Varied Industries held the southeast corner of the main group, facing the Avenue of Palms to the south and the Avenue of Progress to the east. It was the first palace most visitors passed, since the Fillmore Street gate, not the formal Scott Street entrance, carried the biggest crowds. Its walls were divided into broad bays by pilasters carrying little travertine bears, each "holding before him a shield, for modesty, and looking over the top of it at you in a most self-righteous and patronizing way" (Todd). The Guide says the consoles showed the grizzly, emblem of the Native Sons, embracing the state seal.
The main south portal was the building's glory, an adaptation of the portal of the Hospice of Santa Cruz at Toledo, reaching nearly to the gable. Faville kept the Spanish Renaissance frame but replaced the saints. Ralph Stackpole, a San Francisco sculptor who, the Guide notes, had once worked as a miner, filled the tympanum with the industries and lined the niches with the repeated "Man with the Pick." Todd thought it "such art as we rarely see in this country" and said it "alone would have made the Exposition worth a long journey to enjoy."
Inside, Varied Industries shared a classification with Manufactures and held what Todd called "the Exposition's real Temple of Mercury": cutlery, jewelry, silver, clocks, pottery, glass, leather, toys, furniture, carpets, textiles and clothing. The southeast corner of the building sat below grade. McLaren banked it with acacias trained for two years into flat square heads, planted so close their tops "looked like a floating lawn," with ferns, cinerarias and cyclamen in the shade beneath.
