St. Louis had built its fair of 1904 on three equal parts: five million dollars from private subscription, five million from city bonds, five million from the Government of the United States. San Francisco, Todd's own comparison shows, set out to do the same, and ended up doing it without Washington. The money came from the city and the state, and above all from the city's own people, who bought the fair by the share.
Fourteen thousand stockholders
On April 28, 1910, at a mass meeting in the Merchants' Exchange, $4,089,000 was subscribed in two hours, the Building Trades Council among the subscribers for $5,000, and the Builders' Exchange adding $43,800 in thirty-two minutes on another day. By the time the books were closed the capital stock stood at $6,028,700 from 14,290 subscribers. The shape of that list is the point. Four hundred and sixty-two subscriptions of $2,500 and over came to $4,869,480, an average of $10,540; subscriptions between $500 and $2,500 came to $689,725; and 13,241 subscriptions of between ten and five hundred dollars came to $469,495, an average of $35.50 each. The fair was owned, in name, by thirteen thousand small holders as well as by the banks.
The public's share
Subscriptions alone would not have been enough, and in the summer of 1910 the Exposition persuaded the Governor to call a special session of the Legislature for September 6. It proposed two constitutional amendments: one to raise $5,000,000 by a state tax, the other to let San Francisco bond itself for the same amount. The state voted on November 8, 1910: 174,513 to 50,857 for the tax, 180,043 to 34,723 for the city's authority to bond itself; and on November 15 San Francisco passed the charter amendment for the bonds, 42,040 to 2,122. organized labor, through McCarthy, worked for them, and the campaign, Todd says, cost the Exposition very little considering the $10,000,000 at stake. One later appeal failed: on March 19, 1915, with the fair already open and money tight, Alameda County voters refused a bond issue in its support, although Alameda, Emeryville and Piedmont gave it their two-thirds.
The budget
The budget Comptroller Durkee brought to the Finance Committee gave the largest single operating allowance to music, $450,000, with $285,000 for special events; the Executive Council raised those to $586,300 and $348,700 and took the difference out of buildings and grounds. Other large items were $250,000 for exploitation, the fair's word for publicity, and $225,000 for live stock. Building the palaces cost $4,382,560 for the eleven exhibit buildings, at about $1.57 a square foot, the Palace of Machinery the dearest at $655,336 and the Palace of Fine Arts with its annex $631,929.
What it cost and what it took in
The gate was fifty cents, and admissions were the largest single source of revenue. The concessions returned $1,238,106 net; the biggest earners were not shows but services, the Inside Inn with $675,727 gross, the Desmond Supply Company, the Yellowstone Park restaurant and its Old Faithful Inn, the Fadgl auto trains. Fifteen concessions took in more than $100,000 apiece.
Where the surplus went
The season's surplus was real, but the company had spent more getting to opening day than it could ever recover: Todd's statements show a pre-Exposition deficit of $1,381,227 after the cost of the Exposition Auditorium, $1,089,780, which the company built in the Civic Center as its permanent memorial and gave to the city. Counting the Auditorium as what it was, a surplus spent on a building, the final surplus stood at $2,401,931, of which $1,312,151 remained in cash. Wrecking the fair returned a further $353,121 net; the best single bid for taking the whole thing down had been $4,755. The company was formally dissolved in Superior Court on August 1, 1920. The stockholders had never expected their money back, and the prospectus of 1910 had said so.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. I (1921): the subscription meetings, the special session of 1910 and the two amendments, the budget.
- Todd, vol. II: "Labor Cooperates"; the Alameda County bond election of March 19, 1915; construction costs.
- Todd, vol. V: the Comptroller's final statements A to D, the concessions returns, the salvage.