Every world's fair of the era had its midway, and Todd called San Francisco's the largest yet: about sixty-five acres at the eastern end of the grounds, south of Fort Mason. The name came from a public contest. The prize, a ten-dollar season book, went to a Mrs. J. Cortissoz, who died before it could be awarded, and the name was not applied until late in 1914. Every show fronted on a single paved avenue 100 feet wide between building lines, seven city blocks long. Counting both sides, a visitor walked past more than a mile of booths, rides, restaurants and some twenty-five theaters. Several shows were villages of people put on display for admission: Samoan, Somali, Tehuantepec and Australasian (Maori).
The street was not straight. From the Fillmore Street gate it ran east along the line of Chestnut Street, bent at Laguna Street where Toyland Grown Up faced the Shamrock Isle, and continued along roughly the line of Francisco Street to the Van Ness Avenue gate. Near the east end it opened into a circular Plaza at Gough Street, with Japan Beautiful and its giant gilded Buddha on the north side and a fire station on the south. The Director of Concessions and Admissions, Frank Burt, insisted that each show's front announce what was inside without needing a sign. The result was a skyline of Buddhas, pagodas, a 90-foot wooden suffragette, plaster giants, painted cliffs, and the steel arm of the Aeroscope swinging nearly 300 feet in the air.
Behind the fronts was a hard business. Space rented at fifty dollars a front foot for the season, and the Exposition took a percentage of the gross, usually a quarter. The wet spring of 1915 and the European war kept crowds thin for months. Many ambitious shows failed while cheap ones prospered. Todd's official history lists the Zone's hits and flops with a showman's candor: the Panama Canal model, Stella and the Safety Racer made money, while Toyland and the Submarines sank. A Zone carnival on May 27, 1915, with a Queen Zona, a parade of elephants and camels and a mock battleship (the old ferryboat Amador) blown up by mines off the Marina, was the main draw of a day that brought 104,486 people through the gates.
Nothing of the Zone survives. The buildings were sold to wreckers, and by June 30, 1916 the last trace was gone and its 97 parcels were ready to return to their owners. The site is now residential blocks of the Marina District between Fillmore Street and Van Ness Avenue. They include Moscone Recreation Center, the former Lobos Square (Webster to Laguna, between Chestnut and Bay).
Nevertheless it was a great amusement street, and with its Golden Buddha, its tall suffragette and twin soldiers before Toyland, its Chinese pagoda, the giant holding back the waters of the Dayton flood (while he lasted)...
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 155 (1921)
