land cost $1,037,085 by Opening Day. Demolition of houses started on April 25, 1912. On March 14, 1912, a trainload of 228 Oregonians led by Governor Oswald West received the deed to Oregon's building site, and Oregon became the first state to make a final choice of location (see Oregon Building).

The central cove still had to become dry land. The first Division of Works contract, let on March 25, 1912, went to the San Francisco Bridge Company for filling it. On April 13, 1912, Moore pulled the lever on the suction dredge John McMullin, anchored 300 feet offshore. Sand and mud from the bay then flowed through a 22-inch pipeline for 146 days, until September 7, 1912. The contractor pumped 1,300,100 cubic yards at an average of 16.5 cents a yard. The engineers wanted about 70 percent sand and 30 percent mud, and a gap left in the old seawall let some of the soft sludge escape back into the bay. A second contractor pumped 360,525 cubic yards onto the marshy Presidio flats west of Baker Street. Todd gives two figures for the total land reclaimed, "about 184 acres" in one chapter and 196 acres in another. By his count, the Palaces of Varied Industries, Mines, Transportation and Manufactures, half of Agriculture, and one corner of the Tower of Jewels all stood on the new ground, where 12 to 20 feet of water had been a few years earlier.

Building the city

The fair's look was set by an Architectural Commission chaired by Willis Polk, which first met on February 19, 1912. Its members and their design system, which grouped palaces around courts behind a continuous wall under Jules Guérin's color scheme, are covered in Architecture. The first great palace was the Palace of Machinery. Nearly 200,000 people attended its ground-breaking on New Year's Day, 1913, and its first roof trusses went up on March 26. Pile-driving for Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts began that June. Honduras began the first foreign pavilion on August 20, 1913, and Idaho's was the first state building started, in January 1914. The fence was finished by March 1913, and from September 9, 1913, visitors were charged to look around the construction site: 25 cents for adults, 10 cents for children.

The rest went up in 1914. Soprano Luisa Tetrazzini broke ground for Festival Hall on March 24. Steel for the Tower of Jewels began rising on March 27. By mid-May four palaces were ready for exhibits. The workforce peaked at 15,026 men on February 19, 1915, the day before opening. The Exposition's own construction used 80,631,738 board feet of lumber. Participants used an estimated 30 million more.

Source: Todd, vol. 2, ch. I, and vol. 5, ch. XXXII.

"It will not be postponed"

In the summer of 1914 Moore liked to tell audiences that the fair was sure to succeed, barring pestilence, panic, "or the outbreak of a war." When Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914, Moore was at his country place near Santa Cruz entertaining the Argentine commissioners. The Associated Press telephoned to ask what the war would mean for the fair. No directors were within reach. Moore answered on the spot that the opening would not be delayed, and the Board later confirmed his answer. On August 14 he put it in writing to the foreign and state commissioners: "It will not be postponed."

A good deal was lost anyway. A naval pageant of 160 pledged warships through the new canal was canceled, and so were the international yacht races, a round-the-world air race and a dirigible concession from a Berlin company. The international polo tournament was cut back. Many European conductors and congress delegates stayed home, and cancellations of exhibit space came in waves over the following weeks. Todd admits the war's gloom nearly sank the amusement street. President Woodrow Wilson, occupied with neutrality, could not come to dedicate the fair, and Vice-President Thomas R. Marshall came instead. Nations and States describes who still came.

Opening day, February 20, 1915

Marshall Hale, chairman of the Mayor's Committee of Arrangements, organized the opening around a simple idea: the people of San Francisco would walk to the fair and "accept the work." At six in the morning every fire bell, whistle and automobile horn in the city went off, and patrolmen banged on trolley poles. Crowds filled Van Ness Avenue from wall to wall. When the head of the procession, led by Mayor James Rolph Jr. and Marshall Hale, reached the main gate at Scott Street, the rear was still two and a half miles back. Todd says there were said to have been 150,000 marchers. Women formed a second column and entered by the Fillmore Street gate. It had rained for a week, but the sun came out as the marchers reached the gates.

"As it approached the gates its advance was heard as a low, steady roar of voices, growing into the shouting of a multitude. Once inside it became strangely silent."

Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921)

The crowd came into the South Gardens, facing the Fountain of Energy and the Tower of Jewels. After prayers, speeches and a formal handing-over of the finished buildings, Moore telegraphed Wilson that the Exposition was ready. In the White House, Wilson pressed a golden key connected to the wireless tower at Tuckerton, New Jersey. The signal reached antennae on top of the Tower of Jewels, tripped a relay, and swung open the doors of the Machinery Palace. Its engines started, the fountains came on, and whistles sounded across the city and the harbor. Todd calls it the first exposition ever opened by wireless. At the same moment Lincoln Beachey took off and began turning loops over the grounds, releasing white pigeons. That day 255,149 people went through the gates, against 137,557 on Chicago's opening day in 1893 and 178,423 at St. Louis in 1904.

The season

Attendance started strong. The first million came on March 4, the thirteenth day, and the second by March 20. Then the weather turned. Todd describes a spring "late, cold, and disagreeable beyond the recollection of old Californians," with 27 days of rain. May 3, a rainy Monday, was the worst day of the year at 24,007 admissions. The concessions on the Zone suffered most. Crowds came back in summer and grew toward the end. The Fourth of July celebration, held on July 5, drew 190,846. The Liberty Bell's arrival on July 17 drew 113,672. San Francisco Day, November 2, drew 348,472. Ten of the twenty-three days with more than 100,000 visitors fell in the fair's last three weeks. People and Days tells the stories behind the dates.

