Aeroplane view by Gabriel Moulin, 1915
288 Days
Nine years after the earthquake and fire, San Francisco built a city of domes on the edge of the Bay to celebrate the Panama Canal, lived in it for 288 days, and then tore nearly all of it down. This is the history of the Jewel City, a reconstruction you can walk through, and a film. A rough cut is online now; the finished film is released here on February 20, 2027, a hundred and twelve years to the day after the gates opened.
A world's fair that looked like a picture in three dimensions
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition filled 635 acres of reclaimed marsh between the Presidio and Fort Mason, on the ground that is now the Marina District. Eight of its eleven exhibit palaces stood shoulder to shoulder inside one continuous wall of imitation travertine, opening onto courts full of sculpture, fountains and gardens. Over all of it rose the Tower of Jewels, hung with more than a hundred thousand pieces of cut glass.
Its planners wanted one harmonious whole rather than a scatter of competing buildings. Jules Guérin chose every color, from the terra-cotta domes to the pink of the flagpoles. At night W. D'Arcy Ryan hid the lights and floodlit the walls instead, something no earlier fair had done at this scale. Almost nineteen million admissions were counted before the gates closed on December 4, 1915. Only Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts still stands on the fairgrounds, rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s.
Walk the fair, fly over it, stay for the illumination
The reconstruction places each building where the 1915 U.S. Geological Survey map shows it and sizes it from the dimensions in the Official Guide and the official history. The street grid, the shoreline, Alcatraz, Angel Island and the Marin hills are where they really are. The sun follows San Francisco's actual path through the sky, and after dusk the illumination comes on: floodlit walls, glittering jewels on the Tower, and the Scintillator's forty-eight searchlights sweeping over the Bay.
- Take a guided tour from the Scott Street gate to the evening light show.
- Walk at eye level through the Court of the Universe.
- Click any building to read its history.
288 Days
A feature-length film of the whole story, from the burned city that dreamed it up to the wreckers who took it down, told in period photographs and film, with recordings of Sousa's Band.
Have something from the fair?
A photograph in an album, a postcard with a message on the back, a program, a home movie, a grandparent's story of a day at the Exposition. If it is from the fair, it can be in the film, with the credit you ask for.
One-sheet, 27 × 40 in.
Front cover, 6 × 9 in. In print and for Kindle.
The poster and the book
The documentary has its one-sheet, and the story of the Exposition is becoming a book: the chapters on this site, expanded and illustrated with the fair's own photographs, in print and for Kindle. Both are on their way.
The story of the Exposition
Long-form chapters drawn from the Official Guide, Frank Morton Todd's five-volume official history, and the fair's own books, maps and photographs.
The fair stood on the Marina. Find your block.
Walk the fair today
Stop by stop from Crissy Field to Fort Mason, with the 1915 view at every stop.
Your address in 1915
Type your address and find out what stood on it: the 1915 grounds laid over today's streets, palace by palace.
Every place at the fair
Every palace, court, pavilion and show, with the corner it occupies today.
The fair year, day by day
The Exposition ran from February 20 to December 4, 1915. This page reads today's date and finds what happened at the fair on it.
The latest plates from the fair's own books
Closing night on the Zone
The last pyrotechnics, December 4, 1915
A backward glance: the fair at its close
Old Faithful Inn, the Union Pacific concession on the Zone
Model of the Utah copper mine in the Utah Building
Virginia Stephens, from the plate in Beasley
Japan's pavilion and gardens, 1915
Frank Brangwyn's Primitive Fire, one of his murals for the Court of Abundance
Palaces, courts and pavilions
Tower of Jewels
The 435-foot centerpiece of the fair, a Roman arch-and-tower hung with some 102,000 glass "Novagems" that shook in the wind and blazed under searchlights at night.
Palace of Fine Arts
Maybeck's dreamlike ruin of a Roman temple, set behind a lagoon, and the one exposition building that still stands on the site, rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s.
Court of the Universe
The ceremonial heart of the fair: a vast elliptical court of double colonnades, sunken gardens and colossal sculpture where the Nations of the East met the Nations of the West.
Palace of Horticulture
A glass-domed conservatory in a garden-party costume: Byzantine in outline, French in its lattice and garlands, lit at night by searchlights turning inside the dome.
Festival Hall
The exposition's green-domed concert hall in the French theatrical manner, home to one of the largest organs in America and a year of choruses, orchestras and recitals.
Palace of Machinery
The Roman-scaled timber giant at the east end of the main axis, the largest building at the exposition, where Lincoln Beachey made what Todd called the first indoor flight ever undertaken in an aeroplane.
Court of Abundance (Court of Ages) and the Tower of Ages
Mullgardt's dark, dramatic east court, a Spanish-Gothic fantasy on the ascent of man, crowned by the 219-foot Tower of Ages and lit at night by gas-breathing serpents and red fire.
The Zone
A 65-acre amusement city strung along one 3,360-foot street from Fillmore to Van Ness, which Todd called the largest amusement district ever built by an exposition.
The End of the Trail
Fraser's image of an exhausted Native rider at the edge of the Pacific, the most popular sculpture at the fair and a lasting symbol of the "vanishing race" idea.
California Building (California Host Building)
The Exposition's official host building, a vast Mission-style complex of towers, patios and county exhibit halls on the bay shore, covering about five acres.
Oregon Building
"A Parthenon with the bark on": 48 unpeeled Douglas-fir logs, one for each state, standing in for the marble columns of Athens.
French Pavilion (Palace of the Legion of Honor)
A replica of the Paris Palais de la Légion d'Honneur, built in nine weeks amid the war, later the model for San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum.
Walk the fair today
Thirty-eight places to stand in the Marina and the Presidio where something of the fair happened, and two views from the hills above: the top of the Lyon Street steps, the block where the Tower of Jewels stood, the lagoon, the Zone under Chestnut Street, the race track that became Crissy Field. Each stop has what stood there, how to find the spot, and the pictures then and now.
A single color scheme, by one painter
The Official Guide lists the colors Guérin allowed. French green was used for garden lattices and deep cerulean blue for recessed panels and vaults. Flagpoles were orange-pink, and the backgrounds of the colonnades a pinkish red with a dash of brown. Small domes and mouldings were golden burnt orange, the large domes terra cotta. Statuary was gold and urns verde antique. The walls were an old-ivory tint modeled on Roman travertine.
Timeline, 1904–2015
From R. B. Hale's letter proposing a fair to the centennial, date by date.
Visiting the site
A walk through the Marina District, tracing where the palaces, courts and the Zone stood.
Sources
The period guides, histories and photograph collections this site is built on. Most are free to read online.
Your street was a world's fair
I'm making a documentary about the world's fair that stood on these blocks for 288 days in 1915. If you've got photographs, stories or film from the neighborhood, I'd love to see them. Everything's credited, and I'll ask before anything goes in.
Or write to hello@288days.com