Adult admission was 50 cents. Children under twelve paid 25 cents, later 15 cents on special children's days, and school classes paid 5 cents. Of the 18,876,438 admissions, 13,127,103 were paid. The Exposition's planners had assumed a fair's total paid attendance would come to eighteen or twenty times its host city's population. With San Francisco at roughly half a million people, Todd works the final total out to 26½ times.

Closing day, December 4, 1915

It rained hard on December 3. The morning of December 4 was clear. At noon, in the Court of the Universe, Moore read a toast from President Wilson that was being read at the same moment around the world, and George Sterling's poem "The Builders" was read aloud. That day 459,022 people came, the biggest crowd of the season, and they brought the total to 18,876,438. At six o'clock each palace except the Palace of Fine Arts, which stayed open, closed its doors and lowered its flag.

That night the crowds packed the Court of the Universe again. A little before midnight, Moore spoke.

"Friends, the Exposition is finished. The lights are going out."

Charles C. Moore, December 4, 1915, in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 5 (1921)

The lights dimmed slowly. The last searchlight beam rested on the statue Descending Night before it faded, and buglers on the Tower of Jewels played "Taps." When the lights came back on they spelled "Finis" across the Tower's lower gallery. Six hundred mortars along the Marina fired together, and the aviator Art Smith flew loops trailing fire overhead. According to Todd, the last visitors did not leave until after four in the morning of December 5. See Illumination for how the fair was lit.

Did it make money?

It did, though the answer depends on how you count. The Exposition company never recovered its construction costs. It did not expect to, because it had been financed as a civic project and not as an investment. The 1915 season, however, earned a healthy surplus, and almost none of the money was federal: the United States appropriated funds for its own building and exhibits but contributed nothing to building the fair. The accountants' final statements, carried to December 31, 1919, look like this:

Total receipts over the Exposition's life came to $27,178,065. Gate receipts for the season were $4,715,523. The concessions' gross takings on the percentage plan came to $7,497,022, of which the Exposition kept nearly 21 percent. Todd says most concessionaires had an unhappy time, especially during the wet spring. Some of the money went to court. The State of California argued that because the city's $5 million had been a gift and not a stock purchase, the State's share of the leftover capital should be five-elevenths and not five-sixteenths. In August 1918 the California Supreme Court agreed, which cost the other stockholders more than $220,000. In the final settlement of February 1920, the company's net returns and holdings were valued at $1,229,944.45. The State's share was paid largely in Marina land. The company was formally dissolved in Superior Court on August 1, 1920, a little over ten years after it had been incorporated.

Tearing it down

The day after closing, Todd writes, the grounds felt like a corpse, with guards on duty, people wandering, and no music. The battleship Oregon, the last warship at the Exposition anchorage, sailed on December 6. The exhibits took months to pack and ship. The Exposition sold off its furniture, carpets, trucks and even the guards' revolvers at about half of cost from a store in the Motor Transportation Building. The best bid for demolishing the whole fair as one job was under $4,800, so the company sold the buildings one at a time and wrecked the rest itself. The Tower of Jewels, which had cost $413,709, sold for $9,000. The contractor who bought it said that after eight months of work he had about broken even. The Palace of Horticulture went for $5,000. Crews cut the colonnades loose at the base and pulled them over with a donkey engine and a cable, and they brought down the arches with dynamite. Around May 20, 1916, the Nations of the East group on the Arch of the Rising Sun went down, bending slowly forward "in a long descending arc." Wood not worth the labor of salvaging was burned. Most of the staff statuary had no market value and "literally could not be given away." Only four towns accepted any of it. The Zone was cleared by June 30, 1916, and the site work was finished by February 10, 1917. Salvage brought in $614,110 gross, or about $353,000 after costs.

A few buildings were moved. The Ohio Building floated down the bay on a raft to become a club in the San Mateo County marshes. The Wisconsin and Virginia buildings and "one or two more" were shipped to Santa Venetia in Marin County. The Oregon Building stayed in the Presidio as a soldiers' club. The city accepted the Japanese pavilion, but it collapsed in a high wind while being moved. Saving the California Building for a state normal school failed, and it was wrecked for $30,000 in salvage.

Some pieces survived where they were. The Palace of Fine Arts reopened on January 1, 1916, and was kept open by the San Francisco Art Association with money raised through a preservation campaign. Frank Brangwyn's murals from the Court of Abundance were moved into it. The Exposition Auditorium was formally handed to the city on December 30, 1915, and the great Festival Hall organ was reinstalled there and dedicated on April 8, 1917. The Exposition bought nine blocks of shoreline east of the Yacht Harbor for $443,812 so that the waterfront drive, the Marina, would stay public. What Survived follows those survivors to the present, and Visiting the Site Today maps the fair onto the streets that replaced it.

Sources

• Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 5 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons for the PPIE Co., 1921). Vol. 1, chs. VII–XX (Hale's letter, the mass meetings, the subscription, the fight with New Orleans), XXV–XXVII (Moore; site; budget), XXXII–XXXIII (the site; the block plan), XXXVII (Taft's ground-breaking), XLII, LVI, LIX–LX, LXIX, LXXIX; vol. 2, chs. I, XXI, XXIV–XXV, XLV, XLVIII; vol. 5, chs. XXIV, XXXII, XXXIV–XXXVIII, XL.
• Condensed Facts Concerning the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: PPIE, c. 1914), "Historical" section (the $4,000,000 subscription figure).
• John D. Barry, The City of Domes (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915), for contemporary context.
• Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs, "President Taft breaking ground … October 14, 1911" (LCCN 94507785), via Wikimedia Commons.